It comes like windows breaking

Summahtime! I loves me the sun and the energy it brings, if not so much the ambient humidity and strange storms that wake me up in the early morning hours with a noise like bowling balls being dropped into a car compacter.

The sunlight is helping with my effort to keep on track with workouts, too, grumbles about the warmth notwithstanding. I'm grimly determined to run in Chicago this weekend, partly to stay with the C25K program and partly to offset the caloric potential of the festivities, which, since it's a wedding hosted by Serbs, probably include hepatotoxic doses of hooch and staggering amounts of good food (I'm not clear on the reason—the proximity to Greece?—but Serbian cuisine beats the hell out of most other Slavic culinary arts). Anyroo, things keep ticking at Big Sexy Gym, where I'm getting in treadmill time, yoga classes, and weights classes on a semi-regular basis. I'm still taking the all-levels yoga class, and what I learned last night is that when the teacher sets the heat above 80, even my toes sweat. Now that's inner peace.

What with all this healthfulness, and working with another pediatric survivor, it's been percolating in my brain for a while that enrolling in a long-term follow-up clinic is long past due. There are a couple of local options, one at Johns Hopkins and one at Georgetown (fellow survivor goes to Dana-Farber, but if pressed she might admit that having their patient coordinator schedule her appointments around Red Sox games is part of the appeal), but since I can walk to GU, I've decided to start with them and see how it goes.

Today I got a call from the NP in charge of the program, and she talked me through some basic history and what kinds of tests they'll want to do before sitting me down for a strategy session with an MD and a social worker. It sounds like it's time to get comfy in overstarched arse-baring hospital cotton: To start with, I'm supposed to line up tests of my bone density, lung capacity, cardiac function, and blood counts, plus the ever-popular squarshing of the boobs. All of which I should've gotten done earlier, but survivorship is an emerging field, and in my day (creakypants), patients weren't automatically fed into a follow-up system once they'd cleared the five-year remission checks. At least my optometrist has been checking me for cataracts, which are a potential side effect of steroid treatment (...huh), and thanks be to all the heavenly powers that I'm spared a GI series.

As we ran down my current fitness regimen, the NP asked, "Got any lung impairment?" Beats me; my problems with running might be that and might just be that I've never been too consistent about cardio work, because it's harrrd. She gave a cheerful verbal shrug: "Well, I'd bet you've got some damage, but as long as you're not working until you pass out, go ahead and keep exercising. It's really important for your long-term health." Me and my sweaty toes say thankya, sort of. No free passes in this life (except on bench presses, which she told me not to do unless I want to tease the fates, and as I look back over the last 18 years of doing bench work, all I can say is oops).