Cause and (Side) Effect

Conventional wisdom tells us that life is a kind of "garbage-in-garbage-out" situation, but personal experience of late has taught me that when you are sick and are on a bunch of medications, there seems to be very little in the way of rhyme or reason to how a person might feel from day to day, or even from hour to hour.

Am I sleeping more because my body is reacting to the medications I take? Do I feel slightly better (a whole lot better, actually) in my head because I am getting a lot of sleep? Am I thirsty all the time because my body craves water in order to get my blood chemistry into the normal range, or is it a side effect of a medication?

Yesterday I worked on the Bach Chaconne on the violin. I love my violin. She (I named her Antonia) has probably played it before, but this was the first time she has played it with me. The difficulties I have had with the Chaconne in the past, playing it on my Bearden violin, and playing it on the viola, were not there. I could, for the first time, wrap my head and hands harmonically around what was happening in real time.

Is this because of the violin? Is this because I have been getting enough sleep? Is this because I have been spending a lot of quality time at the piano playing Bach, Mozart, and Haydn? Is it because the tumor that had been filling my days and nights with pain has been obliterated by radiation?

I am in my third week of treatment (three of eighteen), and it is an "off" week for the strong oral cancer medication that I take for the first two weeks of each cycle.

And now it is time to go off to get an infusion of whatever drugs my great team of doctors gives me.