cancer – day 161

[started from Thursday’s Runes Journal] I’ve been up since 3:30AM, no hope for more sleep.

I was thinking about the “why me” thing. There’s the positive why me that is altruistic . . .if it is me, then it’s not someone else, and I’d rather suffer than make or see anyone else suffer.

Then there’s the karma perspective. Mom finally got me thinking about it because in one of her difficult moments of frustration last week on the phone she got a little agitated and said, “But you just don’t deserve this.”

Well, the short answer, from a cosmic view, is that, obviously, I do. I clearly have some things to learn, and things to atone for, all the past selfishnesses and abuse to my body for work and materialism. There’s a lot more to think about here.

Now, Friday, I’m having a difficult morning emotionally. I never got back to writing yesterday because I just didn’t know where to go with it. And I’ve been frustrated all week by my brain not seeming to work properly and function so that I can remember anything or string together a series of thoughts. And this typing ting, good lord, so much red on the screen if I stop to glance at it instead of backspacing every other word to fix what’s there. I can’t type because of the neuropathy making my hands shake and shift over a key or up a key or else I’ve just forgotten what the dam qwerty board is. Do I need to relearn typing 101 now? The frustrations are mounting . . .

I was still beating myself up in the conversation this morning, and Mark kept trying to ask what was wrong. “I’ve suffered through all this, I’ve done it the hard way, here with you helping instead of at home where it would have been so easy to just be taken care of, and I haven’t learned anything. I haven’t gotten any better as a person. I don’t know if I’ve even managed to just be less of a bad person.”

And I’ve been so debilitated by the chemo, that I’ve hardly had the opportunity to go do stuff like milongas and all that, which was a big excuse for staying out here in the first place, you know, to make myself try harder to be more normal, instead of just being “the cancer patient.” I might as well have gone to South Dakota for all the “out” things I’ve done, which are practically nil. Hell, the reality is I’m trapped in this house, not allowed to drive, can’t ride my bike, can’t go for walks alone, I’m literally, physically, trapped here in a place where the only space that is “mine” is a 10×6 office room without a door. And here’s a fundamental truth of Cynthia Miller and her relationship with her family and her comfort in her parents’ home in South Dakota . . . if you have to be trapped inside a house, better to be trapped in one with your own bed and furniture and artwork and knickknacks, and CATS . . . surrounded by multiple people who love you with everything they are. I look back and wonder why I even considered staying here instead of going to live in that environment during chemo. What was I thinking? Not that I have any interest in back-reading my own blog to find out. I usually manage to not feel this way but ach, right now, I feel so alone. It’s just all been so trying, so tiring, so . . . debilitating . . . defeating.