Monthly Archive for July, 2010

I feel I am standing on the cusp of living and dying, lingering in limbo while the world revolves around me. I am no longer useful but cannot be discarded just yet. My body is slowly betraying me, it will be harder to replace the muscle mass I have lost because my testosterone levels have plunged. I will never put on weight again, my pancreas will not supply the enzymes necessary to fully digest what I eat. On the other hand, my blood sugars are high enough to contribute to many other problems from vision problems to damage to all my organs. I do my best to get exercise but I have no ideas that such activity will make me stronger. Just more active. I look at my hands and my legs, they are wrinkled and weaker than they have been in years. I doubt I will ever recover.

It seems like the tide has turned against me and there is not much I can do to combat it. So, I stand idle while this all happens. Daily I consider tactics to combat the feeling of being overwhelmed by my apparent fate. That is most likely the basis for feeling like I want to be in another place, just where is not certain. But away from here and in a body that is not crumbling. My days of drinking are all but over and any other intoxicant is just not appealing. I have just been down the down road for too long, I am tired and out of steam. I wish I could sleep for a week and wake refreshed. But I know that I would just wake and feel groggy and disoriented like I do every morning. Rest does not always come with sleep. Less seldom now than ever. I worry at night about money and my health and my marriage. That robs me of any enthusiasm I might muster to work against all this.

Part of it too is the extreme loneliness of not having people around. I have become quite the hermit with the cancer. I have considered just closing my world down and not talking to anybody, a very small change in my life I can assure you. After a year of pain and infusions and sleeping constantly I have lost most contact with my friends. Just as my house and yard deteriorated while I was indolent with cancer. So much to come back from. Yet every day I do a little bit to get my life back. Some days, like today, I just see the long road and the perils ahead. Other days I can see the possibilities.

I dream that one day I will get my stained glass shop going. Creativity is such a release. I find that every now and then. A little encouragement from having done something creative. Or even just having done something. In that I envy my friend her ceramics work. She gets out there and creates. I just putter around and seem to never get any closer to my goal. The demons of melancholia have me in their cold clutches today. I will resort to medicines to ease my depression and anxiety. The one nice thing about being a terminal cancer patient, at least on paper, is that I had access to all the drugs of any kind I wanted. I settled for just some anti-anxiety meds because really, feeling anxious was the worst feeling. The pain I could almost deal with and I got off the pain meds as soon as I could. They were also killing me in small doses. There are just so many contradictions in my life recently. Taking meds to help this ailment but those same meds adversely affect another aspect of my health. These days I take anti anxiety pills and insulin. Not the long list I was on a year ago.

Screw it. I am going to take a minor anti anxiety pill and drink some rose wine. You should do the same.