Structural Deficiencies

If I could put on my crybaby hat for a moment (or, rather, acknowledge that I constantly wear said hat and rarely remove it), I'd like to confess to you, Gentle Reader, that the most frustrating part of belching up this word slurry for the last couple of years is that try as I might I cannot avoid

including bad or otherwise doom-y and depressing news or details. So please know this:

Behold me!

We have good days here. A truly surprising number of them (and no one is more surprised than we are). So rest assured that things here are not so unrelentingly dark and terrible but the facts undergirding our day-to-day, well, those fuckers are. They are the increasingly fractured bedrock upon which the foundation of our lives is built and every so often we feel the house unexpectedly shift beneath our feet or get burned when the tap gushes flame instead of water. (Please Note: If you are in the market for a tortured metaphor, let me know. Clearly, I have more than I need).

For instance, most nights shortly after dinner Karen will retire to our bedroom to swallow more than a dozen pills and to smoke up some of the Berkeley Patients Care Collective's finest dank ass weed. Because I am fundamentally incapable of staying put for any period of time, I pace around the room, walking a large U down my side, across the foot of the bed, up Karen's and then back again. Over and over and over again, monologuing like Syndrome in The Incredibles because Karen is generally too tired to talk all that much by this time of the day. But for some clearly insane reason she does not merely acquiesce to listening to me babble on about the crafting systems in Dragon Age: Inquisition or my too frequent and (wholly(probably)) unfounded panics that I'm going to be fired (the transition to sole breadwinner has, to be kind about it, been rocky for a certain family member that shall not be singled out except to say that it is me) but actually encourages me to talk. For me, this is generally the highlight of my day although I wish Karen had the energy to spew out just as much verbal garbage back at me as I

Did someone say "Manifesto"?!

cough up on her because the lopsided nature of these "conversations" at times leaves me feeling as if I've taken her hostage and am haranguing her with my manifesto. I take some measure of reassurance in that she insists that she enjoys this time as much as I do. So these moments, these muted humdrum routine everyday nothing remarkables, these are the good times and they happen just about every day.

And then. Well, then there is all the peripheral and unavoidable garbage that stubbornly insists on casting an impressive Valley of Death shadow for us to walk in. Like how this new chemo treatment has finally taken all of Karen's hair. Or how, during one of these evening conversations, Karen shared that where before she felt sick--well and truly and terribly deeply awfully sick--it is only now, within the last few weeks, that she feels as if she is actually dying. That the energy she lacks signals not debilitation cruelly wrought from her treatment but the steady erosion of her being, as if the world were slowly and methodically erasing her. That black pearl of unwanted insight can sour an evening, let me tell you.

And there's Christmas which, like the rest of our holidays this year, was awesome and no mean feat considering Karen had her second chemo treatment two days prior. We had a great Christmas Day, teed up by a lovely Christmas Eve dinner attended by my uncle and capped off by the whole family sitting down and watching Elf. We really hadn't seen this movie since we had seen it the first time, in a theatre some 10 years ago, and everyone clearly enjoyed it. It really could not have been any better. And yet I found myself choking up well before the movie's factory settings intended me to. In the words of Gandhi, "WTF?"

I can't come up with a clever way to explain, so here's an inarticulate attempt. It was so clear that this was our final Christmas as a four person family. Barring a miracle (and I think we've used up our share at this point) Karen won't be here for this next year. I know this because the night before I held her while she cried about never having Christmas with me or her kids again. I know this because Dash will be leaving home to live in Brooklyn on December 31 and who knows when he'll come back to visit. The fact that we were enjoying an evening without any rancor or casual sniping or any other of the usual American family dysfunction only made things, ironically, worse. The movie's setting didn't do me any favors either. That NYC locale only reminded me of the start of Karen and my life together. And when I saw the city in that movie I was gripped by a sense of things ending, of circles closing (abetted, no doubt, by the ending of Dash's tenure in our home). So once again: good times, bad times, you get the picture. I'd be a lot more content if I could just be happy or just be miserable one at a time and not both simultaneously the way I seem to be trending. 

Tonight, Dash will be having some friends over for some sort of Bon Voyage party. In three days he'll take his new winter coat and his old clothes to Brooklyn to start his new life, moving into his new apartment around 2PM on January 1. I'm going with him, but I'm only staying until the 3rd. That will get me home in time to be available for work if necessary and to squeeze as many pacing-around-the-bed-hostage-situations as possible out of 2015.

Behold Plan D

Once upon a time  a trip to the ER would be the most remarkable part of my day but these days, not so much. So consider that whole "things change" saying as validated.

But before the ER, there was Thanksgiving. We had 12 other people join us for a hefty party of 16. Miranda and I did the cooking, we were blissfully free of political discussions, and I believe everyone had a great time. After the noro-virus fiasco of last year, it was especially nice to pull off a major holiday without any sort of medical drama. There's a lot of pressure for holidays to go smoothly these days so it was particularly gratifying to have Thanksgiving be so enjoyable.

If there was a dark side to Thanksgiving (and it really wasn't because we know about real dark sides) it was that Karen was enduring sustained and increasingly painful headaches. Just about a year ago this time unrelenting headaches heralded the arrival of the cancer's spread to Karen's brain. Throw in some forgetfulness and reaching for the occasional word and it was worrying. So Karen headed to the ER to check it out. A CT scan revealed nothing. So we chalked up the headaches to cancer in general, the forgetfulness to cancer in general and the Chem 4 weed, and that was that. Karen has a brain MRI scheduled for later this month, so anything the CT might have missed will be caught then.

The Maui Mauler, Kimo Sweet!

So that was Monday. On Tuesday, Karen returned to the chemo suite for her new Cyramza and Taxocrete treatment. I pause to note here that every time I say "chemo suite" aloud it sounds more like the name of a Hawaiian wrestler than a place. The infusion went fine with none of the abdominal pain that preceded Karen's colitis the last time around. She basically just slept through the whole thing while I wrapped up a document for work. After three hours we left.

And she felt pretty well. In the immediate aftermath of treatment, she was tired but after a nap she was up and about with good energy. That carried all the way through the next day. And it wasn't all that shocking, insofar that, excepting the headaches, Karen has been feeling great ever since she stopped the Zykadia. It's ironic that when Karen is medically at her sickest these days, she is at her best. When her body is healthier from treatment, the side effects sap all her strength. We were encouraged and thinking that maybe this mixture wouldn't be so bad and then Thursday came. And then Friday and Saturday and now we're thinking, nope, we got that wrong.

I have to point out that Karen is doing better than with chemo the last time around. She's not vomiting and is barely and rarely nauseated. Her stomach is doing much better than with the Zykadia. But this new stuff, it absolutely ransacks her energy reserves and leaves her languishing in bed most of the day. She gets a little breakfast, joins us part of dinner, and that's about it. She has also been in the grip of crushing body pain. Thankfully, that seems to have lightened up some today but she is still needing to use all her painkillers and plenty of marijuana to manage it.

Now we wait and hope that this eases up at some point and buys her at least some good time in between the treatments.