Week Five

Second to last treatment of this series this morning. We have it down now: leave the house by 6:30 to catch the 7 a.m. ferry, because if we catch the 7:15 a.m. ferry every car in Seattle is on the road. My theory is that most people in Seattle leave for work at 7:30. That's the way I explain the guaranteed gridlock at 7:45.
We drive in on Spokane Street, get on I-5, stay to the right, take the Madison exit, and head up the hill to the parking garage for the Arnold Pavilion and the Nordstrom Tower, then head up to the urologist's office. I think I've given the details for what happens there in previous postings.
Up until now we have taken the 10:20 ferry home. Couldn't make that 9:25, so we'd stop and get coffee and breakfast (MacDonald's – we're not talking fine dining), or just coffee to drink in the ferry line on the dock. Today, though, we got in and out, and except for a delay on Fauntleroy where they are digging deep rectangular holes in the pavement and then filling them back in with concrete, had a pretty straight shot to the 9:25.
So now we're home, and I'm writing and Rick's cartooning. We're doing this as fast as we can before we both topple over from lack of sleep.
One more treatment, next Friday, and then 6 weeks off.
You know, when you hear the word “cancer” it throws you right off your feed and off your game. I've been pondering the power of that word ever since Rick went through this the first time, in 1998. What we've learned is that many cancers are very treatable these days, but you don't think of that until you've been through that initial feeling that the world has fallen away beneath your feet.
It's such a nasty shock – I mean, it's easy to say, “We're all mortal,” in an intellectual detached way, but when it hits you that you, personally, are mortal, RIGHT NOW – that's a whole 'nuther thang, and there isn't much detachment at hand.
But then you are in the toils of the medical system, and your life depends on and revolves around appointments and treatments and ferry schedules, all the rather mundane details of doing what you have to do to get well again. You do it all, you miss work and go places you never wanted to go and do things you never wanted to do, so you can go back to being detached about mortality.
I don't think the detachment is ever quite the same as it was before cancer, though.