Cancer: a love story

SURVIVING SHAME


Last Friday was pleasantly ordinary: doing small things about the house, shopping with a friend, Michelle, for special sandals to accommodate my increasing neuropathy, watch a DVD. So I went to bed at 10:30 pleasantly content.

I awoke to the Night of Horrors at midnight. I was so feverish that I was literally vibrating with freezing cold. I frantically started piling blankets upon the bed, turned off the AC, and burrowed into the bed to get warm. It was sometime soon after that that the diarrhea started. The kind I had never experienced before despite it's recurring presence in these entries. This time there was not a nano second between initial sensation and execution. I have no further memories so I will skip ahead to noon the next day. Relying solely on second-hand testimony, what happened next sounds like it was straight out of a Howard Hughes biography. Apparently Jeff finally realized that sleeping-in for me never meant noon so he entered my room where he found me completely out of it, and worse. I was covered in feces, as was the bed, the bedroom, and the bath. Horrified he called an ambulance and had me taken to the hospital where the incontinent diarrhea continued for three more days. And where I was repeatedly changed by nurses in the precise style and pleasantness of an older baby - long after the novelty has nauseatingly worn off.

This has been the most horrifying experience of my life. Even now, just days later, it feels impossibly surreal. Never might I have imagined such an ongoingly humiliating experience. I am a shame-based person born of a mother who couldn't say "shit" if she had a mouth full of it! But somehow I was able to simply surrender to it all as best I could. It helped that the first few days, the worst, I was completely weak and depleted from dehydration and had little excess energy to expend upon toleration or resistance. But still.

This is Thursday morning and I will be discharged within the next two hours. I have been here for five days and I cannot wait to leave. Not that I am not grateful for this medical staff; I am. Very much so. I have been given every conceivable test including an ultra sound of my gall bladder to rule out having to surgically remove it. And the source of all this mayhem? Salmonella! Ummhmm. Food poisoning. This is yet another good news/bad news story. On the positive side I am IMMENSELY grateful that it wasn't some further complication of my multiple diseases. Thank you. On the negative side: WHAT THE @$#%*&^# - aren't the aforementioned diseases (plural!) enough?! or as my usually philosophical friend, George, exclaimed: "Somehow this just isn't fair!" Of course it's not fair. But then nothing in life is fair. We blind ourselves to inequity all the time and soothe ourselves with folk tales of equality and good winning out over bad. It doesn't. Things just are as they are. And how they are is random, unfair, and completely absurd. The world abounds with evidence of this yet we prefer to focus upon the rare and heartwarming stories of some unrealistically ordered existence.

I think that the real challenge is to not lose a grounded sense of ourselves in the face of random absurdity, and especially, unfairness. Who really cares about unfairness. What people really care about is who you are being in the middle of the poop storm in which you find yourself. But even more importantly is searching for and locating your own footing in the storm so as not to lose a sense of yourself. We are here to be who we truly are, not some pleasant, pleasingly perfect replica of the real thing. Although, after this last week...

The nurse just gave me my parole papers. I am going to shower and leave this always chilled environment to go home where I will shave and shower again in my outdoor shower and bask in the warmth and the comfort of my garden sitting by the river and let the breeze waft away the memories of this room and all that happened here. It is over. It is done. And I am alive and delighted to be so...yes, even given the poop storm. Think of it this way: what else could my shame-mind possibly have to fear?