Sometimes there are hidden landmines

I was going through papers at the shop today, organizing bills by vendor, when I found a small piece of paper in a plastic bag in the inbox on Jerry's desk.  It turned out to be the instructions, with Jerry's name and the date 1/20/2010, for drinking contrast dye before a CT scan.  The scan from two days after the sigmoidoscopy that found the tumor, the scan that found cancer in Jerry's liver and lymph nodes.

And I learned that crying only makes a raging headache even worse.

Lots more crying these days.  Lots as in more frequent bouts, and lots as in lasting longer after it starts.

Two positive things today: one, the bidding on Jerry's Droid has reached the reserve amount I set, so unless the high bidder (who only has one rating, and that in 2009, which makes me nervous) flakes out and doesn't pay, it will sell even if no one else bids.  And two, friends in Alabama have offered to have me stay with them when I go down (see, I'm saying "when," not "if"... trying to be sure about this) in August.  The more I had thought about staying in the hotel, the more queasy about it I was feeling - it's one of the same hotels Jerry and I often stayed at, and the thought of being there without him was not getting any easier.  This doesn't take care of being without him at the Park, Ride and Fly, the airport in Chicago, the airport in Nashville, the rental car counter at BNA, or the singing itself - but it does fortuitously make one big problem go away.  So thank you, David and Karen, for the invitation.

I'm nervous about doing the drive to and from Midway by myself.  Before I moved to Illinois, I hadn't done much driving, and Jerry did pretty much most of the driving when we were together in the car until early 2004, when his left thumb met the table saw and he spent a lot of time on painkillers.  After that, he tended to have me do all the local driving just as a matter of course, including our daily commute to and from the shop - I suspect he just wanted me to feel as comfortable as possible behind the wheel of the car.  But with one exception, he always drove to Chicago, and to and from the airports, because he knew highway driving in big cities makes me nervous.  The one exception, if I'm remembering right, was when he got bronchitis while we were in Birmingham one year for the Alabama State Sacred Harp Convention and wasn't up to driving home from Midway when we got back.  And I did take someone to the airport after a visit once.  But all in all, this whole prospect makes me nervous.  Just another aspect of life on my own to deal with.

I've got today's morning-to-evening headache almost beaten into submission.  I do have a tendency to get headaches at times, and I'm sure my current really bad sleep patterns aren't helping.  The ENT doctor we used to go to until she retired had me have a scan of my sinuses a bunch of years back and said I have really small sinuses and a deviated septum, and it doesn't take much swelling to cause the tissue to hit bone and cause pain.  But she said surgery could actually make things worse, so I never pursued it.  Somehow, through sheer necessity I suppose, I managed not to have any significant health problems from the time Jerry was diagnosed with cancer until he died - now I keep expecting my body to decide it's had enough and collapse.  This is the first of those really bad headaches I've had in months and months.  Sometimes they start happening on a daily basis... I hope this isn't the start of that.