How to spend time in quarantine

News from quarantine:  Four days in one room of your house and you opted not to get the digital converter box for the tv.

After taking your tiny pill from its giant lead container, you rush home into quarantine with a stockpile of hard candy.  You need the candy because you want to keep your saliva moving because the radiation can make your salivary glands burn and hurt. Mine feel fine.  You can feel where the radioiodine is being absorbed as the area gets a bit swollen.  It seems that mine is all concentrated around the scar tissue and where they took the lymph nodes and not at all around the empty thyroid bed.  Good.  Zap those cells!

You follow the protocol so as not to irradiate your spouse.  You are never in the same room, eat off disposable plates, wash your towels daily and separately, etc. Dagwood is keeping the dog near him as well.  I am not sure why but I have been having vertigo so I am really just resting in the bed.  I could move around within my one room, but what would I do? Quarantine ends up being very quiet.  It is hard to imagine how you could make it a high energy event.  You have a lot of time to think, mull, ponder, reflect, and generally work out some mental knots.

I found this piece by Dana Jennings at The New York Times.  He describes some of the things I have been thinking about taking things slow. We rush to return to normal and focus on the physical recuperation and seem determined to gloss over the real fundamental issues being raised.  The big scary questions about life.  The universe is tapping you on the shoulder trying to to get this dance and I would suggest going for it.  And I know because I tried the rush right back to normal approach last go round. Anything life changing demands your full engagement.  And, such things are not to be rushed.  As he says,

After surgery and treatment, my 21st-century synapses and neurons wanted to believe that the cancer had been no more than a bump in the road toward a bright future — just a particularly nasty frost heave.

But the deepest analog part of me understood that having cancer was a life-changing event. As much as I thought I wanted to forge ahead, surge into the whirlwind of dailiness, I needed to slow way down.

My recuperation is going very well.  My recovery is a work in progress.