And so it goes, post #2.  Whoo hoo...

Last night I was writing and my pen ran out of ink.  Pissed me off.  I'm a fountain-pen drafter, so when I write it's a little bit of a production, usually involving lots of ink-stained fingers...  And so it did.  Got it all sorted out this morning, though.  The reservoir in the pen wasn't working well, so it took some nudging to get it to do its little inky job.

But!  I was musing on how much the support of others has meant to me through this.  I am not in any sense religious, but there's been a really strong feeling of support, and I don't know what I would feel that.  So the musing last night was on John Donne's Meditation XVII from his Meditations on Emergent Occasions (the "no man is an island" one).  In spite of my irreligiosity (and even outright atheism), that notion has run strongly through my life: we are all part of a whole, and "if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were or a manor of thine own or their friends' were."

So in some very real sense I am buoyed by the support that others have expressed, and in a deep and to me a very surprising degree.

Physically things are going very well.  I've had little-to-no side effects from the medication or radiation or chemotherapy, and aside from a little bit of dizziness the last two days, nothing at all to remark on.  I'm glad of that.  I know that the effects are cumulative, and that the worst is by far yet to come, but I really like the physicians on my team and they seem hell-bent on making this as easy on me as they can.  They all know this cancer will kill me, but they're working like hell to make sure that it takes a damned long time to do it.

I like the thought that it will take a long time.  I got important shit to do, still.

Not exactly sure what that is, but my sense is that I'll grow into an understanding of what really matters and what doesn't.  I hope so, at any rate.