kvetching up

Entry 1 Blind Faith, God's Grace, Nothing Else Left To Impart Its after midnight. I couldn't prepare myself for the anguish, the despair of these last several days.  Another night of pain, another night of being unable to help, utterly useless. Listening to the pleas of a person who has been with you so long that she is part of you, begging for the end to come, pleading for the agony to cease, tells you she wants it all to end.   You would do anything to make her better, anything to bring relief.  And then, it happens again, the next night, and the next night, and then again a few nights later.  She suffers. She pleads. You try and comfort her to no avail. You both edge toward the realization that when this pattern stops, things will only be worse.  

Entry 1 And We'll Hate What We've Lost But We'll Love What We Find Jenny has seemed sicker the last week or so.  Her long afternoon sleep, yesterday, did end when my sister arrived for dinner.  However, Jenny had zero energy all evening. She felt terrible all night, both physically, I had to attend to all of her needs, and emotionally, she felt guilty she couldn't help.  I comforted her as best I could, and tried to assuage her feelings of guilt.  She has never been sick like this so far out from chemo. Truly. Never. She was in utter discomfort; pain in her upper abdomen, in her lower back, and in her spine.  Pain relief was a Hobson's choice.   She could take more pain killers causing more abdominal pain in the future, but offering relief now, or take no more painkillers and suffer excruciating pain now.   Between 10:30 and midnight, the agony increased.  Convincing her to take meds at around 11 and again at 11:45, I otherwise was powerless ...

  Entry 1 Never A Dull Moment Yesterday I slipped and fell in the bathtub.  Earlier that day, Jenny had taken a soaky bath in epsom salts, and I didn't know she had used the salts, which made the surface slick. I jacked my shoulder muscles preventing a concussion or worse.  It was shocking how fast I went down and also how quickly I caught myself.  If I were in my 70s, that would have been it.   This morning, we got up early and proceeded with the quest for the grail, or given our budget, the plastic Solo cup. While touring a house, I get a call from Abby.  This doesn't happen.  I answer, and she says, "First, I want to let you know I'm ok."  Never a way a parent wants to have a conversation begin with a new driver.  "Okay, I say, what's going on?"   "I am in the park at the first exit off I-90. I just got hit by a U-Haul in the 1-90 tunnel and hit the wall."  The truck had changed lanes without seeing her, despite being t...

Entry 1   Goals, Planning, And Dark At The End Of The Tunnel When I was in my mid-20s, I lived a mile or so away from my friend Shaun, who was 21. We met when I was a counselor at Camp Waskowitz MDA camp and he a camper.  MD stands for muscular dystrophy. Shaun had Duchenne's, a particularly virulent genetic disorder that kills all the muscles in your body, slowly, starting generally around the age of 2. 99.9999 percent of people with Duchenne's don't make 20.  I could go into the science of the disease, but suffice it to say, it is a fucker. Time Flies Anyway, one day, Shaun calls me up and asks me to come over.  He said he needed to talk to me. We were friends, not close friends, but bonded after spending more than a decade together with others at camp.  I hopped in my truck and headed over.  When I got there, his parents were gone, or just leaving. I don't remember. Given that he couldn't move any part of his body save his fingers and his head, they...

A Heart That's Full Up Like A Landfill Chemo bye-week.  Its quiet.  I am laying on the McCrosky mattress while Jenny is in the living room watching the Friends Reunion.   If I'm honest, things are strange here.  Not bad strange, just strange. Maybe we are just a microcosm of our times.    Snippets of the actor's voices waft into this room from the tv Jenny is watching.  Mixed with this are sounds of Abby's show that is playing  in the kitchen, turned up loud enough to be heard  over the whirr of the Kitchen-Aid , and the dog's nails clicking down the hardwoods  as he leaves the room, each step  sounding like a slim branch hitting a window as it sways in the wind. Alexander cutting the Gordian knot As I lay here collecting my thoughts, Jenny texts, asking if I think she should take more pain meds. Her pain is rising again.  I tell her I do think so if she is in pain, and suggest she discuss it with the palliative care docto...

Flying Too Close To the Sun Entry 2 12:27 PM Last night's therapy was insane. I won't go over the details here, with one exception. I have written it all before.  However, Jenny did insist she isn't having an affair. She defines that to mean she can't spend the night or fuck him, to be clear.  But she never says that. The Fall of Icarus by Peter Paul Reubens Today is an unusually busy day.  As I finished a meeting just before 12, I could hear Jenny on the phone, apparently talking to her sister, Moni. She said, I am probably talking too loudly, which peaked my curiosity, so I walked to the bottom of the basement stairs where I am working, to hear more clearly, because I have become a creeper for information, given lies are the currency of the realm. She, Jenny, was telling Moni that last night  Eric  the pinché motherfucker's wife told him she wanted a divorce.  So this tells me two things.  One, she is a lying liar, not a newsflash.  Two, that he...

