Peeking into the rock

 Last year I read a lot of books. I have changed the way I go about reading, because I was not being able to read much. Oh wait, before I go on I should tangentize what I've discovered about my particular sort of chemobrain.

I have been really very frustrated about my brain functioning. It's been nearly three years since I started cancer treatment-more than two years since it mostly ended. I felt I had a right to expect more improvement. I don't know why I felt that! I have returned to the world of the living in so many ways. I no longer sleep four two to six hours every daytime, for example. I never got much flakier than I was to begin with. I mean, I don';t screw up my finances, I hardly ever forget my appointments or miss deadlines. Those are chronic problems I have always had. I have simplified my life so that there's less to screw up, but then there's less to my life too. So that's kind of a neither her nor there thing.

BUT. two really important functions of my brain have just been torpedoed and it is not until very recently that I've seen much improvement: reading and writing.  No, I didn't lose the basic skills. I lost the thread. It was so hard to just read a book from beginning to end. And writing-it's like the story monster has just laid down and --maybe not died, but gone into a deep state of hibernation. With occasional surfacing. I've written a few drafts, maybe three? novellas and a couple-few stories?  But not successfully? Sort of promisingly, but something's missing? And I haven't been able to do any sustained writing, hours at a time, days at a time, get the thing done. I've spent months at a time with a blank space where the story monster ought to be restlessly swimming or pacing or whatever it does. It's not like that part of my brain feels numb, either--it feels gone, a lot of the time.

I thought by now it couldn't be chemobrain anymore. It was depression, maybe. Or maybe I had just lost it. Maybe it was the onset of some sort of dementia. Maybe I actually never had a story monster, maybe it was an illusion, or it's a false memory. Or something. But recently I decided to look it up. I forget what search terms I used. But I got a revelation.

First of all, there's no expiration date on chemobrain. Secondly, some people have late onset chemobrain. Thirdly, it can be quite this specific, though I didn't see any examples quite like mine. Fourthly, while there's a lot of mystery, there's some known mechanisms for this when a person has the kind of cancer I had and the kind of treatments I had...and the kind I am still undergoing. I had an estrogen-dependent breast cancer and a large part of the treatment was starving it of estrogen. And now I am taking an estrogen antagonist called arimidex, which shuts down every last scrap of estrogen production in my body. There's a bit of redundancy in the body, so you can do without a lot of your basic chemicals, I guess. 

So one of the jobs that estrogen does is some subtle regulating in the brain. When you take away all the estrogen from the brain, cells stop reproducing in the hippocampus, and myelination in the brain is messed up. This is kind of teasingly interesting, but I've read about hippocampus function, and that seems to be fine for me (the hippocampus is implicated in several kinds of memory and some spatial functions. I have never had a great memory, but my memory is not pathologically bad). I saw some assertions that estrogen helps regulate mood, but I'm not sure that's part of its brain function, and I'm pretty sure my range of moods are not strikingly different from before. I'm less volatile than I was when I was younger, but I've been that way for a long time. And I can't say that I see things in myself that are the result of demyelination (which is a process of MS as well, but I don't see any indication that estrogen lack causes MS). 

So what I have left in this is: well, I think probably that the mental problems I've been having might be a bit related to wiping out every scrap of estrogen from my body. But the mechanism is a mystery, because my problems aren't the problems that are listed for these brain functions. But. Having a thing to blame it on does wonders for my mood and optimism! Because if there's probably a cause for it, I can fight that. If it's all completely subjective and there's no reason for it, I don't know how to not wallow.

I signed up for the electronic library that my pub lic library belongs to. I read these ebooks and listen to these audiobooks mainly on my phone. And it turns out this change works for me! Not, I think, because of any particular virtue of the format, but just because it's different. Audiobooks have the advantage that I can listen to them while I do things with my hands, and ebooks on the phone have the advantage that reading them on the bus doesn't cause me to get motion sickness.

