MA+CB=OMGWTF

On Tuesday, January 8th of 2008, I started graduate school at USF. I suppose some of my friends and family might have thought something along the lines of, "well it's about damn time," but, honestly, I wouldn't trade all of the experiences I've had in the past four years for a Ph.D, not to mention that I've contemplated everything from law school to master sommelier since I received my BA. Now, though, while I'm going through chemotherapy and putting myself several thousand dollars further into debt every week, seemed like the perfect time to start commuting from Homosassa to Tampa twice a week to attend grad school.

I'm taking two classes: Social Constructions of Reality on Tuesday nights and Communicating Race and Racism on Wednesday nights. So far, it has been interesting.

The first week was extraordinarily difficult -- more so than I anticipated. As I have mentioned before, I am currently finding paying attention, retaining information and speaking in a coherent manner an arduous task. I have a tendency to lose focus, forget everything and repeat myself a lot while talking in circles. As you may be able to imagine, reading text book type material is not easy.

It took me the entire week to finish the reading for my two classes; I would be reading and realize that I didn't know what I had just read, and at times the words just didn't look like English writing, so I would read the sentence again, then still not be able to gain any meaning from the words and read it again, go back to the beginning of the paragraph, still not understand what information the author was trying to relay, finish the paragraph in hopes of understanding something, and then read the whole paragraph over again. This is how I read 272 pages of assigned reading.

Now, I know that 272 pages should be a breeze considering how much we were assigned at the HC, but please don't hold it against me until I find myself reading exceptionally slowly after I'm all done with chemotherapy and radiation. Two months after I'm all done with that, it's fair game and you're welcome to ridicule me openly, but until then I will continue to cite "chemo brain" as the source of my constant in-articulation and inability to focus/understand/remember.

However, it is entirely possible that my brain, like the rest of my body, is learning to recover from the poison, for I have found this week much less demoralizing than last week. I have found that I am able to remember things much easier, even number sequences, which before was more or less impossible. I also don't zone out so easily and I'm only having to re-read sentences and paragraphs once or twice before I at least sort of get what the author is getting at. My favorite part, though, is that I sound slightly less brainless when I talk.

I believe that all of the brain exercise that I've been getting kind of made my brain say "Oh, crap, I have to process information! I'd better start fixing this place up, then." And so it at least seems like it's getting better, which is quite relieving.

The best thing about starting school right now, though, is that I feel more normal and less bored. Sure, it might be a little frustrating at times, but I'm doing something that I'd be doing under more normal circumstances, and it's making me work and put myself in the "normal" category of "student," which kind of helps to blur the definitive outline of "cancer patient," which is nice for me because it kind of helps to prove that category less viable in other people's minds, therefore causing them to view me more like they did before and thus causing them to tell me less frequently that they pray for me every night.

So, basically, this school thing is good, and I think I'll get through this semester just fine.