Chemo Daze--posts of 11/3 and 4

11/3/2021 

Entry 1     10:13 a.m. 

How do you balance the need to care for one who is dying and who is carrying on an affair with protecting yourself? How can one maintain a good rapport with the terminally ill Lotharia when you have empathy and sympathy for the person's suffering but antipathy for the cheating behavior (and all of its accompanying baroque garish behavior) at the same time? In this yin-yang state of love and hate, there is much gray. I am a person that sees nuance, and takes to heart what one of my professor's said time and again, that a person is far more than just the sum of the bad things they have done.  I understand that. I love Jenny. I do. I always will. And, I see the good in her quite often, although I seem to reserve my time here to kvetching. She is more than just the bad things she does, is more than the sum of the parts of her personality as directed toward me.  

I spend my days worrying about her health. I spend my days working and caring for the home. I spend my days caring for her as needed and more than that. I typically make her coffee in the morning, and cook for her when making meals or when asked.  I take her to the hospital, to the doctor. I generally do many things. I try to alleviate her suffering. She cares nothing about the pain she is causing me.  And yet,  she can be as sweet as a Yakima pear to me at times,  and hurt and baffled when i don't accede to her every wish,  as if the affair wasn't a thing. How does that work. 

Sisyphus and Prometheus had it worse. This is a finite problem. I am struggling with the death of a thirty-year relationship. I am struggling with an unremorseful liar. I am struggling with the idea that she will die from this disease. I am not having my liver ripped out and eaten each day or forced to roll a stone up a hill only to have it roll back down each day for eternity. 

At times I feel like I am disappearing. 

------

November 4, 2021

Chemo today. Riding in the back seat of a car, Jenny's friend driving us.  The rain is coming down in buckets. Jenny is so thin if she was standing next to 1980s Bob Geldorf, you could mistake him for Chris Farley. Last time I asked, she weighed 155 lbs.  

She is in fine spirits. Me, I am jazzed because I am on a roll at work, and feel hopeful again. Therapy really is working.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Life, A Cascading Series of Disappointment

Image
Jenny has cancer.  Terminal cancer.  We learned that in late July. Jenny had  dropped 25 lbs. in the spring without trying.  She had been having vague stomach complaints since October.  As a balm for her concerns, her doctor agreed to do a CT scan for her, but told her they would find nothing.  Jenny wanted to rule out pancreatic cancer, which had recently killed her dad-in the spring of 2019.  Her mother had been sick with lymphoma since February 2020.  The day of the scan, the doctor told Jenny they would get results back in a few days. When Jenny's phone rang that same afternoon, I was in the living room with Abby, where I was torturing her by playing the Rapping Duke on Youtube. Jenny shouted from the room, "Geoff, get in here, the doctor's on the phone." "You have a four cm. mass on your pancreas,"  he said. Jenny made a sound like someone had punched her in the stomach.  "There is a spot on your liver. You have a necrotic lymph nod...
Read more

Still Muddling Through Somehow

Image
At the park, I walked my dog through the rain this morning— not really proper rain— more like air that has decided to shrug water at you out of habit. It suited my mood well enough. As I walked, my thoughts kept returning to the same small universe they often do. They are not new thoughts. They orbit the same losses. They consider the same betrayals, the same questions that never resolve. They have been captured, these thoughts, never to escape, never to be forgotten, never to burn up in the atmosphere. It is simply the gravitational field of my life now. What might seem or feel like self-pity is more like muscle memory, which tells me I need more exercise. The holidays are here, and Christmas has always been central to my life, atheist that I am. It was stitched into Jenny’s life — the love of Christmas — at least as strongly as it was stitched into mine. We carried that love forward with the kids, year after year, without ever needing to talk about why it mattered; it just did. I...
Read more

Don't Do It, Don't Do It, Oh, Lord

Image
It Hurts, It Hurts So Bad.  .  . 3:44 a.m. I walked in the door last night at just before 10 to find Jenny in a ball on the floor--between the giant ottoman and sectional--agonizing pain in her hip. I had ridden to acting with the student driver.  But, let's back up. Jenny had chemo yesterday.  Her friend Jennifer took her.  It was uneventful and she received chemo.  I, as always, prepared the house for her arrival to make sure she wanted for nothing and would be comfortable as she endures the aftermath of all that poison.  Sometime before she came home, she texted, saying the doctor suggested she try Aleve for her hip pain.  Aleve.   She asked me to pick some up for her while Abby was at acting.   During the text exchange I realized she would be alone after Abby and I left for acting.  Leiney was elsewhere and had therapy at 5 and kickboxing later, and her sister Moni had bailed on chemo because she had so much to do (Wit...
Read more