I feel good

April 2010, my sweetie completed his round of chemo and radiation and he was feeling good. During the last couple of weeks of treatment he was tired a lot, and the burn from the radiation got pretty bad but his appetite was better than it had been in almost a year and his mood had improved greatly.

The nutritionist had said to keep his weight up - any calories were good at this point, and I was shoe-horning them in whenever and where ever I could. I made many middle of the night trips to the local fast food restaurants - if he wanted White Castles at 3am I'd hop in the car and drive across town to get them. I was just happy to see him eating again.

Toward the end of the month his fatigue was going away and he was feeling more energetic. He took advantage of this and made the rounds visiting his friends and family. He got a new motorcycle that was lighter and easier for him to handle, and as soon as the roads were dry enough he made sure to go for a ride at least once a day as well.

He was feeling so good that he began to over do it. Every year I had a container garden on our back deck and he would help me set it up, getting the pots down from the shelves in the garage and running them up the stairs. He liked to sit out there in the morning, having coffee, watching the birds and listening to the trains. I wanted him to take it easy but as long as he was feeling good he wanted to act like nothing was wrong whatsoever. He wanted to feel normal. He wanted to do laundry, he wanted to barbecue, he wanted to dig in the dirt...so I let him. We seemed to have a mutual unspoken agreement that as long as he was feeling good, we'd live in denial for a while.

So we went shopping together at the nursery to pick out the plants for the season and get dirt for the pots. We did a lot of shopping in 2010 really...if something struck his fancy, we bought it. I saw no reason to deny him any creature comforts he wanted and he saw no reason to deny me mine. I think we both just wanted the other to feel better, price tags be damned. While we were out shopping he upgraded our deck chairs and we got a patio umbrella to give us a little more shade in the afternoons.

The doctors had changed his prescriptions - instead of taking Vicodin as needed, he was now taking Oxycontin twice a day and it seemed to be managing his pain very well. I remember sitting with him on the deck last spring and being almost convinced that it had all been a bad dream.

He couldn't be dying - he looked healthier and happier than I'd seen him in ages.