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© 1997 John Brightshadow Yohalem
Illness and Diagnosis
The Gods are kind. They didn’t send me a little thingie that would sit in my body for years slowly gathering diabolical strength until its true nature became known, too late for action. My dis-ease [N.B. Dis = goddess of Discord] made itself very apparent last winter, in a series of dis-orders of the digestive tract. Home remedies helped not at all. Dr. Isaacs detected nothing untoward. No food found an easy home, and at last I began to avoid it altogether, which only caused more trouble. My waist dwindled and my chest began to swell, as though something were pressing outwards below my breastbone, an Alien baby slouching towards Manhattan. I was weepy and insomniac. Faithful Bunny helped me to and from the bathtub – ten inches of warm water made me comfortable as nothing else did. I was too sick to go to the country to look at the comet. It was lousy to be alive.
After two months of this, including two visits to the Emergency Room in sheer agony, I asked the doc to send me to a gastro-intestinal specialist. Dr. Kummer was the first to notice that while my intestines were fine, my spleen was vastly enlarged. He sent me for a CAT scan in late April. "This side is okay," said the technician, a feisty Russian lady named Ludmilla or was it Lydia? "Wait, what’s this?" she said, abruptly. "This isn’t okay." That was Wednesday.
Thursday, Isaacs called in triumph: Good news! they had a diagnosis! The bad news was that it was lymphoma (stage 2-S, meaning the spleen), large cell, non-Hodgkins. This is often connected with HIV, but they’d checked that connection and I was Negative for the fifth test in a row. (Go figure.) Isaacs had, moreover, contacted an oncologist at Beth Israel whom he thought the world of, and I was to see her the very next day.
The very next day, Dr. Gold told me all sorts of things I didn’t quite retain. The big one was that I was going into the hospital for tests on Sunday night. I’d never been overnight in hospital before. My mother said the room looked nice. Then she got me moved to a private room anyway – a generous gesture, but the new room proved a channel for roof noise. The only place I could sleep was in the bathroom, to which I dragged my mattress every night. The staff woke me at 5:30am. I thought they’d come to rescue me, but no: they just wanted to draw blood.
It was an unpleasant week (gallium scans, CAT scans, first dose of chemotherapy), and I wept a lot. Many wonderful visitors. Judy and Gwyn brought altar tchotchkes and did a Beltane ritual in my room; Gary and Jim massaged my calves; Ma read the paper; Rich, Susan, David, Marilee and Lisa did COG stuff; Jeannie and Maaike brought CDs; Grant in Oregon sent freesias. I got sentimental and wept a lot. Many wonderful phone calls. Witches did rituals and sent energy from all over the continent. In Tacoma, Dana led a visualization of my cancer as hamburger and my chemotherapy as a rabid pit bull. (Not an image I’d have chosen, but very Dana.) My favorite comment on hospitals came from Brianna in California: "Do not ask questions, Inanna; we do things differently here."
At last they cut me free of that damn pole i.v.; I went to Ma’s house to wait out the first Chemo. First thing I did was turn to her and say, "You remember how you nagged me to get a health plan four years ago? Well, I just want to say Thank-you now."
The Traumas of Chemo
Then came the annals of CHOP, which is the variety of chemotherapy Gold had me do. She, typically, said coolly: "Your hair will fall out, but you’ll get it back. And you’ll be sterile, so if that’s a problem, you’d better deal with it now." Farewell, O patter of little gonads. No – so long as they function, I don’t care if they reproduce. Not likely to be an issue, is it?
The first Chemo was my Ordeal of Air: Compazine sent my mind into a fortnight’s tizzy. Couldn’t read a full page. Couldn’t talk for two minutes without becoming exhausted. (A lot of people react badly to this drug. Dr. Gold thinks I took too much of it, but she switched me to other drugs anyway.) Bunny kept me in mail and clothes. Gary did Reiki and cooked me dinner. Rich made me an Eye of Horus in stained glass. It now hangs in my window.
A problem: two months of digestive disorder had sorely strained my hemorrhoids. At the hospital, they told me I could eat anything I cared to. They didn’t warn me that I could not easily digest much of it. I became severely thrombosed, and so far gone on compazine that I was incapable of anticipating the problem. Bowel movements were like old live TV: long, excruciating, full of unexpected drama. One night, when Diane had invited me for dinner, I told her I was going to the ER instead. She took her other guest, and sat with me at Beth Israel through hours of tedium, then made me eat. I staggered to Isaacs on Thursday – it was difficult to move at all, and getting from the Upper East Side to the West Village took half a day – who quickly found me a surgeon. On Friday I had my hemorrhoids slashed by chatty Dr. Beaton (very urbane – reminded me of my father). "What we want to produce are loose, sloppy movements," he advised. "Ah," said I, "Anton Bruckner, not Joseph Haydn." It worked.
