The Consonance of Softly Falling Rain

After about three hours’s sleep, I dragged myself to JACC entirely too early this morning to wait in the waiting room for a lab draw (liver enzymes are good, kidney functions are good, hemoglobin is good, white count is good as in I still have enough to do the job, sigh of relief). Then I went across the hall to wait in the waiting room to see my oncologist. Then I went back to the main waiting area to wait for my infusion. I came fully equipped: had my phone, a charge cord for it and the Bluetooth earbuds that are paired to it, two different knitting projects, an 8-inch Kindle with charge cord and earphones, 2 bottles of water, and a PayDay candy bar.

How do I have time to knit? Well, for one thing, instead of playing with my phone while I was sitting in one waiting room or the other for over two hours, I knitted. The pink thing is a round baby blanket (I have strategically retreated from the battle to work out the increases on the hexagon blanket pattern to live and fight another day when I’m not beset by chemo brain and working to a four-month deadline.)

Carlee cometh!

On or about 21 July, this one gets a sister.

I also brought with me the 5 tablets of prednisone that I’m supposed to take on the day of my chemo infusion, but I wasn’t sure when I was supposed to take them — before? after? — which is one of the things I asked my oncologist when he made his brief appearance. He said it was good I hadn’t already taken them because whether or not I would subsequently get my infusion of chemo was contingent on the results of my labs: If the lab results are bad, the infusion is cancelled. But if they’re good, then I take them while I’m getting hooked up to the IV rig. Also mentioned to him that my pancreas has been randomly elbowing me in the ribs and I wondered if it was attention seeking behavior. He didn’t seem to think so. I also found out it doesn’t matter if I’m fasting or not when they do the lab draws, which simplifies my life. Every little bit helps.

The hospital volunteers run a “snack cart” in the infusion area. They have sandwiches (I had a tuna one today) and various soft drinks, fruit drinks, and assorted munchies. The nurse brought me a blanket from the blanket warmer, I pulled up Soma FM‘s Drone Zone on my phone’s internet radio app, put in my Bluetooth earbuds, reclined the infusion chair and slept through the 2-hour infusion. I was there from 8:20 in the morning to nearly 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and at some point during that time, it apparently rained enthusiastically enough that the valet parking attendants had to relocate farther back under the porte-cochère. It had stopped raining by the time I left to go home, but they weren’t taking any chances. It thankfully had rained enough to pull a lot of the dust in the air left over from yesterday’s little hooley (with gusts up to 70 mph).

The Bradford pear trees that are literally all over town are in bloom again, and my sinuses are not the least bit happy about it. Anything else I have to say on that subject is definitely not G-Rated. In other tree related news, the one outside my window decided to bud yesterday. It may be an Ulmus pumila, but then again, maybe not. Right now, it’s Club Grackle. There’s always a lot of air going someplace else besides here and big tails on a windy day make it hard for you to impress the ladies with your lissome silhouette and your big yaller eyes when the wind keeps trying to jibe your spanker boom. Pairs of squirrels have been spotted scampering through the heretofore bare branches doing the squirrel version of the perennial game of “Tag. I’m it.” (Did you know those little perishers can RUN straight up brick walls?)

I’ve been listening a lot to this YouTube “video” which has the sound of gentle rain (no thunder) behind oldies music from the 1930’s and 1940’s, but I was listening to this music-only one late this evening when I became aware of “ambient rain sounds” from a slow rain dripping off the trees outside my window. That provoked two thoughts: “Oh, good. It’s raining in the real world for a change,” and this one. We only average about 16 inches/41 cm of rain a year (semi-arid has nothing to do with trucks), and we’ll take every drop of it we can get.

Слава Україні!