To The Woman of One Year Ago

Next week marks one year since life was upended - February 3 was the first seizure, February 5 was the brain biopsy, and February 7 was the day of the official diagnosis - and I've been thinking a lot about what I wish the me of one year ago had known about what was about to unfold.  If I could stand face-to-face with that woman, what would I tell her? I've always been someone who likes to know what to expect in advance. It's probably partly why I enjoy my job as an event planner - I can help other people know what to expect, where to go, what to do, how to navigate events and spaces. When you know what to expect, you take the edge off the uncertainty and ambiguity, lessen the anxiety associated with the unknown. Except that's not life most of the time. Most of the time it's hairpin turns that weren't on the map. It's hurricanes forming offshore that no meteorologist saw coming. It's loss and death and grief and heartbreak that were just hanging out in the abyss of some unknown you had not yet encountered. Life is punctuated, italicized, bolded, and underlined by the unknown.

If I could take the collective experience of this past year and give a grand speech to the me of one year ago, what would I say to her about all that is about to happen, to help her know what's coming around the hairpin turn? (Yes, I know parentheses would not be used while speaking, but let's overlook that fact for the sake of this post, shall we?)

This is what I would tell that woman:

You and I both know you like to walk into situations knowing what to expect. So let me help you manage those expectations about how the next twelve months are about to go down. (Your neuro-onc will be exactly zero help in this department. You will come to despise the phrase, "It's different for everyone," which is basically a non-response response he will use so many times you’ll want to launch out of the exam chair and slap him. I’m not saying you will do such a thing; I’m saying you will want to. Just ask your parents. They were there to witness the moment.)

You are on the edge of a precipice, you just don’t know it yet. You are about to free fall into what will oddly be the most gloriously hope-filled while simultaneously most misery-filled time of your life. You will take up swearing with greater regularity than ever before; particularly and surprisingly, the F-word will be your word of choice. You will toss around F-bombs like candy at a parade. (Your mother will not be pleased, your friends will be surprised, but in turn, you will be surprised to learn one of your sweetest book-loving friends will violently launch a book across the room when she learns of your diagnosis. You have good friends who know when it's okay to throw things and drop F-bombs in your honor.) You will finally get to fulfill that secret wish of yours to shave your head, but not under the circumstances you would have ever envisioned. In fact, you’ll shave it so many times eventually you will stop crying when you do it. You accept it as a new normal. (But you should still ask the neurosurgeon to shave your head in its entirety during surgery in April, none of that partial nonsense. You are going to look ridiculous when he does that.)
 
Your search history will soon be filled with words like “oligodendroglioma,” “Temozolomide,” and “morbilliform rash.” But you made the right call on not searching for the prognosis for cancers such as yours. The answer won’t matter to you then and it still won’t matter to you now.
 
You will face days that are unimaginably hard, the hardest of your life thus far, and when you scan the horizon line of your future, you will wonder if the light will ever peek over that line again. It will. You will scan that same horizon line of the future and wonder if your left arm will always be this clumsy, dysfunctional thing attached to your body, destined to a lifetime of one-star Yelp reviews and tremors. It won’t. And yes, you will get through more than one rehab appointment without crying. Pinky promise.
 
You will discover that chemo and radiation are not the blackholes you thought they’d be. Sure, there will be bad moments, but take to heart now the words a friend will speak to you in the wake of your upcoming surgery in April: “So often we dress rehearse tragedy instead of joy.” Dress rehearse joy. Don’t dress rehearse puking your guts up. Don’t dress rehearse a neverending life of depression, sadness, grief, and death. Dress rehearse a life filled with joy amid the sorrow and a peace deep in your soul that can only be explained by Jesus. Dress rehearse the day when the seizures stop because the day will come when they do.
 
You will be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of mail, texts, and gifts you will receive from friends from all stages of life. You’ve spent decades collecting and investing in these friends, now reap the benefit. They want to love you, and they want to show you, so let them. None of them are going to care if you send a thank you note or not. Just don’t communicate with anyone in a written format for about a week or two after your surgery in April. Girl, just don’t. The writer in you is going to look back at texts and be horrified at the gibberish you communicated. Spare yourself the embarrassment.

Ignore your neurosurgeon; get that neuro-psych eval scheduled, no matter how long he tells you the wait is or that the results won't be of any value. 

