Rainy Days

It's been raining all day today, the last day of November. If you ask me, it's time for the rain to turn into snow and release the beauty of winter.

When I was growing up, I loved the rain. I would always take the basketball out into the driveway and shoot around, and it was special when it rained. I would stay out there for hours, listening to nothing but the sound of the raindrops on the pavement and the pounding of the ball against the wet concrete. I always had the street to myself; people would disappear inside their houses when it rained, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the wind in the trees.

I would think about anything and everything those days. I took the time to appreciate the things that made me happy, and I gave thought to the things that needed figuring out. I dreamed about the future; college, basketball, girls. I always thought about girls.

Left to my own thoughts, I never once dreamed that such a dark, cancerous cloud covered my future.

Once I left for college, my daily basketball schedule was made for me; I was away from home, and I stopped having the opportunity to take the ball out into the driveway. But the peaceful tranquility of those rainy days is something that stays with me.

As I was saying, I would really prefer this rain to turn into snow. Winter can get so cold here, yet somehow I associate it with a quality of warmth. I think of bundling up against the biting chill of the outside air, and of getting close to someone because when it's cold, it's the perfect time to be tangled up with someone else. I, of course, have to avoid human contact like the plague, but I'm still looking forward to a fresh snow to warm my feelings.

Another month has passed, and I feel as if I'm getting stronger. I can still feel something in my bones, something that doesn't belong there, but it's not like it was before and I'm confident that it will be gone before long. A winter alone will be a difficult test, but I have a renewed motivation, a sense of inspiration, and I can feel that inside of me, too.

I look forward to snow, and I'll get through the year, though I'll yearn for the days that I've lost. I'll keep looking ahead to get to the bridge, if I'm sufficiently blessed, I will cross.

Sweet November

I can't believe it's almost the end of November. I'm still accustomed to that meaning the beginning of a new basketball season, the end of a semester, and the air turning unmistakably colder. It's hard for my brain to register that I'm almost a year and a half removed from college, and there are no upcoming basketball games in which I'll be playing, but it's still getting cold outside.

I would imagine that this is the time of year when days will seem to go by even more slowly than they have over the past few months, if that's even possible. I wish I could wake up to a different reality, but my wishes continue to dissipate without response. My days still seem to drag on without end.

I asked for a time-out yesterday, as if some invisible referee were overseeing my life and could somehow grant me a few weeks' break from this cancer-fighting marathon. I could really use a vacation; I'm not sure where I would go, or if I would even tell anyone or invite anyone to come with me. It would just be nice to escape for a little while. I haven't been able to find an escape from this; I've just been creeping along one day at a time since it started.

I couldn't get out of bed again today. I felt like a wax creature, all disfigured and immobile in my bed, on my back, for hours. What I would give for a pretty girl to just come and be there with me! Then, at least the hours of blanketed obsolescence would bring me some joy!

It doesn't feel so foreign to me to remember what that feels like, having someone close to me like that, and I look forward to it again every day. It makes me romanticize the idea of being in a relationship, even though I know it's never going to be as easy as I would like it to be or think right now that it will be. It's just a sensible idea to me that there's someone out there who is meant to be nice to me, and I'll be nice to her, and we'll enjoy spending time together, and everything will work out, and I'll always have someone to waste the day away with me in bed.

To be honest, over the past few days, I've learned of the human capacity to miss something, or someone, that we've never even really had. Missing and longing, it seems, come from the same place, when we recognize some missing element as an integral component of our completion. It is, of course, the natural inclination of the human body and spirit to want to be complete, though we're so often operating at less than maximum efficiency.

I'd like to believe that I'm making sense, and I definitely believe in what I'm saying. The truth of the matter is that I don't know if I'll ever be lucky enough to touch, or to hold, this thing that I'm missing. Right now, it's really far away, but I can feel it as if it were next to me and I know it's real.

So, for now, the object of my obsession will have to remain just that. But at least I know she feels the same, which is a hell of a lot better than feeling alone. And it's nice to feel alive again, like something I had forgotten even existed has awakened from within me. I needed to express it; I want it to breathe, but I don't want to smother it and I don't want it to break. I have to let it be, and that's fine, for all things grow and develop in their own time, and as we know, it's not our minds at all that decide who makes a difference in our lives.

