Tags

, , , , , ,

In My Head: O Where, O where can my little cat be…?

In the Cup: Coffee with almond milk splashed into it

Currently Playing: The Breaking Dawn soundtrack. I’m very strangely obsessed with it all of a sudden.

Daily Run: 3 miles

On the Desk: The Mighty Knights; synopsis for The Power and the Glory

On the Nightstand: My “Fiddler on the Roof” script

Papers Graded: 8

Yesterday morning as I was leaving the house, it occurred to me that I had not seen one of our cats in a day or two. I asked my DH, and he answered with some surprise that no, he hadn’t seen her, either. A brief forage about that featured mainly the opening of various closet and cabinet doors turned up nothing; finally, we determined she must just be sleeping somewhere. This is a cat who has never been outside before – except in her carrier for trips to the vet, after all. She could actually be allergic to the out-of-doors. Obviously, she has to be in the house somewhere, right?

But then again, it’s possible she did slip outside at some point last weekend, when the weather was gorgeous and the girls were in and out all day long and the back door was open for long periods of time throughout the course of the day.

At any rate -  as of this morning, I still haven’t seen her. And now, I’m a bit worried. Granted, this is our resident terrorist – “Kiki the Other-Kitty-Killer” – but still, we don’t want her to be gone forever. Just a little nicer to the others. So – where, O where, can my kitty cat be, with four inches of snow on the ground? I just hope she is OK.

In other news around the house, DH up all last night not feeling well and I heard him yakking, and I am STILL trying to get over the bug from last week – so this could be a fun couple of days here at Casa Chaos as we fight over who gets to be the doctor and who gets to be the patient….

In writing news, I’m still struggling to get through the final chapter of Mighty Knights and feeling fraudulent. I am sure this is going to pass eventually and I’ll be hard at it again. Yesterday I got caught up working on the synopsis for The Power and the Glory again – I think you are going to love this project, if I ever find time to work on it. I also got the suggested revisions back on my Teaching Tolkien article for MLA, and I looked with great guilt at the binder full of Female Biography Project materials – so I’m definitely not hurting for things to do, just time and energy with which to get them done. I have to finish grading papers first. Everything will be fine in a week. Or, it would be if it weren’t for the damned meds.

OK, warning – you do NOT want to read this next part. I promised all the way at the beginning of this strange and terrible cancer journey of mine that I was going to be 100% honest and give you the real deal, good bad and ugly. I’ve done my utmost to stay positive and give you the good and the upbeat, but today is a dark day and the following is going to reflect that, and I KNOW this is temporary, I know it, but at the same time it is frighteningly permanent and immediate and real for me, so hang in there if you insist on reading it despite that I told you not to, and remember that i am thankfully NOT a suicidal person. And that I warned you not to read this. Twice. Three times, now.

Nope – this whole Tamoxifen schtick isn’t getting any better. In fact, I think I’ve already gained five pounds eating my weight in chocolate every night, and this morning I feel bloated and old. Technically, I know that I am not bloated and old. I am thirty-seven. I might be bloated, but I haven’t even properly approached middle age. Still, between the fact I’ve got a birthday around the corner, and the wrinkles and bags under my eyes right now from the insomnia that led to my staying up all night eating the chocolate that’s now leading to the bloated old feeling, and that I haven’t had the time or energy to stick to my running schedule for the past two weeks, I am feeling less-than-glowing.

After biopsies, surgeries, chemo, and radiation – taking this little white pill once a day for the next five years is what is going to do me in???!

I apologize for wallowing. But this is really terrible stuff. How do people live through medications like this without losing themselves? I can feel my personality slipping away incrementally. I can feel my energy draining out of me. And if I keep eating an entire container of Trader Joe’s dark chocolate peanut butter cups every week, I can totally kiss being a thin and miserable person goodbye. There has to be a line drawn somewhere, right?

If only life would go on “pause” and give me a chance to catch my breath. I look back at the past couple of years and it’s just one thing after another – my Daddy died in 2009. I graduated from the MA program. Then, it was two years of stressing over applications and failures and reapplications to get into a PhD program. Then, our dogs all died and vanished in the space of six months. Then, our furnace blew out. Then, our daughter broke her arm. Then, I got cancer and had two surgeries, three biopsies, fifty thousand mammograms (OK, that was an exaggeration, but it FELT like fifty thousand of them) and four rounds of chemo and 35 radiations, EVERY DAY, an hour’s drive before I ever even got to work in the morning. It’s been a never-ending shit cycle – and every time I turn around, somebody is asking me for another favor, or to do something, or to be in charge of something. And the house is a disaster. And OK, yes, technically, I get a week off every nine weeks and two weeks off at Christmas, but that’s NOT time off when you are being treated for cancer and driving to three places an hour from where you live every other day for those treatments, and are also a mother and a wife, and definitely not when you are a teacher with six classes to prepare for the upcoming term and are trying desperately to hang on to the activities you love that have defined who you are as a person despite it all. And still, I have worked full time, teaching six courses a term, 5 terms a year, throughout the whole thing. And the real bitch of that is – we’re in worse debt now than we were four years ago. I mean – what is the freaking point of any of this?