The next week Gold looked and prodded for infections, but there were none. She canceled compazine in favor of other drugs for Chemo Two, the Ordeal of Fire.
It is a curious fact that chemo was such a nuisance that I hardly worried about the fact that I had cancer. I was busy dealing with the symptoms of the cure. Never once this year did I believe this disease would kill me. Sometimes I was sorry it wouldn’t.
Except that I had no taste buds (a normal reaction – for ten days after every Chemo), this one began well. Then, about five days out, my digestive tract caught on fire. For four days, with gathering pain, my stomach turned incandescent. Every time I moved, filaments of flaming metal seemed to fall from one side of my innards to land on another, fresh surface. After four days of this, Isaacs at last suggested Zantac, and Bunny brought me ice cream and other cooling things before leaving town.
The full effects only became manifest that night: a great swelling in my abdomen such that I could not lie down on back or front, and my sides were already painful from loss of the fatty pads I used to sleep on. I felt bloated, but also constipated from the pain killers I had been driven to taking. I did not sleep for a minute of that awful night; I thought my belly was going to burst. At last I took castor oil – juices began to flow around dawn, and did not stop for a month. Advice: always keep an enema in the house.
Somehow, while all this had been going on, I revised and added to an episode of All My Avatars: The Pagan Soap Opera, then made enough copies to send to Rites of Spring, where Ainsley directed a performance. Also at Rites, Billy Bardo was asked to lead a healing chant for me, and did so on the syllables: "Ennnnn-Channnnnn-Téééééé."
This is my advice to anyone going through Chemotherapy: They won’t tell you what your symptoms will be because they don’t know. The body is very individual, and chemo is poison. Each of us reacts differently to this stuff. They told me in the Chemo Suite that they’d never heard of symptoms like mine, but in fact I found them in fine print on one of the handouts they gave me on one of the four chemicals that make up CHOP. Inner incandescence (how shamanic!) is rare but known.
A friend who had undergone Chemo, and been given marajuana to ward off nausea, passed it on to me, but in fact I suffered very little nausea, and a heating pad was more help than grass. For a day or two, I just clutched the heating pad to my chest.
It turned out I knew alot of Pagan cancer survivors. Gwyneth, a cancer survivor, recommended Sominex for nausea, and I recommend it too. Deborah, a cancer survivor, called during the worst: "No, lovey, you don’t have to experience pain; that’s another religion. Ours doesn’t give any spiritual benefit for pain." In the next days she called every other day with suggestions, contacts, pain management clinics. (It was clear that problems, when attacked by Deborah, find it easier to just give up and let themselves be solved.) Iouenn, a cancer survivor, came by when I was exhausted and weepy and in pain, took me out to a breakfast I couldn’t eat, and gave me a sack of remedies, palliatives, tonics and other healthy things that had been useful for her. Heather, a cancer survivor, gave me advice about dealing with Beth Israel and Dr. Gold (who had cured her the year before). Jorah, a cancer survivor, recommended essiac. Lots of witches beat cancer! I felt cared for, which was important.
A question: How seriously did I take all this magic? Do I really believe it helped me beat cancer?
Still under the influence of my "birth religion", the rational atheism espoused by my parents, I would have to say that I did not think it accomplished as much for me as chemotherapy did. But that it had practical effects I do not doubt, thus: The folks who cared about me, instead of sliding into a morass of worry, could express their feelings in apparently practical ways, convinced that they were actively aiding my cure, thereby making themselves part of my support group, eager and able to offer shoulders and other practical therapy when I needed it. Too, the knowledge that all this was going on around me made me want to survive, made me feel loved enough and needed enough to fight for survival. And the link these rituals created between me and hundreds of Witches around the country, and in several other countries, and on at least one other continent, gave me a practical sense of what I was living for.
Gary’s Chinese herbal doctor, Fu Zhang, took my pulse and made me up a tea. Alison sent me Ambrotose the miracle drug.
What with the friends and the cards and the hugs, I got through it.
