Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.

I've probably written about this before (thanks, chemobrain!), but I often wonder lately, when the emotions break through the indifferent aloofness that the LexaPro seems to lock me into, how devastating the experience would be were it not for the drugs.  Not that this would have required a MENSA-level intellect to predict but the holidays are turning out to be tough ... whether it's the incessant songs that always sounded a bit sad to me, like the one mentioned in the title of this, or of the usual "I wonder how many more of these I get to spend with my daughter" thoughts or just seeing the happiness the holidays bring others, it's difficult to maintain an even keel these days.

Not helping is we're rapidly approaching (assuming the numbers have continued to at least trickle down) stem cell transplant time.  Months ago that was some nebulous thing in the future that seemed too far away to be worth worrying about.  Now it's a real thing ... I have to make plans soon to get out to Arizona and start planning logistics, etc.

So yeah, Merry Christmas 2013.

I haven't been sleeping well at all lately.  My dreams, the ones I remember, are of things like me passing away in Arizona by myself and my wife getting the call back home while my daughter is in the background crying and yelling for her daddy.  My weight is up and I can't seem to get it under control even though I'm not eating bad -- a fun side effect of the antidepressants, apparently, but somewhat counter-productive and ironic given that I spent the first half of the year before the cancer bomb dropped losing a ton of weight and starting to feel good about how I looked again.

What's odd, if that's the word for it, is I spent most of my life dreading the holidays.  My family wasn't very holiday-ish and it tended to remind me of what I didn't have and would have liked to experience.  Now I have it ... a loving wife, a child to dote upon and treasure the holidays with, and voila!  Terminal cancer.

And people wonder why I have a difficult time keeping my composure when they bring up things like "God" around me?

Friday, December 6, 2013

Two observations.

Random thoughts today.  One, a "busy" cancer center is a concept that sucks on a variety of levels.  Two, leaving chemotherapy I'm torn between wanting to just slink away and curl up somewhere dark in a fetal position and wanting to shout from a mountaintop "I just had chemotherapy" in the hopes that someone would just give me an empathetic hug.