October 26 hic hic hic

Well these posts are starting to get repetitive but I figure I may as well give a progress report. Friday was my second double-dose infusion day, 7 hours in the "infusion bays" as they are called, although not, alas, in the luxury suite. Still managed to get a lot of math done, for instance reading some notes on group cohomology and coming to a proof that was total nonsense and thinking "what is this idiot talking about?" Oh wait, I wrote these notes last year.

The nurse practitioner continues to be baffled by my high energy state and is going to ask the doctor about it. However, on the double-dose weekends I'm not so high energy, generally feeling blah but still perfectly functional. The worst of it is still the hiccups, which can be stopped by various means but for some reason are set off again every time I get up from a chair or from lying down, or occasionally just rolling over in bed. Among the many hiccup-stopping methods I've tried there are two that still have a perfect record. The first, which I've already mentioned, is the Finley-inspired method of stuffing blueberries into your mouth as fast as you can chew them (although Finley often regarded the chewing as superfluous, preferring to store large quantities in his cheeks like a chipmunk). So far I'm 8 for 8 with this method. But I'm getting the hiccups 20 times a day or more, and you can only eat so many blueberries. For the second method I thank Kari Crabtree: Fill a glass with water, sit down, place it between your knees, bend over and drink it continuously with a straw. Started this one today and so far I'm 4 for 4. So between the two I get lots of fruit and lots of water, both of which are recommended during chemo. Tomorrow should be my last hiccup day. Until the next double-dose, that is.

Naturally I've also been offered more medication for dealing with hiccups. In other words, medication to deal with side-effects of other medicines I'm taking to deal with side-effects of chemo. But of course the hiccup meds also have side-effects...so where does it end? For now I'm going to gut it out with blueberries and LOTS of water.

Anyway, maybe I'll stop posting these medical updates unless something new and significant happens. I hope to start a new series of posts soon, on more interesting (at least to me) philosophical themes.