Touch

I miss being touched.

This hit home last Monday while I was at my regular yoga class. We were doing some twisting posture on the floor with one arm dislocated in one direction and the other one sticking up in the air as if we were asking to go "number 5."

The instructor was going from one victim to the next, gently grasping the sacrificial hand, and pulling up and back to ensure that not only the shoulder joint was separated, but that several vertebrae would join the "misaligned anonymous" club as well. My need for touch is so intense that I prayed that she would not leave me, but just keep on holding my hand.

This is so sad in so many ways. I have always been a very tactile person which some who know me might find strange because I come off as being aloof and somewhat stand-offish. The truth is that I am rather shy, which also surprises people, but it is true. Be that the case, I covet the sense of touch, touching, being touched. I need this now more than ever, but I am without it as I have not been in many, many years.

Oh, my children give me hugs from time to time, and I get the occasional hug upon saying farewell to a good friend, but the unhurried touch of a lover, the affectionate laying on of a hand by a friend, the heat of contact between thighs, arms, and shoulders when sitting next to someone is missing. I was not aware of my desperation until I almost groaned with pleasure at being semi-tortured by my yoga instructor. That would have definitely changed the mood of the class.

I don't know where I am going with this. Maybe to say that if you have someone close whom you used to touch, reach out and touch them again. We all need it and some of us don't know how badly until it is out of reach.

Choices

Well, boys and girls, the news is in, and it is not good. My cancer has come back and back with a vengeance. I saw my oncologist last Thursday and he said the CT scan from the prevous week showed a marked change over the one done a couple of months ago. The lymph nodes in my chest and abdomen have grown quite a bit, which explains the feeling of fullness I sometimes have and the difficulty in breathing - I have the sensation that I can't draw a deep enough breath.

There are other symptoms that accompany all of this that gave me plenty of warning in advance that the news would probably not be good. I was as mentally prepared for this as one can be, I believe. Still, it is not something that is easy to swallow.

I don't feel bad for myself so much. I have enjoyed quite a life. There are very few regrets and things that I would do over if I could. My sadness comes for my children who will most likely be orphans before they graduate from high school. It is hard to feel like I am leaving them at such a time so shortly after they lost their mother.

I don't want to get maudlin about this. It's not over yet. I have some choices to make. My options are not very good. I can go back to the first treatment I ever did which is also the most toxic and the one that was least effective. It will cause me to lose my hair (no great loss). It will make everything I eat or drink taste like a plate of landfill. It will put a hit on my immune system and make me feel weak and tired. It will fuck up my gastro-intestinal track from one set of lips to the other. But worst of all, it will give me gopher cheeks. True, it's our state animal (rodent), but my parochial patriotism only goes so far.

If that option doesn't appeal due to its relative easiness, I could perhaps apply for a stem-cell transplant - the marine bootcamp therapy (or is it the navy SEALS). This would be a true hail-mary effort because there is no body of evidence that displays any significant gain to undergoing a truly horrible process that produces a 25% mortality rate just from the treatment. Still, it's an option. On the plus side, I already know all the folks at the U. of M. transplant center. It would be like old home week (or weak).

Thirdly, there may be some study being done somewhere that would take someone like me who has exhausted the gamut of treatments for this particular version of Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma and who's disease is tired of playing second fiddle and has now decided to kill its host. If there is such a study, I would have to leave my children and travel to wherever it is being done for the duration. Again, with no guarantee of a positive outcome.

I could do nothing and hope that it takes me quickly. Eh, no - don't think so. It will probably be option one, the old icky treatment. I don't hold out much hope, but you never know. I feel like I owe it to my kids to give it all I can. I don't want to end up like my wife though - so depleted by disease and treatments that she was left a hollow shell wanting the release of death. I don't want to be so helpless.

I don't fear death. I fear pain. I fear becoming a invalid. I fear depending on others to perform the most basic of human functions. I fear the loss of my mentality. I don't want to end up a body who's soul or spirit is trapped inside a stubborn physical prison. Must think on this.

So, dear readers, not a very comforting story I am afraid. I know that some of you were waiting to hear, and I have laid it out as honestly as I can. I haven't told the children yet, so please keep it under your bonnets for now. Yesterday was my daughter's seventeenth birthday and I didn't want to spoil it.

P.

