letting people know

In response to my first post about my mother's Covid, cjsmith wrote "may everything ahead of you be a non-event." It's a kind thought, but no. I am beginning to think that there is no such
thing. I heard from a friend that her daughter fell while hiking and broke a variety of bones. She's OK, for values of OK that include a broken pelvis, but she is ambulatory and
not in much pain. She didn't want to be admitted to the hospital. Her ER doc told her that if she could walk out, she could go home, so she did. And called my friend to take care of the grandchild.
Another friend's mother died last Sunday, after medical stuff kept piling up on her. On and on. So while Arthur's medical complications are fairly life-altering, in some ways it's just
starting to seem like part of the zeitgeist. We learned earlier in the summer that Arthur has prostate cancer. He will be doing a combination of hormones to get rid of testosterone (started this past week) and later radiation. At first he didn't want to tell anyone outside the family. I got used to that,
and then when he started spreading the news to friends and colleagues, I was still in silence mode. It's a hard thing to bring up out of the blue, unless you're Tig Nataro. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHXo3FFsfeU
I told one friend right away (the one who is part of a clinical trial at Dana Farber for another hormone-based cancer) and later another friend. We told a few bellringers the day that Arthur came
to practice, but I didn't follow up with everyone else. And we didn't dwell on it too much that day, because even though he was there, he couldn't ring, because he's had a rotator cuff injury. (doing amazingly well with PT).
I don't know whether the cancer news will be passed along or other people will have hurt feelings because I didn't track them down to make sure they knew. This is the cancer's first social media appearance. Arthur has a vast crowd of
Facebook followers, and my opinion (besides the idea that Facebook is evil, period) is that once he posts there, the entire planet will know. That might be only fair, because we have learned of other friends' medical issues that way. And once it's on
Facebook, friends in my knitting group that are Arthur's Facebook friends will know before I get a chance to tell them in person. I won't be at knitting for weeks, because I'm in quarantine. I had considered making a tea appointment with one of the knitting friends because
after years, she is still mourning the loss of her husband to cancer and I'm worried that hearing about Arthur might cause a pang. The word is inherently creepy, but I think Arthur has much less chance of dying from this one than people do
from some other cancers. His radiation oncologist claims that sooner or later all men* get prostate cancer, just sometimes it's so late in life
or so slow moving that it doesn't matter much. We saw the stat that 30% of the prostates that are in bodies being autopsied for something else show signs of cancer that the owner of the gland
probably didn't even know about.
We're fine. We're not fine. We're like a ton of other people, but we have more money and better health insurance than many. And possibly more dental procedures. Beleaguered Arthur had an apicoectomy recently. https://www.colgate.com/en-us/oral-health/root-canals/apicoectomy I had three appointments for my own teeth that I've had to postpone (quarantine, out of state), but sooner or later.
I may not be
the luckiest person in the world any more, but I'm probably still fairly near the top of the list. It doesn't mean I don't worry most of the time. I am taking to heart the warning that this may be a bad flu season, but I can't run out today and get a shot (or take my mother to get one) because I'm in quarantine. At some point, I won't be, and I just have to hope that my mother is sort of healthy until Arthur's radiation appointments are over. I've been making elaborate plans to deal with having to drive through the deep snow to get to the zapping place. If we feel that forecasts are accurate, maybe we'll stay in a B&B or hotel downtown. See money, above. I have other possibly goofier ideas (like widening the end of the driveway, so that we will have a place to toss snow quickly). On the other hand, the climate has changed and continues to change, so the fact that the Old Farmer's Almanac predicts a heavy snow winter (so I was told) may not be relevant.

* I am trying hard to say "people with prostates" instead of men, that way I now say "pregnant people" instead of pregnant women, but I'm in a minority.

PCR negative

It was probably silly to get tested again this soon, but right now I feel like being a once a week person. Boston College requires vaccination. People have to log in when they are on campus. They tested everybody at back to school time. Otherwise, they claim to do random testing, but it seems more targeted than that. Arthur's colleague who goes into the office every weekday gets flagged for "random" testing about once a week, while Arthur, who mostly works from home, gets done less.