summer with my shirt off


i've loved swimming for as long as i can remember.

not just being in a pool, wading in the shallow end, or floating on top of the water sunbathing. i love to swim, man. on top of the water pretending like i'm freestyling next to matt biondi (because i'm old, you see) or underwater pretending like i'm aquaman, "when i've got the music (water), i've got a place to go."

the problem, if that's the right word, has been that over the last ten years or so, i haven't really done a whole lot of swimming. outside of the yearly trip to gulf shores plantation we made when i was on staff at huffman or the once every three years or so trip to the beach i've made with my family in the last ten years, we just don't do it much. we don't belong to the y. haven't really had close friends with pools. it's not like we've been deprived. it's just not something, swimming that is, that we've put on our radar.

until now.

and now, we are spoiled. magnificently spoiled.

if my count is right, some combination of our family has been in our new pool in our backyard of our new house that we moved into the first of may 15 out of the last 18 days.

how we ever lived without having a pool in our backyard, i'll never know. i do hope that we won't have to worry about going back to living without one for a long, long time.

in the almost a full month since i posted about my chemo side effects, i've had my first two week break. the first week or so, i didn't experience a whole lot of relief. the second week was absolutely glorious, though! i got my normal taste back. the sores on my hands and feet calmed down and healed to the point where it wasn't painful to walk, run, or exercise. the sores on my gums healed and i could chew on the right side of my mouth again. i got my energy back. i felt like myself for, like, four or five full days.

then, of course, i set myself up to be disappointed. i told myself that, since it took about 10 days for me to feel the effects of the chemo during my first cycle, i could predict the same timetable during the second cycle. i didn't take into account that i would still have low levels of the medicine in my system when the second cycle started, and it only took a couple days for the effects to flare up inside of me after the restart.

today, almost two weeks in, my gums are bleeding again. my taste buds are fucked again. i'm out of energy by late lunch every day again. what's worse, at least today, is the sores are coming back. on my hands, my dumbbells are re-aggravating the places that were hurting a month ago. my feet are worse than last month already. a spot from the first go-round is coming back on my right foot. yesterday morning, i woke up and i couldn't put any weight on my left foot because, of all places, hell has taken up residence in the tip of my second toe.

i can't even think about running. like i told some limbo folks this morning, it takes me ten or more steps just to walk off a limp.

complain, complain, complain. bitch, bitch, bitch. oh, poor kevin. shut the fuck up, you little whiner.

but i've got my pool. our pool.

our new house feels like a beach condo for as much as we are in our swimsuits, dripping everywhere, being beach hungry all the time. i've had my shirt off more than i've had it on over the last month, and it is absolutely fantastic.

a fantastic distraction from the hell in my toe, a distraction from every hole (like, every hole...it's disgusting, and infuriating, and embarrassing) on my body drying up, bleeding, and scabbing over and from the fact that i am taking medicine that arrives in the mail and is adorned with a biohazard label.

we didn't go looking for our new house. in a way, it kind of came and found us.

if i believed in such things, i could argue that we were meant to be here. for the pool. for the distraction. for the fun.

if i believed...