Wishing on a Blue Star (22 page)

Now we just wait to see if it’s the end of the tunnel or the oncoming train. Laugh!!

Cheers all, and thank you for your patience.

Patric

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Going sledding

Once again, I am remiss in my duties and failed to update this thing in a timely manner.

Feel free to kick my ass.

Since we last met, the government let me down, which was a surprise that shouldnt have been, I learned the medical profession is very much like the U.S. government, in that it’s a self serving juggernaut supporting itself at the expense of the people it’s supposed to be helping, that good people get caught on both sides of that fence, and that the latest cat scan suggests I get the last two chemo treatments after all.

Whee....

It’s like sledding down a hill, knowing there’s a lot of big trees at the bottom.

Splat.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Best Laid Plans

Originally, I was going to comment about dreading this next round of chemo. My seventh.

I got sidetracked, I procrastinated, and too soon, time was up.

Certainly chemo isnt fun, and dont look forward to it, but this time I was actively dreading it. Given that I still havent healed from the last cycle, I had good reason, I think. :)

So off I go to get poisoned yet again, thinking along the way that this is nuts! The CAT scan showed that some of the lymph nodes were still enlarged. Okay. I can handle that, but John did say in an earlier phone conversation (Have I mentioned lately I love that guy? He calls, and calls back!) that there was a possibility that the enlargements could be essentially scar tissue.

So I’m thinking if it is, chemo isnt gonna do a damn thing except tear me down further, and if I had thought of it sooner, I’d have suggested doing the marrow biopsy now instead of after the last two treatments. Figured it was too late since I was already at the door, and quite forgot the end of my earlier conversation with John....

Never mind that I was particularly morose that day, having gotten bad news from SSD (Denied, the weebles) but I did tell John I was done with it, that I didnt want to play anymore, and eventually, after John’s gentle coaxing, that I’d think about it.

So when he asked me today if we were still going to do the chemo, meaning had I made up my mind, I was startled, because in my head I was only just then thinking about escaping. (Stupid chemo brain) :)

Point is, the guy put up with me, again.

When he came into the little room and sat down, I still had it in my head I’d have to do seven, and maybe escape eight at least, so when he offered to skip both, I sat up straight, and at the risk of sounding like a cliche, the world looked a bit brighter.

Yeah, okay, a helluva LOT brighter. :)

I’ve been told I’m pessimistic. Perhaps that’s true, although I prefer to think of it as pragmatic. The moniker doesnt really matter. What does is that I’m not going to ignore the probabilities as I understand them just to grab at possibilities.

Cant afford it, really. Hope is such a fragile flower, is it not?

So here’s the deal in a nutshell: On Thursday, the day after tomorrow, I go in for a bone marrow biopsy. That’s the big needle sucking blood out of my hip bone. Yikes! Would have done it today but the practitioner left early, twenty minutes prior when she threw out her back. Double Yikes! (Proof enough when I told John that if there was any way the universe could kick me, it would, and yeah, I was really *excited* to get the biopsy done ASAP, despite the needle.

So... If the results of that test are clear, it means the lumps are scars and I’m a done deal. I go on what John calls surveillance. Presumably periodic testing to see if the cancer comes back. (Remember that this type has a *history* of coming back. Please keep that in mind to avoid crushing that fragile flower I mentioned, just in case.) :)

If the results are not clear, then we start proceedings for a marrow transplant (Autologous, not donor) I’m assuming there’ll be some sort of recovery period between now and then. It’s a hairy assed procedure from what I’ve read.

Either way, whatever happens next, one thing is crystal clear:

I am DONE with the effing chemo, and right now, with a crash pending (I can feel my arms getting heavy) i still feel like it’s a snow day from school and I am high as a kite, sans drugs.

Whoo hoo!

The Lost Ones

Victor J. Banis

There is this to be said about being old, about living in a nursing home: Every night is the end of a day just like the last. Every morning is the beginning of a day like the one before. Trevor Harding woke up wondering why. Why, he wondered, why bother opening one’s eyes, to see exactly what you saw every other time?

