Hunger Pains

 Entry 1    1:42 p.m.

If it's on your list today, you may not find it at Fred Meyer.

I am shopping with Abby. Why does everything have to be so complicated? Thankfully, Abby keeps me on task as I stumble through my ADHD and grief riven world.  This place looks like the Huns descended on it, which is funny given the emptiness of the road. Stuff is everywhere, shelves bare, lines ridiculous.  It will take an hour for us to check out, we've been in line 20 minutes, I swear, and have moved an inch or two. So, employee shortage as well.

Jenny woke after 10, thankfully. She is incredibly weak, weaker and more unsteady than she was before the procedure. I made her eggs and toast, of which she ate a good portion. She is slurring her words today, which is weird. She is on her normal pain med regimen, or was before I left.

Moni arrived shortly after Jenny

had breakfast and she, the kids, and I took all the Christmas decorations down.  I got the boxes in, and will spend the rest of the afternoon packing. Everything is exponentially harder without Jenny being able to help. She won't quit trying.  Last night she offered to take Willow out. She wasn't kidding.  It would have wounded her gravely she can barely, and I mean barely, stand without falling.

Entry 2.   3:22 p.m.

Jenny is failing. She took maybe 5 steps before bending over in exhaustion. She is in pain and it is all really quite scary.  She is having gastric problems, attendant with the surgery and recovery, perhaps? I don't know. Moni has been witnessing it all afternoon. She is just out of it. And while she had to start the pain abatement regimen again--rhe pain in her side overwhelming, she was having weird symptoms before that.  She was slurring her words. Mind you, she had 3 oxy, but we call that breakfast around here and have for 17 months. 3 is one less than her normal dose these days, so I don't believe that caused the slurring. She is eating.  I got lots of good things at the store, and we have lots of good things here already.  She has had soup, jello and watermelon in the last hour. That is like a hot dog eating competition champ eating his body weight in hot dogs.  This is the most she has eaten in weeks.  She isn't throwing it up, but food is leaving so quickly as to be concerning.  

Moni just took her for a drive.  I helped her to the car, and am so worried. I have seen people this sick before. None of them lasted more than a few days.  But, the oncologist says she is ok. I don't know what the fuck this is. I just don't. 

Jenny and Chris have reached out to the doctors to find out what we can do.  We need to do something.

Entry 3     4:50 p.m.  

I spoke with Chris earlier this afternoon. She is going to call Jenny tonight to find out if it is okay when we are talking with Dr. Beiter tomorrow to ask about hospice. I hate this life. I just hate it. She is suffering. I don't want her to suffer. She is dying, I don't want her to die. She wants chemo, I don't want her to do that to herself again. I can't stop crying. I can't stop wishing this wasn't happening to Jenny. This is a terrible thing. A terrible, awful, thing. 

Entry 4      8:45 p.m.

The moment your direly-ill wife hides her phone when you are near, but not before you see she is chatting up el pinche.




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

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

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