A Fresh Pair of Eyes

Charles has arrived in SF to spend a week here with me and Scott, and we've already had some notable chili and stir fry. His visit gives me the opportunity to re-examine my progress since Indiana, and re-see the city that is now my home. Charles and I last visited a very different San Francisco just after the turn of the millennium, staying in a wonderful gay guest house on Church in the Castro (Parker House, highly recommended), and remembered SF as a place where everyone on the street car was smiling when we got on. 

That would have been one of the antique looking cars, and we caught it by the Twin Peaks Bar, AKA the glass coffin--or AKA the place I threaten to become attached to as a disability bear. A famous institution, apparently one of the first or the first gay bar to have plate glass, see-through, Mama-sure-knows-now windows.

Our Monday was spent driving up the coast, hoping to visit Muir Woods (hint: don't ever try this on a national holiday unless you're there at 6am), but driving by beautiful stands of Redwoods on Highway 1 up to Point Reyes Station, where Charles and Scott had burgers and I watched. This was my first foot into a restaurant since before my surgery--and I have to say that being surrounded by all that food, those wonderful smells and all that chewing was a bit overwhelming. I was glad when it over. 

Today, Charles has followed me through chemo and now, awaiting my time for radiation, I've sent him to have a bit of lunch at My Father's Kitchen, the Vietnamese place that sits high atop my eat-at list when eating is possible. He's to scope it out and assess whether my nose, or eyes or my desires are leading me badly astray. Judging by the crowd there for lunch today, I rather doubt it. I assume his report will be as damn good as it seems to me when I stare down those pho bowls waiting for the bus. 

I'm close to the midpoint of treatment--or the new midpoint, given that we've added a week of radiation and some modifications to chemo. Now, with my radiation burns, weight loss, the skin on my neck fissuring a bit and seeping, i'm no longer such a charming relic of myself, but something quite new indeed. I wear a floppy hat everywhere to avoid sun (enough radiation, thank you), I walk more slowly, I feel my age. 

I don't know how a fresh set of eyes encounters me--Charles is likely too polite to be shocked or too well prepared by Scott to be so. The fact that I am not myself is apparent to me, but how bad is it? Probably far less than I think given that I'm always a high interpreter of low expectations. Things could be worse, as Charles reminded me today, when he mentioned how lucky I am to still have mobility when so many people in treatment have issues with the same.

Of course, he's correct--and instead of wailing about my losses I should at least be equally sanguine about my advantages. I still have my voice, here, if not in my mouth. I still have my appetite, although right now it's not inside me, it's across the street having lunch. I can still walk without help, and will walk further once some of my strength is back--and right now I live in one of the world's most beautiful cities where there are things to walk to, restaurants to wonder at, a beautiful sun to protect myself from, and a place where friends want to visit. Indeed, it could be much, much worse.