Monday, August 18, 2008

"Dude, what up with the women's nylons on the arm?" you ask?

Before we get to what surely for some will be a disappointingly platonic point, I'd just like to say for the record that one of my many resolutions was to take the time to jot down updates on days not dampered by drowsiness, dining doldrums and other downers. Good days. Today is one.

Starting off with sunny skies, last Monday was looking to be one, too, on which said resolution quite possibly could've made it to the day's done-list. Suspecting no evil, I ventured to the clinic for a standard check-up. Later, on the way home, I couldn't help but smile out loud on public transport, thinking how the doc might've broke the news to me in the words of one of my dad's favorite quips: "Everybody who's clear of chemo complications, please take one step forward... Whoa there, not so fast, Mr Goold."

The diagnosis was thrombosis, which is:
a) a harmless aversion to Tommy Dorsey recordings
b) derived from the Latin "throm," meaning "affordable haircut," and the Apache "bosis," meaning "great bear"
c) a blood clot

Correct answer: c), a blood clot, which is when your main veins become your slackers (in my case, the one in my right shoulder). For the outlying arteries, this means they need to rise to the occasion... and swell to the skin's surface, which would have been a clear thrombosis tip-off for me had I read the instruction manual for this illness and its repercussions.*

So to free up the blocked artery, I'm taking daily shots (unfortunately, not of the whiskey kind) of blood-thinning medicine. Mornings and evenings. On the bright side, only gotta do them 'til mid-November. And the presumable fetish for feminine legwear is a medically prescribed precautionary measure to keep my arm from swelling.

(*Gotta admit that, until recently, I hadn't exactly been delving deep into all there is to know about lymphoma and the various chemical treatments I'm going through. Not in the way that you'd page your way through programming a new VCR, or read up on sights of interest before visiting an exotic country. More like how you don't bother to stop and read the visitor information board when you're just passing through Podunk.)