54!

Richard tells me I've been quiet. This might be true. Lately I've been dealing with weird sleep patterns due to effluvia, coughing due to effluvia, effluvia due to effluvia. I seem to be a teeming mess of snottiness that has nowhere to go and only me to bother.

I thought this would improve after we had a few good freezes and the moldiness and dust of Autumn was behind us, and perhaps it is better. My nose runs less, that's true. But my recent effluviamania seems to simply be a new wrinkle in what proves to be a dynamic, not static, system. We learn to our disadvantage, kids, that cancer isn't a one-shot, one-trick, one-act fuck up: it just morphs itself to new problems, new ways that effluvia gathers.

I've been staying at home a lot, and I've missed a bunch of lectures I would have liked going to, but it's rude to cough as loudly as I cough in lectures, sometimes the echo of throat gunk sounds like a bullet shot through my trach tube. I can't predict it, I can't control it. At least not yet.

If that all sounds bad, it's not really so terrible. I like being at home, and Rally likes it too. We enjoy flagrant, long afternoon naps, light late morning power naps, heavy late afternoon fuck-this-shit naps, and any other nap we can think of to have. Effluvia, if I may again, typically wakes me up a few times during the night, hauling me to the bathroom to check the neck hole, the tube, to clean up or out, change the tissue in my mouth, sop out the face mask. Interrupted sleep is not happy sleep, and thus, the naps.

This year, I gave myself an early birthday present of an electric blanket. This thing is awesome--ten settings, ten hour run span, soft, pretty, and warm. This was the very best thing I could have done for myself, considering it's already in the teens here, and the snow has already arrived. I like winter, and last night when Charles and I made a late run to the grocery store, the air was fifteen degrees, still, and wonderful. That's when I like Winter best--without  the wind. The snow? love it. The cold? enjoy it. The wind? fuck it.

I tell people that I'm made of chemicals, and without blood I have no hopes of being warm. I'm only half joking. I truly don't warm up the way other people do, and once I've caught a chill, you might as well get the hot water bottle because I'll stay that way until I'm warmed. I have my older electric throw in the living room for watching TV because I get cold sitting there doing nothing, I get cold when I drink cold water, my whole body taking in the temperature of what runs down my tube. When I pound hot coffee in the summer, I sweat; when I dump a cold bottle of water in the tube I freeze.

But listen--the worst I've been dealing with is an ongoing battle to get rid of snot that is annoying and cloying--but it's not killing me. Occasionally, especially lately, my face has hurt--and that's a real problem. Can you imagine your face hurting? and when I say hurting, I mean it feels like someone has smacked the shit out of me, everywhere, and then pinched me for good measure. When I was a civilian, I'm sure I never once thought of my face hurting, and I don't remember that it ever did.

Now, gravity pulls on what skin has no bone to support it, the system changes, my upper teeth are pushed together, sores form in my mouth, a film coats the mouth that has to be chipped off, nothing is quite where it was yesterday. My mouth, which hangs a bit, now hangs more askew, so that I truly do look more and more like a Scream mask. I could do Munch, and be famous for the uncanny resemblance.

But listen--that sucks hard but I take some Lortab Elixir and it's fixed for a few hours. If it's terrible, a bit of morphine sulfate and bitch just goes to sleep, and dreams of fried chicken.

As I'm writing, my 54th birthday is tomorrow. I'm going to celebrate it with a lunch with friends--the chili is concatenating in the kitchen right now, the potatoes for the potato salad are about to be boiled and marinated. I'm happy.

Happy is a construct, true, but it feels like a place. This place, now, here. This is happiness. The dog, the shitty old kitchen that I love, the shitty old ranch house that is one year younger than me--I liked this place the minute I walked into it that fateful day the realtor showed it to us. It was the first house we saw, and we went and saw others, but none of them had the least interest to me. This place, where it is in Bloomington, the yard, the neighborhood, it was exactly what I hoped for, and it has never let me down.

Happiness is a construct, of course, but it's also a choice. I choose it. On a wall of options this is what I most want--to understand what is happening to me, how it effects me, and still know that I'm here, I'm ok, that it will never touch what is truly me--I choose that.

I have decided, as I might have mentioned before, that I will at least make it to 70. After 70, all bets are off--by then my man tits should be somewhere around my waist and my dick might have shriveled to the silhouette of a peanut, but by hook or by crook, I want to see me there. I think I'll be a jolly old fellow--maybe I'll be talking again by then, eating again, celebrating my birthday with a fat slice of cake, one that would choke a pit bull, but no problem for me.

I hope, 16 birthdays from now, that I will have mastered happiness. I'm working at it diligently, I have hope of my achievement. To laugh the great laugh I'll have earned remembering that they told me people like me live 22 months on average after diagnosis. Oh, you silly doctors.