No news

A week has passed in total silence.  You can take this as a good sign.  Nothing bad has happened to me.  You could also take this as a bad sign, depending on your outlook on life.  Nothing particularly good has happened either.  No news is one of the invisible tags I give to certain posts, and the entire last week would deserve it.

In general terms, Wednesday’s chemo was just like every chemo session before, nothing much to write home about.  I had three-and-a-half thousand francs worth of drugs injected, infused and handed to me as pills.  I got drowsy but felt all right otherwise.  My face still looks like my own.  Either the antibody isn’t working anymore, or my body has already learned how to deal with it.  I hope the cancer hasn’t learned it.

When it comes to the little details, every chemo session (and the couple of days on either side of it) is slightly different.  This is not always worth pointing out.  The most that can be said about Wednesday’s session is that I was much less tired than usually.

I dozed off during the therapy but stayed awake late into the night afterwards.  This was good because in the evening I had to give a talk at a workshop I would have liked to attend in person but which was moved online like so many events these days.  Being only five minutes long, the talk was the worst I’ve ever given in terms of exposure gained relative to time invested.  But it’s better than no presentation at all.  Since coming back from Thailand in late January, I’ve spoken only twice at workshops or conferences.

None of this was worth writing down.  The big news this weekend was that the Swiss government has woken up with a jolt from a month-long slumber and realized that not everything is going well in their perfect little world.  Ueli Maurer, the finance minister, expressed his shock at the recent growth in corona cases in a big interview on Saturday.  He is a total dimwit.

Nationwide, infection numbers have risen threefold over the past couple of weeks.  This increase pales in comparison to the approximately fortyfold steady increase since the middle of June.  Over the past four months, the infection numbers have known only one direction.  The government woke up last Friday and immediately fell into a sharp panic.  New measures to contain the spread of the virus were announced on Sunday afternoon.  They came into force less than 24 hours later.  Two days earlier, the virus didn’t pose any particular danger.  Now, we’re moments from being swallowed whole by the second wave.  Switzerland is an embarrassment unto itself.

The good thing is that the health system is still working fine, even in the middle of the second wave.  The exception is the canton of Schwyz where a large gathering of yodeling yahoos turned into exactly the kind of superspreader event that one would expect this to be.  Canton Aargau, where we live, has relatively low numbers and hospitals operating well below capacity.  My next chemo session is bound to be as uneventful as those preceding it.