my gooey little head

March 3, 2012

Is it odd to not feel sick enough? It’s like this: with decidedly less ado than February’s batch, my chemo pills arrived yesterday and I started my third round last night; this morning I am icky but not enough for my liking. It’s odd, right? But it’s like this: everybody wants to feel like they’ve gotten their money’s worth. Whether they actually have or not is a question for the Marxists and the Capitalists; most folks rely on the much less complicated system of value analysis—feeling. And I don’t feel as if I have gotten my money’s worth of chemo today because I don’t feel sick enough.

I want my chemicals to make haste. Get to the front-lines, join ranks with the bad guys, and assault by reckless salvo. Strike willy-nilly, slash slapdashily. In short, make me sick.

Tomorrow, I’ll regret this bravado. Today, this trifling nausea is a waste of my time.

March 5, 2012

Last night’s pills were hard to take. Probably because last night was hard to take. You should have seen me. Watching TV balled like a baby in his binkie. Eating saltines and sipping Powerade. Pining for bedtime because, as yet, or ever really, I do not get nauseated in my dreams.

And, I get to smoke cigarettes in my dreams—moderately this time around, mostly in a social setting, always cool and never unhealthy. Talking about it now is making me sick. Wide is the gulf between dreams and reality; and I say this with a reasonable understanding of Psychology (with a capital P, that is, which is to say in the scholarly sense in that it has been granted sanctuary in the cloisters of modern curriculum where it becomes fast friends with Creative Writing, with a capital C and a capital W). In olden times, I would need a cigarette break after so taxing a syntactical parenthetical; today, though, the thought is yarky.

March 6, 2012

Ego.

It’s not a bad word. Shit, it doesn’t even meet the four-letter standard. It’s the part of us that is not a part of anyone else and everyone else has its counterpart; and those counterparts, those other egos, are not necessarily antagonistic toward our own. Even grammatically, the third person expression of the previous concept does not feel incompatible with the concept’s implication. In other words, one of the great commonalities across our species (and a host of others, arguably) is the innateness of individuality.

[Go back to the beginning of this entry and add the following preface: In my humble opinion. Then come back here where I’ll reiterate that preface and acknowledge the array of differing philosophies of mind and soul which have a legitimate, though largely incomprehensible to we laypersons, claim on the subject of ego.]

My ego.

While not necessarily in direct opposition to yours, it does suffer from a sort of blindness with respect to yours. A blindness that can be semi-corrected by a variety of lenses but for which no Lasik precision exists in the phenomenal world. In my humble opinion.

Where am I going with this we all want to know? (OK, you two are excused. You there rolling your eyes and you there tennis-texting with your secret lover. Hit the bricks. I thank the rest of you for your kind attention—you are a credit to yourselves and our species.)

My ego on chemo.

Last night as I was watching a movie, I became sad. The movie saddened me. Not a scene in particular but the movie as a whole. Usually, I am able to consider my emotions in the context of the moment as well as in a larger context—a novel-sized context that involves many characters, subplots, and exotic vistas. Last night though, I could not wrap my mind around the sadness. I tried. I lost track of the movie at times, distracted by empty efforts.

In the context of the moment, explication of an emotion is moot no matter how desirable—it can be explained but only after the immediate fact. Because we don’t lob an emotion out in front of us that we may come upon it intentionally. (If you do then you too are excused.) We stumble on or crash against or fall into an instance that evokes X emotion.

As for that larger context, however, I was flummoxed. Why couldn’t I crack my egg and poke my gooey little head into the wide world? For all my pecking, my whole world was goo.

The movie ended and the credits rolled. The score’s refrain gathered layers and grew its gravid mass of pathos. The sadness lingered and I was sick.

I was sick. Balled in my binkie. Bedtime reprieve hours away. A clue! I revisited my sadness armed with this clever clue of mine. Hold there, you sadness, explain yourself . . .

but . . .

I was sick. Balled in my binkie. Bedtime reprieve hours away. A clue! I revisited my sadness armed with this clever clue of mine. Hold there, you sadness, explain yourself . . .

but . . .

I was sick. Balled in my binkie. Bedtime reprieve hours away. A clue! I revisited my sadness armed with this clever clue of mine. Hold there, you sadness, explain yourself . . .

Finally, when the music stopped—all gaffers duly acknowledged—I sat up. Another clue—my head swam and nausea threatened my giblets with vomit. And this was my brief conclusion at the moment: my body’s sickness had infected my ego (yes, figuratively, of course . . . say, who let the eye-roller back in?) which aggravated my ego’s chronic blindness.