Last year I read about two books a week, starting in July. This year I seem to be doing the same. I do still reject a lot of books without finishing them. Part of that is that the Northern California Digital Library doesn't have a lot of books in my favored genres. I end up sometimes unable to find any sff available except for stuff I really don't want to read. So I end up exploring other kinds of books, and I'm just likely to not like quite a lot of mysteries, romances, literary novels, women's fiction (by which I mean that kind of literary-adjacent novel that centers the experience of modern women), or historicals. But I'm been doing pretty well at picking ones I'm going to be able to finish, and it's a lot less frustrating to put a book down without finishing it when there's been quite a lot of appealing ones recently.

On the writing front. I don't want to jinx it, but I seem to be a bit better. I don't know what's doing it. Back in August I tried doing a lot of intensive outlining in a paper notebook, and it was fun for some weeks, but that book is still unwritten. I've been talking with some supportive (and demanding) friends, and maybe that's done it? But I think maybe knowing that my drug is causing at least some of the problem may have loosened me up also? Maybe being freed of the feeling of frustration in my self has been the thing I needed?

Anyway, that's where I'm at. And I think I want, at the end of the month, to do a wee roundup/capsule review of the books I've read this month, and maybe continue the rest of the year? 


edit: the biggest symptom caused by the arimidex that I've noticed all along is an intermittent, trivial-to-severe, nocturnal pain in my arms and hands (weirdly specific). It lasts just long enough to wake me up and rarely keeps me awake. The frequency and severity of the pain vary randomly as far as I can see. I have a small prescription of tramadol (an opioid!) which I more or less keep as an amulet. Aside from the sleep interruption it doesn't seem to interfere with my life: there's no impact on use or function. I wonder if this is a myelination issue? Or is there a different mechanism?

The thing about having had several long-lasting painful conditions in one's life is that one can assess a severe pain as no big deal, comparatively, because its duration is not huge and it doesn't accompany other more important problems.

I am low-energy, distractable, lazy, diffident, tentative, and easily discouraged to begin with. I began 2016 thinking I would ride the energy and optimism from my lovely new knees to Get Things Done, Get In Shape, and Get A Job.

I was doing pretty good until February, when I got the cancer diagnosis.

( seriously this is just a long organ recital and for my own records, so don't read it )
So anyway, 2016 was for me like many others mostly a loss. I haven't mentioned much about the big world because others have more, and more eloquent, things to say about tt. I'm still alive, of course, and I still have a house. Also I have a pile of writing I'm sort of working on for several days at a time before I collapse in on myself for a few days again.

I have this persistent problem that I can't get Libre OpenOffice to convert two hyphens to an em dash in text that I have imported from Google Docs. I have Auto-Correct set to do this (it's the only thing in that category I have checked-boxed).

Fake edit: I can retype the bit that needs it, add in an extra letter and space, and it will convert, and then I go back and delete the extra letter and space. But this is cumbersome and I ionly discovered it after the last submission went out with double hyphens because I got desperate & hadn't thought of this yet.

Real edit: there are two instances that won't convert this way either. They are before and after the word "end" at the end of the file.

If I was a fanfiction writer there is a thing I would do.

Last night I was high as a kite on dexamethasone (a steroid I take prior to taxol infusions so as to ward off the possibility of neuropathy) and I couldn't sleep at all. So having run in to the radio play of "Jacobowski and the Colonel," I listened to that. Being shorter than the Danny Kaye movie I imprinted on as a child, it didn't have all the bits, but it was good.

Today I'm thinking that if I were the fanfiction type, what I'd want to do would be an AU retelling in a science fiction landscape (because that's where I feel most comfy, no other reason), in which Jacobowski and the Colonel end up paired overtly, Marianne throws them both over for being two complicated to deal with and picks up with Szabuniewizc--this is almost canon, as the former two do leave together on the ship to London and Marianne and Szabuniewizc stay behind to wait for them in France--but also, along the way they lose the ridiculous macguffin of the idiot-ass plans and spend the plot development time breaking partisans and refugees out of capture and leading them to the Pyrenees-equivalents (as Jan Yoors was doing with the Roma family he adopted himself into)into the Spain-equivalent, so that the Colonel's bravery and ridiculous honor mentality and fatalism and Jacobowski's resourcefulness and flexibility and stoicism continually come into play in high-stakes action leading inevitably to an entirely different scene at the docks where it makes more sense for Jacobowski to be grandstanding with cyanide pills (which do not feature in the radio play unless I dozed off a bit there at the end).