Don’t procrastinate on scheduling that appt with the integrative oncologist.   

There will be that stretch in April and May racked with seizures, rehab, depression, and overwhelming grief and fear about starting treatment. You will feel like you are in a dogfight worthy of Top Gun. It will be no walk in the park, Kazansky, I can assure you. But I can also assure you eventually the fighting will ease and you’ll find yourself back on solid ground and your plane intact. Sort of. Mostly.  

Don’t go back to work a mere 3 weeks after your April surgery. Give yourself more time. You’ll have ample time off stashed to cover yourself. Take a chill about whether you're going to lose your job and your health insurance. It's going to be fine. 

Don’t bother with the ginger chews for nausea. They’re like sucking on Pledge-flavored taffy. You don’t like ginger to begin with, so don’t kid yourself. 

Go to Kristina’s wedding in July, and wear that black dress you bought inspired by Erin Krakow in the Hallmark movie It Was Always You.

Celebrate your 40^th at your own house with your friend Emily, not some cabin in the woods. Because at that point you’ll still be living with your parents (Surprise! You’re about to move in with them for seven months!), so going to your own house is going to feel like a treat all its own.   

Be patient with yourself. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will a brain with a 2-ish inch tumor heal in a day. Your body is about to do all sorts of weird things. Keep calm and carry on. 

Don’t take that antibiotic during radiation. Save yourself from the most ridiculous rash of your life.

Watch out for that day when you go to Amish country with your mom in October. Load up on that anti-nausea medication. 

Watch out for that lady who asks you for medical advice on that live radio interview. 

You will learn to hug your mom, really hug her. Gone will be the days of that half-hearted wimpy stuff you’ve spent most your life doing. And you and your dad are going to develop this odd little handshake that isn't really a handshake, but a series of fist bumps, hand fireworks, and head rubs.

Don’t worry, you’ll be able to renew your driver’s license without having to take a photo of you with no hair. The wonder of progress is that bureaucracy isn’t always destined to exist in the Stone Age. They’ll let you renew your license using your old photo. And bonus! You won’t even have to leave your couch to do it.  

You won't discover until the end of cycle four about the secret-ish oncology-specific lab on the third floor that gets your blood results before you even get out of the parking garage. Take advantage of this lab from the beginning.  

Oh, and make sure you keep all your trash cans emptied and ready for chemo cycle four.  Brace for impact on that one. Just go ahead and skip the dress rehearsing joy part because it ain’t happening. 

And for the love of Pete, cut sugar out sooner so that your shoulder quits hurting, ya big dummy.  

And then, I would close by saying to that woman, pressing one hand to each side of her face ever so gently, pull her close, look her dead in the eye, and whisper with conviction, “Your God is good and your God is sovereign, just like you told the nurse on the day of your diagnosis. He’s going to prove it, and you’re.going.to.make.it. One day at a time. My God, woman, you're going to make it.”

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Health Updates

I figured if my great-niece Stevie can get her own monthly photos posted of the first year of her life, why can't I do similarly and post yearly photos even though I'm 40? While it's not one year since the surgery and shaving my hair, I am happy to say I've now got a bit of a Will Howard-esque (QB of Ohio State for all of you non-football fans) haircut going now. It's just a touch too short to fully cover my scar, and I still live in a beanie hat practically 24/7 (it's amazing how much heat you lose from your head!), but it won't be too long before I go back to my stylist and get it trimmed evenly.

This latest cycle was significantly less dramatic than the last one, thankfully. No vomiting, no laying on the bathroom floor. Nausea? yes. Decreased appetite? Yes. I'm trying to pack on some weight as I've lost 15 pounds since the surgery. There wasn't much of me to start with so I'm working on getting healthy food in me when I can. Although, that donut I ate a couple weekends ago was gloriously delicious.

I saw the neuro-onc earlier this week for my routine monthly check-in. (And yes, he used the phrase, "It's different for everyone." Drives me bonkers.) We are going to keep the same dosage for the upcoming cycle, which will start at the end of next week (pending no squirrelly blood results) - and will mark the halfway point of chemo! At the end of February, I will have my next MRI. I will also see the radiation oncologist for my six-month follow-up since radiation ended at the end of February. 

