Preoccupations

I haven't thought much about this blog this week, consumed as I have been by the party I'm throwing this afternoon. It's a celebration of my sponsor's fifteen-year clean time anniversary, which was yesterday, in addition to being just a garden-variety Fourth of July barbecue. I haven't thrown a party in a long time, and I'd forgotten how much has to be done. I'd just sort of assumed that the day would arrive and things would arrange themselves and everything would turn out perfectly, but of course it hasn't been like that at all. Yesterday I ran a bunch of errands, picking up things I needed for the party as well as all of my usual Saturday errands, and then I came home and got busy making potato salad and preparing the cucumber for a Greek salad. That took a few hours, after which I had to go out and buy Kim's gift. I went to Chaucer's Books, which may have been a mistake. I really think I should be given only a provisional pass for that shop. I cannot get out of there without spending three times as much money as I can afford. I found a gift and a card and managed to make it out the door with only one superfluous item, a deck of cards giving instructions on how to play Victorian parlor games, which I thought might be fun to try out on my guests this afternoon. I admit that I'm a sucker for that sort of thing: Exquisite Corpse, Mad Libs, any sort of word game or memory game. Most of my friends, however, don't share my enthusiasm, so the games may fall flat. We shall see.

Have I got anything to report about my treatment? I don't think so, except perhaps that I've noticed an increased shortness of breath since Dr Hahn raised my dose of Ribavirin. I may have to go back down to 800 mg a day if this doesn't get better. Hypothyroidism also causes shortness of breath, though, so it might not be the Ribavirin at all. I know my thyroid levels aren't where they should be, or perhaps it's just that the symptoms take awhile to go away. They're not as bad as they were, but they're not completely gone. I've noticed shortness of breath for the last couple of months, and it started after I started the Interferon treatment, so possibly that accounts for it. I'll talk to Judy and see what she thinks.

On Monday I go in for another round of labs. I'm not going to predict that my viral load will be zero this time, since I've been wrong every time before, but I will say that I hope it's zero. I've noticed a phenomenon as I've gone through this treatment so far. When I first started it, I resigned myself to a year of not feeling too great, for the sake of not dying of liver disease at some future point. I focused on the day in front of me and didn't think too much about where I was going, but as time has gone on, it's harder and harder not to think about the future. I'm a third of the way through my treatment and I'm feeling trapped in it. It's the same sort of feeling I used to get when I lived in Minneapolis and I would suddenly feel claustrophobic because I was trapped out in the middle of the continent, with no ocean anywhere near. I suppose the answer is to stop thinking ahead and continue to focus on the day at hand, but I'm curious to see if this trapped feeling goes away when I hit the halfway-point. At that point I will have climbed to the top of the mountain and begun my descent, and I suspect that just knowing that half of my treatment is behind me will be enough to cure the claustrophobia.

This was the shortest post yet. Let the party be my excuse. I have to get busy now and dress the potato salad, make the Greek salad and scare up some more chairs so that my guests don't have to sit on the ground.