Actually the thing to do would be to file the serial numbers off completely since the structure of the plot has now changed a lot in which case everybody can go back to having non-romantic relationships with a dollop of tenderness in there with the conflict. Also, Szabuniewizc gets to be much much more of a person! And maybe a woman.

On another front, my left hand feels funny right in the skin layer. I am noting this because I am watching for neuropathy because it terrifies me. I am thinking it is the amazingly dry skin I have there because of the taxol, and I am moisturizing a million times a day. But watching. And I told the nurse about it, though I said I didn't think it was neuropathy because of the area that feels funny, and because there is no numbness or clumsiness. I forgot to mention my wobbly legs after sitting too long on the toilet because I got lost in a phone game (Jewels Star Mineral, the only jewels game worth playing), but I don't think that's neuropathy either, I think it's pinching the sciatic nerve sitting like that in such a doofus fashion for so long. Recording it here so when I think about it again in the future I can find this date.

The hand-foot syndrome I previously recorded as being so very very mild has developed in a doofus way also. All the pain and disinclination to move went away pretty quick and then I thought I was getting away with nothing at all because the peeling took a long time to start. Now more than a month after the last adriamycin infusion the bottoms of my feet are quietly and painlessly--but grotesquely--peeling right off in great flapping sheets of parchment. I'm tearing off the easy bits so they can go into the garbage without getting all over the floor and into Zluta's greedy little mouth (yes, dogs are gross, so what else is new), and scrubbing with the brush after showers and sponge baths, slathering thick layers of cocoa butter on to them, and wearing socks all the time if I can bear it (sometimes it is too hot). My hands have a suede-like texture because the calluses are not so thick there and the peeling is very fine-grade, but as I said, I think it's making them feel odd. Not painful, not numb, not tingly per se, just kind of dry and prickly.

Other than a lot of missed sleep and incoveniently-placed make-up sleep and about two and a half days of delayed-onset excruciating abdominal pain last week my first taxol went uneventfully, and this week looks to be the same, though I hope for less pain since I did discover that tramadol helped a lot last time. I don't think of pain medication for sometimes quite a lot time, usually just planning to ride it out unless there are exercises for it. This is not always wise. If I had taken tramadol earlier last week I might not have needed to miss folk dancing again.

I just read that paragraph and it's not clear why I think last week was uneventful, especially noting that I didn't list the digestive upset. Maybe because the sleep disturbance and digestive upset are par for the course if you're injecting systemic poison into your carotid artery for a couple hours a week? And because it was clear they were self-limiting? And not really huge in the scale of things I'm concerned with at the moment?

Anyway, I'm not writing the Jacobowski and the Colonel rewrite fic, at least not now, but I'm pleased I can think of it.

Yesterday was a productive day. I did a lot of housework, mostly disinfecting things, and I rode my bike to the library and got a couple of (ultimnately somewhat disappointing) books about pigeons for the book I'm working on, and oh yes, I worked on the book--almost a thousand words, which is approaching normal! And I am beginning to have an understanding of the plot.

Yesterday started at 5 am. Today, 6, though I didn't write till 7.

My gosh, the crows are vocal this morning.

he point is, that when I look at the book, I don't see a white hole where my story brain should be. That was really disconcerting this last month or so. It was really rare that I could contemplate a story and see the warp and weft of it, or the lines of movement, or pull anything new out of it. It was like part of my brain was just missing. I suppose it was that "chemo-brain" phenomenon people talk about, but different. I haven't been more forgetful or vague about responsibilities--in fact I think I have been more responsible than normal--but this vital function of myu mind has been just absent. I was afraid it would not come back, and I'd have lost it all before I got it, again.

