cancer – day 199

I have these breakdowns. Emotionally, I mean. I’m trying to stay positive, and it wears me out and next thing I know I’m having a meltdown, feeling awful either about how I feel physically or about how I’ve let it affect me or what it’s done to Mark’s life, keeping him from doing things he’d rather be doing than babysitting a cancer patient. The guilt’s the worst.

Mark’s thinking about taking up the bandoneon, an accordion-like instrument that is at the heart of tango music and fairly rare (and expensive) in the states. There’s a guy that sells them though, and he offered to meet Mark at a place in San Francisco the day after my port removal surgery. We don’t know what condition I’ll be in, if I’ll be fine or on painkillers or what, and whether or not I’ll be up to the drive and dancing afterward to go with Mark or if I can be left alone at the house or what. I didn’t realize at first that he was talking about San Francisco, I thought Mark was meeting the guy at a place here in Sac and I thought, well that’s no big deal, he’ll be gone maybe an hour and I’ll be fine, but when I understood it was San Francisco and Cell Space (where there’s a milonga until midnight every Wednesday night) and Mark said something about how if he has to cancel oh well but that he’d like to do more dancing too, then I got myself on this massive guilt trip about how I’ve interrupted Mark’s life with all my mess. The worst meltdowns are over things that I really, REALLY want to be doing that I can’t or shouldn’t do, that Mark either goes to alone, which often leaves me jealous that I can’t go, or that he gives up to stay with me which really kicks in the guilt. Sometimes I think it was a big mistake to be here and torturing myself with the things (mostly dancing) that I can’t do. But how could we have known how damaging chemo was going to be to my body? When I was deciding whether to stay in Sac or go to my parents’ for chemo, I never considered this situation where I’d be so incapacitated for so long. It’s been so much worse than I prepared myself for.

And I apparently cover it up pretty well with everyone except Mark and my parents. My parents know me too well and can hear how I’m really feeling in my voice even when I pretend to be chipper. And Mark, well, he’s seen me lower than low and beyond my worst because he’s around all the time and there’s no escape and no hiding, whereas with everyone else it’s pretty much a temporary show of pretending to be doing well for just a couple of hours at a time, which then completely wears me out and takes me a day or more to recover from.

Kind of like now. I have to leave for yoga within the next five minutes or so, and I really don’t want to go because I don’t feel up to the emotional cover-up, but I know I have to do it, it’s the right thing to do even if it’s difficult (it’s the right thing to do in part because it gives Mark a little break from me, and in part because it forces me to keep trying to be normal). And so I keep struggling and I keep trying. Off I go.