To further fight off boredom, Gibson is playing an electric keyboard he bought a couple years ago.

“I’ve been teaching myself online,” he said. “You don’t have to learn how to read music. It teaches you which keys to play. But I can’t really do that well because your hands are numb and your feet are numb because of the chemo.

“If you’re not careful, you fall over,” he joked.

A former piano player, he said, “I used to know two or three different songs, maybe four. But it’s been so long I can’t remember them.”

Well, he is 84.

“There is that,” he said.

“One of the problems I have right now — they call it a ‘chemo brain’ — is that memory gets really shaky. There’s a lot of words I can’t remember. I know that comes with age, too. But this is a little different. You start thinking and you just can’t remember.”

Gibson is looking forward to watching his Cardinals on television. It is the only team he watches. He also is looking forward to seeing his son, 35-year-old Chris Gibson, get married in September in Omaha, Nebraska, where the Gibsons live.