Monthly Archive for January, 2006

Like a man nearing the end of his years, I’ve been looking back nostalgically on all the posts in this blog. The newspaper called a few days ago and asked about the blog, and about why I did it, and what I’ll do with it now.

I don’t know. Chemotherapy is almost over. This blog is about chemotherapy. After this last treatment is over on Monday, I don’t know what I’ll write. Maybe a few entries about recovering from chemo. Maybe an entry or two every time I go see Shakey McShakerson in his big trailer.

It seems like they might mention the blog in the paper in the next couple days, which I think is sort of exciting. So I looked back on some of the entries, to see if they were any good. Some of them aren’t crap at all. Some of them are good.

What’s more interesting to me, I guess, is my progress through this chemo process. I feel like such a tool reading some of the earlier entries about chemo. It’s nearly embarrassing, sometimes, to see me talking, early on, about what chemo was, and what chemo wasn’t.

Like I had a clue.

And the cockiness I have in some of the earlier reports of treatments – oh man, I hardly even remember the former me that wrote those. How on earth could I have come out of treatment #3 with such a vibrant pride? Was I psychopathic? Was I an idiot? Was I kidding? It was like I was almost enjoying this somehow. Good grief, who was I?

I don’t feel particularly cocky about chemotherapy anymore. I don’t feel particularly blessed to have gone through it. And I don’t feel like it was a learning experience that “rained down” from above, or anything ridiculous like that.

I feel like maybe things changed around treatment #7, when I started noticing the sadness more in the chemo room; when I finally got it through my head that surviving cancer wasn’t just another one of my adventures I could brag about later. When I stopped trying to find the stupid silver lining in everything and then realized that I had to keep going, with or without a silver lining.

Maturing seems to be more about accepting disappointment than anything else. Experience is useful, but I guess it doesn’t really teach you anything unless it’s disappointing. Does that make sense? That seems to make sense to me.

I don’t mean that to sound sad. I’m not sad. Not sad in the simple way I was when I first got diagnosed. I just feel…complicated. My feelings about cancer are complicated. I don’t know who that young kid was that wrote the early posts in this blog, that young kid that tried to sum up cancer in simple, easy-to-understand entries, that recorded songs, and took pictures like it was a summer vacation he might want to re-live later. It’s all a lot more complicated than his writings suggest.