Summer of Cancer

A car alarm in the parking lot behind my apartment building (a tenement, as fatty called it) went off this morning around 2 a.m.. Sometime around 2:15 a.m. I went back there to see if it was my parents van, which was parked back there. it wasn't and somebody eventually shut the alarm off around 3 a.m..
as I trod back to my apartment, I noticed it was cold. about twelve hours earlier, when I was out for my daily walk around the neighborhood (the closest thing I've got to exercise right now), I made the same observation.
the summer of '07 for the sonoran desert has turned to fall.
my summer was consumed by my cancer: surgery, observation and eventually chemotherapy. whatever plans I made or hoped for the summer vanished into weekly visits to the blood lab, monthly visits with dr. ahmann and eventually daily trips to the clinic.
summer is over. and soon, so will be chemotherapy.
this tuesday, God willing, is my last injection. bleomycin. in all honesty, I'll probably be too foggy to remember much because I'll be high on benadryl.
though I've been counting the days left, I've kept up the emotional and psychological defense that i erected when chemo. began.
there are certain thoughts and emotions I never allowed myself during this time. this also helped me deal with the physical pain of the treatment as well.
but I think that defense is coming down, slowly, whether or not I like it, because my days in chemo. are coming to an end.
I've noticed it has become harder to take the needle pricks of an IV and blood draw. there was no novelty to my barium sulfate shake the second time around. it was just something to get through.
and now I'm almost through.