Bubble Brain

I took the opportunity during yesterday’s chemo treatment to inquire, again, about my prognosis. The oncologist’s response was, again, just as expected: we want to keep you alive for as long as you are content with the quality of your life. I asked for a specific date I might give to the crematorium. She demurred. I understand her position. She really does not know. But she did suggest I would have died before now if I had opted to refuse chemo treatment when I was diagnosed with a recurrence of lung cancer.  I agreed to continue treatment for the foreseeable future, provided my quality of life does not get appreciably worse. Oh, she called me “frail.” The man I was fifteen years ago would have slapped her. But, having turned into a frail old man with a completely different personality, I chose not to; I probably would have lost my balance and fallen to the floor, breaking a hip, dislocating my shoulder, and yanking the Infuse-a-Port from my chest in the process.  As for my prognosis, I’m assigning myself enough time to allow an as-yet-undiscovered-cure for my form of cancer to be found and successfully administered to me. In other words, I have as much time left as I have time left.

I’m returning today and again tomorrow for another infusion of IV fluid. I cancelled my physical therapy sessions (except for the final “summary” session in a week). My intent is to retrieve some of the time I have given over to treatments that do no measurable good. Nice guys, my physical therapists, but they can do more good elsewhere.

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The highway is an expanse of mottled tan sand, embedded with threatening fragments of beige and brown and off-white pebbles. Visible from my vantage point, walls of the nearest building and its roof are similar in color, though darker, as if chosen from a companion palette that share density and tone. The combined color schemes seem designed as the perfect setting for a scene of hopeless emotional rubble. The only elements missing are blowing sand and tumbleweeds. Give them time and the harshness of the environment will adjust accordingly. Before long, a swirl of poison and dangerous ideas will merge to create an atmosphere of ominous perversity.  But that may be just a nightmare, crippled when it was struck by a malevolent locomotive that derailed as it slammed into a a ghost-town left on the tracks by irresponsible dream-weavers.

Where is this place? There are no rattlesnakes here…none that are visible. But the palpable shame in the streets is more dangerous and deadly, anyway. I can’t make out whether the scenery around me is real or simply an ugly fantasy in the midst of transformation into an eternity one step down from Purgatory and one step up from Hell. I’ve heard of this place before. My grandmother taunted me with predictions I would end up here—my body on fire in perpetually excruciating pain. A demon—with a massive belly and hair coiled into horns—will approach me, holding a can of gasoline he will use to douse the flames. Oh, my grandmother. She was a brutal old gal, an evangelical television newsreader who attempted suicide on live TV before I was born. When she babysat me for my parents, she spent the entire time in their absence poking me with an ice pick she had heated over an open flame on the gas stove-top. Ah, but this place cannot be the one my grandmother described to me, can it? Where are the high-rise buildings expelling thick smoke and burning corpses from the windows? Where are the promotional signs offering cigarettes, self-study courses in burglary, and parental torture…all without charge? No, this is not the place the old woman talked about. Unlike that repository of unspeakable iniquity, this place has vague hints that its toxicity may not last forever…hospitals that occasionally discharge patients, rare “not guilty” verdicts rendered by judges assumed to be in the pockets of corrupt politicians, and other uncommon actions by individuals and entities long since assumed to exemplify the face of wanton injustice and unnecessary vengeance.

Those shreds of evidence that all is not lost, though, constitute intentional misdirection… promises of hope in an environment in which hope simply cannot survive. After being misled by two or three shattered promises, even people who most fervently cling to the slimmest hopes surrender to despair. The tiny filaments of optimism that illuminate their confidence dim, at first, and then fade into complete darkness. Belief erodes into doubt. Doubt shrivels into bleak certainty. Bleak certainty erupts into the darkest of despair. And from there on, it just gets worse.

Forlorn highways always lead away from ugly places. That’s as positive a perspective as one can have about such circumstances. At the other end of the spectrum, though, is recognition that those same highways lead toward worse places…places where the damage has already been done and will only decline further into a place where “worst” is only an interim step into a bottomless abyss.

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I haven’t taken my meds yet this morning. I woke up late, after sleeping for roughly 12 hours, and decided to jump right into the real world…rather than spend 10-15 minutes eating and drinking medicine. I’ve spent almost an hour blogging. Time to return to reality. I’m still tired, though. I could sleep another 3-4 hours, if given the opportunity.