Things to eat when you are on Chemo and have no taste buds: cold roast chicken, hummus, iceberg lettuce, steamed vegetables with lemon butter, cashews, bread, vegetable broth, white fish, orange soda (awful stuff, but the only thing that cuts the even more awful taste of prednisone). Things not to eat when you are on Chemo: cooked tomatoes in any form (soups, sauces, chili, stews), wasabe paste, spices, capers.A curious phenomenon: when your tongue tastes terrible no matter where in your mouth you put it, or what you put into your mouth, it (and you) will forget what food tastes like. You will feel hungry and ponder what you would like to eat. Your tongue will not reply – it will not be able to imagine anything that tastes at all pleasant. Nourishment will seem sterile as hard tack. You will be bored with food, while famished for something unimaginable. Life hardly seems worth the trouble of chewing.
Warning: After ten days, your taste buds will come roaring back, and you will be ravenous for anything. If you’re not careful, you’ll regain all the weight you were so happy to lose when you got sick.
Chemo Three was the Ordeal of Water: my innards held nothing for long. I was very weak, could barely walk three blocks, lay abed dozing and reading. On the other hand, I could fit into clothes I hadn’t worn in years, looked kind of rakish with a shaven head and the remains of my mustache. The mustache fell off in July – as did most of the rest of my body hair, including parts that hadn’t seen the light of day in thirty years: derriere, mons Veneris, chest. I felt like a freak, but when I went to Les Danaïdes at Lincoln Center, one of the cast members (all the male cast had shaven heads) sneaked me in at the stage door for free. Litha with the Minoan Order in Central Park – wasn’t too weak to hop the tiny fire, and Marilee’s healing gong was very soothing, much better than pathworkings. Sunflower seeds cut through to my tongue and I couldn’t get enough. Then to Jeff’s for another solstice, though I was too weak to do much but lie in a hammock and be mordant. Well, the sun was standing still, and I mimicked it. Good magic, what?
The Chemo Suite is a very pleasant place, full of cheerful nurses and morbid patients. I would take my poison for a couple of hours, then go have my (last) tasty meal (for a couple of weeks). As evening drew on and I felt my tongue go, I often became very emotional. I had certain friends primed: I would call and demand, "Make me cry." They would tell me they loved me. That always worked. Peter and Cat got it down to two minutes. Big Sue clocked in at three. This is better than zoloft or St. John’s wort. I recommend it highly. Turns out, Prednisone makes one very emotional. Nonetheless, it’s good to have friends around willing to deal with one in that state.
Chemo Four: Everything deceptively normal. Two Bears fetched me to Laura’s house for a week of country air and fresh broccoli from her garden. Jorah and Myrriah fed me shiitakes (anti-carcinogenic) and essiac, the miracle drug. Cat did a full moon ritual. I was strong enough to bus home alone. Spent my birthday doing Lammas with Polyhymnia coven – pear nectar abruptly cut through to my tongue and almost got me drunk.
Another thing they won’t tell you, unless you ask. (They won’t tell you much, unless you ask.) Chemo rots your teeth. Seriously. I was forbidden to go to the dentist without a blood screening and a platelet count, lest I die of temporary hemophilia in the chair, and my platelets were always too low. When I finally got examined, in December, two teeth had chipped in a major way, dozens of old cavities had fallen out, much expensive work was called for, and my health plan did not cover dental.
I joined Gilda’s Club, free to any cancer sufferer (and their caregivers), which is in a very pleasant building two blocks from me, and began to attend a Wellness Group there. Articles in New York and the Times Magazine and The New Yorker by cancer sufferers, surviving or not. Cancer is becoming chic – like my shaven skull. (Everyone – especially women, alas – told me my skull was shapely and sexy, but I wanted my mustache and eyebrows back.) (People denied I looked like Uncle Fester, when I said I did. If I didn’t say I did, they would sometimes remark how much I looked like Christopher Lloyd as – "Don’t say it!" I had to scream.) (Now I’m back to normal – Tim Curry in Three Musketeers.)
Dr. Gold looked smug and triumphant whenever I came in for another chemo and she examined me. No infections. Spleen declining to insignificance. She was very pleased with me, as if I had done any of it. Bradamante rescuing Astolfo from the hippogriff. (No, Bradamante rescues him on the hippogriff.) (You pedant!)