Ultimately, I have far more good days than bad days. I'm trying to connect more with friends, but that has its own challenges as it feels like there is such a backlog of people to catch up with. The conversations that are the toughest physically are the ones where I end up shouldering most of the talking. I get winded and I can tell cognitively things start to take a hit and I get a bit disoriented at times. So, if you're around me - you're gonna have to talk about yourself, too, so I can get a break!

I'm trying to get a lot of routine healthcare taken care of - eye doctor, dentist, dermatologist, etc. As my friend said, "Everybody needs their own healthcare concierge." Keeping up with the routine stuff now feels like a chore all its own, but I'm grateful to have baselines established in other areas of my health. I'm scheduled to head back to the gym for my first session the week of February 10, which I am really looking forward to getting back into shape, slowly but surely.

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Eternity in The Human Heart

I've given more than a passing thought in recent years, even prior to my diagnosis, about our culture's obsession with anti-aging. Make-up products, supplements, diets, workout regimens, healthcare choices, all aimed at living longer and longer. There's even a conference for the ultra-wealthy, held in Switzerland, called the Longevity Investors Conference, where an elite group of insanely wealthy people gather to discuss ways they can live longer and how they can fund the research and science to make that happen. It's private, invitation-only, and guests have to pony up tens of thousands of dollars to attend. 

It's a head-scratcher for me.

Do I want to be healthy? Yes. 

But do I really want to live longer on this planet, in this body, among this kind of brokenness? No.

This planet we tread is a mess. And this body in which I dwell is a mess. And everybody around me is a mess. We are ravaged by the results of sin. We have a conference for people who spend millions of dollars trying to live longer while there are millions of people dying from preventable diseases that cost dollars to prevent. These people dying of preventable diseases? They, too, want to live longer. But they aren't trying to make it to 120 years old; they are just hoping to make it to twenty days old, twenty months old, and twenty years old. Making it to 120 years old is unfathomable. And yet - and yet - there is something inherently ingrained in all of us that makes us long to live forever. 

Because what that conference - and our culture - puts on full display is this truth: We don't want to die early - whatever 'early' may mean. We are desperate to live longer, to live forever, and yet we can't figure out how to make that happen based on our own knowledge and our own willpower. We can't figure out how to solve the longings of our own hearts.

Famed atheist-turned-Christian-theologian, C.S. Lewis, commented in a series of letters he exchanged with Sheldon Vanauken in Vanauken's book, A Severe Mercy

C.S. Lewis asked how it was that I, as a product of a materialistic universe, was not at home there. 'Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures?' Then, if we can complain of time and take such joy in the seemingly timeless moment, what does that suggest? It suggests that we have not always been or will not always be purely temporal creatures. It suggests that we were created for eternity. Not only are we harried by time, we seem unable, despite a thousand generations, even to get used to it. We are always amazed by it - how fast it goes, how slowly it goes, how much of it is gone. Where, we cry, has the time gone? We aren't adapted to it, not at home in it. If that is so, it may appear as proof, or at least a powerful suggestion, that eternity exists and is our home.

This desire to live forever is born from an inherent knowing that we are supposed to live forever, just not here on Planet Earth, but rather in heaven with God. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says, "[God] has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end." 

That desire to live forever that wells up within you? It should point you to the heart of God. He's the one that put that desire there. It is a good and right longing, but not one you will solve on based on your own effort and willpower. You can use every anti-aging cream known to mankind, drink every version of a healthy smoothie there is, and exercise your way into oblivion. And at the end of the day, you don't get to choose how long you live. But you do get to choose where you get to live after death comes to your door. There are two options: Eternity with God in heaven, or eternity apart from God in hell. 

Look, I'm not saying we don't take care of our bodies and treat them well. They are a gift God has given us, we are to steward them well and not treat them like garbage. But as we can see first-hand, I treated my body well and did a lot of things right - ate well, slept well, drank water, worked out - and I still got cancer.

Prior to my diagnosis, I often thought I didn't care how long I lived. However long I lived, I lived. But then when the diagnosis came and suddenly the illusion of how long I lived was seemingly wrested from my control (as if I had any to start with), I found myself desperately praying that God would grant me a long life. I didn't - and still don't - know how to reconcile those two realities within me. I don't want a ridiculously long life, but I'm fearful, too, that I will die early, though. I'm not sure where that leaves me.

