Well, the rest of the title should have been "and back to longer ones". In fact it's been a long time since I wrote here last: not that I haven't done anything in the meanwhile... they have actually been full days of relatively feeling well, so I tried to get the most out of them -although I must admit that in some cases this "most" was just sitting in front of the pc, and browsing websites and downloading stuff and so on-. Whatever, should I sum them up now, they've just been "shorter days", which passed away far too fast...
Eventually I went to the O bej O bej fair, and I must say that the new location was awful: it makes much less sense out of its historical, traditional one. I hope it's a temporary thing and that next year it will be brought back there. The details of why I think so are far too complex to explain, but for one thing it was missing the suggestive, unofficial, unapproved part displaced by young people in narrow streets and in certain strategic places... for the rest it's yet another plain standard fair with common fair food and stuff for the home or things like those.
However I just went to the fair with mom, and not with friends. In fact I sort of lost contact with friends who (may have) loved to be there - although I met a pair of them there. And I didn't stay for much time: just what it took to quickly see it all, and buy two or three little gifts. For one thing it was so damned cold, and OTOH I was still in a health condition that would expose me to the risk of getting some disease from staying in such a crowd.
Now that I think of it, the same days there was another fair of a different charachter, to which I also love to attend, in Milan. It's a big Xmas(-oriented) commerce fair ideally dedicated to craftmanship: in practice, also a largely dedicated to gastronomy. Both things from all regions of Italy, european countries, and extrauropean countries. I plainly skipped that this year: far too much crowd. And I don't know if I should be proud of it, but I was able to eat from morning to evening without even the need of buying anything: exclusively by means of testers. And I'm talking about getting as full as possible! But with all those people... too risks of getting a germ. Also, it's in Milan's Fair: many buildings too warm inside, with the need to pass from one to the other by going outside. Yet other risks. No, not for me this year...
Then these short days were so short that at the beginning of last week they seemed to end. More precisely, they should have ended. Instead, it was just a two days long pause: I got back to Candiolo (Turin) for the next, and my last cicle of chemoterapic treatment. Unfortunately my neutrophil count was below the threshold they generally apply, which is of 1000 per cube millimeter of blood. They kept me there (here) for one night to see if the following day it would improve, and since it was just below, if it would even slightly, we would have proceeded. Actually, they were even fewer. Granted, not just as few as they had been in past periods of maximum toxicity of chemoterapic drugs; i.e. they shouldn't have exposed me to the risk of infections. But the rationale is that if they were brought virtually to zero starting from normal values, so much more would happen starting from below average ones. All in all this just means that my bone marrow has been suffering from the previous stimulations. This kind of things needs time, you know...
In the end it was a 2 x 180 Km travel for nothing, but in the afternoon, instead of going directly back to Milan, me and my family took a nice trip to Turin. Visited some touristic locations. Took a tour to a museum (Palazzo Barolo, where Italian patriot Silvio Pellico spent his last years). And eventually took a city's exclusively charachteristic bicerin in the Bicerin Cafe where they actually invented it some 150 years ago (it's supposed to be a secret recipe, but basically consists of coffee, chocolate, and milk cream).
The funniest thing in going back to Milan has been that I have been invited in just a bunch of days to a number of "Happy hours", suppers, and nights at the pub with friends, of which I obviously took advantage and that I would have missed otherwise. Oh, and of course I could also have our traditional Xmas lunch at home...
The "return of long days part" has to do with the fact that yesterday I came back to Candiolo, checked in and notwithstanding the fact that the neutrophils count is just as low as last week, I began the treatment: simply, we cannot procrastinate any more. They will give me higher doses of growth factor soon after. What can I say till now? I've puked twice: yesterday night and this morning - damned Cyclophosphamide! I feel much better now, though. And in a few minutes I'll turn off the light and try to get asleep: the fact that I'm constantly attached to the volumetric pumps gets slightly in the way, but you get used to that too...
