Then Matt started being tired. No, not the normal level of tired I was used to. He was barely awake during the day. I couldn't fathom it. We struggled our way through, and managed to do the minimum necessary. He looked tired, smelled different and acted very wrong. I was disturbed but too tired to really peice it together. My sleep was going crazy at this point.
Tuesday I finally caught up a bit. On Wednesday we discover why Matt has felt so weird.
They doubled up his dose of chemo. Fortunately, they tell us, it was caught quickly. If I had written down the numbers we would have known right away. I hadn't. So...
From Wed To Fri he was off Chemo. He could even shower!
Well... if he felt up to it. He was even worse during these days, and I was starting to seriously stress out even if I finally knew what was causing it. He was unsteady on his feet which made him singularly unwilling to risk taking a shower, since that is how he fell in the hospital.
I hit a wall Friday morning. I realized his symptoms were reminding me of my father when his fight against cancer took it's swan dive from functional to marginal... and I just broke down and cried.
Yes, I have daddy issues. Hello, I'm a girl and knew my father, and he was a nice guy. But they have to wait in line with cancer issues. Matt's is the first case I've personally been involved with that didn't involve a terminal diagnosis and eventual death of a patient usually within 1-2 years. Dad, ever the lucky one, lived 3 years with stage 4, after being told he had six months to live. My grandfather lived about a week after his stomach cancer diagnosis, and never left the hospital. I didn't even hear about it until after he died.
Sure, I had one friend who had cancer, but she pretty much pretended I didn't exist during that, and I rarely heard about progress. Then again, I was dating the guy who nuked my social life out of malevolent jealousy.
The others I know are cancer survivors, and ... I really hate to say this, but after the fact it seems unreal. Sort of like those people who I knew growing up who had polio and lived to tell about it. It's almost impossible to imagine how horrible that disease was, even with those gawdawful iron lung pictures. With cancer survivors and cancer death, it's almost like they are two different diseases. Oh, and there are so many different types of cancer... Yeah, don't get me started. Let's just say Dr. Google will not be returning today.
Suffice to say it's been a helluva few days, and I'm starting to decant from the past few months. Thanks to the fact that my brain is coming back on line after...a good ten years of a thing I can't call anything but depression, but it's not what most people think of as depression.
I have been a zombie. My brain only functions in tiny aspects, and I push them for all they are worth just so I can feel like maybe I accomplished a fifth of what normal people do in an average day.
I travel through a slow motion loop where an insane amount of effort goes into doing a task for hours that takes normal people 20 minutes. Reality is flat. I literally had no sense of depth perception, as well as it seeming more like a badly produced movie with no sound track.
All of this was true long before Matt had cancer. There were other factors, but a part of it is my limbic system has been crashed and burned multiple times... and I have some bad habits when it comes to emotional regulation. But that's another show. Suffice to say, I'm seeing an endocrinologist who treats me out of the kindness (or boredom in his off hours, I can't tell which) of his heart, and for little more than the cost of the few things he proscribes and heartfelt gratitude. Which he can have any time he wants.
Now that I'm back, it's like I feel all the effects of my accumulated sleep loss from the last ten years. And somehow, I still feel better than I've felt in years. Because being in misery is still living.
And it's only pain, it's only exhaustion and crankiness, and an endless frazzled anxiety that what little you have will come flying apart into space. That's really not bad when you feel like you live your whole life encased in Ice Nine, where you will be nice and safe until men of the future dust you off and put you in a museum somewhere. But life is out of reach and you can't even be clueless comedy relief in the future.
Here's hoping I can clean up these Augean Stables before I lose my mind... almost before I have it.
And the cancer thing is on a whole different level. Until recently, it's been a problem to be solved, a battle upon which to make one's last stand.
Now it's just another part of life. And I'm not going to be able to look heroic doing it.
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