I just want to crawl into bed and cry and wallow and feel sorry for myself, and then have someone wave a magic wand and say “OK, you know what? You need a break. Take a few weeks off and just get back to center.”

And there’s no way that is going to happen.

I am totally overwhelmed. I  am totally in over my head. I am drowning. I am absolutely drowning.

Here’s the part where, if I had suicidal tendencies, they would be cropping up with a vengeance. I don’t (at last not yet) but I can completely see why people just decide to drop everything and die. It’s because that’s the only way they can get off the fucking wheel.

Every morning, I wake up, I make the lunches, I make the coffee, I sit at this desk, I check my emails, I try to write something, I try to come up with something for this blog, and the entire time, I am wondering how I am going to get through this day. And every morning, I’m terrified I won’t. And then I go to work and I try to plow through the day grading papers, giving critical feedback, leading lectures and classes, dealing with my students and their myriad anxieties and concerns and needs and wants, dealing with my coworkers and everyone’s attitudes and problems both good and positive and bad and negative in nature. And then I come home and I’ve got something else to do, this or that paperwork, this-or-that errands, this or that whatever-the-thing-is-tonight. And I push through it, and I try to stay upbeat and positive because I chose this life. And yet, one by one, all of the things that bring me joy and make things worthwhile, seem to do that less. It’s all just a chore. It’s all just work. It’s all just shit I have to do because there’s no one else to do it. Even the things I love to do, my writing, theater, painting, even the people I love, my family, my students, my friends – all just things that are eating away at me and making everything harder and harder.

And now, on top of everything else, I’ve apparently lost another pet. So I can pile that much more guilt on my plate for dropping yet another ball on yet another responsibility I can’t seem to be responsible for these days, because I am useless, because I’m too overwhelmed even to get out of bed. But I do it anyway, and I smile and laugh and joke through the day, and I feel completely numb about being fine because it’s a lie but it’s a lie I have to tell, because I don’t have any other choice in the matter except to die, and that’s not a choice.

And my husband is too busy running two newspapers and trying to parent our children on the weekends while I try in vain to figure this all out and eat chocolate and bitch and moan about everything, to be able to really help me through this. And frankly, he probably could use some time off, too, since he doesn’t get home until after 8 p.m. most nights, so I get home from work and pick up the girls and get their dinner and drag them off to whatever meeting I have to attend until he can show up in the middle of it to pick them up on his way home from work. When he gets home and gets on the computer and does more work until some godsawful hour of the night. Usually right around when I wake up to get started on another endless day in this endless cycle.

And I tried to dump some of my responsibilities when I started realizing this was going rapidly downhill to dark places – but no one will take them from me. The emails go unanswered; everyone’s got a reason why s/he can’t help out, why s/he can’t do it. And anyway, it’s just one little thing(every time), surely I can handle it? FINE. I can HANDLE IT. Who needs you? Who needs help? I’m the fucking Energizer Bunny! No wonder I feel the way I feel these days about the things and the people I love. They’re NOT LOVING ME BACK.

I have a real problem asking for help. As in, I don’t do it. EVER. I am a firm believer in, “I took it on, I will handle it.” i am the suck-it-up and suffer-in-silence type par excellence until I get to an absolute breaking point – just ask my mother, who has actually yelled at me from time to time about this tendency of mine not to share the pain around a little. So, it is a really big fucking deal when I say I NEED HELP. Or, at least, I think it is. And so when I do, and no relief arrives on the scene, that’s a total stab in the back for me. Where is the damned pause button already?!

I feel like everyone just expects me to keep on, keeping on, like nothing ever happened, like I am not still dealing with cancer, like I was never dealing with cancer at all. Maybe because I made it all look too easy. Maybe because in the grand scheme of things I don’t really have it so bad. Maybe because I should just suck it up and shoulder my part and shut up about it – it’s just cancer – what, one out of eight women get it in their lifetime, right? And only about half of those end up dying from it – no big fucking deal. Or, maybe they just really don’t care as long as they don’t have to be inconvenienced. Whatever it is – maybe the reason I’m all obsessed with vampires again all of a sudden is because I feel like I’m being sucked dry by this Thing Called Life and all of the people and things in it. It’s probably a fucking metaphor.

So, I’M FINE. It’s ALL FINE. EVERYTHING IS FINE. It’s not, but it is, because it has to be. I’m fine. See? I’m smiling, even. I’m cracking jokes. Everything is just FINE.

And there’s no freaking pause button! I just need a damned pause button.

See? I told you I hate Tamoxifen.

Then again, maybe the Tamoxifen is just un-inhibiting my usual censors and letting me be totally honest and open about all of this. All I know, is, “this ain’t me, Babe” – and yet, strangely and sorrowfully, it very much is. I violently and passionately DON’T CARE. And at the same time, I violently and passionately care so much that it’s crippling. I miss my bliss. I’d like it back. Just one day of

OmigoshIcan’tbelievehowawesomeeverythingnisandIhavethebestidea
forastoryandletmesitrightdownandstart
writingandhugsandkissesallaroundforeveryoneisn’titagloriousday!!!!

That, used to be my normal. And now?

I have no idea how to get through the day. That’s my new normal.