Chemo Five was a surprise: my belly reacted badly to tomatoes and other things, and I missed the Weavers COG meeting, so I rebelled and canceled Chemo Six, in mid August, so I would not miss Merrymeet at the end of the month. Gold took this well – my latest CAT scans had been superb, my spleen was down to a reasonable (though still enlarged) size – "The first four have to be regular," she said, "but after that, they can vary." She had volumes of data. I also had other tests, which revealed that there was no active cancer any more. I began to feel cocky. I reread letters written during the crisis and found I’d forgotten whole weeks of awful events. I went back to the gym. I did six days of tedious but well-paid paralegal work, just to prove I was a mensch and could do this – and as a result missed the surprise birthday party Laura threw for me. I flew to Merrymeet and was made much of by Witches who’d been sending energy at me all this time. Julie was angry at me for cutting a Chemo session: "The Covenant isn’t worth it, John!" "No, but my mental health is." "Oh. Point taken." Three nights sleeping in a tent in the pouring rain and I was ready for anything – even Chemo Six, which is what I got hit with the day after my return on Labor Day. This was followed by another CAT scan.
The CAT scan was problematic: The gallium scan had shown there to be no active cancer in my body, but the CAT showed the spleen and its attendant lymph nodes still slightly enlarged and a shadow of some sort. As the late Gilda Radner would say, "They don’ know what it is." Gold said, "We may not do the last two treatments after all." I almost wished she hadn’t told me because I got my hopes up.
The Day of Filet
Imagine my alarm when I walked in on designated Chemo Seven Day and Gold said, "We’ve decided not to do any chemo." Then the bad news: "We’ve decided to do a splenectomy instead. Don’t worry – people live without a spleen all the time." A week later I met the surgeon, Dr. Surick, who seemed reassuringly blasé.
They wanted to do it on October 8th, but I held out for the 15th because I felt I needed the weekend in the woods provided by Twilight Covening on the intervening weekend. Contretemps at TC with Arthens who wanted to keep me in a heated cabin, when sleeping alone in a chilly tent is the reason I go to these things. (Well, some of it.) I won. My Tarot card for next year’s omen was Knight of Wands, which I interpret as: Get the quest on track. Sounds about right. (All the other Tarotists I’ve consulted confirm.)
This was my Ordeal of Earth. I knew it had to come, sooner or later.
On October 15th, I arrived at Beth Israel, changed to a gown, was shot up with anesthetic at noon and knew no more. Came around at 9:30 to find Ma, attended by Christopher and Iouenn, who had been entertaining her for some hours.
I was put on a morphine drip. From sternum to bellybutton I was all staples – unfortunately I don’t care for the rock clubs where this would have made me popular. There were also little tubes and faucets and things down there that I didn’t want to think about.
The next day, as the room filled with flowers and phone calls, I clung to my morphine drip and could only gape at interns and nurses who detached this or that and demanded that I get out of bed, walk around, pass gas, etc. Weird dreams of clans they’ve never had at Twilight Covening. Couldn’t read for four days – my mind wouldn’t focus. It kept playing the same song over and over: "Long ago and far away, I dreamed a dream one day...."
Hordes of visitors and gorgeous flowers, more fun to watch than TV. I figure the crowd was due to Beth Israel’s being near Union Square – I was convenient.
They took out the catheter on Thursday afternoon. On Friday evening, when I still hadn’t pissed, they put in another one. It was the wrong size. Altercation and macho fight at the other end of my bed between the squabbling (male) interns over pulling it out and putting the right one in. A female intern looked at me with great compassion, for which I was grateful. The power of the "Virgin at the base of the cross" archetype was thus revealed to me. She may seem helpless, but it helps.
On Saturday, they pulled the catheter and I began to piss. Buckets, each hour. Excruciating and bloody, and it continued so until Thursday, so that I moaned at the miserable prospect. On Sunday, they took away my morphine drip, replaced by Percocets, for which I had to quarrel with the nurses. By Monday I was bored silly and getting feisty. When the interns came in to ask if I had passed gas, I was sitting at a desk writing, and replied, "Yes, and I have a few questions for you." They said they were discharging me at noon.
Surick had come by to assure me all was well and the glop on my CAT scan had turned out to be "necrotic tumor", i.e. the stuff the chemo had killed. Gold, who had threatened more chemo (with a new formula and new side effects) if it turned out there was cancer left after all, came by Saturday, all a-grin from the biopsy: spleen and lymph nodes entirely free of cancer, thanks to the chemo (as she had hoped) and she was convinced the glop would have become infected had they left it in. From her point of view, a complete success. Plus, she had sent me to Isaacs for pneumovax and flu shots ere I got fileted. Use that spleen while you got it, babe.