Today or tomorrow, the surgeon said, we should get the pathology results from the surgery. I thought the oncologist said it would take longer than a week, but maybe she said it would take longer than a week to get started with the next phase of treatment.

Anyway. The way it goes is that there are two possibilities. Either the margins are good or they are not. If the margins are good, I don't need another surgery. If they are not, the surgeon needs to go in and take out more flesh. And beyond that there are two possibilities. Either the lymph nodes are free of cancer, or the lymph nodes have cancer in them. If the lymph nodes have cancer in them, I need chemotherapy before I have radiation. If the lymph nodes are free of cancer, there are two possibilities. Either the cancer cells from the breast have a high oncotype score, or they have a low oncotype score. If the oncotype score is high, I will have chemotherapy before I have radiation. If the lymph nodes are clear and the oncotype score is low, I will go directly to radiation and thence to taking hormone blockers for five to ten years depending on another string of possibilities.

The numbers are with me in each of these if/then situations--I mean, it's more likely than not that the margins are good, the lymph nodes are clear, the oncotype is good. If that is all the case, then I suppose I advance from "cancer patient" to "cancer survivor"--or do I do that at the end of radiation? I'm not sure. If any of those things are against me, I stay a "cancer patient" for that much longer.

I just want to open the box and see which I am, but it's not even 8:30 so I need to be patient.

Meanwhile, my brother-in-law is insisting on paying to paint my house  but the problem with that is that he's insisting on doing things his way, which means insulting the professionalism of the painters and insisting on breathing over their shoulders while they work. I almost fired him and started thinking about how to get the money for it myself, but then I used my cancer situation as a lever to get him to slow down instead. I'm going to use the time gained to figure out how to get him to trust the painters to do their job. He refused to consider Zack's painter, I believe because he doesn't trust Zack, and got three folks off of Yelp: the first two are kind of bros who started painting irregularly and independently but a long time ago so they're licensed and they have crews now. The third is a woman who got where she was by working for another painter for a long time and studying for various certifications before she took over the business.  Myself, I feel I have reason to trust any of the four of them (including Zack's painter), but if I'm choosing and I can't throw the business to Zack's guy, well, I think you can guess which one I want.

I have a bad head cold for the first time in years. I forgot how stupid and sleepy a cold can make me. I'm good for a few hours in the morning, when I do a bit of housework, take the dog out, and write a little. Then I doze and struggle to do anything at all for the rest of the day.

And now I am off to pick up my Grey Bears vegies and walk the dog and visit my friend Glen, which will take up the rest of the morning. I did poke a little at one of my projects this morning, but I am soooo slow and stupid that I made little progress. I did realize how little I know about horses (hence th previous post).

My friend Glen Fitch decided I needed to read Master and Margarita so he ordered it for me and I regret that because it's a nice hardcover edition and it couldn't have been cheap but...I didn't last fifteen pages. I am allergic to stories where the Devil shows up to caper around and claim that whoever the author doesn't like is in cahoots with him. And I just didn't like it as a block of stuff to read. Not much of an Ambrose Bierce fan either, which it reminds me of. When it comes to satire, I kind of like stuff more on the line of The Good Soldier Schweik (or Švejk) or Iceland's Bell (as difficult as that can be to read: it's pretty grim).

What I bought myself is an immense tome, part cookbook and part social, ecological, and economic history: A Mediterranean Feast by Clifford A. Wright. I love it. I'm on the second pass. The first pass I read the parts I thought would be most interesting first--it's really immense and I was a bit daunted--and when I had read all of the book in that piecemeal way I started again at the beginning. You can probably tell I love it. I got it at the used bookstore for $7.50! That's downright amazing. I already had what I think is a fix-up of notes he took while researching the book (though I don't know this for sure), Mediterranean Vegetables. That one is in encyclopedic form and it drives me crazy because it is so raw and unedited and full of errors I can catch (the pointless little errors that arise when you're doing a large work very fast) but it's also magnificent and lots of fun to reread and I do reread it frequently. The bad editing made me worry about A Mediterranean Feast but I've only found a couple of that kind of errors in it so it's more relaxing to read. His main premise is that historically the Mediterranean was anything but a feast, and it's the poverty of the land and people that drove history in such a way that it seems to be the center of a lush life now.

