If feels as if you’re utterly emptied of yourself, then one day you feel yourself starting to fill up again. Or, maybe, you’re a dry stalk, and you feel some green, pale at first, coming back.
This round of chemo’s stayed with me for seven days. Each recovery's slower. I seem to be a bit better, now, but not quite “back.” What, you ask, do I mean when I say I don’t feel well? My stomach feels sour and icky, but the main thing is tired. Not an ordinary tired—a deep, accumulative tired. Not sure how to describe it. Example: Monday I went to the hospital for my weekly blood test. I had to wait maybe 20 minutes (unusual). Normally, I grab anything with print on it and read it, even a Sports Illustrated. But I just sat there, hands folded in my lap as if I were 95, waiting for the next thing. After dinner I stretched out on the sofa at 7:30 and didn’t get up until we made our way upstairs to bed. Gravity announces itself with a ferocity. I just want to lie down.
Tuesday I couldn’t even get through my little stretching routine in the morning, and instead of meditating, once again I went back to bed. I have to choose which one or two things I’ll do in one day. If I go out, I can only run one or two errands before I want to come home and lie down.
The first three days after chemo, I take steroids and anti-nausea pills. When that ends, I crash, and often have a little cry the next night. For at least a week, my mouth 
feels sourly metallic and a bit numb, especially the tip of my tongue. I seem to want salt and citrus right now; other tastes are either flat or flatly obnoxious. After years of eating salads with dinner, I can’t abide them. It’s as if I were pregnant. Things I want I really want, and things I don’t, I hate. Monday night I craved multigrain chips and avocado dip. I bought them, ate too many, felt sick and could hardly eat supper. So then my whole digestive system was in an uproar.
But what do you really want to know? How this is for me, how this matters to me? Didn’t Proust build four volumes on the meaning of the taste and texture of a madeline, the memories that came up when confronted by such objects of the past? I am not yet philosophical. It’s too soon. I can tell you that when I’m a husk of myself, I do what I do, one thing after the other, that’s all. My vision shrinks to this, and then this—not in an enlightened way, but dulled, self-absorbed. Blank to all but my stomach, or what I call fatigue, for lack of a better word.
I’m getting to know aliveness from what it is not to have much of it. I’m getting to see how it is when the world is small and then when it opens again. I am having a lot more compassion for sick or hurting people whose world has shrunk to the bit they can handle.
Nothing clever or allusive in this post. I don't have the energy.