My friend Myrt always said she wanted to live to be 80 and then she wanted out of here. She wanted to die five minutes after her husband, Paul, so that she had enough time to tidy up after him and then head out. They had lived full lives, accomplishing everything on their shared bucket list. But Myrt did not get her wish. Paul died in 2014, and she did not pass until 2017. So, not only did she live past 80, she also did not die five minutes after Paul. She wasn't openly bitter about the circumstances and hostile toward God (that I was aware of), but she didn't shy away from expressing her occasional unhappiness over the matter.

But this is the weight of the matter - Paul did not die early, and Myrt did not die late. My friend Jonathan did not die early at thirty-one. If I die tomorrow, I will not die early at forty. 

So all those investors at the longevity conference? I don't know, maybe they will make it to 120 years old and be in perfectly good shape until their last breath, but the day will come when they will take their last breath, somehow, some way. Not a single one will be able to escape death. But if one of them drops dead at fifty? 

They will not have died early. They will have died precisely at the moment a sovereign and holy God intended they should. And no anti-aging cream or longevity conference can override him.

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Throughout this past year, I have returned countless times to the words of pastor Matt Chandler, who also happens to have a more aggressive grade of the same type of brain cancer I have, roughly the same size of tumor and same lobe of the brain. He was diagnosed fourteen years ago.

No ER For This Kind of Pain

I can feel the start of the metaphorical hemorrhaging, the spilling over of trauma into other parts of my life. I'm not sure what kind of tourniquet exists for such things. I knew I’d start seeing the emotional bleeding at some point, I just didn’t know when, where, how, or the severity of the bleeding. Donald Miller said in his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, after the end of a significant relationship, "I knew then the shock was wearing off. A certain fear grew. They don’t have an emergency room for the kind of pain that is about to happen to me, I thought" (194). I've been to the ER for a seizure, which led to the discovery of a giant brain tumor, but there is no such ER for what I'm experiencing now.

As I approach the one-year anniversary, I feel the weight of this past year starting to catch up with me. As one friend noted from her own cancer experiences, it feels like trying to clean up an oil spill with a paper towel. Impossible. I feel the hyper vigilance taking root. So many things gets flagged as warning signals in my brain. Trauma doesn’t allow a person to differentiate in a healthy manner anymore, and I'm losing the ability to differentiate between what's safe and what isn't. So many things feel untrustworthy, a danger, to me right now. 

My own mind can’t be trusted. 

The world around me can't be trusted. 

And most of all, perhaps God cannot be trusted.

Tish Harrison Warren wrote in her stunning book Prayer in the Night

It was a gray Sunday morning when I was in college. A few months before, a three-year-old boy in our congregation had drowned. Our church was still staggered in grief as I sat listening to my pastor, Hunter, preach about trusting God. "You cannot trust God to keep bad things from happening to you," he said. I was dumbstruck . . . But Hunter's point was that God does not keep all bad things from happening to us. He cannot be trusted to do that because he never made that promise. Doing so is, apparently, not his job. Our Creator lets us remain vulnerable (22).

Doggone it.

I'd prefer it, God, if you did make it your job to never let bad things happen to me and to not leave me vulnerable.

I see the hemorrhaging playing out most tangibly right now in the physical house I dwell in, a house that's stood for over seven decades and has been in my family for four generations. I swear I hear dripping all over the place. Appliances, vents, walls, ceilings, pipes. I go around listening to all these things, and I feel like I'm slowly losing my sanity. I lost some good brain cells in the surgery, but now I feel like I’m losing my whole dang mind. Did the contractor not do his job when he replaced the siding and the roof in the last couple of years? What if there's a leak and I find it ruins my walls? What if there's something wrong in my appliances, they catch fire, and the whole place burns down?

I dwelled in a body for four decades to discover that it had been harboring a malignant brain tumor for as long as maybe two of those decades. Potentially HALF MY LIFE. No symptoms. No warning signs. Then the bottom dropped out and my world erupted. A fully-loaded freight train I never heard, never saw, and never felt coming.

