10.20.06 More on a Day in the Life

[the internet window opens for a few minutes, so I do a quick copy and paste job here below. it's slightly dated material, a few days, but it remains accurate for then and various times still now...]

Blog on 17 OCT, written from 10/17 to 10/19.

Progressive cancer. Real timeline. Real-time reminder. No more leeway. No more options but the Miracle. The Miracle and Its Followers. Anger, frustration, pain: these brought to me by the god damned shouts of “Here it comes, here comes the Big One!” referring to the thing. Not hope per se I hate. The idea of pushing it into my face, the idea of shoving forward something that is statistically so improbable. Beware to the salesmen and women of hope. Not to say we’ve quit, or will, just to point out the precarious balance between hope for the self and understanding of the other. All of us stumble, we all get tripped up.

Cut out all forms of *social* enjoyment. All forms that any other would understand. And oneliness results. Nothing but, to find your enjoyment w/o any others in the world, pure seeking/finding (simultaneous same moment birth-fruition enjoyment-purchase) [jump to below then return to finish a thought]. Loved ones, friends, family are all excluded thereby, all left out cold, all left in their community, the one I’m slowly being ostracized from. No person has ordered my expulsion, no gods are angry, rather the mindless dice of the universe, thrown by an agent with no hands, brought by a messenger with no legs, conveyed and explained by a deaf mute diplomat.

It isn’t final, it’s musing. Take it as such. All thoughts must be allowed despite discomfort. Discomfort and pain will exist either way, so why not face the various possibilities? Why not live in acknowledgment? To those filled with the most hope (I know you) think of even the most fundamental foundational myths. The second myth, that of the Garden in one tradition. Facing the worst possibles was necessary and, if you will and for lack of a better word, predestined: there was fruit and an Act to be committed, that would bring ruin to paradise. What was the choice? Was there a choice? Everybody has to take a bite. You don’t have to like apples but you do have to taste them. There is no other way.

Cancer is the capitalism of the body. It grows unchecked, until at some point it will eliminate itself by eliminating its host, its own means of production — me / I will die at the hands of Capital as metaphor. The materialist’s metaphor, the world where words are things and things are words. Of course I will. Spending the better part of the past two decades deep in study of this Thing, the production and replacement of people with the Thing (C), and now the Object of my study is going to get me. I’m being chased down by a nemesis I thought existed Out There somewhere, in the world and constitutive of our world. It’s taken on material form inside me. And revolution. That impossible option (could we call it “hope”?) that remains impossible until it occurs and we all see how inevitable it was. Someone said that.

Another metaphor, that of cleaning: as therapy, as distraction, as practicum, as obsession. What does it mean to ignore human interaction, interaction that is daily becoming more precious by its increasing rarity, for the cleaning domestic space/s? How to negotiate the travel between healing ourselves and hope for healing and just continuing on with as little resistance as possible, which is what we all really want?

Franky Scale: 5 to 6. This would be on the 17th, another connectionless day.

What is new that becomes appealing, a list: Warmth. Absence of pain, dumbly of course and too plain. Fantasy, a novel by Tolstoy or Balzac or Zola with the long drawn-out pans of whole swaths of society as means of escape, fantasy like the Lord of the Rings where the films might be just as good as the books because they now take just as much real-life time to get through as the old-fashioned way of reading, any long stories of something slightly to radically askew or even full allegorical replacement of what’s real. Why? To kill time — ironically and pointlessly, that. (Yes, even I see it, the i. and p., but I must admit them both still, and admit in at least two senses of the word.) To distract the mind from the Real. To instill momentary and delimited hope, even within the scope of screen walls, the bounds of reading time. To be another escape from all the necessities, the so many little must-dos from pills to calories to soap and water to last-“minute” legal paperwork like wills & DNRs to maintaining salary to “finishing” a number of professional tasks that alternate on given days from more to less important — no, it’s binary, just the variation from worth doing to not worth the time. Who knows what will help on any given day.

What else new: small moments, looking elsewhere, rain through a window, a comfortable silence, bits of sleep without dreams. A recent one though, where I am to be tending an old friend’s young child, who is helpless without me, and I am intensely aware of how much depends on me, but it’s all I can do to keep myself awake and responsible and watchful and caring and protective. My own inability to stay awake — in the middle of sleep — keeps me from being a good babysitter. Stuck in this unwaking state with my friend and his wife’s expectations resting heavy upon me, heavy like the sleep upon my eyelids. The child alone with me. A nightmare but still a dream, so I owe you a quarter.

Can you translate all this into numbers? Can this wandering narrative transform itself into a scale? There’s a number above and lots of words in between. More numbers will come. More words, too. Is it all clear about the restaging? The cancer is progressive and the tumors have been growing, which means the last round of chemo was not effective. There is one more round of chemo with other drugs to go; also there is a targeted drug therapy to add to this, with a drug called tarceva (maybe I can do this in a later post). I can’t really explain the hoped-for mechanics of this part of the treatment, all I can do is trust it might do something good. There’s that and the glyconutrients, to see what they add to the mix, what they take from it. With all this there’s waiting and enduring. Living until then.

10.19.06 Stealth Post: A Day in the Life, Stage IV

Seems like the last few days off the air have been an eternity. To me, some of you might be thinking, ah, not long enough. ;-) Well see. I have a draft and a blog to post but I'm still battling with "stealing" bandwidth until we get an official internet hook-up in the new apartment — till then it's piecemeal like this. My apologies.

