The Electron Pencil

An End In Sight

I woke up this AM in a state of shock. My first thought was, “Holy shit, this is my final week of chemoradiation!”

I can hardly believe it. I’ve gone through five weeks of nuking and poisoning and, somehow, I’m still alive. My Olive Pit(s)™, OTOH, are dying. The main pit, the one just to the left of my thyroid gland, is down to the size of a le sueur pea. The others have been reduced so far that nobody can feel them anymore, not even Dr. Wu, whose digits are as sensitive as, well, the princess to a pea.

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This fifth week will be the coup de grace. Both the radiation and the chemotherapy work cumulatively — as well as in support of each other — so that by the end of this coming week their combined might likely will turn my little le sueur and its satellites into nothing. Just where I want the dinky bastards to be.

So, I’m on a bit of a high right now.

I hadn’t been for a few days. I’d been having some throat problems — pain and sloughing off of mucous membrane (keep in mind my throat is being sunburned so the inside of it is, essentially, peeling). It’s taken days for me to learn how much and how often to dose myself with Hydrocodone, the dope that handles the pain and sloughing. I think I’ve got it down now. My Hydrocodone dreams, though, are bordering on the psychedelic. Cool. I’ll put up In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida right now.

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I’ve been daydreaming about food, of course. I have to keep reminding myself that I won’t be able to chow down the day after radiation stops, Monday, March 21st. It’ll take my throat a few weeks to heal and my salivary glands and taste buds to come back on line, as much as they’re going to for the rest of my life.

Weirdly, one of the dishes I’ve been fixated on is the baked ziti from Sbarro, an Italian fast food chain that was founded in Brooklyn 60 years ago and is now HQ’d in Columbus, Ohio. I used to eat Sbarro’s baked ziti at the Thompson Center food court in the Chicago Loop. It wasn’t bad stuff, for a chain. I wouldn’t prefer it to my own homemade b.z., or Club Lago‘s baked mostaccioli, or any Sicilian cook’s pasta but it would do in a pinch. I googled for Sbarro’s locations in Indy, Louisville, and Cincy but, sadly, found none. The closest sites are in Chi.

Long as I’m going to be forced to trek up north in late April or even May, I may as well do the whole gustatory tour: Ricobene’s for pizza, Chinatown for dim sum, the Red Apple for Polish buffet, Café Iberico for paella, and so many others. My mouth — much as it can — is watering.

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