Today, Eva took me to the NCCC for my platelets. They went in smoothly without a hitch and then she, Eva and I went for a walk by the river in Manchester. It turns out you can walk about a mile and a quarter next to the river on a nice little path that is surrounded by a nice neighborhood, woodsy kind of stuff or for a little while, the ugly, unused, backside of Hesser College. There were a lot of people out running or walking and we saw what looked like some kind of a fitness bootcamp. They offered us the chance to join them for lunges, but we turned them down. There is on one side a fairly steep (10+ foot) drop to the river. Sometimes you could see shopping carts and bicycles on their sides in the river at the bottom. It was not quite as scenic as Lake Massabesic was, but had a lot more interesting things to look at.
Eva took me to visit Matt's stand and I got some mutsu, empire and macoun apples. When I got home, I was pretty tired and caught up with the day's sudoku and then took a nap. I read on the internet that some neutropenic diets don't allow *any* fresh fruits and that if I am going to eat them at all, I am supposed to be peeling the apples. Drat. I'm a little tired of this neutropenic thing.
Have you read this article about first and second sleep? It's pretty interesting. Go read it; I'll wait. I've been noticing that after chemo I do tend to sleep in two stages for a while and then after a couple of weeks, reconsolidate to one sleep period. The time in the middle of the night gives me lots of time to think and one of the things I have been thinking about is sleep through the ages. I've read that 100 years ago, lots of people would sleep in the same bed, sometimes with animals even because it was so darned cold. No one could have been sleeping very well then and I wonder if that was better or worse for our bodies than the way we sleep now. Remember how unhappy I was with the double room? Patrick tells me that there is a lot of high quality evidence telling us that people actually get better faster in doubles than singles and better fastest of all in open wards. (yuck!) His take is something like even though we don't like it as much, togetherness is good for us. In the middle of the night, I wonder if something similar is true about sleep, that we'd be better off with more bodies crowded into the bed. I remember the guy who taught about sleep at my med school saying that there had been a remarkable decline in the number of hours that people spent in bed since the turn of the 1900 century. Certainly our "sleep efficiency" is way up compared to then, but makes one think.
Tomorrow I have no plans to visit any health care establishment. My hope is to keep it that way. May you be healthy tomorrow, too.
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