The Chemo Chronicles: An update after hitting the wall

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It’s Thursday morning. On Tuesday, I did too much and hit the wall hard, ending the evening without a drop of energy in reserve.

Wednesday was a blur. I didn’t do much at all. The only time out of the house was driving Meda to an eye exam. I stayed in the car and slept while she was getting her eyes dilated and examined. Her results were good, and I got a bit more sleep.

Except when eating a few small meals, and trying to stay hydrated, I spent much of Wednesday in bed.

Not reading. Sleeping.

Get up. Drink a glass of something. Check email. Assess the recovery. Consider a snack. Still no energy. Back to bed. Repeat.

Instead of recharging overnight, it took two full nights and an entire lost Wednesday just to crawl back to the “new normal.”

Another chemo lesson learned.

The Chemo Chronicles: Hitting the limit

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I did far too much on Tuesday, and crashed into my own physical limit. Hitting the wall hasn’t been fun, but it has been educational.

First, early Tuesday morning, I walked to the park to watch the sunrise.

Later in the morning, we got ourselves to the Blaisdell Concert Hall where the Native Hawaiian Convention was set to honor the 50th anniversary of the January 1976 landing on Kahoolawe, a protest against the Navy’s bombing of the island. It has widely been considered one of the key sparks of the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s. At least five of the participants in that first protest landing have died. Molokai’s Walter Ritte and I were the only ones to appear in person.

It really wasn’t a strenuous outing. It just required walking around the concert hall a bit to get back stage where we then waited around for more than an hour for our moment before the audience.

I felt bad about not staying afterward to mingle with the audience, but given the risk of infection while undergoing chemo, and the advice to avoid crowds where you could easily pick up a cold, flu, or worse, I decided, once again, that discretion was the better part of valor as a matter of self protection. So we slipped out of the building and hailed an Uber to the ride home.

At this point, I should have cut the day short.
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The Chemo Chronicles: Learning the limits

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July 20, 2026

I’ve described most of the side effects of chemotherapy and immunotherapy drugs that I’ve experienced to date as mild or absent, at least so far after completing a single round of infusions. I feel a bit “fuzzy”, what I’ve described as perhaps 15% short of a sharp focus, along with moments of dizziness if I stand up too quickly, find myself waking up at night, and still have a somewhat depressed appetite.

Recently, though, I discovered a key limitation associated with the chemo.

It took me weeks to finish Monday’s post about former City Council member Trevor Ozawa and his past ties to the late Michael Miske Jr.—a complex investigative piece that normally would have taken a fraction of the time.

To explain requires going back to my “normal” writing routine.

My regular blog or Facebook posts are typically done quickly, usually no more than a day or two between the idea for a post and when it goes up online.

But I take much more care with longer and/or more complicated stories intended for distribution to a wider audience. These might percolate in the background for some time as I gather bits and pieces of information that might be relevant, stashing those details in a folder for future reference, and then begin to shape the form of the story, settling on the major points around which the story will be built. Finally I’ll sit down and write an initial rough draft, followed by several days honing the draft until it’s almost ready to publish.

BC, Before Cancer, I would at some point decide that enough is enough. The final step would be to lock myself and my laptop in our spare bedroom for most of a day to push through a final rewrite and edit.

By the end of a sometimes long and stressful session, I’m usually able to nail the final draft down tight before what used to be wine o’clock.

Writing a post about Candidate Ozawa has been high on my “to do” list for a long time, and I finally moved it to active status a couple of weeks ago. I selected a close-to-final draft more than a week ago. Normally, at this point, I would be ready to shut myself off for a day and wrestle the beast into form for publication.

But now, instead of a single, intensive marathon, I was forced into a relay race with myself—working an hour at a time before my focus evaporated.

So the final edit, usually completed in a day-long editing session, instead took a week of shorter writing sessions.

I wrapped up the final edit after watching the sunrise at Waialae Beach Park Monday morning, then hit publish.

It required coming to terms with the limits imposed by chemo—and, by extension, making adjustments to my own sense of self. This particular shift isn’t hard to accept, but it is a wake-up call. There will be other accommodations down the road as treatment continues.

“Know yourself,” the old adage says. I’m learning.

The Councilman, the Crime Boss, and the “Hostage” Trees

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Tree at Joe Lukela park claimed by Mike Miske

Now that Trevor Ozawa is again a candidate running to take back his former seat on the Honolulu City Council, voters should examine his past misuse of his political position to benefit the late racketeering boss Mike Miske.

As a voter in his district, I haven’t forgotten how Ozawa—who served on the council from 2014 to 2018—aggressively used his legislative power to muscle the Department of Parks and Recreation into giving Miske special treatment.

In a nutshell

In 2016, Miske took over a tree in a park along Maunalua Bay in Hawaii Kai and wrapped it tightly with lights. The city Department of Parks and Recreation eventually received complaints and directed Miske to remove the lights. He belatedly complied, but wanted to repeat the tree lighting in 2017 over the department’s objections.

Miske turned to the Honolulu City Council member from his district, Trevor Ozawa, who became his rather enthusiastic advocate, eventually resorting to legislative threats and insider political muscle to get Miske what he wanted. Ozawa successfully forced the city to approve Miske’s lights despite substantive opposition from the parks department that cited the danger to tree health, the administrative problems posed by privatizing park trees, the precedent affecting 200,000 other trees, and the placement of bright lights along the shoreline, which posed a threat to seabirds and appeared to violate environmental laws.
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