Tuesday, October 14, 2014

After the storm

Friday September 19th, we arrived home from Moffitt Cancer Center around 4 to our two sweet boys and Cha Cha. Medi home met me at the house with an oxygen compressor and some "to go" tanks. I took one look at the "to go" tanks and thought those will be the "hidden in the closet" tanks. They are not of the cute small backpack canister style. They are gigantic. The compressor is smaller than our last and a little less noisy. I wonder how long before MM calls Medi Home to return them.  Butter wants to discuss first things first. "It's about Dad's birthday cake. I know you're probably tired and might not feel like making the cake today." No, I assure him today is the day. I am making the cake. It is a birthday to celebrate!

Saturday I gave MM his daily Fragmin injection around 7. I joke with him that nothing says good morning like a good cup of coffee and a shot in the stomach. After lunch I administered the Zemaira infusion, which ordinarily would have been done by Kathleen on Friday morning, but we were still in Tampa. Saturday MM took the boys to the library and to get a movie from Redbox. Sunday he is at church at 9 a.m as usual. Monday night he leads the Boyscout meeting. He says he feels like a demolition derby car, windshield shattered, a tail light out, rear bumper damaged, but still in the race.

I felt like a cat with a sand spur in my paw all morning, trying to get comfortable, then ignoring my mood, then trying to attack my mood more aggressively, gnawing at my paw to try to get it out, whatever it was. I tried making cards, doing laundry, cleaning, taking a shower. Nothing worked. The tears came as easily as if I were a post-partum Mom. I don't like the tears because they give me a headache, and make my face puffy.  I develop the dreaded faceache, close relative of the headache. Sometimes the tears just go on and on and on well beyond their allotted time. Not today, as quickly as they came, they left. I was thankful the storm had passed.

The storms keep coming for me, day after day. Sometimes I am disproportionately angry with my grocery cashier who implies that the teriyaki beef jerky is NOT on sale, when it most certainly is ON SALE. Otherwise why would I have purchased this many packages of Teriyaki beef jerky, I ask you? It seems like a bigger outrage than it is. A song or a rainstorm will have me in tears in a second. There is that strong desire to tell whiny people what I actually think of their whining. Each morning I wake up, wow, another day, wishing I could go back to bed, grateful I have a job that gets me out of bed. The job, and the daily routine, getting up @ 5, reading, making lunches, shower, getting Butter out of bed, leaving a note for imac, driving to work, working. Laundry, lest we forget laundry. All of that is my tightrope. On one side of the tightrope, despair, on the other anger. Sometimes I fall off into despair. I overcompensate trying to get back on the rope landing on the other side. I think of Cirque du Soleil, which I have had the good fortune to see twice in Orlando. On either end of the tightrope, a tiny platform for rest. So I give myself permission to get in bed @ 8, to do yoga for twenty minutes instead of cleaning the bathroom, to sit and read or recite the rosary. It's my time on the platform.

P.S. Melanoma Man is using his oxygen all night long, almost every night, and feeling much better.