I restarted my IFN last night. My mom arrived yesterday. This is actually a coincidence. But it was really nice to have her here while I tried to pretend i wasn’t nervous. I can’t quite tell whether i was actually calm, or was in denail. previously it was clearly denial, w/ a lot of pacing. but today, after a week of meditating, and my mom’s comforting and distracting presence, i think i might actually have been somewhere in the middle. close enough to the middle, that I don’t know.
I just woke up. Its 7:30AM. I have a headache. I had the usual chills, though less fever than normal. woke at 4:30, and only kind of slept after that.
Clearly my unconscious was churning through the implications of restarting the IFN. I had a series of dreams about IFN, science, and weakness. One I only remember as me on a mountain bike, trying to climb a hill, and getting passed and yelled at: this is about the bully who rides in Prospect Park, and who yelled at me last time i rode there. I remember one about camping with my mother in snow (she has car camped w/ me once or twice tops.) But the best one was another naked school dream.
I was in the audience at the front of a lecture hall listening to a lecture on the immune system. It was a young female professor. She went through all of the obvious functions of the immune system, the lymph nodes, whats in blood, red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, and some other stuff that i remember from my many bloodwork results (billyrubin, leukocytes, neutraphil, etc). Then she talked about Interferons, which stimulate neutrophil? I forget. I was repeating the pseudo-high school science lesson i’ve gotten over the course of this process. Things I never really knew.
Then the lecture happened again, except this time it was a song i knew. But only kindof. I was singing along to the lyrics to comfort myself, b/c at the same time it was the song, it was also the same immune system lecture. The young co-eds to my left and right were indignant — I mean, I am tone deaf, and didn’t know half of the lyrics to whatever song it was. One of them (on the left) said, “do you actually know this song?” in a tone that made it clear she was really saying “shut up asshole.” When she got to the part about Inteferons, and the side effects of Interferon therapy, and listed them all, and talked about how hard it was, i said out loud “I have that.” And I started crying.
At that moment, the class was dismissed, and the co-eds kind of dissappeared, but kind of registered their surprise and also disgust/fear of me. I get up, and realize that i’m only wearing a t-shirt. chest is covered, but the choice bits are poking out the bottom (LOL). as per usual with naked dreams, i’m not that embarrassed, just concerned about the difficulties it sets up. I try to get out of the lecture hall, which actually is surrounded by an airport like structure, with big pillars, and caverns, but no gates or planes.
Somehow I realize that I’m supposed to teach the same class for the third time around. I hear “well, if your such an expert, why don’t you just teach the class.” I try to escape via the caverns in the edges of the building, while someone comes in singing with a choir from the entrance door, and makes their way to the dias at the front of the room. They are singing an a capella motown/gospel song; all i could make out was the refrain: “Here comes the Doctor. Here comes the Doctor.”
I escape to the outside (maybe i magically get pants, maybe not, i can’t remember.) The young co-ed on my right comes up to me on the path away from the big building and touches me with a big rolled up sheet of paper. She offers it to me. I open it. It is that 2 foot by 3 foot size of paper that comes in pads and is used in classrooms in lieu of a chalkboard/whiteboard. There are words on it written in in black whiteboard marker. I don’t remember what it said.
I’m hungry now. I’m starting to get some fever action. Going to eat cereal and lie back down.