Needless to say, I examined the errant organ for omens according to the old Etruscan ways delineated in my dog-eared copy of the Sibylline books. You may imagine my surprise when I discovered clear indications that the world was about to end. On the other hand, the bull market is going to go right on pumping, a load off all our minds. There was also something about the succession to the throne of Arezzo that didn’t seem relevant.
The Alarums of Remission
Babs and her trusty vehicle, with Barry to carry the bags, transported me to Ma’s house for recovery in comfort. Ma, feeling guilty, and her Paul, left for Italy the next day. I assured them it was okay to go. They could not possibly have been sweeter to me, constantly attentive, filling the house with requested foods and reading matter, and I would have killed them both if they’d stayed two days longer. Alone, at peace, I found myself unable to wear underwear or pants. Bunny and Gary and Cayte and Jeff and Jim and various aunts brought groceries. I lived on Percocet and phone calls and Cole Porter songs ("After you, why/ would I ev en care to try/ for who else could qualify/ after you?"), and finished volume 11 of Dance to the Music of Time. Wore overalls to go downtown and check my e-mail.
After a week, Surick took my staples out. I suppose I should have kept them for relics, but I didn’t think of it. He seemed to think everything was going well, but in fact I was so bored I soon began doing too many mildly active things, and became exhausted. A visit to Laura in New England proved more strain than relaxation. Everyone was very dear, but my belly remained sensitive. Samhain with Stepchild Coven.
When I got back I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t walk around the block. Missed group. Lay abed panting. No appetite either – the signal, my Pa used to say, that things were really wrong, at least in my case. Cab to Isaacs, who found nothing wrong on X-rays but thought I looked unduly pale, even anemic. I thought about this – and about Ma, who was anemic for many months after her kidney was extracted last year. And I had not been taking my iron tablets. "Oh, John, you’re a very bad boy; you lose a lot of blood when they take out a spleen." So I took my iron, and soon recovery resumed its course.
While Isaacs was out of the room, I was alone with his file on John Yohalem. All the notes from Gold and Surick – saying nothing clinical that they had not said to me. But Gold added what she was planning to do to me if my spleen had still shown some cancer after six months of CHOP. Gaah! Chills shook my spine. I couldn’t put it down. She’d added, "Thanks again for associating me in the treatment of this lovely man." Isn’t that nice? Of course, I was on time for all my appointments.
By the next week, I could wear pants with belts again, even my usual underwear. By the end of it I was off Percocet and able to lie on my belly for minutes at a time, and sit still for a Mycota Coven esbat. A sure sign of returning health: I was beginning to be depressed about my life again.
But I felt different about it: It no longer feels like my life, so I can toss it down the tubes if I feel like it, if I give up on it, if I can’t deal with it any more. It feels like it belongs to other people as well: to Dr. Gold, to Bunny and Gary, to all the witches who sent energy and did rituals for me, plus Michael, who lit candles for my spleen to St. Rita in half the churches in Paris. It feels like I have to live up to something. (Bummer.)
On the 18th of November, I saw Gold again. She seemed very pleased with herself, me, us. But she told me there was a 50/50 chance of recurrent cancer in the next two years (and some small chance for three years more after that), during which she intends to monitor me closely – a look-see every three months, a CAT scan every six. This is not arduous for a Pagan to remember – each cross-quarter holiday, I’ll know it’s time to make an appointment with Ellen. But 50% was rather more than I’d expected. "I told you it would be 50% when we started," she said, a bit crossly. But I had other things to worry about then. And since my cancer showed no sign of wandering from one organ to another, since it seemed a rather homebody cancer, happy to stay in the splenetic lymph nodes, and since those nodes and the spleen had been removed, I thought, and still think, that my chances of full recovery rather better than half. She declined to confirm this supposition. (Superstition?)
She also told me (when I asked) that this particular cancer became curable about twenty years ago, just before she began her studies. Yes, twenty years ago, I’d have been dead today. (Parse that sentence.) On the other hand, who knows what contemporary pollutants had infected me, that a century back I would have escaped?
