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

I finished Bleak House last night, upon which I shall report on a more lucid day.

I also began The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbary, translated from the original L’élégance du hérisson by Alison Anderson (thank you, Jeff!), which is a pure delight. And I took a running start at Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, which is already as challenging and rewarding as I’ve been expecting.

I set Gravity’s Rainbow aside for next week when I have more brainpower. But I’m excited to be reading it.

I found Bleak House much more absorbing than DVRed American Idol (note how my punctuation reflects my priorities: books are bold, television shows merely italicized). Lil satisfied her Idol addiction while I sat with my iPod and headphones and Dickens, happy as a clam. A drugged clam, but a happy clam nonetheless. As far as American Idol goes, I usually watch the 30-second recap at the end of the show and feel satisfied with that. Also, I can’t stomach the results shows, which I suspect violate some obscure terms of the Geneva Convention.

My last chemo is over.

Now, we wait three months and do another PET scan. Hope that the cancer is gone for good. Then regular PET scans, spreading out to every six months and then to every year and then, at the five year mark, I’m proclaimed cured.

Next step: fight the insurance company, which of course doesn’t want to cover you if you’re actually sick with anything.

And start to detox. The poisons have done their job, now it’s time to clean out.

Today I’m flying high on steroids and delight. I’m determined to feel well enough Friday night to sit downtown for the Celtic Festival and movie in the park (Brigadoon, of course).

I leave you with two more quotes from Chapter 35 of Dickens’ Bleak House:

In falling ill, I seem to have crossed a dark lake, and to have left all my experiences, mingled together by the great distance, on the healthy shore.

And on another topic entirely, but no less true for that:

I said it was the not custom in England to confer titles on men distinguished by peaceful services, however good and great; unless occasionally, when they consisted of the accumulation of some very large amount of money.

Is it just me, or is little old Smallweed from Dickens’ Bleak House a literary candidate for a Tourette’s diagnosis?

“You’re a brimstone idiot. You’re a scorpion—a brimstone scorpion! You’re a sweltering toad. You’re a chattering clattering broomstick witch, that ought to be burnt!” gasps the old man, prostrate in his chair. “My dear friend, will you shake me up a little?”

Smallweed’s verbally intricate outbursts are primarily directed at his demented elderly wife, but they have the flavor of coprolalia.

Under this provocation, Mr. Smallweed’s favorite adjective of disparagement is so close to his tongue, that he begins the words “my dear friend” with the monosyllable “Brim;” thus converting the possessive pronoun into Brimmy, and appearing to have an impediment in his speech.

And his requirement of being frequently shaken like a canned beverage, his particular obsession with money and signatures, even his cushion-throwing tic all suggest to me a Dickensian expression of Tourette’s, which would first be identified as a neurological disorder about 30 years after the publication of Bleak House.

“I had no such thing. I have nothing but his signature. Plague pestilence and famine, battle murder and sudden death upon him,” says the old man, making a curse out of one of his few remembrances of a prayer, and squeezing up his velvet cap between his angry hands, “I have half a million of his signatures, I think! But you,” breathlessly recovering his mildness of speech, as Judy re-adjusts the cap on his skittle-ball of a head; “you, my dear Mr. George, are likely to have some letter or paper that would suit the purpose.”

Granted, Dickens characters are a breed apart, peculiar and hilarious, but Dickens was an astute observer and grounded all his caricatures in very real character traits.

So what say you, oh my literary and/or psychoneurological enthusiasts? Smallweed: Tourette’s or ornery oddball?

Last night I finished the delightful YA novel Once Upon a Marigold by Jean Ferris (a birthday present — thank you, Bev!). This book got bonus points for A) presenting dogs as important characters, B) presenting willingness to work hard as a highly valued character trait, and C) finally cluing the world in to the proper use of discarded teeth.

My one major complaint about was that several characters behaved rather stupidly for no apparent reason other than to advance the plot at key points.

However, for the most part I had a splendid time reading the story, which clipped along at a brisk pace and offered an ending that was simultaneously satisfying and cliff-hanger-ish.

• Buy Once Upon a Marigold at Powell’s.