I really could go on forever, but I fear that wasted words will only spoil that which I am trying to protect. If nothing else, I am admittedly a hopeless romantic, and that is something that neither chemo, nor cancer, nor anything else that comes to mind can change about me. And I do believe that it's a good thing, and that it will all turn out well for me in the end. I hope this new thing remains, though I don't know what it will become, but it's been too long that I've missed missing and being missed, and I don't mind it at all.

Round 8

I have now completed eight out of fourteen scheduled rounds of chemo. It feels like I've been doing it forever, and it still feels like I have an eternity yet to finish, but at least I'm officially past the halfway point.

Five days of chemo is always such a long time. When they finally give me permission to leave and deaccess my port, I usually make one last trip to the bathroom before I go. If for no other reason, I want to make sure that the ten hours of fluids I've just received don't end up on the seat of the car. But I'm always bothered by the fact that I don't recognize myself. My face is always swollen and red, my body looks inflated with air, and I'm always so exhausted.

It really is surprising to me that sitting in a hospital bed for five days can be so exhausting, but it makes more sense when you consider that the nurses don't allow you any semblance of a normal sleeping pattern. The last two days, chemo went up at 8am and 4am respectively, so you can imagine how anxious I was yesterday when chemo ended at 6am and I could do nothing but wait to finish the fluids and go home.

I also find it interesting that my simple, well-planned, organized pill schedule is so terribly butchered by nurses who have the schedule all written out in front of them. I love my nurses, don't get me wrong, but I don't always get my familiar nurses and sometimes it's like the nurse I get pays no mind to the schedule at all; they'd rather just stroll in with whatever they find in their hands at that particular moment and leave me wondering if it's what they say it is and why I'm taking it at that time. Then, when I finally leave the hospital, it's hard to remember what I was given at what time and then determine how to get back on track.

It's flu season now, too, so the hospital is packed with patients from the E.R. who need an isolation room. That means there's no chance of me getting a single, even last week when I was the only patient to be admitted for chemo that day. In fact, not only was I put in a four-person room (with a fifth behind a makeshift curtain about fifteen feet from the foot of my bed; an infant, no less, who was incapable of making human noises but rather screamed exclusively like a velociraptor), but it still took almost seven hours to get from the clinic to the hospital room.

I realize that it's a hospital and that they're doing their best with limited resources, but it seems dangerous to me to put flu patients on the same floor as cancer patients. I'm not sure what was ailing the raptor baby, though I'm suspicious that it was a virus, but even if you assume that all of the flu patients were kept in isolation rooms, we're all still being treated by the same nurses and that makes me a little nervous. Clearly, I'd never think of refusing treatment to a flu patient in need of isolation, but it's obvious that things are getting more difficult for the hospital to manage around this time of year. Unfortunately for me, all I want is to show up and get what I need, then get out of there with as little a headache as possible.

The patient in the bed next to me was a young kid with a ruptured appendix. It seemed pretty rough, but I'm glad they were able to remove the organ and all of the poison before it was too late.

That said, I'm not really looking to make friends with other patients' family when I'm anxiously awaiting five days to go by. Still, each morning, this kid's dad was nice enough to come over to my bedside soon after I had first opened my eyes to offer me his newspaper. Aside from the shock of waking up to an unfamiliar man's face, I really didn't want to touch his newspaper. I wanted to stay as far away from that scene behind that curtain as possible, for fear that some abdominal fluid had escaped the child and smeared itself onto his father's newspaper.

So, each time he appeared, he promised to bring me his copy of the paper when I was more awake (he could never just wait until I was really awake), and each time I graciously declined and closed my eyes again. One day, my nurse even came in and said to me, "That man wanted me to tell you that you can borrow his newspaper whenever you're awake."

I don't know what it was that gave that man the impression that I read the newspaper, but I somewhat admire his persistence.

I'm not feeling very well today, which I expected, but I am carrying a sense of accomplishment for having finished another five-day round of chemo. There's not a lot of fanfare and it feels like I'm making progress in inches rather than in strides, but at least I'm going somewhere.