shorter of breath, one day closer to death

Sorry to be so macabre. But this song was on the radio when I was driving home from work and it seemed appropriate today. Are there any Pink Floyd fans out there?

The Hodge is beating the heck out of me today. My groin pain (which feels more and more suspiciously like NERVE pain) came back. Thanks nerve-wrecking “V” drug. My lungs are in rebellion (deep breaths are not my friend). Thank you, lung battering “B” drug. My hair is shedding. Thank you appearence and vanity wrecking “A” drug AND “V” drug. And, to top it all off, I just in general feel kind of down and “yucky.” I’ll blame the dreaded, dastardly “D” drug for that one. I guess the medical term for “yucky” would be malaise. Whatever it is, its not fun.

Still, I dragged my sorry self into work and stayed most of the day. Did my usual exciting lawyer stuff: filed an eviction action, filed a money damages complaint in a different matter, wrote a letter to another lawyer about problems we’re having with their clients answering discovery requests (my boss signed it, not me), and did some skip tracing (i.e. searching for good addresses of debtors we’re trying to collect from). Oh, and I drafted a Motion for Contempt. Those are my favorite. Actually they aren’t, but they are useful. I actually like drafting any motion that I get to do from scratch or mainly from scratch. I like using my brain and not just doing law clerk, fill-in-the-blank type stuff — which is what most complaints or motions we file usually are. Motions for Contempt are useful because they do tend to bring the debtors to court to answer questions about their assets. Something about the threat of being held in jail on a capias gets people who have ignored everything — including the Motion for Default! — to actually start cooperating. The next step then is usually wage garnishing which is just filling in a bunch of blanks and then making about sixty copies for the Court. I think the Court likes to kill trees.

I can’t be much more specific than that about what I did ’cause of confidentiality (anyone who knows even a bit about law knows how much us lawyers love confidentiality), but now you basically know what I do at work all day. Glamorous it is most certainly not, but it pays the bills (most of the time anyway). Now you know why I rarely talk about my job — there is rarely anything to talk about.

I think I’m going to go do something fun — work on And Then A.P. Hill Came Up. That always keeps me out of trouble for a while anyway. Anyone got some new Hill stuff for me?

(Did I mention my father found me an A.P. Hill t-shirt on our trip to Gettysburg? I wore it to work and everyone asked who the bearded dude was. The biggest and best perk of my job is my boss doesn’t care WHAT I wear to work, as long as its not a day when I am representing a client in court.)

Tags: ABVD, bleomycin, cancer, chemotherapy, hematology, Hodgkin's Disease, lungs, oncology