Something Evil This Way Comes

So, a friend of mine died of ovarian cancer on Friday morning. Unlike other folks who I sorta know who have died of OVCA in the last couple of years, she is someone I knew in the flesh and knew before her diagnosis.

Marianna got diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer about a year ago. I remember pretty clearly because I was having a crap-tastic weekend. I had just been told my dad has lung cancer, and I had a major appointment of my own at the High Risk Clinic, and in the midst of all that, a couple of friends took me out for dinner, to offer some morbid support. While we were having burritos, one of my friends’ cell phone rang, saying that Marianna was in the emergency department, with her girlfriend. On the way back from dinner, we stopped in to check on Marianna.

She said that the surgeons had drained a litre and a half of fluid from her lungs. She said they were talking about the possibility that it was cancer but, as she said, she wasn’t willing to believe that right off the bat.
I remember thinking, “You hold on to that thought as long as you can, sister.”

Marianna did chemo right up till about three weeks ago.
Along the way, people I know would say that she was dying.
I, as a cancer survivor, have a particular issue with regular folks deciding how much time a cancer patient has left on the clock. But suffice to say that Marianna has been proving folks wrong for at least the last six months.

And on Friday, she died.

I saw her on Monday night. She had been unconscious and, out of the blue, came to on Monday and spent the day on her porch, enjoying herself. By the time I got there, she had slipped back into sleep. But I sat there with her. It was nice. The house was warm like an orchid hothouse, but her bedroom window was open and it was a summer rain happening outside and a nice breeze and the sound of rain falling, and I was happy for her that she got to be in her home.

I had planned to go back on Thursday, but I got the mother of all colds and couldn’t go with all my germs.
And I knew that might mean I just wouldn’t see her again before she died. But then again, I thought, people have been burying Marianna for the last 6 months.

On Friday morning, a friend called to tell me she had died earlier that morning. I hope it was as peaceful as can be.

And now, my head is a jumble of emotions, few of which make sense in any linear fashion.

And tomorrow, I will go to a fund raising walk for Ovarian Cancer Canada.
Last year, after the walk, everyone on the team went to visit Marianna at the Cancer Agency, because she was still in the hospital.
Her fight was intense, and, while it seems to have been so much longer, began and ended in a year.

So, R.I.P., Marianna.

You were so much tougher than me.

So, it’s been a very carcinogenic time lately.

How to explain.

My dad was re-admitted to the hospital for lung cancer/COPD/pneumonia.
That situation remains up in the air.

A friend, who was diagnosed with OVCA last summer, has been given a bed at the local cancer agency while she argues with them about whether or not she is palliative. It is her ferocious intent that she will go home and visit with her cats and work on her garden.
It strikes me that there are people who have, understandably I guess, taken that diagnosis and decided she is checking out, in spite of her kicking and refusal to just go along. I think that’s what people who aren’t sick need to do for themselves; start shifting their connections and, in some ways, pulling up their drawbridges.
I understand, and still, as someone who had plenty of people interact with me in a way that implied I had one foot in the grave, I will always back the long shot, cuz my friends, I am the long shot my own self.

So, that’s happening.
It’s weird on so many levels.
It’s a bit like staring at a fork in the road and seeing how someone else got the much rockier ride.
And do I feel any guilt about that?
More than you will ever know.

And then, last week, as all these things were shaking down, I made the ridiculous mistake of going through my “Copies to Self” file in my e-mail. I confess, I hadn’t gone through that file in several years. And in it, I found so many e-mails I had sent to women who have since died of ovarian cancer.
I’m counting four just off the top of my pointed little head.
Which leads me to wonder why I got to dodge that bullet and these other marvelous women took the hit.

And that’s not to say that OVCA didn’t completely destroy my former life.
It destroyed the most important relationship I have ever been in.
It messed with my work and my career aspirations.
It did strange things to my relationships with my friends.
And still, amid the fucking rubble that is my current life, I am the lucky one. Or one of them.

I’ve been really angry for the last few years about that which I have lost because of cancer. And unless you are a cancer survivor of some stripe, save yourself the keystrokes before you tell me something all sage-like, cuz you don’t understand cuz you can’t understand until you’ve done it.
Don’t mean to offend, just stating some facts.

Anyway… I have been angry. Cuz I was terrified.

And here is an enormous confession.

I remain terrified. Hence the crankiness.
Cuz whether you get it or not and whether you have already exhaled or not, for me… they still send me to a place at the cancer agency called the High Risk Clinic.
The folks at the cancer agency are only willing to say, “you are in the group of people which we view most optimistically”, and that’s when I live in a statistic of having a 20 – 30% chance of being around in 2011.
So, hey… I am one of the lucky ones.
And inside of all that, how weird is it to say that. But in spite of all the losses, I still get to wake up too early and go to work and curse that, and have my heart go in all its crazy directions, and if there are folks crying for me, it’s for things much less severe than because I left this mortal plain too soon.

