4.21.06, The Daily Numbers Game

Today's a 5.

My friend Frank suggested a daily number as an indication of how I'm doing each day, perhaps just tacked onto a longer post as some indication that cuts through all the trivia or verbal obfuscation or occcasional sarcasasm. Today, let's say 5, on a scale from 1 as worst to 10 as best. (We have to be careful not to confuse this with the pain scale, a very important indicator, wihch is reversed with 10 meaning something "you can't go" or "you want to die" and 1 meaning "no pain." Nothing tongue-in-cheek about that, the pain scale, since it's become a daily and necessary part of how to cope with this.)

Two days ago, like day-one post-chemo of the last week seemed so good. So on the Franky scale I'm going to give Wednesday a basically really good, a 9 in comparison with all the recent days. Now yesterday was middling from around a 4 or 5 in the morning, up a couple of points later in the day, then back to a 4 in the evening. During my run, however, I didn’t feel much if any pain. These numbers. Part of me feels like I’m the Daily Game you can play here in WA state -- "The Daily Game is a fun way to put a little extra money in your pocket every day, because you can win anything from $40 to $500 for a $1 play, or play for as little as 50¢." The lottery people wouldn't come chase me down would they? You pick any three or two numbers and if you get two of them in order you win x amount, all three you win y amount, depending on how many others guess correctly.

So Wednesday a 9, Thrusday a 6 with a couple of dips; the day before, chemo day, that’s harsher and rates only about a 3 purely for fatigue.

From now on we'll have the Franky Scale and the Pain Scale, though there's very little reason to introduce the latter daily.