Hulk Shot?

Day 4 of radiation. It seems to be getting easier for her. We didn't talk, only IM, so information's sketchy at best.

Lila says it's going "okay." Not much pain, no nausea (yet; apparently it's a persistent possibility.)

She said she got her "hulk" shot today. I don't know exactly what it refers to, but she mentioned a shot she'd be getting that would boost her immune system, cuz the treatments impede natural resistance. It would be timely, after a week almost of radiation and a chemo treatment, to apply such prophylactics at such a time, seems to me. Opportunistic infections are a constant danger in these things, I hear...

Anyway, my gal seems to be chipper, and that's the main thing. Keep her spirits up. She's devouring the various literatures that are implicated in her diagnosis (that's how phenomenologists think...We're both basically phenomenologists, which is why we don't have the problem of paradigm incommensurability. A phenomenologist might ponder over the significance of differences between a 'diagnosis' and a 'condition,' an 'illness,' and a 'disease.' Sort of, as in "The Raw and The Cooked," Levi-Strauss interrogates these various renditions of food).

Her sons (23 & 21) are over tonight to clean and do some cooking. And hover over Mom.

So we can't/won't talk today/tonight, which exacts a trivial twinge in my cardiac region. I'm just a little resentful, and at the same time, guiltily I feel sorta petty about it; cuz it's not often she has energy to talk, even a little, and we used to talk for hours and hours and hours, and the first thing she typed was that she was feeling good...so I wanted her to talk to me... And we mightn't talk again til Monday, worst case.

And really, the "old interstellar anthropologist" would claim (and not without justification) that as the interloper, I really haven't any ontological status from which to complain. Hell, he'd say, you've got it easy. (Think Mel Brooks:) "If you were tribal, instead of civilized, they'd have driven you both from the commune/compound, divided up your 'property,' and you'd have lived/died alone, together, since that was so important to you..."

OY!

But if I could hold colloquy with the OIA, I might reply in some such manner as this: "You know, you're right. I have absolutely no right to complain. All that I have any right to is my pain.

"I can imagine that this all sounds somewhat melodramatic.

"Hmmm.

"Well, it IS a pretty melodramatic situation, really. Life & Death, and all that, fraught with emotional undercurrents, mysterious narratives, impending tragedy, all the necessary elements (except, probably, the happy ending). So I only feel a little embarrassed to note, in my own cause, that I do not know how many more times I shall hear my Lila's voice, only that it is a finite number.

"And that makes every time a fundamentally non-trivial event. And every miss a loss."

And possibly that relieves me of some of the onus of harboring these self-pitying thoughts in the first place.