The Day After

I woke up this morning about 4 AM sweating. Not a good sign. Sleep was evasive after that. Too many worries running around the old noggin. This morning's sweat could be an aberration, but more likely, it is another sign that my cancer is active again. Not a surprise to me. I am expecting bad news when I see my oncologist this Thursday.

That was only one of the bogeys that danced through my head as I lay in the dark, tossing and turning. I kept replaying the previous day's group encounter when my feuding sister's-in-law who came over to participate in the first crack at cleaning out our closet of C's clothes. It went OK, I guess. I was very nervous about the whole thing for numerous reasons. This was the first time I had seen either them since the "meeting from hell" last October (masochists can find the details over on the Love Letters blog).

Considering our last meeting, this one was all sweetness and light. No one started screaming. No one started crying. We were very careful to stay on the path and not stray into the woods where the wild things were waiting. My other SIL drove down from Duluth and added a degree of stability and support that I dearly needed. It also helped that my two children both decided to stay home and participate in the project. I was very happy that they did so. Not only did they provide a moderating influence, they also found things that they wanted to keep and use for themselves as the "aunts" sorted through the compendious supply of clothing that my dear wife collected over a lifetime.

I busied myself in other ways. I decided the day before to make a large batch of chicken stock from scratch, timed to provide the maximum olfactory input as C's sisters arrived. I figured that I needed to do everything I could to influence them in a positive way and the smell of homemade chicken soup would be just the thing. So, while they picked over the detritus of my wife's wardrobe, I processed the chicken that had sacrificed itself for the sake of peace. Now, as I write this, the stock is reheating with fresh vegetables and the chicken added back in. It makes for a nice addition on this cloudy winter's day.

My son managed to lobotomize his PC yesterday as well. He had purchased two gigs of new RAM recently and installed it on Friday. The PC booted up and seemed to run fine. When he tried to turn it on yesterday morning however, he got the dreaded BSOD whenever the boot routine got to the Windoze login screen. Swapping the old memory back into the system did not change the situation. I am trying to get him to do as much with this as possible, but I suspect that I will have to get more involved - if only to keep him from stealing my new laptop whenever he gets a computer jones.

I don't know if it is the chicken soup or the anti-depressants that I started taking two weeks ago, but there have been some really nice moments in my life lately that help to offset the worries.

Last night, my daughter came into my bedroom in her new pajamas (salvaged from her mother's closet earlier that day), hopped up on my bed where I lay reading, and proceeded to stay for an hour just talking. You could have knocked me over with a feather. This the soon to be seventeen year old who usually would rather have a digit cut off with a rusty razor than spend more than a minute in the presence of her parent. It was so sweet. Maybe she was sick.

Now it is Sunday night. The soup and grilled cheese sandwiches have been eaten. My kids are off to a movie with the fourteen year (male) old bringing a "friend" (girl). He begged me to let his sister drive rather than me. "Too complicated" he said when queried. "Hmmmm," I said.

So, I get some quiet time tonight. Me and Dawg. Ta.

P.

Broken Hearts

About twenty-five years ago, give or take, I joined with some friends to form a small theater ensemble. The idea was that we would perform guerrilla theater and somehow get people to pay us big bucks in the process. Where we got such a hare-brained scheme, I’ll never know, but that was our goal. It was a very quixotic venture that never really went anywhere, but it was fun hanging out together and fantasizing about what we would do when we hit it big.

Now this little bundle of talent was formed up initially of three couples and me, the odd man out. Until just recently, I had been part of a couple, but things had gone south, and the relationship of three years was in tatters and for the first time in for ever, I was devastated. I was envious of the easy camaraderie of my fellow thespians. Then things got very, very strange.

Within a period of about two months, every relationship around me disintegrated. In our little troop, the husband in one couple ran off with the wife in another. The third couple split up over who knows what. All of my tethered friends were coming undone. It was like a miasma of misery had blown into town on an ill wind. I felt like the Typhoid Mary of Love.

All of these newly single souls started clumping together like some chemistry experiment on colloidal suspension. Misery loves company illustrated. But who wants to hang out with a bunch of depressed, heartsick people? What’s there to talk about? One more way to brutally dispatch that heartless fuck who walked out on you? It got old way fast.

So, it was with interest, that I listened to two of these forced bachelors as we walked down the frozen main street of our little town, talking over the sorry state of our cursed love lives, when we had an “animal house” experience. When life is getting you down, when all seemed to turn against you, what do you do? That’s right – partay.

