Hi Caringbridge folks-- update since it’s been some time and as we’ve learned to ride the new wave of this phase of things. Here’s the long and the short of it: Chemotherapy is really hard. It’s hard. It’s really hard. My brain does not have descriptors or reference points to draw from, and well, further illustration is not fruitful anyway.

A way back (ok, now like 15 years ago), I was talking to someone I love and trust about “acceptance”; she chuckled after I rambled on for a while, then declared “you really don’t know what the word means, do you?”. We agreed I didn’t, and then started the simple exercise of saying, “it is what it is”. While I would love to say that seed of action proliferated into some incredible spiritual mastery of the principle—but it didn’t, though it did give me a simple mantra with which to face those things that have to be as they are, and boom, here we are. I’m marching through the pasty blurred warzone of chemo, knowing that it is what it is and that at some point, I’ll clear into sunlight—this is what I learned from round 1 of 4.