The Christmas Gang. L-R-My Brother Tom, My Wife Marilyn, Son Noah, My SIL Karen, and Me Enjoying Post Movie Drinks.
As usual, up at 4 AM on Mondays. I like to take my weekly steroids early. The plan is to avoid the first night’s insomnia. I re-supplied the wood stove. It kept a bed of coals through the night. I added a couple of logs and then rested, even napped, on the couch. I awoke an hour later from an exquisite dreamless sleep and felt hot flashes from the drug. So it goes this winter: steroids, an oral chemo, and infusions of bone strengtheners.
I’d spent Christmas in San Francisco with my wife. We visited our son, Noah, and my brother and his wife, who I have written about previously here and here. We rented a suite at a hotel in the SoMa, the south of Market Street neighborhood, close to Market Street, on the corner of 2nd and Folsom. We flew into Oakland and used the BART, to navigate between the airport and SoMa and the East Bay, where our son lives.
Cranes at Work in the SoMa, Building Something New and Wonderful.
The hotel room was within a block of his office in SF. He is an attorney with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Southwest Region. He works on a team that reviews permits under the auspices of the Clean Air Act.
This neighborhood has it all: glorious steel and glass high rises, expensive hotels, theaters, tourist restaurants, and everywhere, everywhere the homeless, scratching out a daily existence like wild animals, only sometimes crazy, jabbering nonesense, begging for food or money, bathrooms, creating residences out of shopping carts and blankets, doorways and alleys. Overall, they behave themselves, less they be rousted from the moveable feast of their territory. The hubbub of business murmurs around them but Christmas provides a reprieve from the traffic and noise, for much of the SoMa was closed.
Market Street at Dusk.
My wife and I walked the streets, noticing that our son negotiates the ironies of the haves and have nots each and every day. He is successful. He is also paralyzed and schleps from the BART at the Montgomery Street station to and from his office, rain or shine in a manual wheelchair, dodging the dog shit and the spit on the sidewalks, witness to the baffling inequalities of American life that have taken hold during the last three decades.
He was injured in 2002. Many of his disabled peers don’t enjoy the independence that he has attained. His determination to educate himself opened doors of opportunity, which he rolled through.
Life is hard in a wheelchair, but it’s not lost on me that many of the homeless also have disabilities, both physical and mental. In a perfect world some may have found the support and strength of will to overcome the obstacles of life. Family seems to be the only program that is not underfunded. It is flush with love, not dollars. Veterans programs, the beneficence of religious organizations, and social services wrapped in the saugaged conscience of city politics take a scattershot approach that misses as much as it hits.
On Our Way to Dinner and a Movie at Embarcadero Center.
I arrived in SF recovering from a head cold. It worsened upon leaving the city. Flying never helps but it’s not the outright cause. That would be my weakened immune system, a result of the blood cancer multiple myeloma that I’ve lived with for eight years.
When I get sick, I seem to wander farther from shore into the swamp of my disease, tainted by eight years of drugs spoiling what once was the healthy wetland of my bone marrow.
My cancer markers may be stable, even leaning toward improvement, but I’m sick with survivorship: numbed feet, fatigue, yadda yadda yadda … the worst is shortness of breath because it is accompanied by the sensible and terrifying paroxysm of panic. These little viruses often cause congestion of nasal passages. I occasionally awaken at night feeling as if I’m being buried alive. Over the counter remedies help but also add to the toxic swill accumulating in my body tissues.
The Christmas Skyline in San Francisco.
With drug administration, the patient wants to take the highest dose he/she can tolerate. I am at the max amount and feeling it, stubbornly bumping along on a deteriorating road full of chemical potholes. These little viruses often feel like setbacks. Yet, if I can process through them, the medications seem manageable and the road smooths out. I’m ok; I’m better and writing again.
I’ve updated The Drill with the latest cancer marker numbers.
Tagged: cancer, chemotherapy, dexamethasone, Environmental Protection Agency, Homeless people in San Francisco, Marilyn, multiple myeloma, San Franciso, steroids 