In the daytime, what he saw was a room nearly as Spartan as a monk’s cell—night table, one hard wooden chair, like something from a turn-of-the-century kitchen, an open door giving a glimpse of a toilet that gurgled endlessly, another door to a corridor wall of bilious green, bare of any decoration. From down to the left, he could sometimes hear the nurses at their station, talking, but they were like voices from out of time. He only saw them passing by, or when they came into his room.

His bed was situated so that he could see out the window, but the view had long since ceased to excite his interest. The lawn, hardly greener than the nurses’ corridor, plodded its way down the hillside to the highway, sidling sullenly about a mossy sundial, evading a flagstone walk, pretending not to see a flaming bush of azaleas, and finally coming to a halt at its border of prickly shrubs.

And at night, nothing but the rectangle of light from the corridor, and a smaller, dimmer rectangle that was the window. None of it ever varied, and it was hardly worth opening one’s eyes for.

Only when he did, finally, open his eyes, what he saw was different from the ordinary. As a usual thing, the room was empty. It was the middle of the night; he knew that without even bothering to look at his pocket watch. And unless he happened to catch one of the nurses doing her rounds, there was hardly likely to be anyone there.

Even at visiting times, there was no one there. Who would come to see him? He had no relatives anymore—none that counted, anyway. A cousin or three, none of whom were close enough, in any sense, to want to visit him. He was ninety-one.  Most of his friends, and there hadn’t been many of them for a long time, had already passed on So, it was the occasional nurse, or, more often, an empty room.

Only this time, the room wasn’t empty, and it wasn’t a nurse on her rounds. When he opened his eyes, he saw a young man seated in the hard wooden chair next to the bed. Seeing Trevor’s eyes open, the young man smiled, a warm, friendly smile.

“Good morning, Mr. Harding,” he said.

“Is it? Morning?” Trevor glanced toward the window, but it was dark.

“Technically, yes. Not
getting up
morning, I’m afraid, but morning. It’s a bit after four, I would say.”

Trevor’s pocket watch was on the table by the bed, but he made no effort to reach for it. Four sounded about right. Only…

“Well, what in thunderation are you doing here at four in the morning? And you’re not a nurse. At least, you aren’t dressed like one.”

“That’s right. I’m not.”

“So…?”

The young man grinned again. “Oh, I sometimes volunteer here, in my off time.”

“Not at this hour of the night, you don’t.”

“No, you’re right. It’s just…well, I have a night job across town, and I come right past here on my way home, and sometimes I stop by and visit with the patients. The ones who are awake.”

“Couldn’t be many of them awake, not at this hour. Anyway, I was asleep. You were sitting there in that chair when I woke up.”

“That’s right. Everybody was asleep. I was about to leave and go home, but when I paused to look in on you, you said something. At first, I thought you were awake, and I came in to see how you were doing, but then I realized you were talking in your sleep, having a dream. A pretty vivid one, it looked like, so I thought probably you’d be waking up in a minute or two.  I just sat down to wait.”

“Oh.” Trevor’s mind was still a bit sleep-slow. It took him a minute to think of the obvious question. “What did I say?”

“Just a name.”

“What name?” Trevor asked, but already he had his suspicions.

“Jamie.”

“Damn,” Trevor swore. He struggled to sit up in bed. “You just get straight the hell out of here, what right have you got…” The effort to sit up and his excitement caused a sharp pain to shoot through his left shoulder and across his chest. His angry sputtering deteriorated into a groan, and he sank back down on the pillow.

The young man jumped up, his face etched with concern. “Mr. Harding, don’t get yourself all het up,” he said. He came to the side of the bed. “Here, have a sip of water. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

All het up?
What an old-fashioned thing to say. Trevor had said it himself in the past, probably a lot, but that was a long time ago. Nobody said it these days. He took the glass that was offered and managed a long swallow of lukewarm water, and dropped his head again to the pillow. His visitor dipped a white handkerchief into the glass and wiped Trevor’s brow with it.

“Feel better?”

Trevor let his breath out in a long sigh that rattled in his throat.