As it turns out, the other two gentlemen had already talked over the basic concept, agreed upon the theme, put together an initial invitation list, selected a date, and needed only the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place before making the commitment, find someone who was dumb enough to host it. With that, a legend was born – The Valentine’s Day Memorial Broken Hearts Partay.

At that time, I was living and working (kind of) in a studio located on the top floor of an otherwise non-productive factory/warehouse. It was a large space with no pesky neighbors, right downtown, but off the beaten track. Perfect for a large blowout. So we sat down, listed off all of our romantically challenged friends, threw in a couple of local celebrities who were always looking for “slumming” opportunities to bolster their own illusions of grandeur, ordered a keg or two of beer, and were off to the races.

We all had such a good time that we did it again the next year and on a slightly larger scale. It turns out that there are a lot of people who don’t have that special someone to snuggle up to on Valentine’s Day and this was the perfect alternative. Not only was it a fun way to spend VD, but it also put you in the company of many other single skeptics of love, who just may find you interesting. More than one person disqualified themselves for the spirit of the following year’s festivities by meeting a fellow BH at the partay.

I, myself was disqualified a couple of years later, but it was such great fun that we continued to have the partay’s long after we moved to the big city. The guest list changed some, but the spirit remained. Somewhere along the line it petered out though. I think it was having children that did it. We could still pretend that we were just temporarily in love, probably going to be breaking up any minute now and therefore could plan, host, and enjoy the annual BH Partay, but when we had our first baby, we could no longer maintain the charade. We were good and truly not broken hearted any more.

Till now.

Just this morning, my soon-to-be seventeen year old daughter asked if she could have a friend over for a Broken Hearts Partay tonight. She said her friend didn’t want to be alone tonight, and even though her heart (my daughter’s) was not broken, mine was for sure and broken enough for two, so could we?

Why not, I said.

ToF (Theory of Follicicity)

I have a theory. Everyone knows that many men (and some women) lose some or all of their hair up on top as they get older. Now, prevailing opinion is that the follicles get tired, retire, and move south to bask in the sun somewhere. I don’t think that’s true.

I think that they are still there, but reversed. Just think about it. This could explain a lot of otherwise puzzling things. If for some reason, your hair follicles did the ole 180 and started growing “down,” mysteries like rampant nose hair, furry ears, and bad eyes become no brainers.

Come to think of it, you could add stupidity, deafness, and a predilection for watching football until paralyzed on the couch to the list. Why this hasn’t been discovered already is beyond me.

Imagine thousands of strands of hair growing down, through the brainpan, invading the centers of logic, pushing aside millions of functional and hard working neurons, in the primitive search for light and air. Naturally, the closest and most obvious routes are out the nose and ears. So simple.

Along the way, these marauding strands insinuate themselves between and around any organ that stands in their way, much the way simple blades of grass push their way through the strongest concrete, and over time, turn it to dust. Same thing with a man’s optic nerves, ear components and parts of the brain charged with the higher functions.

What makes the follicles turn tail and head in the other direction is still unknown. Perhaps it is the loss of testosterone. As man’s hormonal output decreases over time, perhaps areas of the brain begin to shrink, creating small pockets of vacuum that suck the strands of hair inward.

Or, it might be that the reverse is true and that some hair follicles go “rogue” and begin to feed off the pools of testosterone that permeate the male brain, sending “roots” down into the food source, consuming the host’s vital resources. No one knows for sure.

ToF

I have a theory. Everyone knows that many men (and some women) lose some or all of their hair up on top as they get older. Now, prevailing opinion is that the follicles get tired, retire, and move south to bask in the sun somewhere. I don’t think that’s true.

I think that they are still there, but reversed. Just think about it. This could explain a lot of otherwise puzzling things. If for some reason, your hair follicles did the ole 180 and started growing “down,” mysteries like rampant nose hair, furry ears, and bad eyes become no brainers.

Come to think of it, you could add stupidity, deafness, and a predilection for watching football until paralyzed on the couch to the list. Why this hasn’t been discovered already is beyond me.

Imagine thousands of strands of hair growing down, through the brainpan, invading the centers of logic, pushing aside millions of functional and hard working neurons, in the primitive search for light and air. Naturally, the closest and most obvious routes are out the nose and ears. So simple.

Along the way, these marauding strands insinuate themselves between and around any organ that stands in their way, much the way simple blades of grass push their way through the strongest concrete, and over time, turn it to dust. Same thing with a man’s optic nerves, ear components and parts of the brain charged with the higher functions.

