This is pretty typical after a treatment session, and the sequence goes something like this: Get treatment on Thursday (an all-day undertaking), come home a little groggy (mostly from the pre-med drugs intended to alleviate nausea), eat dinner, get ready for bed (lots of steps here - more on that another time). Sleep for about an hour, and then remain awake until about 5:30 or so - the steroids (decadron) I get for preventing nausea tend to make my mind race about randomly but not particularly in a useful manner. I'm finally so exhausted that I fall asleep for a few hours on Friday morning before waking and going in to work. Why bother going in to work at all, you ask? Because that's what I do - I may not feel great, but I actually do get some satisfaction in getting work done, and the decadron does provide enough of a lift to let you physically and mentally do some amazing things. I repaired my roof last year after a windstorm blew a lot of shingles off on a treatment Thursday - something I might not have had the endurance to do without the decadron. I can usually sleep on Friday night - I'm pretty exhausted from lack of sleep, but sometimes the decadron keeps me awake on Friday night as well, and I'm so tired by Saturday morning that I crash and may sleep until I have to go back to the treatment center to get Silent Bob disconnected. The picture above shows me napping, with Silent Bob in the little black case. I may fall asleep again after leaving the treatment center and nap some more on Saturday and into Sunday. I may get a few things done on Sunday, but may also take a nap again. Eventually, I may snap out of the hibernation, but it may take a few days. I've been taking a little time over the past day and a half to take in a retirement planning seminar at work, with the final session all day tomorrow. For any of you who have this sort of thing available from your employer, I highly recommend it. It's better to take some time to plan ahead well before retirement than to wait until the last minute. It's been a little strange for me to hear that the average life expectancy now may well be up into the age of the high 80's and early 90's, and that you may need to plan on having enough money saved up to support your lifestyle for another 40 or 50 years as a retiree. But I'm probably in a little different place in life than the rest of the class. While none of us can forecast the future and know how long we have to live, I have a pretty good idea what will do me in, and that there's a very good chance that I won't live to be an old man. Living to age 80 or 90 is probably not going happen. This doesn't make trying to plan your future financial resources any easier though. I need to make sure that my health care needs are covered - they're not likely to go away anytime soon, and they won't be cheap. I need to make sure that my loved ones have enough to survive and prosper after I'm gone. It may sound morbid, but there's the basic fact that treatment is buying me time. If I'm fortunate, it will buy time measured in years. But what if....? What if I'm really lucky and beat the odds for long term survival? What if I really do get into that elite club and survive longer than 5 years (statistically that's only 6-10% of us when the clinical trials were done a few years ago)? How do I plan for something that is kind of statistical long shot? There's a chance I may be able to participate in a new clinical trial in a few months - what if it works really well? Of course, that would be wonderful, but how can you plan with so many unknown variables? Well, the fact is that even for healthy people, the future is still unknown, so I really shouldn't fret. It's going to be challenging to fine-tune a long term financial plan, but at least I feel like I've learned a few things and will be better prepared. And I still like to think that statistical long shots are a good thing to hope for.
For the record books, last Thursday's marker numbers went down again - last measured at 8.6 and now down to 6.2.
Snow in my backyard on Saturday morning
