kvetching up

Last night's sanctuary .   Entry 1 Sitting outside cardiac rehab. I picked Abby up after 1 last night from light rail. When I got home, Willow was glued to me, but unable to sleep and so I couldn't close my eyes. Around 2 I fell asleep. At 3:00 Willow decided she needed outside time. This early morning rising has been going on for a couple weeks. When we came back inside she thought it was snack & play time. I decided it was sleep time. Unlike at 2, she respected this. All of this to say I am exhausted. The scale this morning said I have GAINED .8 lbs. Time to go run it off. I'd like to brag and say I work out harder than any of my cohort, but they all appear to be 10-15 years older than me. I feel love Kramer bragging he is the top of the kid's karate class. Entry 2 Weirdly, the cardiac rehab team neither helped me start my workout, nor did they check on me and adjust it or take my blood pressure during my workout. Apparently,  no one had me on their list. Go figur...

 Entry 1.    1:04 p.m. I was up with Frank into the wee small hours of the morning, when the whole wide world is fast asleep . I wasn't listening to that masterpiece, the first-ever concept album by the way (yes, the king of cool, ol' blue eyes invented that now dead construct), but to his first Christmas album. I bought it at Peaches🍑 Records, near my then home in the U-District. It was the day Jenny and I went on our first date, seeing The Act Theater's production of A Christmas Carol . I also bought Bummed Out Christmas, but that seemed too on point. Jenny threw up all of her stomach contents again this morning. She is having broth now, but I am fairly convinced, given she has thrown up every day for days on end, that this will not stay with her either.  She was out running errands, when she called to tell me. I am not kidding. She can't stand for more than a few seconds, nor walk more than a few feet without risking collapse, has no nutrition in her body, and i...

 Entry 1     9:00 a.m. Tomorrow is the eight-week scan . It starts very early.  I don't know where the fuck I am going to park. I have to go to a parking garage with my jeep, that still has the roof box on it. Maybe I will get it off tonight, I hope. Jenny, who can do it sans ladder, can't help anymore. I think she never thought she'd be this sick--who can blame her refusal to admit it early in the journey. Now, last night she talked about needing to finish her "funeral stuff" a marked shift.   Can we go back to the bad old days of her not being sick, and us barely interacting? Me not knowing she is cheating, but suspecting something was off-kilter? Of Leiney and I hanging out, talking politics with Abby baking in the tiny kitchen?  I don't want to deal with anything outside my tiny bubble. It gets smaller all the time. John Travolta's got nothing on me . Work is so busy, Jenny so sick, the house such a time suck, that I am working here in less th...

 Entry 1     9:12 a.m. "Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made."     -Edgar Allen Poe, The Masque of the Red Death Last night in therapy, we talked death. We talked life. We talked cancer. We talked and we talked. Jenny cried. It was an entire session dedicated to this topic or these topics. It was not intentional or planned, but because I brought it up at the beginning of the session.  Jenny, as my last entry noted, was despondent for a time yesterday, suffering from uncontrolled pain.  She expressed her desire to stop treatment.  It's a regular occurrence, but hard for me. It isn't time to contemplate that, and I know she doesn't mean it. I also know that should or when she arrives at that point, I will support whatever decision she makes.  In the interim, I struggle with how to deal with these declarations. My tactic is to say nothing and comfort her. It isn't pe...

Entry 1      10:00 a.m.  Every day, darkness . Today I went to wake Jenny and found her sobbing, finally mourning for the loss of her mother and for her own impending death. She vacillates more between hope and despair, but the last few days, she has been despondent, telling me over and again she doesn't want to die--asking me what can be done to stop this. I have nothing to offer. She isn't really expecting me to give an answer, but she doesn't know who else to ask. The doctor, on Thursday, will he offer hope? If so, is it real?  Should she ask him directly, "Is this going to kill me?" We all know the answer, but hearing him say it, would it accomplish anything? I wake everyday thinking about her cancer, thinking about how sick she is. I put on my pants. Find my shoes upstairs, by the front door, climb a second set of stairs and go let the dogs out of their crate, and then take them to the bathroom. Each morning I worry, sick and weak as she is, that she may ge...