Peggy and Lowell Update

 

Daraxonrasib, Peggy’s new drug for pancreatic cancer, has lowered her CA-19-9 cancer-marker and eliminated the tumor-related pain in her hip. Unfortunately, it has swollen her tongue, upset her stomach, made her food taste bad, and left a sometimes bleeding rash on her face and non-bleeding rashes on her chest and tongue. She is also expressing feelings of depression, perhaps due to the drug’s side-effects, but possibly due to the knowledge that she will die quickly if she stops taking the drug combined with the knowledge that the cancer could kill her within the next year if she stays on it. Because the drug has yet to be FDA approved, its maker must provide it free of charge, but the many drugs that mitigate its side-effects are most decidedly not free of charge. Fortunately, Peggy and I are frugal by nature, and we’re reaping the benefit of that.

Three weeks ago, I was pruning a large outdoor cactus when a section of the cactus fell on my flipflop clad left foot. Peggy being too sick to get the needle out, and me being unable to reach it, a week passed during which the foot and lower leg became increasingly swollen and hot. I finally had the sticker removed and went on antibiotics. Then passed a second week during which the heat and swelling became even worse. The doctor said that cactus thorns sometimes promote clotting, and that if a clot in my foot broke loose, it could form a pulmonary embolism. He then gave me a dozen anticoagulant tablets and sent me for an ultrasound.

When the results came back negative, he ordered a CAT-Scan in the belief that I either had a “deep infection” and/or a piece of cactus was still in there. The CAT-Scan showed that I had a broken second metatarsal, so a podiatrist scheduled me to see his nurse for a boot-fitting. At the last minute, he decided to examine me first, and on the basis of his exam, sent me home without a boot.

The next night while walking across my dark garage, I tripped over a box that the cats had been playing in and did a face plant that blackened my eye, cut my forehead, left a goose-egg on my forehead, and drove my glasses into the bridge of my nose. I was very touched by the loving way that Peggy responded to my accident. 

Now, my refurbishing of the patio has come to a halt because the podiatrist warned that such activity might lead to a fallen arch. Thanks to the work I had already done, bilateral shoulder pain has been keeping me awake nights, and if it should happen that I have torn rotator cuffs, I’ll need two more shoulder surgeries on top of the four that I’ve already had. Peggy was there to nurse me during the lengthy rehabilitation period following past surgeries, but I will have no one to care for me now.

In happy news, I was recently accepted as an associate member of an organization called Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, although I have four direct-line ancestors (three of them slaveholders) who fought for the Confederacy—and none who fought for the Union. However, I did have a long ago Alabama aunt who was an outspoken Unionist, as I hope I would have been (a lot of Southerners were, including General George Thomas from Virginia, Admiral David Farragut from Tennessee, and 545 white soldiers—and 17,000 black soldiers—from my home state of Mississippi).

When Sherman passed through my aunt’s part of Madison County, Alabama, his calvary requisitioned a valuable horse she owned. Had she been a Confederate, she would have been ineligible for reimbursement, but because she could prove her Unionist sympathies, the federal government later gave her full value for her horse following war’s end.