Day 89: On Going Episode

Today I cycled to the clinic for a round of vaccines. I felt a sting, then a pulse: the body learning, preparing, remembering.

It was bad timing, really. the “special time of the month” arriving in tandem, 2 internal rhythms colliding. But that, too, is the body: busy, layered, never quite at rest.

Later, I cycled into work. The ride there felt uphill even when it wasn’t. But on the way home, after a bowl of pasta for lunch, everything loosened. I moved through the pitch black early evening like a current finding its flow. 36.5 minutes for 8.2 miles. Not too shabby.

By 6pm, night had already settled in. The dark seemed to come earlier than it should, folding over the streets as I pedalled home. The air was calm, cool. a kind of perfect stillness that made me uneasy.

When I walked in, my mom said there was a letter on the table. A thick one. Hospital post. I could tell she wanted me to open it there, in the warm kitchen light, but I couldn’t. Not yet. I took it upstairs instead.

I ran a bath, let the heat draw out the ache from my arms, watched the steam rise like breath. Later, we watched Bake Off, I ate ice cream, and began to pack: the familiar rhythm of travel. FFP2s and FFP3s stacked neatly beside toiletries, everything finding its compartment in the old grey duffle bag I’ve taken everywhere - my “old faithful.”

It was only as I sat down to write this entry that I opened the letter.

Inside: results from my most recent constellation of blood tests. dozens of numbers, tiny witnesses of internal weather.

Most things were, reassuringly, in range. But there were gnarly deviations: the CEA tumour marker elevated again. Calcium climbing to 2.89, post being lowered, edging toward a threshold that would mean another hospital stay. ESR, LDH, IgM all raised. GGT, which I had to look up, suggesting oxidative stress. PTH suppressed. In short: something is definitely going on.

I stared at the printout for a long time. The numbers are both utterly impersonal and entirely mine. a portrait of what is unseen. They describe me in chemical shorthand, more truthfully perhaps than any photograph.

Oliver Sacks once wrote that the elements themselves were his companions, that he found comfort in their permanence as his own body faltered. I think of that often.

Tonight I feel the weight of the letter, yes, but also a strange lightness. the quiet knowledge that I am still here to read it, to make sense of these rising and falling values, to name the day, to feel the pedals turning beneath me, laughs in the office, text messages with good friends, and the warmth of a mom who waits at the kitchen table.