I'm coming to the edge of the widest canyon My companion's dear I'm starting to question my manifest destiny My claim to this frontier I'm coming to the brink of a great disaster End just has to be near The earth spins faster, whistles right past you Whispers death in your ear Don't pretend you can't hear Don't pretend you can't hear -from Manifest by Andrew Bird The morning brings with it another day of excruciating and unremitting pain for Jenny.  The pain meds take forever to work, if they work at all. The pain, a phantom that moves around her lower extremities, is likely from her tumor. Referred pain, pain caused in one part of the body that shows up elsewhere, isn't uncommon.  She is so miserable, I just want to solve this, so she can be comfortable. Jenny has commonly, like today, awakened from pain in the dark hours,  and gone to the kitchen seeking pain relief.  This early morning that didn't work, so she arose again in the light, just a...

I saw the rain dirty valley You saw Brigadoon I saw the crescent You saw the whole of the moon   --from The Whole of the Moon by Mike Scott This Life Is A Journey Everyday is a gift, life is a journey.  Trite clichés.  Or so I thought.  It's all in focus now, more than when I watched other people dying.  I feel an overwhelming sense of guilt, having mourned so many in the past, without fully appreciating the loss.  I lost my best friend when I was 17, when I barely understood death. It all became quite clear, or so I thought, with that loss.  Untrue.  Then, I started losing friends and campers from MDA camp.  And that was a different kind of loss.  Except, it wasn't. Watching a child die, I thought, was perhaps the worst thing I could experience.  Harvest Moon over the Palouse Then I lost my  uncle.  Then my mother, and the parents of friends. Each loss allowed me to erect a facade of reckoning. There were more losses in...

[Note Accident and Emergency is what the call emergency rooms in the UK] have you been here waiting long?  with the others whose evening"s gone wrong have you been here waiting long? --from Accident and Emergency by Lucy Wainwright Roche   What a weekend.  Can I even remember all the events, I'm not sure.  So, Ill just touch on a couple of things. Yesterday Jenny and I spent the day together all around Seattle and Renton, ending up at the Jacob Lawrence Exhibition at SAM in the afternoon.  We went with Jane and Mike.  I like SAM much more than I used to, both its standing and traveling exhibits. Benedict Arnold In the evening, we continued hanging out, watching What About Bob, one of the great Bill Murray movies, with Leiney. We were out again this morning, Sunday, the two of us running around before we met with a financial advisor, who us helping us understand how to better plan for retirement, and who was impressed with what we have done so far.  T...

The last two days have been very good.  Jenny didn't get chemotherapy because her numbers and counts were so godawfully bad as a result of the last chemo.  But, in better news, she got more clarity.   First, the doctor told her that her CA 19-9 numbers are so bad because he believes the mRNA vaccine has some major impact, skewing the numbers.  Dr. P and oncologists elsewhere are seeing this phenomena, and he, leader in the field, is starting a research study on this, presumably nationwide.  So one of the few PDAC prognostic tools has been bent, if not broken by COVID-19. Eye of the Hurricane   Secondly, the doctor told her he believes her disease is stable, given the place we are at.  The goal is to keep it that way.  Great news. Incredible news. Third, Jenny learned from the palliative care doctor that Dr. P is against Death with Dignity, an option Jenny strongly wants on the table, as would I were I in her predicament.  The good news i...

Act I   She Lives With A Broken Man, A Cracked Polystyrene Man I am exhausted. I slept well enough, but this marathon has too many intermittent sprints for my 54 year old body, and I have always been better at walking than running anyway. Wednesday started early, with me taking the dog to the groomer at the PetSmart on 130th and Aurora at 8:00.  I got home and went to work. It was pleasantly busy yesterday, work was, with many meetings.  None were contentious, but nonetheless busy.   It was a quiet house, especially conducive for getting work done. Abby doesn't have classes on Wednesday, and Leiney sleeps in a lot now that she is working everyday.  Jenny sees Eric on Wednesdays.  She doesn't tell me that anymore, she always has other things she tells me she is doing.  But, she left wearing the Dallas Cowboys baseball hat just around 9 to have breakfast with a friend, and didn't finish breakfast until nearly one. At 11:48 I texted Jenny to let her ...

  And then the other shoe drops.  .  . Jenny went to Jennifer Murray's after therapy ended at 1:30.  Murray had another friend over, someone else with stage iv cancer.  When she arrived home, she was, not surprisingly given how the day has been going, morose.  She rushed to her bedroom and threw herself on her bed, sobbing.  Not unusual.  Happens weekly.  I have no answer to this.  I do my best to first give her distance, and then give her comfort.  I followed that pattern.     Prone on the bed, she tells me she wishes she were dead now.  What is the point, she asks. "I am just going to die anyway."  She then begins a list of lamentations, of which I am not unfamiliar.  She is completely overwrought as she lists them: She is going to die; there is no point; she gets no affection.  She sleeps in the bed alone.  Exeunt Geoff, who retreats back to the couch. Glum I begin entering the above, and h...

