April 21

Let me start off by saying that cancer sucks. It sucks everything out of you, energy, attention, time, details, your life. Today was a bad example of that. This morning I awoke with nausea that washed everything in a topsy sideways sort of seasick. I tried to read my computer screen and all I got was a fluid scope of letters on wavy lines with a back and forth sort of viscous vision. Everything I read was affected by the screen draining off to one side then the other. I put my glasses on to see if that helped, but all it did was emphasize just how violently the letters were washing across the screen. I could see real clear that all the letters were in a washtub sloshing back and forth across my screen. Alphabet soup in Times Roman font on an electronic screen, faithfully representing the thoughts of some madman from far away to torment my eyes, flowing off the angled aspect of my screen, spilling the letters onto and across my desk to the floor. My only alternative was to resort to analgesics, anti-nausea medicines to quiet the raging tide. And that meant more sleep because the major side effect is drowsiness. I lost my morning to tortured sleep where all the entities toppled and rebounded from precarious towers and bounced in cruel waves across my dream scapes. Come lunchtime I was groggy, dizzy and sick. I needed to wake up, feed myself, and find some solid ground. I made myself a roast beef sandwich with all the usual; pickles, lettuce, fresh tomatoes and condiments. It went down too fast and for a split second I was satisfied. Then on to the blood sugar checks, insulin injections and back to bed. The cancer then handed me the pains again. Pains made by pulling my gut first one side then the other in tugs from deep down in hell and reaching to every corner of my inner self. Time for the hydrocodon, the pain relief that can make those pains go away one at a time over a time always too long and never for long enough. And of course the hydrcodon makes me sleepy. I lost the afternoon to that. Finally, I awoke at about 4:30 and was able to get up. My wife came home from work and made my dinner. A small meal by local standards but enough to fill the carbohydrate regiment given my the nutritionist and enforced ruthlessly by my wife. I am now in the golden hours of my day, between sleep, pain, drowsiness, medical chores and all the rest. Now I try to catch up with a world gone on without me.

I am in the third week of chemo. This week they let my body rest from the poisons they have been dumping into my body. I had no idea the extent of the damage those chemicals do to your body. They are intended to target the cell replication of the cancer cells. Along the way they interrupt the stomach from reproducing the lining necessary to protect itself. The chemicals also reduce the red and white blood cell count to the point of anemia. Every move that was once a small effort is now a major concern;. getting the mail is something you consider carefully as it will take all the energy you have for the next hour. Eating is an effort, no matter how hungry you are. And what you eat doesn't all get digested because the entire system is running at minimum efficiency, and the cancer takes 20% off the top just like the Mafia. I have two more three week cycles to go. At the end they will put me under a scope and assess what damage they did to the cancer. That reading of my entrails may be a very important day of my life.

I haven't lost all interest in politics in this mess. I still struggle to stay abreast of the news in a world gone mad. It does seem to have gone more insane recently and I can attribute that to my lack of ability to follow in every tiny detail how the madness has spread. I see that logic has fallen to the bottom of most political approaches and sheer unmitigated greed and self aggrandizement is the pinnacle of perfection for most all of the people involved in that venal endeavor. A spectacle meant to emphasize the ability of people to fall far from all moral purpose, only now reported in full color and high definition to the world within seconds of the debacle unfolding. Oh, be still my beating heart, the modern world in all its glory unfolds before me. Cancer seems a more sincere and worthwhile companion in comparison.