The Honest Courtesan

As I’ve often mentioned, my best friend Grace is not aging well.  Beside inheriting a tendency toward health problems, she spent most of her life in the industrial trades and also did a bit of wild living; as a result she has a number of different illnesses and conditions including thyroid failure, diabetes, arthritis, glaucoma, mild COPD, and bad teeth.  We assumed the latter were to blame when she developed a lymph node infection in her throat, but a biopsy revealed that it was caused by HPV-related throat cancer.  Fortunately, it was caught fairly early and the mass is compact; the doctors tell her the prognosis for radiation treatment is very good, so for the past month we’ve been running around taking care of all the preliminary steps for the treatment, which looks like it will actually start the Monday after Thanksgiving.  That means taking her to town for treatment five days a week for seven weeks, and more intense caretaker duty than I’ve become used to over the past five years.  She has a very positive outlook and the doctors are optimistic, but all the same it’s going to be very hard on her, and therefore very hard on me.  It probably won’t be as difficult as caring for Jae in 2015-16 was, but I’m almost a decade older than I was then; I’m going to try my damnedest not to fall behind in my writing and maintaining this blog, but obviously Grace’s needs must come first.  So please bear with me, and gods willing things should be mostly back to normal by the end of January.