So, I guess this makes me stronger.

It sure as hell has made me crazier.
And it has made me angrier. But I feel that I am turning a corner.
If I am gonna be here, then it’s time to get going and indulging, and letting go of that which torments me, to whatever extent that is possible.
But I feel so much less interested in being tormented by imbeciles and their presence in my peripheral vision.

Wish me luck.

And wish whatever you wish/hope for for the women still duking it out with this damned disease.

Rodger Dodger
over and out

Well, not *me*, exactly. More like the Ovarian Cancer Canada folks.

See, me and some friends will go walk around the park and people will give us some money for that, because that’s how this works. And then the OCC folks will take that money and do researchy things and that will be good and, one hopes, someday soon, we can put all this nastiness behind us. And somewhere along the line, if you give some, unknown to me, amount of money, you get to tell the government to take it a bit easier on your income tax.
Sweet deal, no?

Spike
queering up cancer since 2004

I woke up this morning to an e-mail from a friend who is having a double mastectomy because she was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. She is having her surgery today.
It just sucks.

If you’d like to read about what’s up with Mary, you can go:

here

More later.

So, someone sent me a blog comment which basically amounted to them telling me that I should work on a more prolific blog presence. That posting once a month was, perhaps, less than ideal.
Having given it some thought, I think she is right.

How to catch you up on the last month…
A couple of weeks ago, I went to Seattle for an ex-gf’s 60th birthday. At first I was horrified because I thought this meant that I was old, but what I realized is that it really means she is a chicken hawk.
Being in Seattle was good on a lot of levels. Part of what was good was seeing friends who have been in the same relationships for the last twenty years and seeing how they interact. It’s not perfect and sometimes they bicker, but at the end of the day, it’s pretty sweet.
I confess that I try to learn as I go when it comes to those big time relationships. I kinda got knocked back to kindergarten, but that’s okay. I can hone my humility some. It’s still really interesting to me to see how people interact when they have been together for a long, long time. I think it’s easy to get in an absent-minded groove and to be upset about whatever grumbly and annoying things are messing with your utopian vision today. It’s hard to remember to be kind and sweet to each other.
Thankfully, I am no longer put to that test, but for those of you in relationships, I think you should try to remember to be sweet to your sweetie. How else will they know that you care if you don’t extend yourself?

On other fronts, this week has been a week of coming out all over again.
I don’t know how to explain it and this thing has certainly consumed a lot of my mental and emotional energy and… if it needs to be said publicly then let me be the one to do it but after a long haul with sobriety, I have decided that I want to see if I can be just like a normal person.
Like I said, I don’t know how to explain it nor do I know how much I need to explain to the general public.
The details that are available for the general public are that I am awfully tired of being the person who is always different than everyone else in the group.
It’s also true that I have felt more and more isolated with the whole sobriety thing over the last few years, so that ultimately,crossing that line seemed like a way to re-connect with people.
It’s an experiment, and if I screw up, I know where to go to drink bad coffee and be hugged non-consentually. But in the short term, this is where I am at.

S’cool?

Last week, in a spontaneous moment, I confessed to two co-workers that I owned this domain name/website/blog/corner of the internet universe.
And then I instantly had a Homer Simpson “Doh” reaction and thought, “Was that the wisest thing I could have done?”
See, for years, I have read the blog entries of my OVCA sisters and thought, “Man, how sweet would that be to just say, “My partner is an amazing id-jit” or “My co-worker is as useless as tits on a bull.”
Long have I envied the candor which my more anonymous compatriots have brought to their blogs.

So, there it was, hanging there. And I wondered, “Did I ever say, ‘Damnation… I work with a legion of fools and wankers!”?
Cuz, frankly, I have had my moments of thinking that. As have we all.

Anyhow… I am at least partially outed as a OVCA blogger, at least at work.

And this outing has sparked a couple of cancer related conversations, which have caused me to think, even three years after the fact.

So, here’s a thing I should say.

Sorry I have been so crabby. I tried to be all Lance Armstrong-like, but unless you know what it’s like to lay in bed for the best part of a year, wondering if you are going to croak like all the statistics strongly suggest, well, I am not sure you get to be critical.

I took a book out of the library recently. It was a Cancer Survivor’s Notebook, or some such title. I really should memorize the title because somehow the book got water damaged and it ended up costing me over $30.
And after all that, I didn’t even read much of the book, since I was trying to get ready to move. But one wee tidbit that I did read was about how cancer patients/survivors can come across as angry, because we are so absolutely terrified right to the bone of dropping dead. So, angry is really about scared. Scared in a way that you can’t know till you get here.
So, forgive me. And forgive any other crabby seriously ill person you encounter.
It is frightening in a way that you can’t know yet.

More later.