A Moveable Timeline

I didn't conceive or start this project at the exact moment that anything in the introduction happened, and I've considered trying to simply piece the narrative together event by event-good old chrono-style-but that simply won't work for me. Herein my rules, and as E. Pound had it: Damn Perhaps!

Tomorrow I'll have a g-tube put in my stomach and effectively start a campaign of weight maintenance by avoiding the mouth entirely and going straight to the source. G tube insertion is a surgical procedure, minor by the lights of many surgeries, but I'll still be out for an hour and given the whole twilight drug sequence so I neither remember nor recall. Fine by me.

When this story started in November, I weighed around 177, and I had fought that back from, perhaps, 185 tops. I've never been F A T but by my thoughts, my ideal weight is around 170. I was measured recently as one of my 20 or so sessions of "getting my vitals" at 5' 11' and 1/2...of course I round it to 6'. And some of my weight does manifest as muscle because I'm addicted to sit ups and push ups and, when in San Francisco, enjoy a 2-3 mile jog as much as the next aging middle-aged white gay guy.

The last naked weigh-in I did at my house showed 150.3 as my weight now--in February, from November, a 24 pound swing downwards--and I think the trend is that direction. It's hard to maintain weight by liquids, hard when you're stressed out, and hard when your appetite is questionable, though mine is actually decent. The problem is it's decent when I think of what I want to eat:  Ribeye, peanut butter, cashews, steamed vegetables, rice with a lot of exotic seasoning, the hottest dosa I can source, K-Pop in the Castro, a plate of appetizers at any Lebanese restaurant...you see where this is going. Shwarma doesn't cooperate with the inability to chew, and neither--yet--does the attitude that guides my hunger.

My reaction to getting the tube was complicated, emotional; I cried. I cried hard. I cried about 30 discrete times and cried every time I had to tell someone it was going to happen. To everyone else, for whom the practical goal of "getting better" had already countenanced this sort of situation, there was the bland, calm prescriptive of how much better it's going to get. And I viewed this calmness with all the askance that any kid getting his ass beaten in an Oklahoma backwater might have to an "It Gets Better" video. Indeed, by the way, it does get better, but the getting to better is the problem, not the endpoint.

There are things that bother me about the tube so much, and involve so little. They talk about "feedings" as if I'm some vampire baby set loose in a blood bank--a zoo animal whose mother is too cut loose from its natural moorings to offer a teat would need feedings. I'm a man, dumbass, and I don't do "feedings." I eat.

Too, pouring beige liquid in a tube directly into my stomach is not quite the same thrill as imagining that ziti roiling down the drain and plopping with heavy satisfaction into my gut.

But tomorrow is tube day. I am today telling myself that 150 pounds is not what I wanted when I wanted to lose some weight. That I don't feel right. That my clothes do not fit whatsoever. That it scares me that jeans I bought 2 weeks ago are already a bit loose. That I can do anything and accept anything and I can, but I can accept it this time only with the immediate thought that this cannot be the final answer.

And, by the way, I am slowly learning that there are--in pure cancer buzzkill-ville, no final answers.