What if there’s something lurking beneath the surface of my house, in its walls, in its roof, subtle symptoms I ignore, and some day I’m going to watch the whole thing come tumbling down all because I just didn’t know what I didn’t know. What if my house has its own figurative tumors? What if things go undiagnosed in my house and the whole thing falls down around me? There are no ERs for houses. There are only fire trucks and fire hydrants, to douse the flames of what's left, just like chemo and radiation are dousing the flames of what's left of my tumor.

I'm having to wrestle all over again what I believe to be true about the sovereignty of God, just like I did before my surgery last April. God already hasn't stopped bad things from happening to me, but what if there's even more around the corner, waiting, lurking? The disparity grows between my reality and my faith. 

I don’t trust God to not let bad things happen to me. 

God, help me to narrow that gap once again. Do what only you can do.

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Health Updates

I ended the pills for cycle number five this week, and it wasn't the abyss that the last cycle was, thank God. I don't know who all was pounding on heaven's door and what you said once you got there, but this round was significantly less severe than the last one. I still fought off some nausea, but no vomiting, no laying on the bathroom floor - none of that misery. I was able to eat like normal and water tasted perfectly fine. I'll see the neuro-onc again the week of January 26 to review this cycle and look ahead to when I'll start number six, which will be the halfway point!

One of my goals has been to get back to the gym. I've been talking with the owner of the gym to see about setting up times to meet with her one-on-one and slooooowly get started on some basics, build back up over time. I have no idea what my limits are any more when it comes to how long I can work out, how many reps I can do, etc. I am starting from ground zero. I keep joking with her that the scene from Apollo 13 is our inspiration. We are going to have to put this thing back together using nothing but that, meaning we are going to have to work at putting my body back together, but there are some things my body just isn't going to be able to do right now and will be eliminated as options until we know better.

The week of February 2 will mark the one-year anniversary since the first seizure, the biopsy, and confirmation of the diagnosis. I'm sure it will be a weighty week, and I have another post coming that will go with that week. Some people have asked how I'm feeling about that anniversary. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of emotions and sensitivity around it, but I feel like the anniversary of the craniotomy in April will be far more emotional because that to me is when the real chaos and the descent into the abyss started. 

I would appreciate your prayers for mental wisdom and stability as I sort through trauma. I'm making connections to a trauma counselor, but nothing firm yet. And prayers for wisdom in what I tangibly need to address in my house and what is just my brain being weird.

Comedy as Redeemed Mourning

Harrison Scott Key said in his wildly hilarious book How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told, "So much comedy is a kind of redeemed mourning, turning the dross of pain into gold, just as visiting Disney World HIS BEAUTY and HER BEAST tank tops is a kind of psychosis" (138).

I have felt that sense of comedy as redeemed mourning a lot in the last year. (Can you believe it will be one year already in February since the diagnosis?!) There was a lot of mourning, but there was also a lot of hilarity and ridiculousness, which in some ways felt irreverent at times. I felt as if I had to button it up because I had cancer, and who laughs when you have cancer? Everything just needs to be sad because that is the caricature I had in my head of what a cancer patient should look like. Bald and sad. And a permanent resident living on the bathroom floor.

So I began thinking over the more comical moments I've had here lately. Sort of my own personal version of "You know you have cancer when. . ." sort of list, but really these are the moments when I know I have brain cancer (and when I know I have friends and family who have sorted out when they, too, can safely inject some humor into the situation.) This clearly is not a portrayal of anyone else who has or has had cancer, so don't generalize what I'm saying here.

You Know You Have Brain Cancer When:

