All My Little Morphins

18 days

We returned to Richmond late Tuesday night after 18 days in Baltimore. The front nine were spent as an inpatient at Johns Hopkins Hospital, the last three of which represented my first three-day cycle of chemotherapy. The back nine were spent at my sister's home nearby in order to accommodate (A) some followup appointments and (B) a general feeling of safety in being so close to JH in case I had an adverse reaction to the therapy. After nine such days, we felt confident enough to return to Richmond.

My next cycle of chemotherapy is scheduled for next Thursday through Saturday, June 15-17. We anticipate three cycles in all, give or take. It is an iterative process: you get some therapy, then look at the current state of the disease, then decide what's next. For those of you in the software development world, it is very Agile.

At this point, I feel half-decent. I can put in a solid but abbreviated day of work, punctuated by at least one nap. Life could be worse!

About those morphins

Last week, returning from a longer-than-usual walk around the block with Alison and clearly tired and winded, I said to her: "Well, that can only be good for my [withered] muscles." To that Alison waved both of her hands in a zigzag pattern up and down my body and said: "That is going to be good for all of your little morphins."

A morphin, I therefore deduce, must be a single, microscopic unit of health and wellness. I expect that they reside in my brain in untold numbers.

Photos

Tidbit

Johns Hopkins, both the hospital and university, were named after Johns Hopkins, a 19th-century American and long-time Baltimore resident. Hopkins was an entrepreneur, abolitionist and philanthropist. Having never married, the bulk of his fortune was used to found the various institutions that now bear his name.

His unusual first name was the maiden name of his paternal great-grandmother, Margaret Johns Hopkins.