It's interesting how shallow the Mediterranean food tradition is. I've already wondered foir a long time what the food was like there before tomatoes--it seems it was completely, utterly different. I would have thought that tomatoes would have pushed out other fruits in traditional sauces and it seems like that is not the case. People weren't eating the same sauces with plums or something in the tomato position. And while durum wheat and dry pasta has been known in the Mediterranean for centuries, it wasn't such a popular thing in Italy and elsewhere until the nineteenth century.And so on.

He looks at the cooking history of Spain, Italy, Egypt, Turkey, and Tunisia, with peeks at other places--he picks these five because of the documentation that exists and their importance at various times in the history. He includes a little information about classical Greece and Rome, but there's not as much information that far bacl and the story really gets cooking in the thirteenth century an on. The sixteenth century is a big focus. The book is arranged according to topics, and each region is visited in each topic, and their interrelationships are heavily explored too.

I heartily recommend the book, and now I have a hunger for similar books about other places.  The food I've been most interested in these days is Central/Eastern European and Western/Central Asia, and I enjoyed reading Please to the Table, about Russian cooking, but it's not anything like as deep or scholarly as A Mediterranean Feast. Any suggestions? Mostly for things I can get from the library...

On another front: I bought my membership to FOGCon. There is a story behind this I'll tell later.

Still another front: Zluta Zluta Zluta all the time. If it was up to her, we'd be walking ten miles a day. She is almost a year old and has become markedly mellower but she's still excitable and high energy and she demands something every forty-five minutes to an hour and a half.

Oh, and I'm like a day or two away from having the semi-final draft of The Drummer Boy ready for beta readers. If you were thinking of being one of them, contact me. I'm actually finishing off another few of my bagatelles also, so that I have something to do when I have to stop and think about the main project.

I have more evidence that Affordable Care is an imperfect system and we really need single payer, but I'll give that its own post.

So I don't even know where I saw this, but this is the latest version I've seen of "post a bit of your work:" you go to page seven of what you're working on, count down seven lines, and copy the next seven.

This is what I get if I consider the whole novel as one manuscript instead of the various chapters independently:

"I have breeches," Yanek informed his sister, "But Zhenny wouldn't let me wear them because I wore them yesterday when I played the drum."

This led to an enthusiastic telling of the events of the day before. Yanek confided that he had had beer and herb-liqueur the day before, and he relayed some of the more puzzling things he had seen and heard as if he had understood any of it. Ludmilla countered with some of the grander events at the palace, and Sasha announced that he also had breeches and he wore them all the time, and he had a drum, too, which had little rooster soldiers painted on it.

This is the best I can do if I consider the chapter I'm on: it hasn't gotten to 7 pages yet, so these lines are from page 6:

"It's just coincidence. It'll all go away when this is over," Yanek said. "A week or two from now I'll be back at work at the glass factory." If I live, he thought.

"You think you're getting back to Boem in two weeks?" Krenek asked. "Well," he added to Honza, "I can certainly understand why you don't want to come with us. Garlo stayed behind for similar reasons. But we'd better go now, the sun keeps moving even when we don't."

The other workers in the field had already started loading the wheat into the wagon, so after embraces for all the soldiers, Honza turned back to join them. Yulaida lingered a little longer.

The strikeout words are going away because thanks to heleninwales I now know I did all the harvests in the book wrong and I have to go back and correct them. I didn't realize about stooking: I thought it was just hay that got that treatment. Definitely not "writing what I know" here. Just "learning about what I write." Also, the second passage looks boring to me on its own like this.