We deify numbers, clutch at their corky buoyance: Is 85% more likely to save me than 65%? Gold has no patience with this sort of thing. I’m well now (if weak). The rest will come as it comes. One thing that will come if it comes: extraction and replacement of bone marrow. Chills again. "But we’re having very good results with that," Gold said, licking her lips. A devotee of Artemis: she hunts down cancers, shows no mercy, delights in the chase and in the kill.
Other superstitions: What brought this about? Woddyedo? Is it the impurity in the water? (There have been a lot of cancers in my building – but also a lot of people living to their 90s.) Is it my eating habits? Secondary smoke? Reading used copies of the NY Times? (Bunny’s theory.) Some new, weird immune disease spread by gay sex? (Too unlikely.) Too much black tea? Too much Wagner? Too much travel? Too little sex? (I have so few vices.)
A medieval primer on display at the Morgan Library illuminated ms. show informs me that the spleen is ruled by Cancer, and also by Saturn. Where was Saturn last spring? Aries, apparently. Something to do with the comet, perhaps? Fortunately, I don’t believe in astrology. I’ve got five planets in Leo, man – I don’t take any shit from stars.
That night I went to a "Wellness Alumni" group at Gilda’s Club, for people who are "over" cancer. They brought up new issues. All further along than I, they are facing loss of interest from friends who, however close and united they stood during the treatment, now want to move past it – and we can’t move past it, because we could be recurring at any moment. They are facing the wish that life could go back to the way it was before chemo, and they find that it can’t. They are facing the way all life looks different now, the way they feel hurried, rushed, it’s time to do what we’re going to do. They are facing "Why don’t I eat and get fat? I could be dead", "I was exercising, eating well, doing everything right, and I got cancer – why bother?" They are facing, "If I forget to do one home remedy somebody’s wise man’s friend suggested, I could have cancer and it will be all my fault," so guilt rains in if they take their minds off cancer for two hours a day, but no one wants to talk about it.
The next day I went to my regular Wellness group and got slapped: "Have you faced how serious your disease is?" asked one fellow sufferer – one of those quiet guys who usually doesn’t speak, so you learn to be wary when they do. "I don’t think you have," he said. "Everything is a joke with you. That’s all I ever hear from you – jokes." I’d thought I was being gallant; I’d feared being a bore; I hadn’t wanted to use up the time of people suffering real cancers with my own, which does not count. I have been sure from the beginning that it wouldn’t kill me. That makes me self-conscious in the presence of people equally sure that theirs will kill them. I have not succumbed to terror because, frankly, the bloody nuisance of chemotherapy and post-op has occupied more of my time and focus than cancer itself. Has this been offensive?Besides, I don’t need strangers to break down with; I have friends who have been glad to help out in that line. And they like my jokes.
I’m ready (other than financially) to bring out a magazine, and I think I owe it to my subscribers to do that. I’m gung-ho about my commitments to Covenant of the Goddess, as National Public Information Officer and First Officer of the Gotham Local Council. I could not write on chemo, but lately I’ve been working again on my novel about Ruritania after the fall of Communism, and have drafted a play as well (about E. Nesbit). It’s always exciting when my creativity rolls in again. I am strong enough to work, perhaps to travel – Michael suggests I spend a month in Paris with him this winter, and has offered to take me to Ruritania, wherever I say it is. My hair is back. My eyebrows are back. My looks are back. My stomach crinkles and feels awful if I sit in too cramped a position for very long – ninety minutes at the Met, and I was in agony and, no, it wasn't the performance -- the performance was splendid. I eat as much as I used to eat, but my stomach can’t handle it, and up it comes. I have (mildly) wild sex, and then I crinkle for a day.
"Now that it’s over, I want to go back to where my life was before the cancer," said a woman in the Wellness Alumni group. "And it won’t." Everyone there complained about that. Time won’t go backwards. Physicists have always been puzzled about it.
So this is where I am.
P.S. Three months later (February): First quarterly checkup, Gold giggling as much as I, pleased and astonished at how I look and feel. "And now I want to travel," I told her. "Go!" she cried. "We'll do a CAT scan in May." "That's when I'll be traveling." "Okay, whenever you get back." I work, I write, I bike, I make love, I lift weights, I go to the opera (standing room), I walk for miles. I am full of energy and optimism, which isn't like me at all. I have a list of friends who are my projects, on whom I have now to work to make them as pleased with their lives as I am. It's quite a list. I must have invoked a great deal of Fire Energy at that Brigid ritual I led for New Moon New York the other day....
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