Day 14: Catching Up One Thing at a Time

There's been a haze of new developments and new activity over the last couple days.

The brain radiation is finally providing its promised "inability to focus" and "confusion." The result of this is that I blog much more slowly.

I type pretty quickly, especially if it's a teaching I'm developing. I already have all the ideas in my head, and I'm trying to put them together. The ideas come rushing, I get them all down, and while I'm typing my argument, I'm considering possible refutations, the types of people who would do the refuting, and whether the refutation is worth addressing before it ever comes up.

That system doesn't work so well now. As you can see, it involved holding multiple thoughts in your head, lining them up, then firing them down your fingers.

The problem is that I can't hold as many multiple thoughts in my head as in the past. Worse, if I thought of something would be addressed later in the document, I'd drop down about ten lines and type it in. That might be a question, a scripture, or another way to write the document.

When I get there to type, however, I just can't type as fast as I used to.

Apparently, I have a lot of patterns that I use in typing. In my mind, when I type the word "dextrous," for example, I type dex, and then -trous. They're one word on the screen, but my mind breaks into two "typing syllables," because over 20 years of heavy typing have developed muscle patterns, and I can type "trous" really, really fast.

Remember the old "macros" from MS Word? Same sort of thing. You could memorize any series of mouse clicks, mouse movements, and keystrokes, name that series, then hit a shortcut key and the computer would perform it for you.

Anyway, my macros, my printing syllables, are degraded right now, so my typing's slower.

Health Updates

The big news, to trump all others, is that on Day 13, my White Blood Cell (WBC) was 0.1.

Now that is not a lot of white blood cells. In fact, Nurse Liz this morning called it "one" cell.

However, even that 0.1 WBC does require my body to do some production. I don't think that qualifies as engrafting, but it indicates the stem cells have found their new home."

The rash's are all improving. I'm still on total body nutrition by IV, but now they're recommending I begin eating as I tolerate it.

Ok, I'm going to post this. I've fallen asleep two or three times during the post. Not everything is here, surely not even the most interesting stuff, but I'll just add a coupe of shortly.