Delayed Plan, Round Trips and a Marriage

Those who have read the earlier post know about my mission-remission plan. In the plan I wanted to wait for normal blood counts before training to first regain and then maintain stamina.

Like all good plans mission-remission slipped from the very beginning - My blood counts refused to hit normal levels - which meant that the plan stood delayed ...

But all was not bad... there was a silver lining ... etc etc ... blood counts actually got stuck after creeping near 90% of normal values ... Being a Mechanical engineer I could easily declare the blood counts as normal ...You see its very characteristic of Mech engineers ... we don't shy away from happily rounding off pi as 3 and the value of acceleration due to gravity 'g' as 10 ... for the illiterate - pi is actually 22/7 which comes out to be around 3.14... 'g' varies from location to location but conventional students like to believe that it is 9.8 m/secsquared ... Mech engineers can do all the approximations because we pad up our final results with a "factor of safety" ... which means that when calculations require a part to be 1 inch thick, the mechanical engineer can safely ask for a 2 or 3 inch thick part :-)) ... Sadly I don't have a "factor of safety" so the optimistic approximation may not work.

Anyways, I could not let technical glitches from spoiling my plan ... Normal blood counts would have signalled that my body could take the load of shaping up ... now I planned to bypass the counts and test my endurance directly ... So I took two adventure trips (must agree that the trips were not solely for testing my load-bearing capacity ... after months of staying at home I was dying to go out and meet people) ...

First trip was more challenging ... it involved driving on Delhi-Agra-Gwalior-Jhansi-Satna route in two days ... Gwalior-Jhansi strech had to be covered after sunset (poor planning by me) on a path which had non-existant roads (poor planning by UP and MP governments) ... the challenges didn't end with the drive ... there was more -> Satna- Allahabad travel, stay with the in-laws, Allahabad-luckhnow-Delhi by various combinations of train and bus ... Bottom line is I endured the trip without too much trouble ...

Second trip was within a week -> I went to Mumbai to attend my friend Andy's wedding. It was a typical Tam affair ... the detailed story is on the IIMB Class of 2004 blog. This one was two days flyin-flyout kind of a trip . Was good fun ... but took some time to recover from it ... slept throughout the day for 2-3 days ...

Anyways ... so that was how I was whiling away my time ... after all I have the licence for doing Haraamkhori ... though I guess the licence will expire soon ...

I have my PET Scan on 24th Sept ... The scan will tell if the treatment (chemotherapy and radiation) has succeeded so far ... an all-clear in the PET means I would be back to normal life (though I will have to take care of my body ... stay in shape and get regularly checked-up to see if the cancer has relapsed) ... In case PET shows that the cancer lingers on, then I will hold my Haraamkhori licence and may have to get on to a second-line of treatment (which is slightly tougher than the first line treatment ... with less optimistic results) ...

So the coming week is a week of uncertainties ... which is nothing unusual for me ... I can continue making full use of my Haraamkhori licence-

Ajgar karey naa chaakri
Panchi karey naa kaam
Das maluka kahi gaye
subkey daata raam