Stardust to Stardust by Erik Olin Wright

Stardust to Stardust by Erik Olin Wright

Author:Erik Olin Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2020-06-29T16:00:00+00:00


Smooth sailing

—September 4, 2018

One of the remarkable features of the disease I have is that there are periods in which I feel 100 percent healthy, completely free of symptoms, and sometimes even free of fatigue. Tastes of wellness. That is how I feel today. Last night I had no nausea at all from the chemo. Considering that the first round of the chemo produced such awful, debilitating nausea, I was fully prepared for another onslaught, although this time armed with Ativan, ready to intervene at the earliest sign. But it didn’t happen. During the day, yesterday, I started taking Compazine, another anti-nausea medicine. It worked perfectly. So, I had a good night’s sleep, barely waking up when my chemo ended and my labs were drawn. The lab results show that the chemo has rapidly had its desired effects: my white blood cell count dropped from 16 to 4 (normal range is 3.9–11.2) and the percentage of white cells that were blasts from 50 percent to 3 percent, and thus the absolute blasts from about 8,000 to 120. That is the pivotal number, indicating the intensity of the presence of the leukemia cells in my system. None of this touches the manufacture of leukemia cells in the marrow, of course. For that we need the transplant. But the active leukemia in my peripheral bloodstream has been knocked down very efficiently, which is a relief. This is why I feel so energetic, for the high level of leukemia cells is very taxing. I have been very much “living in the moment” and taking things as they come, but it is also so nice when the present moment is filled with physical ease.

This feeling of genuine wellness had already started yesterday. In the afternoon I was writing and listening to music from my YouTube classical playlist. One of my favorite pieces came on, Stravinsky’s “The Firebird.” I had played this a couple of times in orchestras, from the very back of the viola section. One of the nice things about being in the very back of the viola section is that you are pretty close to the very center of the entire orchestra, with the woodwind section immediately behind you. In the grand moments of the full orchestra playing some fantastic finale to a great piece of music, this is a wonderful place to be—completely engulfed in the full power of the music. It is hard to beat the finale of “The Firebird” for this. I stopped writing, turned up the volume on the remote Bluetooth speakers, shut my eyes, and started miming playing my instrument. My bow arm moved with the violin and viola parts (which were pretty much doing the same thing at this point) and my left hand fingering the notes. At some point, when the whole orchestra joined in, I shifted to conducting. The ending of the piece has this wonderfully simple melody of the firebird reborn. It is repeated over and over, sometimes in full, sometimes truncated, sometimes fast, sometimes slow.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.