What makes the follicles turn tail and head in the other direction is still unknown. Perhaps it is the loss of testosterone. As man’s hormonal output decreases over time, perhaps areas of the brain begin to shrink, creating small pockets of vacuum that suck the strands of hair inward.

Or, it might be that the reverse is true and that some hair follicles go “rogue” and begin to feed off the pools of testosterone that permeate the male brain, sending “roots” down into the food source, consuming the host’s vital resources. No one knows for sure.

Notes from a New Machine

I have not posted in a while because I have been trying to deal with the ups and downs of my emotional landscape and just as if I had been traveling on foot over such hilly terrain carrying a heavy load, I find myself exhausted and unable to raise the energy to write.

Now, before you get all worried, let me say that I do feel that this is a pretty normal situation to be in given all that has transpired over the last year. I am paying attention to it and am making use of professional resources to help me find my way forward. I also want to let you know how much I appreciate the calls, the cards, the emails, and the comments that you have sent my way. It is very humbling to find oneself the recipient of such attention. Thank you all.

When I wrote the last post, I was feeling overwhelmed by all of the issues in front of me. It was like an alignment of the planets that happens every once in a while. Normally, I am mostly concerned with one or two things that I have to focus on or try to learn a new skill in order to manage the task. But occasionally, the whole line-up empties out of the dugout and converges on me at once and I fall prey to dark thoughts.

I don’t think that life has gotten any harder, it is just that my emotional immune system has weakened and I am more susceptible to illness. Part of me understands this and knows that it will not always be this way, I will recover to some degree and feel robust enough to rejoin the mainstream. I will never be as I was, but that is also part of life. Life’s events change us. We grow. We sometimes get wounded. Some recover. Some do not. Eventually, we all have some scars and reminders of things encountered along the road. In my case, my path has taken me into a strange, dangerous, and dark land that I am not familiar with. There are demons and dragons that must be overcome for going back is not an option.

Lest I paint a picture that appears all dark and muted colors in your eyes, let me assure you that it is not so bleak. There are many instances of sunbeams and beautiful flowers along the way as well. You are all part of that “lightness” that finds me unexpectedly. My children continue to amaze me with their resiliency and increasing responsibility. What a marvel it is to watch someone grow.

Another reason I have not written in a bit is because we took a trip to visit family up north last weekend. J and I went, but K stayed home alone because she had to work. That was a first for us. I have to admit that I find it difficult sometimes to accept the fact that my children are growing and need to have space in their lives to make decisions on their own and live with the consequences. I don’t know who I worry more for – them or me. Still, K had her first experience with being home alone and to all appearances, did fine.

J and I spent a very cold weekend in Duluth where the air temps got down into the mid-twenties BELOW zero (F) with wind-chill factors easily twice as low. Overall though, it was a nice visit.

I needed to go see my father who recently entered an assisted care facility. This was a visit I was not looking forward to. It is very hard for me to see the man my father has become. This is a subject for another post. Let me just say that I am glad that I saw him and he saw me. We visited for a while before he fell asleep in his chair. I left him there, in whatever land he now resides, to go back out into the bitter and biting cold of my world.

Another reason for procrastination on posting is the arrival of a new electronic treat. I finally bought a laptop and after nearly twenty-five years of PC based computers, I bought a Mac. In part to learn a new system - in part to please my son who had been relentlessly hounding me to buy one. I must say it is a beautiful machine that enchants the eye in every way. It is like getting into a wonderfully designed exotic sports car after driving Ford’s and Chevy’s (not to disparage either marque – I have driven my share of both and have great respect for them), where the glove leather of the upholstery wraps around you in a sensual embrace, the wheel and the shift lever fall exactly in the right way in your hands, and the performance leaves you breathless.

I would have used it sooner to craft this little piece, but I couldn’t peel my son off of it. I set up a small table in my bedroom where it normally resides now, and I have found an unexpected benefit in that I am suddenly seeing much more of him. Whereas he used to come home from school and disappear into his room, coming out only for food or a random TV show, he now camps out in my bedroom, begging time on the new laptop, and occasionally convincing me he just has to take it down to his room to do his homework. Ah, life in the new age.

Well, I will leave you with that. Today, I make bread. Tomorrow is cleaning day and also preparing to host my brother for a night or two before he flies back to Manhattan. I will try to post more frequently (I know, I’ve said that before).