July 20, 2026

I’ve described most of the side effects of chemotherapy and immunotherapy drugs that I’ve experienced to date as mild or absent, at least so far after completing a single round of infusions. I feel a bit “fuzzy”, what I’ve described as perhaps 15% short of a sharp focus, along with moments of dizziness if I stand up too quickly, find myself waking up at night, and still have a somewhat depressed appetite.

Recently, though, I discovered a key limitation associated with the chemo.

It took me weeks to finish Monday’s post about former City Council member Trevor Ozawa and his past ties to the late Michael Miske Jr.—a complex investigative piece that normally would have taken a fraction of the time.

To explain requires going back to my “normal” writing routine.

My regular blog or Facebook posts are typically done quickly, usually no more than a day or two between the idea for a post and when it goes up online.

But I take much more care with longer and/or more complicated stories intended for distribution to a wider audience. These might percolate in the background for some time as I gather bits and pieces of information that might be relevant, stashing those details in a folder for future reference, and then begin to shape the form of the story, settling on the major points around which the story will be built. Finally I’ll sit down and write an initial rough draft, followed by several days honing the draft until it’s almost ready to publish.

BC, Before Cancer, I would at some point decide that enough is enough. The final step would be to lock myself and my laptop in our spare bedroom for most of a day to push through a final rewrite and edit.

By the end of a sometimes long and stressful session, I’m usually able to nail the final draft down tight before what used to be wine o’clock.

Writing a post about Candidate Ozawa has been high on my “to do” list for a long time, and I finally moved it to active status a couple of weeks ago. I selected a close-to-final draft more than a week ago. Normally, at this point, I would be ready to shut myself off for a day and wrestle the beast into form for publication.

But now, instead of a single, intensive marathon, I was forced into a relay race with myself—working an hour at a time before my focus evaporated.

So the final edit, usually completed in a day-long editing session, instead took a week of shorter writing sessions.

I wrapped up the final edit after watching the sunrise at Waialae Beach Park Monday morning, then hit publish.

It required coming to terms with the limits imposed by chemo—and, by extension, making adjustments to my own sense of self. This particular shift isn’t hard to accept, but it is a wake-up call. There will be other accommodations down the road as treatment continues.

“Know yourself,” the old adage says. I’m learning.