cancer. it's not just an astrological sign anymore.

adrift/astray

A

fter this long, strange trip, I have reached a crossroads that is completely foreign. In some strange, sick way, absence is making the heart grow fonder. Without our lives being dictated to us by doctors, we tentatively reach out into the fog and try to grab onto life. But instead we seem doomed to forever feel the mist slip through our fingers.

We try to envision what may lie down the road for us in 6 months, a year, five years...but it remains the same empty rhetoric that was to serve as inspiration during the treatment. Eric and I both knew that, while in the midst of his bone marrow transplant, that talk of houses and new jobs and adorable adopted children and pets was literally just talk. It was nice to think about, but there were far greater matters at hand. Focusing on survival and daily medical testing forced us to switch how we gage the passing of time. For now, every day without aches or nausea or skin rashes is a good one.

In theory, living for the moment is a great perspective to have--our experience has forced us to take stock of and appreciate the small things in life. But when finding joy in the short-term becomes apprehension of the long-term, this perspective is no longer welcome. We want to need to find a new life--being part of a renting couple with one menial and one wholly soul-crushing job is not the Great American Dream. But each decision is fraught with risk--the availability of health insurance for a transplant patient weighs heavy on our minds, as does proximity to a proper hospital--what if Eric found that dream job, only to find out that the only large medical facility in the area was a podunk County Hospital? Should we bother to make long-term plans, when we are armed with the knowledge that our own mortality is so frail?

Part of me just says, "Fuck it"...and that voice is getting louder and louder. There is a self-destructive streak emerging that I never knew I had. That part of my brain would be perfectly happy to take the easy way out; to move to a cheap house in a backwater town and get a dead-end job where it might be OK if I showed up hungover once in a while.

I am having trouble finding the right words to describe this mental fog...it is not depression, but rather a cavalier dismissal of any new challenges...I am insulating the two of us in mediocrity...

posted by amanda @ 1:35 AM