“I’m sorry. It just caught me off guard, your saying his name like that. You’ll have to forgive me. I’m just a crabby old coot. Everybody here knows that.”

“You’re not a coot, Mr. Harding, and there’s nothing to forgive. Would you like for me to go now?”

Trevor rolled his eyes around and looked into the young man’s face. He really did look contrite. “No,” he said wearily. “That’s okay. I’m glad for the company. Even if it is a weird time for it.”

“Do you wake up a lot like this? I mean, in the wee hours?”

“Too often. I guess I could ring for the nurse, get something to help me sleep. But at my age, you take a lot of pills. I’d just as leave not take any more than I need to. Usually, I  lay in the dark and…say, the light’s on.”

“I turned it on when I came in. I can turn it off if it bothers you.”

“No, no, that’s okay. I’m just surprised it hasn’t brought the night nurse in.”

“She’s clear down to the other end of the ward. There was a problem with another patient. Mr. Barnes.”

“Barney? He’s been kind of touch and go lately. He didn’t…?” But he didn’t like to say it. It seemed too much like courting trouble to mention death aloud. One of the superstitions that came with being ninety-one.

“No, not the last I saw. But he was having some trouble breathing.”

“Oh. Well…that kind of goes with the territory, I guess.” As if to demonstrate, he turned his head and coughed, a hacking, phlegmy cough.

There was a moment of silence. It was usually quiet in the middle of the night like this, but tonight, the quiet seemed particularly dense, as if the room, the entire home, was holding its breath. He listened keenly, but there was nothing. Just his own labored breathing, and a swish of starched sheets when he moved his leg.

“Mr. Harding…?”

Trevor had been focusing so intently on the silence, he had all but forgotten him.  The visitor might not have been there. Trevor started a little when he heard the voice.

“What?” he asked, more sharply than he’d intended. He felt all disoriented,  like his skin didn’t quite fit him anymore. Like
he
didn’t fit him anymore, whatever that meant.

“Would you like to tell me about Jamie? What happened to him?”

Trevor snapped his head around, glowering. “What makes you put it like that? ‘What happened to him?’ What makes you so sure anything happened?”

“The way you said it. When you were asleep. It was almost as if you were crying.”

Trevor looked away from him, into the shadows in the corner of the room, as if he might see Jamie there. He couldn’t, of course. Not unless he was a ghost. A very old ghost.

“He was my son,” he said, and his voice broke on the last word.

“And you lost him?” It was a statement more than a question.

Trevor’s eyes sparked angrily. “No, damn it, I didn’t lose him. I killed him.”

“Oh.” The young man looked contrite again. Trevor tried to say something more, but he couldn’t. He squeezed his eyes shut. That didn’t help either. He saw an image of Jamie on the insides of his eyelids—the way he’d last seen him. He had been laughing. Looking back from the distance, Trevor thought, as he had thought many times over the years, that he should have known something was amiss, that it wasn’t Jamie’s ordinary fifteen-year-old laughter. That should have told him…

After a long silence, the young man said, “Would you like to talk about it?”

“No,” and then, quickly, “yes, hell yes. It’s been so many years. You’d think the poison would drain away, but it never has. It’s still as bad as it ever was.”

“I don’t believe you really killed him, not literally, anyhow—did you?” A soft, ready-to-forgive voice.

“I didn’t pull the trigger, you mean? I might as well have. If I’d paid him any attention, if I’d been the kind of father he needed…” His voice broke.

“Jamie shot himself?”

Trevor couldn’t trust his voice just yet and only nodded.

“Do you know why? Did he leave a note?”

“He didn’t leave a note, no.” He opened his eyes and looked directly into the ones regarding him so solemnly. “But I know why. He was gay. Some kids had been bullying him after school. Every day, it seemed like. He didn’t tell me, but I knew. I’d see him come in, all scruffed up—one time his lip was bleeding—and his clothes would be dirty and torn, and he’d dash to his room. I’d hear him crying in there, but I didn’t go in. He was in there with his heart breaking, and I didn’t go to him. That’s what I mean when I said I might as well have pulled the trigger. If I had gone to him…”