Wednesday, September 2, 2020

Reading of last Friday's X-Rays--separate from this Monday's Emergency Room Ultrasound

 We were shown in April the PET scan in which the torso was lighted up like (as they say) a Christmas tree. Lymphoma, it looked like, but the good doctor had tests to rule out other possibilities. Valley Fever! On 27 April Fluconazole to fight the fungus! The right eye was the problem--brown, brown, unable to see. The next day, 28 April, my diary: "Crazy but I am feeling that the eye is a little better from the 8 pills so far." I was not crazy but oculists poo-poo'd me: Fluconazole does not help fight cancer. April 30, in for a lung biopsy. Valley Fever, NOT Cancer. The eye improved fast enough for me to use it at the computer in less than 2 weeks, but the brown film persisted. Now, September, the lesion is almost gone.  In the oculist's pictures the gap at first looked like an alligator swallowing, I said. Last pictures, the heavy lines were almost together. I could track changes because when I close the left eye at night in partial light I see something if I am, say, a foot from a white wall. It was a giant tumbleweed and finally an elongated watermelon and on down smaller to a pendant and a hunter-green ring and now, as of last night, just a hint of an oblong shape, but on the left the large shadow (the permanent marks of the lesion). The eye lesion as of today is all but gone. Now, the news from the Friday X-Rays. For many years the 1950s tuberculosis shrank to a small tight white concentration of trapped bacteria in the upper left lobe. Probably that has nothing to do with the news. Now, as of Friday, a 4 mm nodule in the upper left lobe which, says the reading, "was present on the recent PET scan of 4/21/2020 and on the AP chest of 4/30/2020." No need to follow up for a year since 4 mm is smaller than 6 mm. -- I did not know. I thought maybe the Fluconazole just knew that what I needed was vision, first, but it has been working all over the place. While shrinking the lesion in the eye the Fluconazole has been busy in the torso. If I read this right, a new PET scan would not show flashing lights saying LYMPHOMA or SOMETHING ELSE DIRE. If this deep vein thrombosis just quiets down we can get back to taping and mailing boxes to ship to the Berkshire Athenaeum. 10 boxes are packed but not taped. No more setbacks, please. But recovering strength from the Valley Fever is very very slow. I have changed ambitions. 1. Make Brother Rick's Rolls. 2. Tape and mail the 10 packed boxes. Then work on other unpacked Melville stuff. 3. Continue work on the first self-published book on my family's history on this continent--whites, Indians, blacks. After searching 6000 GLIMPSES for slave, negro, yellow, Indian, and the like, I have now about 6 inches of printouts including some absolute horrors. Seeing all this is a revelation to me. Who said out loud that the first year of the Revolution in North Carolina was devoted to killing Cherokees and burning their towns? Who knew that wills from the 1600s on showed such an astonishing range in the disposition of slaves? Who knew how often slaves resisted? I am at work, but showed down temporarily. One big expanding family with 30 or more last names and racial relations, inter-relations. White Lives Matter. Red Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter. And Intermixtures matter.

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