The Incredible Machine.

Not until you get into some sort of treatment you realise what an incredible machine a human body is. When everything works normal, and you are doing your daily life, and It Just Works (like Ubuntu should… haha), all the organs doing their stuff, in balance. You can try to kick it out of balance, but unless you try very hard (like with the cunning use of a hacksaw or something), it will find its way back and continue Just Working, ni balance.

When you are in treatment like me, your balance is broken and held up by medicine. But this balance is very easily broken and you need all the discipline (see practically all the posts in this blog) to keep it running more or less smoothly.

My artificial balance has been working quite nicely, but it can just as easily fall out – I mentioned this, chemo for me has been pretty much dealing with a list of “nuisance level” side effects, and I truly believe it has been the strong discipline that helped me keep it that way. Or sheer luck, how the fuck would I know — I haven’t dared breaking the discipline.

Well this round was somewhat special in this sense, in that I broke discipline a bit at the beginning (well, life broke it for me) and it butterfly-effected down to some disturbance in the Force balance:

Stomach problems around day 6 → had to do a diet → no proper food intake, stomach was empty on day 8 → reflux caused by bleomycine (day 8 IV drug) was quite strong → this may or may not have added to the (sorry, naturalistic details follow) fungal scar in my mouth for the past 2 days → eating hurts → further stomach fuckupery could ensue (but I forcibly force myself to force eat (some force)) → luckily it seems it didn’t though, I seem to be back to my artificial balance.

Point is: you have to have strong discpline to keep the balance, and a tiny detail can cause some big waves.

Also, while we are here: a big shoutout to 21st century medicine, you da real MVP. (One of them anyway.) It’s fantastic to see just how thousands of years of human self observation in a way or another has lead up to this point, where I am getting my white blood count artificially restored by the use of a granulocyte colony stimulating factor extracted from freaking RATS (although now that I mention this, I can not find an article to back this up… did I just dream it?…)