I felt rested after yesterday’s nap and a good, full night of sleep, as Kevin and I cruised along on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway catching up on the holiday weekend and our summer travel.
We caught up with my new friends and their families before I was called back my turn on the table with Synergy 1 zapping its powerful beams of radiation deep into my head. Synergy 1 was the machine assigned to dole out the fractioned doses of radiation throughout my treatment in studio one.
Contained by my superhero mask, I thought about Kevin and my last trip to Nantucket and how each of the daily trips here to Johns Hopkins were special too.
Eddie, his dad, Mike, Carl, Joe, Kevin and Richard (and numerous others who offered to also join) generously signed on to help with these, as Joe said, “ungodly hour”, treks not fully knowing what they were getting themselves into. That’s the point of all of this I realized, as trite as it is to say, — life comes fast and as much as we plan for it we never really know what’s around corner.
When I first begin to notice something was wrong I was mid-workout. I felt exhausted. Not just fatigued from a hard workout. Exhausted. Within days I noticed stiffness in my knees, aches in my lower back, pain in my shoulders, swelling in my feet and other oddities including unexplained weight-gain. I pushed on fighting off daily fatigue, intense mood swings, physical changes to my body including swelling of my face, elongating of my jaw and feet, swelling of my hands, shifting of my teeth and over 22 pounds of weight gain before finally two years later my primary care physician said he had a hunch. He sent me that day for an MRI of the Brain with and without contrast.
The recollection of all of this made left me even more tired and I looked forward to getting home for my nap.