Gobsmacked

okay, in this post, I will demonstrate for any and all of my readers that I am, in fact, a bit of a sloe learner.
slough.
sloww.
slow.

See, I have to tell you that I am now at the point where I find myself kind of wrestling some element of disbelief, some lingering doubt, some feeling that maybe I just had this terrible dream for a big chunk of last year and look at me now, all rested and refreshed and handsomely hirsute.
Sometimes, and always at the oddest times, I find myself stopped dead in my tracks while I try to make sense of the sentence, “Holy crap! I had/have cancer.”
See, I am so not good with all this that I don’t even know what tense to use for that sentence.

You see, I have had a pretty solid political understanding of AIDS since my friends started dying in the eighties.
And I know a bunch about the horrors of Hep C, because so many people I know have it and have to deal with all the crap that comes with it.
I have spent some time in the ringside seats watching those I love battle some big nasties.
And I have certainly had friends and loved ones deal with cancer, don’t get me wrong.
I just never, ever though I would be someone who dealt with cancer.
When it came to my time to step into the ring, I never saw myself, in the black silk trunks, going up against cancer.
Yes, even though I smoked for all those years.
Never mind that.
I just never saw myself that way.
So imagine how odd it was for me to get a type of cancer that, according to Dr. On-call-ogist, isn’t effected one way or the other by smoking.

I complain a lot lately about how I feel like I can’t keep up and how I am still trying to rebuild my life and I wish people would understand that.
Here’s my dirty confession.
I am not so good with remembering that detail myself.
I really want my old life back.
And if I can’t have most of that old life back, I’d like to fast track out of this time of reconstruction and re-figuring everything out again.

I would like to know how one mentions the events of the year 2004 without bringing any conversation to an awkward and grinding halt and creating a situation where I get treated, errr, differently.

I would like to have enough time in my life to make sense of last year, repair the carnage that exists in many little pockets of my life from last year, and think about my future and start getting on with it.

I would like to have enough time to have a thorough and comprehensive break-down about all the shit that happened to me and mine in 2004.
2004, really not my favorite year.
Not by a long shot.

I would like to just feel solid again.
And I would like to someway, somehow, make it up to my girlfriend.
I don’t even know where to begin.

That’s what I would like.

I guess the first step in accomplishing all that is to realize the totality of what I went through.
Sometimes I feel like I can only peek at the events of last year for a few moments at a time, otherwise it’s just too freaky and overwhelming.
So, every so often, I pry the lid off my box of terrors and watch my demons spin around the room and I wrestle them and sometimes I win.
There are a lot of demons in that box.

I think this is going to take a while.