Fun

I shared the parking lot elevator (and level B: BIRD) with Dr Chris Loiselle yesterday evening as I was leaving the clinic after my infusion. Sheesh—the thing that sucks about getting an infusion for only about an hour and a half is that I'm now pretty much always stuck in a chair. Yesterday my chair was the only one on the north end of the floor, and it was in a room of its own . . . but I could still hear the TV loud and clear across the hall, and it was a vinyl chair. I would rank a bed in its own room at the very top of the scale, naturally; a chair in its own room and a bed separated from the chairs by only a curtain pretty much together in the middle (bed probably slightly higher than chair, and both seriously inferior to the bed in its own room); and a chair separated by curtains from the other chairs at the very bottom. I have learned that they're a lot more comfortable to sit on if you put down one of the warm blankets first—last week the pants I was wearing were such a lightweight cotton weave that I could feel the sticky plastic grossness through them. They are planning to open the new addition to the floor—larger pharmacy and more beds—in July. I hadn't really expected that that would matter to me, but it looks like it's going to.

Anyway, Chris Loiselle. He was pretty much the first doc I saw very much of a year ago, during one of his residency rotations. He was the one who asked me to spell "diamond" in the ER, as one of my neurological tests, then spell it backwards. Which I was able to do. I remember him being pretty chill about that. "Yeah, yeah, that's right," he said. We recognized each other pretty immediately, said "Hey", and asked how each other was doing. Residency is good but exhausting; he has two more years left. I am doing well, fit and a healthy color instead of chemo gray, and told him I was back to horseback riding. He was impressed by that, but then I got to tell him that a couple weeks ago I started jumping again, and he was all "Really?!" I nodded, modestly, and he told me to wear a helmet. Well, duh.

The jumping that I'm doing is pretty minor stuff—barely more lift than a canter stride, of which I've ridden hundreds, if not thousands, in the last year. But boy does it sound like an impressive feat of health!