Jenny had therapy with her cancer coach today.  As I have consistently noted, I find her coach to be a charlatan, but if Jenny finds solace there, its better than going to a faux shaman for gazillions and bajillions of dollars.  It is a lot of HR kind of positivity, which I hate--stuff that seems to come out of a refugee Hallmark card content creator cum morning/afternoon talk show producer.  That said, I won't argue with the way meeting with this person helps Jenny gaze forward to a possible future, rather than being stuck in the present morass or looking back in disappointment and anger.   Therapy was 12:30 to 1:30 today.  At 12:34, I get a text from Jenny, revealing that her cancer coach was found to have had the  BRCA  gene when she was diagnosed.   BRCA  is linked to ovarian, colon, breast and apparently pancreatic cancer. Jenny believes this changes everything with regard to her outlook.  I've read a couple of journal art...

Tuesday. Lots of writing here in this journal, overall. Very little introspection, interestingly.  Some people write to explore and expose their thinking.  I kvetch.  Today, I am crawling deep into the shallows of my brain. The truth is, I'm scared. Not simply scared of the cancer.  Nor am I simply scared of leaving--although truth be told I am scared of the idea of pulling up 30 year old roots and planting them down in a new planter-box with hope that my life will take root again and make sense.  I am not simply scared of losing Jenny forever. That has happened already, with her betrayal, her refusal to stop her betrayal as she is dying, and it will come again when she passes, and  yes, it simply scares me shitless. But this simple fear, this basic terror that wakes me in the night and keeps me from going back to sleep again is, I think, more existential.  Why do we do all this?  I mean all of it?   If it is true that nearly 50% of rela...

Spent a loft of time in Westport and Grayland as a kid, and then as a young adult.  Lots of memories.  We can't escape the treacly memories of childhood, nor escape the limitations they often place around imagination where the emotional and experiential landscape of memory is only so malleable. Beachcombing 2021 My horizons only expanded in my mind as a youth, but not in real life or real time.  Without looking out of my window, I went on Harrisonian travels. I had been to pre-Weimar Germany; taken the cure for TB in the Swiss Alps; visited England over and again with Shakespeare and Chaucer, or as a member of Robin's merry band, or through the eyes of Dr. Watson and Agatha Christie's protaganists. I had been all over the US with the likes of John D. Fitzgerald, Salinger, Twain, Poe, Vonnegut, Steinbeck, London, Kerouac, Hurston and Ginsberg, Angela Davis, Harper Lee and Capote.   I had seen the stars with Heinlein and Asimov, mystery worlds with Tolkein, Moorc...

For the first time since December, when I stayed in an airbnb downtown for a week, I am going away for a short vacation --3 days--this time to a motel out in Open Sores  Ocean Shores.  I invited my sisters along so that I cant cancel or reschedule. Im over the 🌙 🌔 🌖 🌛.  More to follow.

I'm terrified.  Jenny has stage iv pancreatic cancer, unnresected (meaning no surgery to remove tumor because its inoperable at this point

I'm dreaming of drinking whiskey and listening to Patsy Cline .  Friday can't come too soon. I need a break. One is coming Friday, when I head to the ocean with my sisters.  I am beyond ready.  The emotional roller coaster bullshit never ends.   Today, I was so sad for Jenny, who is suffering a lot with this malady.  After last night's ridiculous therapy session--which mostly entailed 45 minutes of complaining that I didn't cook her dinner the day before and me correcting the record constantly, and growing more annoyed by the minute, followed by an apology text so familiar I won't bother posting it here (it entailed the inferential blaming of me for her choice to have the affair)--I didn't have any expectations about how things would be today, because how could I?  I should note that again last night she tried to lie about the non-status of her relationship with Eric el pinché, and I shut that shit down.  She had nowhere to go, no counter to the ...

"But you just couldn't bear to do me any harm So you just sulk" -from Sulk by Billy Bragg I told a dear friend a story last night that I hadn't planned to write down here, but I have to tell the story of this morning's interaction and that requires last night's conversation for context. I woke up thinking it was morning again in America. Anyway, it felt like a good day, given how Mother's Day had ended with Jenny being so content. Jenny sunned herself most of yesterday afternoon, after running a couple of errands.  I am so glad the sun is out, and the backyard in good enough shape that Jenny can enjoy herself.  I kind of worked during the day, took some calls, had a couple meetings, it is still very slow for me, though.   If you want to bend my arm, well you could do it with a little more charm.  .   . I did my mundane and routine chores, watering the garden, putting out the bins for pickup, blah, blah.  Jenny came in from sunning herself and sat ...