5/8ths is better than half.

Getting unplugged is always something I look forward to. Finally that stupid pest of a pump is someone else’s problem and I no longer have to worry about the hose getting caught up and yanked from my port. Finally I can start to flush out the poison. Finally the pain and discomfort can start to clear up.

Four days of constipation followed by a couple of normality and then finally a storm of diarrhea. Still it beats the last time I visited Portland and got food poisoning. That was a fun trip. Except for that first day in Portland. And the week or so of cramps and shits.

You know what I fucking loved about Portland? Powell’s books. A book store that takes up a full block. And it was packed on a rainy Sunday. For that Portland, I will forgive you for all the conversations I had to endure with strangers.

Maybe it will help that my dosage has been cut by about a fifth. I’m not really noticing much of a difference in my daily symptoms. Moderately cold things still hurt to the touch. And let me better define cold. I don’t mean the depth of an arctic winter level of cold, where your hands would freeze, blacken and drop off. I mean this thing came out of the fridge, normally I could handle it for hours with not a jolt of pain – now my hands and throat are stinging.

Hey, that room temperature water that is so blandly tepid? That is going to make your throat feel like it is seizing up. And you better let that yogurt sit out for a while before eating it. This week, amongst others, I was set across from a Vietnam vet. We didn’t interact, but you get to overhear things about other people’s experiences regardless. I’m bitching about discomfort when it comes to the cold, but he had the total package, fatigue mixed with loss of appetite.

Hard to complain about my stomach pains as he fights a bigger fight. I am relieved that my path isn’t that much more difficult. I don’t know how much willpower I possess to force myself to eat when I really am not feeling up to it – not if our positions were switched.

I had a conversation in my off week with a fellow partaker of the chemo drugs. We swapped symptoms before my nurse returned and passed on the platelet counts. Or, if it doesn’t fade, this could be my life from here on out. Forgot to ask if his eyes really hurt when he sneezes, but on the whole we had a venn diagram of shitty experiences to compare and contrast. I could be facing two years of sensitivity to the cold. Two years before it might fade.

Permanent nerve damage indeed.

We had storms over the weekend. Storms and hot weather. Hot and humid weather. The kind of weather that made me happy that my roommate had plans that meant not being in the apartment, leaving me free to lie about in front of a fan in me undies. Yeah, that is almost a brand endorsement.

The miasma of weather did a fine job of robbing me of what little sleep I managed to claim. Friday night, fifteen minutes after falling asleep I awoke to discover that heart racing against the incoming storm. Adrenaline rush. But it did manage to get me up in order to close the windows.

Get me up and then keep me up. That is the worst. Not being able to get back to sleep. Come Monday I am usually exhausted. I don’t feel physically fatigued. Maybe a little less stamina than before. But for the weekend of and a few days after chemo, I’m nearly dead to the world as my brain fogs up.

Did we have plans on sunday? A true pity for I shall be sitting about listlessly whilst napping.

I’ve finally shaved my head. I had grown tired of it looking like our national forests after the Republicans auctioned off all the timber rights at a bargain price. Looking at myself in the mirror at work, where I have “better” lighting, was just depressing. Vainly attempting to keep something from slipping through your fingers seemed a mite pathetic to me.

This is the first time in my four decades of existence that I have ever had my hair this short. Now I look like a cut-rate Lex Luthor. Though I am slowly getting used to the sight. Maybe this year I’ll dress up as Henry Rollins for Halloween. Though I’m going to need to do a lot more push-ups to get something like his physique.

How am I? I’ve had better years.

But I find that I’ve had worse years. But Epicurus said that even in the depths of illness, pleasure outweighed the pain. I find this to be true, but I do have manflu cancer and chemo.

No, I’ve had a couple worse years. The second to the contender being a few years back when the company I worked for expanded drastically, while refusing to take on more help. I spent so many 12+ hour days working open to close to help keep up. And failing. I made six grand in overtime that year as my days were: get up shower and then eat, go to work, and then come home eat and go to bed.

Taint much of a life. But I did manage to make a dent in my student loans.

I spent a year being angry at our management for not doing something to rectify the situation, Why would they ignore that problem? Sometimes it still pisses me off. It is in my nature. But I have learned to quickly let it go. It doesn’t mean anything.

The worst year of my life came after I graduated college. Not that first 12 months, but the twelve following. The first year after graduation I spent most of my days writing. I would go to bed in the morning excited for the coming day, and then get up excited to get back to work. It. Was. Awesome. After I got my morning’s writing done, I would usually go for a walk. Summer or winter, the same. Then come home and write some more.

I was going to be a professional millionaire novelist.

Except that never happened. I put in the hundreds of hours of work to create this thing. And nothing ever came of it. One of the two biggest disappointments of my life, one that I’ve whined about more than once here. And will probably bitch about again.

After that grand year of hope, I ran straight into the wall of nope. I moved away from the city that I had lived in all through college. I found myself in a place that I didn’t in the least care for. Do you want to publish my novel? No. Do you want to publish my novel? No. Slowly that dream was just wrenched out of my hands as I realized I was never going to be able to afford to write full time. There was no escape.

I got a job making a cut above minimum wage for a pharmacy with a high turn-over rate. Seriously it was around 20% at the height of the fucking depression. I spent my days taking boxes out of boxes, putting stickers on them. Taking those stickers off of the boxes, and applying new ones, putting them into other boxes and then putting different stickers on the other boxes. I worked in shipping. The job was absurd and boring and pointless. It ate at me. I was making just enough to survive as my student loans crushed my soul.

They say to take what you want and pay for it. It took me ten years to pay for college. It may have been worth it.

I became the head of my department. Not through skill but more by winning through default. Al that meant was I got $0.32 more an hour and bitched out by management that ignored me when I made requests to make the job easier.

I was depressed. A lot. And fell back on my drug of choice, MST3k. That always made me feel good again.

Hail the crew of the Satellite of Love.