So some of the side effects of the chemo caught up with me today—and there will be more to follow. The first half or so of the day I spent feeling pretty rotten. (The details of which you would want to read even less than I would want to write them.)

I am still eating, albeit in smaller portions. For now, I’m off the endless fluids they’ve been pumping into me since I arrived to help flush the chemo through my system.

I spent the day with my family, though for much of it I wasn’t much company. I slept some and took a walk through the halls when I felt up to it. When you’re going through this, you take the small victories wherever you can find them.

My doctor came to check on me. There’s a distinction to make here. My doctor is often not the doctor I see while I’m here. The doctors I see daily are those assigned to work this floor on particular weeks. Mine though, came up to check on how I was feeling. He’s very pleased with how everything is going so far, and marveled at my sister’s stem-cell-producing prowess! Go Sarah!

I’m settling into a diet that is starting to consist of a lot of sandwiches—grilled cheese, turkey, and roast beef so far. I’m finding it safer and more palatable than much of what I’ve already written about. Certainly better than chewy chicken tenders.

The road ahead is going to be rocky for a bit, but I find myself pretty optimistic now. For the next week or ten days, I’ll probably be feeling pretty awful. Some time shortly after that, I should start the long, slow process of bouncing back.

Which leads me to one other thing I’ve been meaning to mention here. It’s a strange experience, but here in the hospital—especially since I can’t just look out the window and see the day or night or even the weather—there isn’t any real sense of time passing. It’s like those old Infocom games when you’d issue the “wait” command, and the game would say, “Time passes.” In some of the games, something would actually happen if you waited long enough; in most, absolutely nothing changed whatsoever. All you got was “Time passes.”

That’s kind of what it is like here. Some time on Sunday afternoon, time just stopped for me. I’ve been thinking the day is Sunday ever since.

That thought lead me to another. Douglass Adam’s wrote once about that sleepy, drowsy time on Sunday afternoon when (presumably if you’re British) you take a nap, take a bath, make a cup of tea, and descend lazily into “the long dark teatime of the soul”.

That’s what the last few days feel like, and what I’m imagining the next phase of my recovery will feel like as well. “The long dark teatime of the soul.” There will be a lot of waiting—“Time passes.”—and a lot of simply existing in this strange twilight time that exists only to bridge the gap between “before” the transplant and “after”.

For the first time in a long time, I find myself thinking about the future in ways that aren’t exclusively about how I feel or how I’ll manage my MDS. I’m thinking about the things I want to do when I’m well again.

All I have to do is wait through this long dark teatime.