Good Mother's Day and a walk down memory lane

Family selfie with Ben, Katie and Joe

On Sunday, Katie and I took out our bikes for my first ride of the season, going for just about an hour on the bike trail from Hadley to Amherst.

We wanted to get back on time for Ben and Joe to come for a Mother's Day cookout.

As is the case when discussing running distances, "just" can be a relative word.

As in, one person saying she had just run eight miles, meaning not a lot for that person, when you had run five and it was enough.

Brigham and Women's Hospital, 2003

I was thinking about how "just" an hour is relatively a lot considering what I could do on a Mother's Day fifteen years ago. That's when I had gotten out of the hospital for Mother's Day after my induction chemotherapy. I would have thought that even a few minutes on a beautiful bike path would have been a big accomplishment. Those days are coming vividly into focus as I revisit them and dig out photos to go with my posts on Health-Union.com.

My post about how I developed skin cancer is on the skin cancer site, but my leukemia posts are still in the queue; blood.cancer.com  is a new addition to the platforms of content on various illnesses and conditions.

The photos are in a mess of papers, pictures and newspaper clips in a box next to my bed. Some of it is in chapter form from my so-called memoir, which I shelved, or rather boxed, after getting polite rejections from editors. They liked my writing but said I would have had to be famous for them to want another cancer book.

Without getting out of bed, yesterday I rolled over, leaned down, and started digging around.

It was kind of strange but not too bad to pull out a photo of me riding a bike in my hospital room after my first round of chemo in April, 2003. It's going to illustrate a post about hospital exercising. My mother took the photo. She got a kick out of seeing me up on the bike with my IV pole. Much better to be untethered.

The tennis bear will illustrate a post about hospital room decorating, about how important it was to make my room a homey place. It revolved around Diane's brilliant idea of getting a lamp. It ended up going everywhere with me, including trips to the emergency room when I suspected I would be hospitalized.

My guy friends from our mixed doubles team sent me the Ronni bear that occupies a place of honor in my bedroom. In the photo in my hospital room, she sits on a handmade quilt  with blank squares where co-workers wrote me notes. I remember how touched I was when I pulled that bear out of the box. I particularly liked the little tennis racquet. It made me smile.

But back to the present, it was a great Mother's Day. Having all three together was a special gift. Ben brought the food. Katie set the table. Joe cooked.

When they were getting ready to leave and we took a few photos in the driveway, I said, "I can't believe you all use to live in this house."

Now that Katie is closer, it should be easier to get everyone together.

A baby visit and a (re) birthday

Musician-in-the-making

A little experiment with my blood pressure monitor shows the effect that reading about politics, and the opposite, sitting quietly, has on me  (and probably on some others).

 When I took it after glancing at all the bad news on Twitter this morning, it was 154/77. I took it about five minutes later after closing the cover on my laptop and sitting for about five minutes, and it was 103/78. I don't know what to make of it when the upper number is high and the lower number is normal, but in any case in looking at the top number I could see the difference.

I'm sure it was fine on Friday because I had such a good time when Nell and Ben came to visit. We took a little walk with Maddie, but it was too cold and windy, so we had lunch and played inside. She enjoyed sitting at the piano that my parents gave Ben on a day that seems like yesterday. I sent it home with them to go with the other instruments in her "band."

She also liked "talking" on two old remotes. I'm not sure why I'm keeping them. Maybe for nostalgia because I don't like the new system with the blue talk-to-me button. Or because they're good pretend phones.

As I've gotten back to exercising, I can feel the repercussions of the three-week gap the most in yoga.

On Thursday after class, I knew that my arms would soon be sore from doing down dog and plank. On Saturday as soon as we did the first pose, I realized how sore my forearms were. I thought, maybe I should leave. But of course I didn't, instead doing child's pose when I needed a break.

I also did legs up the wall when they did box pose for handstand preparation. Way back before leukemia, I had been able to do this with help from my teacher, Erin, who had me put a strap around my forearms to provide a sense of stability.

I am better at acknowledging without judgment "that was then, this is now" with yoga than I am with tennis or running, when I sometimes compare what I used to be able to do with what I can do now. The metaphor of the yoga class is one of sticking around and doing something that's good enough for that moment even if not as advanced as before.

In any case, today at tennis I hit some pretty good net shots and had some long rallies. This is a lot better than I could do eight years ago, when I could only walk around my hospital room or the nurses' station or sit in my chair or lie in my bed while awaiting my new stem cells.

They arrived eight years ago tomorrow.

Hospital stay extended

I was supposed to be discharged today, but I have to stay a couple of extra days because a 100.8 temperature snuck in this morning. My temperature has been normal the whole time I've been in the hospital, and it was normal all of today, so that tiny spike is a bit of a mystery.

All of my blood cultures came back normal, so they took me off antibiotics and will just watch me for another day or so to see if I'm OK. 

Nothing eventful has happened, unless you count the hour I spent lying on my side after a physician's assistant put liquid Colace in my ear in hopes of loosening the wax that has been bothering me. She then tried to suction it out; unfortunately the home remedy did not work, so she ordered prescription drops. I can't hear out of that ear. Just get me a crochet hook!

I've been having a good run with "Seinfeld." I watch it a lot, so it's amazing that I often see episodes for the first time. During my winter-spring hospitalization, my friend Barry, knowing that I like "Seinfeld," brought me a tiny wind-up pony that reminded him of the "pony episode" in which Jerry gets into trouble by casting aspersions on pony-lovers. I played with the toy and it made me laugh when it trotted across my table, but I couldn't relate because I had never seen the episode. It was on tonight, and I finally got the full meaning of the joke. 

Last night, I watched the first of the Keith Hernandez episodes, which I had also never seen, and tonight, after I switched channels for my second "Seinfeld," I caught the second part of the Hernandez story.

Yes, this is what it comes down to sometimes. Oh well, it makes the time pass.