A Spork in the Road

My blood counts are down today from last week. Neutrophils are hovering at the bottom of “normal” range, but my overall counts were down to 2.4 (marked simply with a “C” in the margin of my blood work sheet: “C” for “Critical”).

Neulasta works. It also retails around $7,000 per shot. An Everest of a number when you’re battling insurance woes and staring at a box full of past due medical bills.

We’re going to see if my counts climb back up a little next week. Otherwise we need to talk about Neulasta. In the meantime I wash my hands, avoid crowds, sleep more.

Loss grew as you did, without your consent; your losses mounted beside you like earthworm castings. No willpower could prevent someone’s dying. And no willpower could restore someone dead, breathe life into that frame and set it going again in the room with you to meet your eyes. That was the fact of it. The strongest men and women who had ever lived had presumably tried to resist their own deaths, and now they were dead. It was on this fact that all the stirring biographies coincided, concurred, and culminated.

Time itself bent you and cracked you on its wheel.

- Annie Dillard, An American Childhood