So today, in these morning hours of relative unqueasiness, I crack my egg and see what lies beyond my goo. Beyond my goo, I see you. You with your tower of unpaid bills. You beneath the overpass, starving and cold. You in the shower, your ablution for rape, for a false shame. You serving life for the crimes of a free man. As far as I can see, I can see you.

Especially you, today. You, one mention of guacamole away from up-chuck, watching your movie, sick and unspeakably sad. I see you and in the morning you’ll feel a little better and next week much better, and the following even more so.

Then you’ll go through it all over again—all of you. All of us. Trading in our minor peeves for crippling tumors now and then and sometimes swapping our fathomless pain for hilarious mirth.

It's tough luck being sick, no doubt. Sick--four letters, smack on the nose. A once healthy self-awareness becomes self-obsession--the ego awash with egotism and sinking into blindness. And then comes the bad news . . . there ain't much you can do about it. Get your binkie and your saltines and your Powerade, and brace yourself for a sense of solitude.

Your ego on chemo.

dubiety and Fred Gwynne

February 21, 2012

Actually sore from yesterday’s physical therapy. Now we’re getting somewhere. She had me on a death-defying obstacle course and I defied. Defiantly.

Note to self and hereby to the public: Finish making yourself sick on Valentine’s candy hearts so that your body can recover before March’s round of chemo.

February 23, 2012

Three days ago, I felt a dubious sadness for the loss of an imaginary distinction and a warranted sadness for the advent of a new generation of fearful souls.

For being self-indulgent, the first sadness calls for less, if any, consolation. Nearly half of my life ago, I was young. Like young young. Young enough to still be wise-beyond-my-years. Not the sort of young that I admittedly still am—the sort that curmudgeonly chair-rockers ridicule the mere notion of—the humph! if I was your age I’d be cake-walking Everest with a woman over each shoulder sort of young. (It is also fun to picture Fred Gwynne glowering down at Joe Pesci, asking, “Uh, did you say yutes?”)

To the point, nearly half of my life ago I started this perennial patient-hood of mine. Not even counting two unrelated surgeries and two fish-hook extractions, I’ve done some hard time in waiting rooms; and in the beginning I couldn’t help but notice how young I was. (Have I said the word “young” yet?) Comparatively, that is. I feel safe in saying that on average I was 40 years wetter behind the ears than my fellow patients.

Strangely, my chief emotion for the fact was pride. Sure, there was self-pity, but mostly I scanned the waiting room, smiling, accepting the sympathetic looks as adulation for my inadvertent accomplishment—my early-onset glioma.

Don’t get me wrong, my chief emotion in general, age notwithstanding, was trepidation. Anxiety is timeless, an equal opportunity destroyer of peace. Peace, to get myself on record saying this, is the ultimate antidote to a poisoned mind; faith, hope, love, while perhaps supreme in wellness, pale against peace in times of illness. (Argue amongst yourselves concerning the verity of that statement, but don’t bother arguing with me.)

Back to the point, three days ago, I grudgingly forfeited my figurative seat in the waiting room to generation Y. I was back at the Comprehensive Cancer Center to have blood drawn in advance of next week’s visit to the Kirklin Clinic where my neuro-oncologist holds court. The CCC, you may recall, is where I had my radiation therapy five years ago, where I had expected a burst of mixed emotions at last month’s visit but was in and out too quickly for a burst of anything but a blood sample. This time, however, there was a wait. I sat and absorbed the familiar surroundings. Then, I scanned the waiting room. Old-timers. Dozing, drooling, palsied old timers. Ha-ha—still the pup. A bit wizened about the eyes, of course, but still, representing my demographic with that strange sense of pride.

[Off-stage record-player screeches. A woman in her early twenties goes to the front desk to get her new-patient paperwork. On the arm of her worried mother, she limps to a seat beside me. Her hand shakes. The mother takes the clipboard. One minute goes by. An even younger woman, hair in wiry patches, signs in, limps to a chair, smiling, visibly proud.]

My genuine sadness came. In a burst. Where would these girls be twice their ages from now? Still shaking, still strangely proud? One or the other or both with this moment in their rearview? One or the other or both back in familiar seats, wanting to feel something, anything, when a frail eleven year old wheelchairs herself into the CCC, stretches up to sign her name, then takes her place, waiting with everyone else who wait for their names to be called.

[Resume record. Protagonist prays his best for the best thing he knows.]

Peace.