What I did today (a paraphrase of an earlier email)

Woke up late. Ate breakfast. Read Kelly's The Great Mortality. Napped. Woke up. Ate lunch. Texted Abilene Rob to see how his NCLEX went and got encouraging news. Napped again, this time under a pile of cats. Considered doing laundry, cleaning the bathroom, buying a new Weed-Eater (the last one caught fire the last time I used it), or dyeing my eyelashes. Rejected all options as being too labor-intensive. Started Jeffrey Steingarten's It Must Have Been Something I Ate. Let Max in out of the heat. Rubbed his belleh. Went out and picked up a six-pack, and on the way in to the house, picked a tomato off the plant in the front beds. It's now ripening on the windowsill.

What I most emphatically did not do today:

Answer phone calls, frantic or otherwise, from any hospital, clinic, coworker, or doctor. Get tested for anything. Have anything plastic refitted. Slide into any tubes, magnetized or otherwise. Suction, rinse, or wipe snot out of my enlarged oral cavity. Think about what I could or could not eat. Be exposed, therapeutically or not, to radioactivity. Think about having cancer. Take pain medications. Research anything. Worry about whether I'll have enough energy tomorrow or the next day to do what I want to do.

In short, it was a beautiful, ordinary, lazy golden day: the first one I've had since August of last year. Even if things go to shit tomorrow, I'm going to treasure this twenty-four hour period. Thank God for ordinary days.