MJ doesn't live hear anymore

I have gone down a dark hole. It definitely isn’t Alice’s. This has made my brain synapses blast to next is “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” A great little movie from 1974, starring the fabulous Ellen Burstyn -- a down on her luck single mom trying to get back on her feet as a night club singer.I can't help but think of Ellen's other great role. Sara Goldfarb in "Requiem for a Dream." I feel like I'm Sara in her hell, but I must focus.

This hole has closed behind me with a resounding boom. I can see some faint light ahead. I mean WAAAAAAY ahead. It is just a speck of light that is wavering. Much like the light of a flickering candle. I am almost afraid to move or breathe, for fear the light will be extinguished.

Once I am sure of my footing, I begin to see that I am surrounded by a darkness that envelopes me like a warm blanket. I suddenly realize I am so exhausted. Just ridiculously tired that I just want to lie down on the cold hard ground and go to sleep for about a 100 Van Winkle years.

But I don’t. I put one foot in front of the other and trudge forward. Like I always have. I think Alice would be proud.

As I march on, I realize the light never really gets any closer, but I quit focusing on it. What is really running through my head is how angry I am. And the further I walk, the angrier I get. I suddenly hear a loud noise. It is the most mournful, grief-stricken moans. My footsteps have ceased.  I am wringing wet with sweat.

The sounds were my screams. They were my moans. Moans of anger and of sorrow. Cries of regret.  I drop to my knees and pound my fists to the ground. Those brain synapses are firing again to a long ago bible verse from childhood. My six-year old self sitting in the pew doodling on the bulletin barely paying attention to the pastor until he read verse from Job. Job is Old Testament. Old Testament, I would soon learn, is hard core.  And God, is also hard core. The pastor reads, “And my gnawing pains take no rest. By great force my garment is disfigured; he has cast me into the mire.” Job 30:17-19.

My pencil dropped to my lap. I had never heard such awful words. Why would God, whom I had always thought was so loving, torture anyone? My silly innocent, naïve self. I would soon grow older and learn of other things such as the New Testament. It was really a good preparation for life. Girding me for heartbreaks of the real word. There would the verse from Matthew 13:42. “and they will be cast into the furnace of fire. There will be gnashing of teeth.”

As I was on my knees, I cursed everything I had ever believed in. God, love, prayer, faith, doctors, medicine, vitamins, exercise, rest, education. One thing I knew for sure, nothing had worked for me. Everything I had believed in and trusted all my life had failed me. When you get cancer, it all goes to hell.

I was so positive throughout my diagnosis, through all the surgeries, all the horrible, awful treatments, all the hospital stays, the dreadful emergency room visits, the procedures, the incompetent office staff, the condescending nurses talking to me like I was a child, the goofy  idiotic oncologist who I would never refer anyone to go. The 36 agonizing, horrible days of radiation that would blister the inside and outside of my neck and mouth. The treatment to kill those cancer cells would make me lose me taste for who knows how long now. Maybe Christmas? I am getting my nutrition from a feeding tube that extends from my ever shrinking belly. And when I can stop using it for two weeks, the doctor says with enthusiasm, I can go to his office, lay on the table with no anesthesia, and he just yanks it out!

“Easy,” says he.

“Holy Crap!” I say.

This just keeps getting better and better. Til it doesn’t.
And then it is over. All done. I get to ring a little bell. They give me a certificate that I completed radiation treatment and chemotherapy. They clap for me.
I look at them like they are sadists. What the fuck are they clapping for? I have been hospitalized twice for extreme fever and uncontrollable nauseas due to side effects. But I still have to continue the treatments. And then they want to throw a party. No freaking thank you.

I want to leave and never return. I go back to my surgeon and tell him so.
“I am choosing my next oncologists. Those you picked were idiots.” I say in a loud voice.

He agrees. I am too weak for him to perform the ultrasound on my thyroid. I hope to hell there is no cancer there. I may just cut it out my own damn self. I have lost all faith in doctors and modern medicine at this point.

When I lost my mother to cancer I was 32 years old. She was 67. I have never gotten over her loss. I cry every day for her.  The anger and sadness of her loss festers in me but I manage to keep it tampered down pretty well. The cloud of cancer has always loomed over me since her death.
And then in 1998, I was given the diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis. That afternoon driving back from the neurologist’s office I remember clearly thinking  maybe I would get a reprieve from cancer. My silly innocent naïve self thought things worked that way.

Wow. If I was just six-years old again. If I had just never let myself grow up. Maybe that is why I want to be young at heart. It is a coping mechanism from the shitstorm that has always been my life.

So now, at age 55, I am faced with the fact that life is difficult and messy and breaks your heart and takes you places you don’t want to go.
But you have to go there. You have to go through the darkness. You have to persevere. Even as I write this, my hands are shaking and my jaw is killing me.  This is my life at the moment. Will it be this way tomorrow? Maybe. Next month? I have no clue.

Yesterday I exploded at the love of my life. He stood and took it. I unleashed a torrent of expletives and hateful words that he didn’t deserve. I have so much anger that I no longer know what to do with it.

I got through all the crap that comes with cancer. Now that is left is anger. A black, seething, all-consuming, uncontrollable rage that I am beginning to like.
Maybe I’ll let it inhabit me awhile. I will try and harness it’s power to good. Or maybe I will try and ride it out until it passes.
I am not a patient person. I want me back. I am afraid I will have to find a new me again.

I did it before, when I got the MS diagnosis. My doctor said my body was telling me to change my life.

Well, damn. It’s that time again.