Game night, GN with Telisha, random BeReal, group pic from GN

October 12, 2023:

Well dang it’s after midnight so I guess technically I’m writing this on the 13th. I had a pretty nice day today, mainly because of how it ended. Well, today started with me taking my meds at 8:01am with mango and peaches & cream yogurts, and then having a good therapy session. For that, I was actually over at Jodi’s house because there was construction work going on upstairs here. It was super loud. At Jodi’a house, Bill also brought us bagels and I got a scone. I also asked him if he’d met me before the brain injury, and he definitely had. He even said he helped me to move in to my house with Nicole, which was father back than I’d thought.

Pretty much right when I finished therapy, we drove to Mayo. On the way there, I chose to have Papa drive so I could organize my notes and type up another list of questions for Dr. Go at Mayo. It’s funny, going in to this I hadn’t even been quite sure what the appointment was going to be about, but a couple more questions occurred to me when I was thinking about it. Then, on the way there, we actually re-started the book I’ve been listening to on tape, Four Winds. I’ve heard the beginning two or three times now and I appreciate different things every time, but it was Papa’s first. Another thought I had was that maybe I was suggested to look at this book because at the beginning the main character was saying “I’ll never X” a million times. In the book, that character had a sickness as a child, and is therefore seen as incapable and fragile as an adult, and I kind of relate to that. Only, my illness hasn’t completely gone away like hers has. If I were still feeling really depressed, I’d say that that just proves that I actually am incapable and fragile like the character’s parents think she is.

After we got to Mayo, we had a very productive meeting with Dr. Go, who is kind of my main cancer doctor at the moment. I asked him how long it would take Turalio to dissolve into your system, since I’ve struggled with throwing it up a bit. He said the gastric emptying time is like three hours, and that if I ever throw up after a pill, I could maybe just take the next pill with some extra fat to get more of the drug. He said that I’ll see him again in about six weeks now, and that he doesn’t think my left leg hurting a bit on stairs is a big problem or very worrying. He also said that I’m different in a better way since the last time he saw me, in like May. There’s improvement in memory retention, and am “more alive and back to myself.” As far as moving forward with the nausea, he suggested possibly trying a longer-acting Zofran pill, so I wouldn’t have to take so many of them in a day.

Anyways, then I drove back to Minneapolis, still listening to more of the audio book. We got back, and I very quickly got ready to go to the game night event I had at night. It’s something I found on the Facebook page called “Minnesota Gals Making Friends.” When I got there, I learned that the woman, Athena, had posted the event to two different groups. The one I saw it in, and also some Facebook group for “connecting black women” or something like that. At the event, I started out by playing this one game called Over-Rated, where you try to match the funniest cards to a given location. I won the first round, which was had “nude beach” for the location. Not sure what I submitted. There were like 16 of us playing.

There was also a point where some people were asking about jobs, and I was able to say that I studied journalism and used to do that UMN job, but now I’m recovering from a traumatic brain injury and not really working at the moment, just on disability. It went over fine with the people I was talking to, though I don’t remember the specific reactions. Now, half of my notes are just listing people’s names and things they were wearing. The one girl I talked to that I actually liked quite a bit was named Telisha, and she’s the one I have the selfie with. I got her Snapchat too. We also played some other games, like the word guessing game Taboo, and Telisha also taught me a new card game called Crazy Eights. That was just a two-person game we tried while some other people were paying a song lyrics game that I was AWFUL at. I don’t know any of the pop culture references. It’s my biggest weak spot with trivia in general.

After a little more game playing, I drove home from the location in St. Paul. I’d parked on the street for 75 cents for a few hours, which wan’t bad. When I got home, I followed the advice Dr. Go had given me today, and took my mediation at 10:01pm with a cheese stick and like two bites of an avocado. I’m not sure how long it was from when I ate food at the game night, but I think it was a bit less than two hours, which he told me today was find to do. Really, Dr. Go’s advice was really just to loosen up on the medication-taking details a bit.

Grateful: Oh god, no space. I’m grateful for the new girls I met tonight, and also for having doctors who are so committed to me.