Hope For Holly

Back when I was a kid, we didn’t have 60″ plasma TV’s with 1,000 channels of crystal clear, digital, high def programming. No we had 7 channels. In Philadelphia we had 3, 6, 10, 12, 17, 29 & 48. You had to know the difference between UHF & VHF and you were stuck watching commercials. Cartoons were only on on Saturday mornings from 7 - 10. While being able to tolerate such limited programming was a skill, a far greater skill was the ability to adjust the rabbit ear antenna on your set.

Anyone over the age of 30 probably recalls the rabbit ear antenna. You remember your dad freaking out because the TV would go static-y during the most important play of the game. He’d get out of his Lazy-Boy and curse and scream and move them around to get a clear picture on a black and white 15″ set. Your uncle would wrap tin foil around them to make them longer in hopes of getting a better signal. And then, if it were an important program, he’d have you pinch one of the ears with your left hand and hold your right hand on the radiator (baseball season only) in hopes that your body as a conduit would somehow inherit more signal from the sky than rabbit ears alone.

Then the knobs. Oy vey, the knobs. Once you got your picture as close as you possibly could with the rabbit ears, it would be on to the knobs. Rotate the signal ever so slightly in order to dial in the granularity even more. Oh no, the picture looks great but it is flickering!!! “Get me my flat head boy”, the Old Man would yell. Of course, I couldn’t find one, but a butter knife worked just as well. Adjust the Vert & Horiz until that Phillies game comes in. The picture would look great for about 8 seconds and then the dance would start over again.

Cancer recovery is a lot like those old television sets. No one has the perfect picture, it is just constant, minor adjustments.

Monday was really bad. Not just like I don’t feel well bad, but really bad should we go to the hospital bad. Which had it’s own mental side effects. Anywhere but the f’ing hospital again. The side effects of chemotherapy seem to be incredibly unpredictable and contradictory. It might cause headaches, it might not. It might cause hot flashes, it might make you feel cold. It might cause constipation, it might cause diarrhea. Who knows?

So it’s an adjustment. Move the rabbit ears a little bit this way, oh, that makes it worse, move them a little more the other way. Oh, that did something else? Oh, move them around some more. It is a horrible way to live.

We’ve gotten into the point of documenting everything. What did she eat? What were the effects? Did she exercise? What did she do? What were the effects? How did she sleep? What were the effects? And so on and so forth. It seems to be the only way to understand cause and effect of what she does and how it makes her feel.

We are stating to get her body dialed in. The last couple of days she has been feeling good. Minor modifications to diet, increased exercise of course seem to be working, but as anyone who has ever tried to lose weight knows, modifications to diet and exercise are tough to pull off. The rabbit ears seem to be in the right place now, I just hope that they stay there.