Personal health news: I’m coming up on the 21-month mark of post-diagnosis survival. The metric is meaningful to me because that was the median survival time for folks with this diagnosis when I received it in 2024. But I’m doing fine!
Scans are all negative so far, and I’m feeling strong. My hair is unrecognizable from its former state but has grown into a thick, curly mass that I’m starting to accept as appropriate for the slightly scary old swamp witch I was destined to become.
So, thanks healthcare team, heroic NIH researchers and others who contributed to effective new treatment protocols! (All of whom are now under assault by dumb quacks who should go step on rusty nails and perish of tetanus.)
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The post title is from my grandmother, who used that phrase to describe her older brother’s mental state during a visit with him in the 1990s. She reported back while nursing him through a nasty cold, accusing him of enjoying being “waited on hand and foot,” as she put it.
Both my grandmother and her brother lived to be quite ancient. He was an engineer and WWII vet who lived in Columbia, South Carolina. He had an eccentric wife who adored a series of Pekinese lapdogs that traveled everywhere with them.
We looked forward to their visits to Florida to see Great Grandma, who disapproved of her son’s wife on general principles. She also treated her son-in-law, my grandfather, with casual contempt. That imperious and terrifying old lady lived well into her 90s.
Gran and Great Uncle long outlived their parents and spouses, cantankerously looking after one another as they aged. (She nearly made it to 100; we converted her century birthday party plans into a funeral when she came up just short.)
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I was thinking of them this morning for no particular reason. I also thought about my now-elderly dad, whose birthday dinner I attended yesterday. He’s as old as Donald Trump and voted for that prick too, even though Dad is smarter and more hardworking and more kind and infinitely more “manly” than the cosseted Orange Pustule. (You’ll just have to trust me on that.)
Anyhoo, I was sitting on the porch this morning thinking of my olds, living and dead, and watching a feisty Belted Kingfisher wheel and chatter and dive-bomb fish in the mist. I felt this weird warmth in my chest and realized it was… happiness. And gratitude. Just thought I’d share.
Open thread!
As I’ve vaguely alluded to here over the past several months, I’ve been dealing with vexing health issues since approximately the holidays. I wasn’t trying to be mysterious about it. At first my condition seemed much less dire, though I felt awful due to severe anemia.