October 23rd, 2013: Saskatchewan Reentry

I'm told my absence of updates has been rather conspicuous, and that immediate rectification of said absence would not only be nice, but is in fact considered a required service. To that end, then, the happenstance.

I was successfully discharged from the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance clinic on August fifteenth. Mom and Dad had driven down in order to help move me back to Canada, because at that point, I had acquired and/or had delivered to me far too many items to make it worth the airfare to ship it home (and also, Mom really wanted to visit her hair lady in Seattle). We loitered for a day, crammed my goods and services into their car, and toodled off to Canadiana, via Creston, BC. The border crossing was uneventful.

I had actually written a couple of posts while in the back of the car that never saw the dim, flickering, basement ceiling lights of the internet, posts that go into the lead up to the trip back in far more detail that I can recall currently; to that end, I shall post those just as soon as I've typed them up. Give it a day or two.

On Saturday the 17th, we stopped in Medicine Hat to visit my sister, Kelly, and it was while there that I realized that I was having chills and fever, so, after consulting Seattle as per instructions, Mom, Dad and I spent about five hours in the emergency room at Medicine Hat Hospital; this was the required amount of time for admittance, questioning, the taking of various samples for testing, the testing of said samples, the delivery of the results, and the paperwork for discharge. They were looking for a bacterial infection, because that would be the biggest thing to worry about by the proverbial long shot. What they found was, well, nothing. Which meant that I most likely had a viral infection, in which case my immune system was robust enough to handle that on its very own. We drove the rest of the way home the next morning, and it turned out that I did, in fact, have a viral infection - something flu-like - and I spent most of the next week feeling poorly. 

Fun facts: there are numerous infectious agents that cause "flu-like" symptoms, which include aches, pains, general malaise, and fever/chills. Occasionally, these non-flu flu-like agents will also produce nausea and vomiting (which I did not have at the time), and this is a decidedly inconvenient way for you to be absolutely certain that what you have contracted is not actually the flu. Real flu almost never (read: doesn't) cause nausea or vomiting. If you've got the barfs, you ain't got flu.

That week spent feeling poorly accounts largely for the lack of posts, if I'm honest. Writing tends to require a certain momentum, and when that momentum is disrupted, it can take some time to regain. This was compounded, of course, by my return to availability for social activity and moving to a new apartment.

Medically speaking, I'm doing rather well. All tests continue to come back clean and indicative of excellent overall health. However, I am definitely experiencing complications with my skin, relating directly to my old lymphoma and the much drier climate of Saskatoon Vs Seattle. I finished tapering off of my immune suppressants this Tuesday past, and my physicians and I remain optimistic that my now non-suppressed cells will take alacritous care of this dermatological boondoggle, though the time frame for that cellular police action is difficult to describe with any degree of accuracy. It could be days, weeks, or a year - the graft versus lymphoma effect is certainly not instantaneous, but it does strongly tend to perform its duty.

So, you might ask, what have I been doing for the last two months? Playing house husband, mostly. I clean, I cook, I catch up on my stories, I play video games. I drive Ash to her carpool every-ish morning (sometimes it's her turn to be wheelman), and I pick her up at varying times in the evening. I was spending a fair amount of time unpacking our stuff at the new place, but that's mostly done for now, at least until we acquire some more furniture.

"When life hands you lemons, you clone those lemons, and make super-lemons." - Principal Scudworth, Clone High

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