Me about to go to Mayo, Mayo robot, me with Rosie

September 29, 2023:

This morning I had my meds at 6:07am with peaches and mango&cream yogurts. Then I went back to sleep for a few hours. I got up again in time to do the Microsft Teams interview for a new volunteering job, that Suheily had suggested to me the other day. It was with the Community Action Partnership of Hennepin County (CAP-HC). The woman I met with was named Latyran. It sounded like some of the volunteer positions would have to do with helping people fill out tax documents, which I’m not super interested in, but she mentioned there were opportunities to do front desk work or to be a greeter, and that there are many clients who only speak Spanish too. It was cool, and felt kind of like it could help fill my need for working.

Then, I updated my phone and replied to Anne from Methodist food shelf about being able to work on October 10th and 31st, since she had said in email to let her know if we’d be available on days we were scheduled with a question mark. I only remembered to do that because I’d written it on my hand the other day.

After that, it was almost 11am, and we decided to go down to Mayo for me to receive a spine MRI. I didn’t write down basically any notes at Mayo, not even the name of the nurse who got my IV in on the first stick, which was nice and surprising. Then, I did the 2 hour MRI. In the MRI, since I was just laying there for hours, I had some important realizations. Here they are: 1) I had been "drowning my enlightenment" in work, filling my life with being insanely busy, so I wasn’t even able to think about problems. 2) I have been equating being “normal” with being happy, and that is why every single medical issue I have that makes me not “normal” is so painful to me now, like the cancer and everything. That is why the cancer has been pissing me off more recently. 3) Meaningful friendships are the true meaning of life, which is why the thought of never being able to make new deep friendships has thrown me into such an existential depression. I’ve also realized that I have been defining “a good friend” as someone who I met in high school, and therefore ensuring, by definition, that I won’t be able to do that again. I also have been thinking that being “happy” is literally being ecstatic all the time, and obviously no one achieves that.

Oh, and then at night, I had my night meds at 5:38pm, with a bowl of ramen noodles with 7g fat and also a single fried egg with 5g. After that, I went through my camera roll in detail, and deleted almost 3000 photos, mainly just stupid screenshots of games and duplicate photos. I didn’t have lunch today at all, partly because I had been feeling the tiniest bit nauseous, and also not hungry. And then at like 7pm, Dr. Flanagan also called and he talked to us about the fact the scans from today might be showing a “recurrence,” and they might have to increase the dose of my cancer drug. He also said that I might need a brain MRI in the future, and that he might order it when we go in and see him on Monday.

At night, once I started working on this, I realized I hadn’t really taken any photos today, just the on time BeReal before we went to Mayo. And then I also have a picture of this robot that was delivering food at Mayo Clinic today. After I realized that I didn’t have much, I used one of my extra BeReals to take a photo of the dog Rosie at night.

Grateful things: I'm grateful for people like Suheily, who gave me the name of the place I might look at volunteering. Not even sure if it'll work out, but it's good to have the option. Also grateful for Dr. Flanagan, who called me at 7pm with news about the scans.