Happy Birthday To Me

This Day in History

1929: On With the Show, the first talking movie that is all in color debuts at New York City's Winter Garden theater.

1934: The identical Dionne quintuplets are born in Ontario, Canada; the girls are made wards of the government and put on display at a themepark called Quintland.

1980: The first Islamic parliament, the Majlis, opens in Iran.


1987: West German Mathias Rust flies a private plane unchallenged through Soviet airspace and lands in Moscow's historic Red Square.


1991: The 17-year Marxist rule which brought famine and war to Ethiopia ends when rebel tanks storm the nation's capital, Addis Ababa.

Born on This Day

William Pitt, British prime minister (1759) Jerry West, basketball player, coach, and general manager (1938) Thomas Moore, poet (1779) Jim Thorpe, athlete (1888?) Walker Percy, essayist and novelist (1916) Ian Fleming (1908-1964), British novelist, best known as creator of the popular suspense-fiction character James Bond, British secret service agent 007.

The Mexican Is Loose

OK, I'm way past the age where I'm up on modern lingo. My kids pepper their conversation with expressions that need to be translated for me.

So the other night I'm watching "24" with my younger daughter. There's a close-up of an actor who has one of these big middle-aged wattles hanging from his neck. My daughter casually comments, "The Mexican is loose". I've never heard this expression but luckily this time I can figure out what she's talking about from the context. I think it's pretty funny.

At the commercial I ask if she would mind telling me the derivation of the phrase she had used. I get a blank stare in return. "What expression?", she asks. "The Mexican is loose". She gets hysterical. She says, "I said his neck skin is loose!".

We've decided to adopt this expression and see if we can insinuate it into the vernacular.

So if you hear someone say The Mexican is loose, remember, you heard it here first.

Rhythm

I've begun to get in sync with the rhythm of these treatments and the predictability is 1) comforting and 2) making it easier to plan my time as I pretty much know how I'll feel day to day.

Treatment is every 3rd Wednesday. Thursday, Friday, and most of Saturday I feel fine as the bag of steroids that's part of the cocktail keeps me from feeling the fatigue right away so I can pretty much keep up my regular schedule. By Sunday, it's worn off and I crash and the other side effects begin as well. The neuropathy, however, is always there but it's never so bad that I can't button a button. As a side note, I've apparently lost that reflex you get when the doctor rubber-mallets you on the knee and that's probably gone for good. Luckily, I can't think of any reason I'll need that particular reflex.

This past Sunday should've been a crash day which was too bad as there was a street fair in my neighborhood I wanted to attend and also I had set up a meeting with STBxW at a local tea house to see if we could work out the final details of the divorce without going to court again.

To my relief, I awoke Sunday feeling fine, walked the entire fair, had an amicable and productive meeting with STBxW and in general enjoyed the day.

Monday was the same. I got to work at a reasonable hour and stayed the whole day. I even joked that I should call the doctor to complain that something must be wrong as I wasn't feeling like crap. Maybe she'd forgotten one of the medicine bags. Anyway, I was feeling fine and was fairly bursting at the idea that maybe my body had become accustomed to the meds and I would breeze through the next 8 weeks.

Then it happened Monday night. I was watching TV with my daughter when all of a sudden I felt it begin to wash over me. I was exhausted and also, that funky taste coated my tongue and the rest of my mouth.

By Tuesday morning I could barely drag my butt out of bed, showed up for work later than usual, left earlier, and the bounce that had been in my step the day before was gone. I'm back to the chemo shuffle.

I was so depressed during the day that I got teary a few times. I'm really getting tired of this.

But I'm better now. I'm back into the rhythm.