So the key points: Thank you so much everyone who's posted and sent email of support after the restaging. It does suck and all the other unpleasant verbs and descriptors that have and have yet to be used out there. Just not good. Seems like a primary task for me now is some kind of peace-making, some way of coming to grips with this shit, which I'm hesitant to do. Then too, there are still some concrete tasks to slip in between bouts of paralyzing reflection, body-curling slow pain waves, debilitating nausea, and the related shit. No, none of this is maudlin, I'm just not going to bother with couching anything right now because the time vs. politic speech ration seems unbalanced and unfair. Just trying to say this is now what a day in the life is like. More to come on the trivial details later I hope . . . . Though references to "fairness" (above) I also don't like, so scratch that. Appealing to such implies higher powers or processed that could make it all just and fair, and look around to see how often things are well balanced.

In any event, give the Franky Scale a wobbly 6, which makes it go both up and down. There is less nausea this many days out from chemo, the last cycle of which was cut one day short by the restaging. When it's not working, what's the point, that was the logic. But now I'm thinking "Do I start the next type of therapy on Monday or a week from?" A question with both psychological and physiological consequences. Telling, but telling what? Well, let's see first which choice I make.

I will try and get out to a cafe later today so I can post something else/also. For now this is what I got for you, from the calm grey skies of the emerald city.

10.16.06, Restaging Results: It's Your Cancer Talking

No Franky Scale today, especially since the restaging result will do something to show that the FS doesn't always cut through this situation at the best angle, give us the best cross-section of life to see "how it is" from. My cancer is progressing now. Just a simple answer, progressing. Progressive stage-IV cancer.

All the nodes that were enlarged before are now even larger. The liver tumors, larger. Pancreas, the mother tumor, larger. And the lungs, the small nodules that appeared not to be cancerous before, well, those are larger, too, so the new diagnostic approach might be "Go figure."

This is no artful telling of things. I just wanted to pass on the news and don't have the motivation at this moment to make up a more entertaining story. Besides, there are times when the simple straight-forward telling needs to be left to do its work.

Later I can write about what it was like to have my mom there, I was there with my mom and K, and about how the discussion with Whiting shifted gears slightly into more euphemism and circumlocution. Why do we all get the impression that she wants this? Does she? She and I had a pretty frank talk about it all after coming home — there's another scenario to knock your socks off, sit down with your mom and discuss dying plans, what actual bed you might want to kick off in, and who might be around.
What a day. More later, just thought I'd pass on this much.

[I also allowed that comment from an anonymous person about "glyconutrients," which are still on the docket, but you know, I have thought better of it and this is not the place for people's sales-pitch testimonials so I'm going to yank it. No offense to the poster. But the comment was just about how some product can change your life and that's actually offensive to shove that kind of so-called "hope" into the face of someone who is really, actually sick.]

10.16.06, Restaging Results: It's Your Cancer Talking

No Franky Scale today, especially since the restaging result will do something to show that the FS doesn't always cut through this situation at the best angle, give us the best cross-section of life to see "how it is" from. My cancer is progressing now. Just a simple answer, progressing. Progressive stage-IV cancer.

All the nodes that were enlarged before are now even larger. The liver tumors, larger. Pancreas, the mother tumor, larger. And the lungs, the small nodules that appeared not to be cancerous before, well, those are larger, too, so the new diagnostic approach might be "Go figure."

This is no artful telling of things. I just wanted to pass on the news and don't have the motivation at this moment to make up a more entertaining story. Besides, there are times when the simple straight-forward telling needs to be left to do its work.

Later I can write about what it was like to have my mom there, I was there with my mom and K, and about how the discussion with Whiting shifted gears slightly into more euphemism and circumlocution. Why do we all get the impression that she wants this? Does she? She and I had a pretty frank talk about it all after coming home — there's another scenario to knock your socks off, sit down with your mom and discuss dying plans, what actual bed you might want to kick off in, and who might be around.
What a day. More later, just thought I'd pass on this much.

[I also allowed that comment from an anonymous person about "glyconutrients," which are still on the docket, but you know, I have thought better of it and this is not the place for people's sales-pitch testimonials so I'm going to yank it. No offense to the poster. But the comment was just about how some product can change your life and that's actually offensive to shove that kind of so-called "hope" into the face of someone who is really, actually sick, despite a healthy salesperson's best of intentions.]

10.15.06 See Attached Comments

OK, parental/sororal visits are demanding, at least in terms of focus. In addition, I'm w/o any internet service right now so get any posts up is miraculous. So the bare bones. Spacely posted a quick summary of her take on her few days here — my mom is still here, so we must await her guest blog or report. She will go back and report, I'm sure. Franky Scale, today maybe a 6, really up and down with the long-hours of moving (on that next para below). Moving day was not too bad at all FOR ME. With all the help it was the easiest move I've probably ever had. Some of the karmic cycle, must be. That day may have been more of a 7 until the end of the day, when the quick wind down must take place. That's natural.

Moving: a huge and wonderful thank you to the hearty souls who spent their Saturday moving over here. From one floor to another, one view to another, one space to much more. The latter being the best aspect of it all. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Pizza and beer — I think there was not a single beer had by any mover-friends, which disturbs me a bit — are hardly enough. Like I said in the invite, however, you will receive some life-lessening in the big wheel of recurring-life game. It's all arranged.

Restaging: the film has been shot, number requested in blood work, etc. so now Monday morning I go meet with Dr. Whiting and we "restage" the damned cancer. We hope, too, that it is has been damned. No more, thanks. Whether I post again tomorrow at any point or whether it has to be in another day or two, based on cable/internet hook-up, I'll give the full details on where it's going now, how it's getting there, or whether.

Too, p.s. to other family, please don't be worried or be impatient if I'm not able to talk on the phone every day or even days at a time, there's a lot going on. Think about hosting mom, in your house, which some of you have done.... that should be sufficient explanation even without moving.