What a difference an eternity makes.
(My mental health therapist has suggested that I’m prone to
hyperbole, but she tends to paint my musings with a million mile-wide horsehair
brush.)
Surprised? Therapist, you say? Did you think I was
neglecting my utilitarian brain cell cancer labors all this time at the expense
of its mystic fruits? Yes, I confess: I’ve had regular couch composure
maintenance since my introduction to Rad Chemo.
I’ll leave how you and I feel (about what we think of how we
think about what we feel) to the philosophers and the guy who rotates my tires:
“If you don’t do ‘em, you’ll be out of balance,” says my rubber
side-down wise man Dudley.
I accept this with more depth, timing and metaphor than
Dudley the tire guy could ever appreciate. But, it’s not important that he does,
because if I tried to tell him how unwittingly street-smart, he was, he’d only puff
up and start insisting on helium fill-ups.
He’d plead that it would be a good thing my pressure would
be less effected by my temperature, but I couldn’t take the profundity of that,
and for ten bucks a tire I’d only yearn for a return to flat or inflated
distinctions, body and truck.
Since Day Sixty-Three there were intense redirects, beginning with an ER admission in crisis. Two weeks in the ICU, a host of frontal assaults from all directions (nurses will get that) and twenty-seven pounds less of me later, we’re back to the complex basics. I was sick enough that my cancer treatment regimen had to be held, but we’ll be returning to it soon.
What happened? When someone asks, I ask them if they want
the two-word or the two million-word version. A squirm and wink or two later, I
respond with something that sounds a lot like:
I had an intense viral upheaval in my nether region, above
and below its equator. I couldn’t stop pooping liquid, and pees came in surprise
fits and stops; I couldn’t stop not-eating but I couldn’t taste what I didn’t
not eat; I vomited like most of us breathe in and breathe out without a blueprint;
I had waves (feelings, not thoughts) of seven-legged arachnids side-stitching up
my back and inside my liver (thoughts, not feelings).
Jerky limbs, artsy-fartsy bruise-etchings, pop-up lesions,
blocked nasal passages turning my words into Foghorn Leghorn mumblefests, and
when I did manage a swallow, it was like pushing sandpaper around a golf ball with
lettuce leaves.
Balloon animal bouts of nausea.
Lead balloon animal joint pains.
Sweatless fevers. Moist chills.
Never asleep long enough to reach REM.
Ever-present? My gaggle of docs making rounds, working the
problem lists, all options open, seeking consensus in places where generalities
and specifics are always mixing it up in spoiled rotten sandbox wars.
Yes, I survived, I’m now home, and my “normal” bodily
functions are returning like rolling eggs imitating your college kids on a
maxed-out spring break.
One more bonus sidebar thought just for fun and a well-earned
reader’s respite:
Up to here, how much have I repeated myself in this diary?
Did Charles Dickens ever have to stop, go back to an earlier
draft because he couldn’t remember if he’d given Tiny Tim one or two crutches?
Did he ever need to retreat and confirm whether he’d given Mrs. Giniwin a first
name, and if not, why not?
Do I want to do that now to both of us? Return and physically
check for all the inconsistencies or incompletions or self-plagiarizing repetitions I may have forced
upon you up to this point? Had I already been inspired and recorded how my cancer
is the great equalizer of lofty blah? Or the final fool’s arbiter of blah blah?
Or the ultimate gutter leveler of blah blah blah?
Hell, no I don’t. Let’s go with a broken butter churn handle
crutch, call her Dudleybelle, and get on with getting off it.
More as we go, El
