I start Round 2 of chemotherapy/immunotherapy this morning. I don’t feel overly stressed about the prospect of continuing it over at keast the next several months. The infusion experience has not been unpleasant, and I haven’t experienced the kind of severe side effects that you hear so much about.

I’ve previously noted disrupted sleep since starting chemo almost a month ago. I wake up from a dream that weighs on me, so I get out of bed and spend a little time awake reading mail or news or whatever. That continues.

But it’s taken me this long to realize how many stressful dreams involve chemotherapy in one way or the other.

Some of these are kind of obsessive. I’m looking at some kind of printout of chemo results. And I’m unsuccessfully trying to make sense of what it shows, repeatedly going through the same futile attemps. Yes, I know, that doesn’t happen. But it creaps into my dreamworld.

I another dream, repeated a couple of times, I’m looking at what appear to be three small, fancy pastries. But I’m told these are part of the chemo regimen, and I’m supposed to choose which one I want. In the dream, I’m visualizing taking these apart, layer by layer, to see what’s in them in an attempt to inform my choice. It doesn’t go well. The dream always ends in frustration.

I have to start paying closer attention and writing down those fleeting memories immediately after escaping from one of these dreams.

Interestingly, none of these dreams includes realities as I’ve experienced them, few of which have been bad. I guess that means its the unknown that is nagging at me.

Getting out the other side of these frustrating dreams will make it easier to get more rest, which is sorely needed.

It’s Thursday morning. On Tuesday, I did too much and hit the wall hard, ending the evening without a drop of energy in reserve.

Wednesday was a blur. I didn’t do much at all. The only time out of the house was driving Meda to an eye exam. I stayed in the car and slept while she was getting her eyes dilated and examined. Her results were good, and I got a bit more sleep.

Except when eating a few small meals, and trying to stay hydrated, I spent much of Wednesday in bed.

Not reading. Sleeping.

Get up. Drink a glass of something. Check email. Assess the recovery. Consider a snack. Still no energy. Back to bed. Repeat.

Instead of recharging overnight, it took two full nights and an entire lost Wednesday just to crawl back to the “new normal.”

Another chemo lesson learned.

I did far too much on Tuesday, and crashed into my own physical limit. Hitting the wall hasn’t been fun, but it has been educational.

First, early Tuesday morning, I walked to the park to watch the sunrise.

Later in the morning, we got ourselves to the Blaisdell Concert Hall where the Native Hawaiian Convention was set to honor the 50th anniversary of the January 1976 landing on Kahoolawe, a protest against the Navy’s bombing of the island. It has widely been considered one of the key sparks of the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s. At least five of the participants in that first protest landing have died. Molokai’s Walter Ritte and I were the only ones to appear in person.

It really wasn’t a strenuous outing. It just required walking around the concert hall a bit to get back stage where we then waited around for more than an hour for our moment before the audience.

I felt bad about not staying afterward to mingle with the audience, but given the risk of infection while undergoing chemo, and the advice to avoid crowds where you could easily pick up a cold, flu, or worse, I decided, once again, that discretion was the better part of valor as a matter of self protection. So we slipped out of the building and hailed an Uber to the ride home.

At this point, I should have cut the day short.
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