I took three books out of the library: another of Paul Stametz's mushroom growing books, Tanith Lee's The Dark Lords, and Lisa Goldstein's Tourists.

I'm a bit disappointed in the mushroom book. I thought that since it was promoted as being more for the home grower than the other one, that it might therefore have more information about the kind of garden cultivation I am trying to do, but it doesn't. It has even less information about it than the other one, and quite frankly I am not planning on getting into large-scale cultivation.

I've been warned that it is "too soon" to be very detailed about being appalled at and not enjoying a book of Tanith Lee's, so I'll leave it at that. Well, I'll hint: sexual politics, race politics, class politics, esthetics, and story structure.

Lisa Gildstein's book would have been written a wee bit differently now, I think, but it stands up (publish date 1989, a momentous year). Americans in a fictional Middle-Eatern/Central Asian sort of country for the father's research become embroiled in a complex magical/national/political crisis, where "nothing is as it seems" in an interesting way. I like that while the teenaged girls' presence is catalytical for the history of the country, they aren't the story at all, in the long view. I mean they are not the American Saviors. Magical forces have simply slotted them into the patterns that are being worked out and fought over. Literally, patterns are key here. There are many things I love about this book. The girls have been engaged for years in developing an imaginary landscape with warring countries, including making up their own languages for them and producing stacks of notebooks with mythologies, histories and literature for them. The older girl has withdrawn from the "real world" to escape the pressures of gifted child adolescence, The younger girl has withdrawn from the imaginary world to take on the practical challenges of keeping her dysfunctional family together (a task which is less hers than she imagines it to be). All of this is extremely relevant. The mother, who gave up her career for marriage, drinks to deal with her disappointment and her difficulty dealing with things. The father wants to do nothing but his research and hides as much as he is able from the problems of his family.

I could go on for hours about how the different pieces of the story interlock and move about in different directions, but a lot of you people care about spoilers and I don't really understand well what constitutes a spoiler and what doesn't, so I'm going to leave this here and say it's a yummy book.

Also I finished it in the wee hours of the morning the night before last because I couldn't sleep for reasons that escape me. And then I started a strange duck of a little story which I am now having trouble finishing. Although the story doesn't have any of the same elements except that language does a thing in it, I think the story is inspired by the book.

Next I will go back to the library and find something else to read, I don't know what.

Last night as easier because she was farther away from the trauma of surgery and the anesthia had had some time to go away, but I still had to give her vicodin... well, I expect that the next day after surgery I might need some vicodin on top of the basic pain meds to sleep also.

This morning she was ready to go but I was not taking her on any adventures at this point. She has an appetite: not a big one and she still won't eat anything but boiled chicken, but I don't particularly care right now. As long as she eats a little and drinks water, I'm satisfied.

She went in for her checkup and the ver said her sutures were lovely and she looked good, also that her kidney function had returned to normal right after surgery (which means her Addison's is under control again and was only off because of the stress of the hematoma on her spleen). She was terrified at the vet's office and really wanted to leave, but once we did leave she calmed right down. My experience from before is that the PTSD from the surgery lasts a few months.

On another front, I am now paying my friend Cassandra to do my pruning and other such work, and I spend the time she's doing that in working on other garden taks. So that's finally coming together. My plum tree is blooming, as is my almond tree. The Euro plum is not, yet, nor is the apple. Emma's Satsuma mandarin is also blooming. It needs to be moved into a sunnier spot. Everything needs to be fed.

Once we've got a handle on what we've got here, I will look into getting other fruit trees, maybe, though the space for them is smaller than it used to be, because of Zack's house.

On the writing front, I am still struggling with the story of how Elisabeth and Melissa, my lesbian mechanics from A and A Salvage, met up in the first place. It involves a vengeful ghost resident in a Subaru two-seater, but probably nothing else that you imagine with that. The story's kind of kicking me around, but I figure witrh persistence I will pin it.