• You lose your hair to surgery and then again to radiation (but only half of it!) and then while throwing up from the chemo, think, “Well, at least no one has to be here to hold my hair back.” 
• You update your Memoji to more closely resemble the version of you that wears a beanie hat 24/7 and now needs glasses. 
• You joke with your brother that at least you managed to hit the trash can every time you threw up instead on the floor or on yourself, and he responds in a way that only a brother can with “#winning.” 
• You keep a running list of your medical claims just to see how much your insurance company has been billed, just for kicks. And you do this because you called your insurance company to see if they can provide a master report. No, no, they cannot. Not unless you need it for legal purposes, or some other reason you cannot recall. (And for the record, it's A LOT of money that has been billed to my insurance company. I'm not quite to seven figures, but we're getting there.) 
• Your friend buys you a water bottle decal of a cartoonish looking dumpster on fire with text beneath it that says, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.” Which is a very polite way to say “Your life is a dumpster fire, but you’re doing a great job.” 
• You start a playlist in your iTunes that is simply called “The Year of Cancer.” 
• When you’ve been asked for what feels like the 9,000th time what your birthday is for verification purposes, you have fleeting thoughts of giving some alternate date, just to see how they respond.
• You’re like a toddler whose day revolves around nap time. Although, I suppose the statement could move in the geriatric direction just as easily, but let’s move in the toddler direction. 
• Your prayers consist of things like “Dear God, please don’t let me lose my lunch again today,” and your gratitude journal includes things like “Thanks, I didn’t lose my lunch today.” 
• It takes you four months to finally make it to a dinner date with friends after months of scheduling and rescheduling thanks to a body that has long since left you out of the decision-making process.  
• You have a new section in your personal library you mentally call “The Cancer Section.”
• You realize some people dream of sleeping or napping all day, but you dream of staying awake all day.
• You joke with a friend who is a paraplegic who has a shirt that says, “I’m in it for the parking.” So then when you roll up to radiation and slide into the “oncology patient” parking space, you text him a photo and say, “I’m just in it for the parking.” 
• You watch all these pharmaceutical commercials you used to laugh at, wondering why anyone would take them as the guy speed talks his way through all the possible side effects, “including death,” and now you watch them and think, “No judgment here. You go right on and take that med that includes possible nausea, vomiting, skin rashes, hair loss, deafness, blindness, heart attack, paralysis, asthma, kidney disease, heart disease, loss of all limbs, osteoporosis, hemorrhoids, curvature of the spine, stroke, and in rare cases, death.” I see you.
• You know what day it is based on your pill organizer. (But that’s only if you remembered to take your pills when you should. And if you don't do that, well, then you're just up the creek as to what day it is. Except for your phone, which also houses reminders to take your meds, and yet you still forget to take meds.)
• Your friend sends you a candle with a picture of a dog with a cone on his head with text beside it that says, "At least you don't have to wear a cone."
• You keep a daily log of symptoms in a notebook, and since you've given legally strict instructions to two of your friends to burn your real journals with all the true insights of your life when you die, those health logs will be the last documented remains of your life. So, congrats, at least the world will know if you had a bowel movement or not should you meet an abrupt demise while going through cancer treatment. 
• You seriously question the dividing line between aging and brain cancer. It doesn't really matter why you just walked into a room and can't remember what you're doing there. Just make another lap and the answer might come to you. You could use the steps anyway.
• You now understand the value of dry erase boards and dry erase markers more than you ever have before in your life. You have to write down what you need to do ten minutes from now sometimes. You even ask for some sort of shower-version of a dry-erase board for Christmas. Doesn't everyone do their best thinking in the shower? And you can't wait until you get out to write things down. No, that's far too long. You forget what you were thinking about in the amount of time it takes to squeeze shampoo in your palm.
• You think "Well, clearly when the neurosurgeon removed part of my tumor, he also apparently removed the cells that gave me the ability to back into a parking space without looking like some drunk, newly-licensed teen driver just pulled in."

Comedy. It really is a redeemed kind of mourning. So laugh away.

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Health update

My most recent appointment with my neuro-oncologist was last week and we did our usual monthly lab work. My platelets took a major nose dive. The low end of normal is 150 and my platelets were down to 86, which was the lowest they've ever been in this process. We had to put further chemo temporarily on hold to see if the platelets would rebound before we could green light cycle number five. I redid lab work today and the platelets rebounded - just in a week! - to 175, which the highest they've been since July. I'll start the next round of chemo tomorrow night (But I don't take it until the evening, so I'll still be with it during the Buckeye game!) I told one friend, "Welcome to a life where perhaps whiplash is, in fact, the most common side effect."

In conversations with the doctor, we elected to maintain the higher dose of chemo, which is the same dose as last time when I was ultra-miserable for a period of a few days. I'm not a masochist, but I want to see if the same symptoms still play out or if the body adjusts in any way to the higher dose. This higher dose is ultimately the target dose and the highest I would go anyway. If it super sucks again, then we can just drop the dose back down without hampering long-term outcomes. If it does hold true, then by about Wednesday next week, I'll probably be getting reacquainted with the carpet in my bathroom closet again and water will sound absolutely awful to me. Yay for padded carpet!

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