Logan Pethel

Notes from an infusion chair on the 7th floor

September 4, 2026

It’s a beautiful Friday morning before Labor Day in Atlanta, and I can hear everyone’s big weekend plans around me. Last shot out on the lake. Pool time. Weekend travel. Taking Friday off to stretch it into four days. Weddings. You name it. Excitement all around.

Not me though.

Sure, I’m off work today. A four-day weekend is upon me. Hoo-Rah. I’m sitting in a cool room on the seventh floor, drinking a freshly made latte from the kindest gentleman manning the espresso machine, watching cars travel north on I-75.

On my way to pick a window seat, I passed maybe thirty other people. All here for something. Some for something similar to what I’m here for. Some for something much more difficult. I can’t help but wonder what’s going on in their lives. A few of them look about my age. Some look stronger and more vibrant. Some look older and weaker, but they’re fighting nonetheless. A room full of people all fighting something they didn’t exactly ask for.

I get to my seat and settle in. Sipping the latte. Watching the sun move across the sky. Waiting on the slow drip of an IV to finish. Not as glamorous as a 7A window seat on the way to Kauai, but I guess this will do. I’ve got about five and a half hours planned in this chair today. Hopefully less. You never know.

Today is my second infusion of a drug called rituximab. I’ll spare you most of the medical details but basically, it destroys the B cells in your body. Sounds complex, and I’m no biochemist, so we’ll go with that.

That dollar amount at the top of this post is the bill.

Two bags of fluid. $52,184.96.

Complex is probably accurate.

From what I understand, we have about a 60% chance this works.

Here’s the part I keep turning over. I spend my working hours helping people think about risk. Expected return. Downside. What a number actually means when you set it next to somebody’s life. And then a doctor hands me a 60% probability and a fifty-two-thousand-dollar invoice, and the only thing I think is: I’ll take that bet.

There was no analysis. No modeling it out. No second opinion on the math. Somebody said 60% and I said yes, because the alternative is another ten years of what I’ve already had.

I’ve been fighting a kidney disease called Minimal Change Disease for about ten years now. Don’t let the name fool you. There is nothing minimal about it. Maximal Change Disease, I’d call it.

Over the last year and a half I’ve had five relapses. Each one hits a little different, but generally my blood pressure spikes, my protein levels skyrocket, and I gain a significant amount of weight very quickly. Thirty or thirty-five pounds in about a week and a half. Something like that. It’s hard to keep track these days, and honestly, I don’t really want to anymore. Twelve times in ten years I have gone from feeling completely normal to feeling like a balloon filled with fluid. Tired. Irritable. Sometimes angry. Always searching for answers.

The weird thing is, if you looked at my life from the outside, you probably wouldn’t know any of this. That’s probably what makes today worth writing about. There’s a lot going on in people’s lives that nobody else can see. You can look perfectly fine while sitting in an infusion chair watching traffic move down I-75. And you can fight something for ten years and still have no idea where the story is going.

Kind of like the traffic, in a way. Every one of those cars is going somewhere, and I’ll never know where.

So I sit here and wonder if today is a metaphor for the whole thing. Always traveling somewhere, never arriving. Always moving toward the next thing. The next goal. The next job. The next race. The next business idea. The next number to save.

Am I actually going somewhere? Or am I just in the passenger seat of my own life, waiting to see where the road takes me?

For the first time, I’m starting to wonder if that’s the problem.

I said yes to the 60% chance. Ten years in, that’s just what you do. You take the next thing that might work.

But I’m not really sure what I’d do with it if it works. That’s the part I don’t have an answer for.

Five more hours in this chair. Plenty of time to think about it.

LP