Today I started making the phone calls to get appointments with a shrink and a therapist. The shrink's office has me filling out a 22 page long form. I read it over. It asked if I had recently experienced stress or other factors. That will be a YES. I could in fact save a lot of time by just cutting to the chase and telling him that being a pancreatic cancer patient means you got the grim reaper's scythe at your throat day in and day out and it won't go away, ever. The cancer might disappear off the scope but you never really know if there isn't one little bit of that demon left just waiting to roar back.

It would help if I had a job to leave the house to go play at. Having people around to provide an external source of annoyance and amusement would be a godsend right now. Being here day in and day out leaves me to play mind games with myself. I'm trying to find a job right now, but not much luck there. A couple of interested people but nothing that is going anywhere. I have to moderate the job search with the possibility that I may have to go back into chemo, either full or into a reduced regimen. My bet is that people will get a little miffed if I start new job and have to go away for a while to handle a chemo regimen that will likely leave me looking like a B-rated movie zombie, with approximately the same intellect. But I plug on, thinking all positive thoughts. Somewhere out there is something that will get me out of the house for money.

I cleaned out my email addresses today. Got rid of some people that I don't remember and some I would just as soon not. That's kind of a hard thought process. In a sense I am predicting the future, but only actually influencing it slightly. Some people just need to be culled from my list of contacts. They could still write me but a response is likely not going to be sent. Part of my overall house cleaning to my new slimmed down and redesigned life. That is a thought far deeper than most of you can fathom. For me it means cleaning my mental house to the bare walls and then moving some walls besides. The cancer wiped many previous experiences clean for me. Think of a hurricane sweeping a swampy coast clean of the trees and grasses and leaving a beach with only few trunks sticking up in the sand. Now just a beach, waves washing over it. The tangles are gone and the tide comes and goes without leaving pools of murky water in amongst tangled tree roots. And then there is always the chance of another angry hurricane coming along. I am searching for driftwood to build my shelter and digging a pit for the small chunks so I can build a fire tonight. One day at a time, no plans for next week because there is no use for such a measurement of time. One day is all I can utilize, the convenient time between sunrise and sunset and darkness to fill in the rest.

That is much easier to describe in this blog than it is to implement in my actual life. I have to make my way through everyday life as if nothing happened. Except for the changes in my body and a medi-port on my right shoulder, and maybe the ridges in my nails from the chemo, there are no real marks from this event. Most of the scars are mental. Not so much memories, they are more emotional reactions to things that have happened as the days go by. All the things that got me here are now lying around in a mess that I have to sort through, like soggy photographs of a life I once had. And those around me have little to no idea of what is really going on inside my thoughts. They all bring their own thoughts to this conversation so they apply their thoughts to the situation as best they can and our thoughts just don't mesh like they used to. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. What is the definition of doing the same things you used to do and not getting even close to the same results that you did before? It sure as hell isn't sanity.