Grief: Rage, and the Dying of my Light

I’ve been putting this off for a while. Months.

After being so open with all of my emotions and thoughts these last few years, I wanted to take a little break from being sad. It just got to be too much. Some of you more astute folks could read between the lines on the weekly updates I’d been sending out over The FaceBooks and asked after me. Maybe I gave you a platitude. Maybe I just said, “I’m hanging in there,” which is my go-to for moving on the conversation to the next topic. I just didn’t know what to tell folks who asked after me. “I’m still furious?” "Life is a tourniquet and my neck is turning blue?" No one wants to know how the monstrous depths of my anger. 

Because that’s what I am. Still.

I thought it might be worth a checkup on the ol’ mental health report card using the five stages of grief as our barometer. I got this list from one of my grief counselors, mostly as a way to check in with myself to see just how well I’m doing. Let’s follow along together.

 

Grief: Death and Taxes

Note, for those of you wanting more frequent, day-to-day updates, I'm writing a "proof of life" post every Friday on Facebook, if you're inclined to brave that particular wilderness. It's more chatty, and talks about movies and TV shows a bit more than on here at the moment. You can follow me on FB and get the notification when I post, and hopefully being on FB to read it won't send you into an apoplexy. 

Tax Season normally fills people with dread and fear; not because everyone is secretly a white-collar criminal and living in fear that this year will be the one where the jig is suddenly up and that end up in federal prison; no, I think it’s just because most people don’t like to do math.

I don’t have a problem with paying taxes, per se. As soon as I figured out in my Economics class in high school that the taxes pay for stuff like roads, schools, national defense, yadda yadda yadda, I reasoned it was okay to expect us citizens to pay into the administrative costs of upkeep. I’ve only ever really groused about the exact percentages in each category.

What’s bothering me the most is having to go back through and relive my year, via purchases made, movies played, and that’s the trouble because I know exactly where I was from July to October and having to keep going over it again and again is a death of a thousand paper cuts. Cathy used to do this, the taxes. Oh, I’d help a little bit, with data entry and printing things out and looking at the uncategorized purchases to figure out what was what. But she did the heavy lifting. And when she got sick (well, sicker), pretty much the last thing on our minds was, “Now, don’t forget about the quarterly taxes. Here’s the password, and you’re going to want to...” I’d venture to say it was dead last at the bottom of the list of things we worried about.

So now I get to relive all of that.

Aftermath: One Month

 Cathy died a month ago today. As hard as the last two years have been, and this includes my own hospitalization and other assorted health problems, and as rough as this year has been, and as painful as the last four months have been, the last thirty days have been some of the most challenging days of my life. I went from the funeral straight to not having a vehicle for three weeks. The enforced shut-in was both oddly comforting and ridiculously stressful, in that it made me feel even more helpless an ineffectual. Running the gauntlet between our wedding anniversary, my birthday, Halloween, and Cathy's birthday sure as hell didn't help matters one little bit. 

All this to say, I am grateful that friends and family don't blithely ask me how I'm doing. Ordinarily I would be loathe to bypass the social niceties (the hi's and how are you's), but my patience is worn tissue paper thin right now, and things that ordinarily wouldn't bother me a bit are sending me into a red rage. But I can't yell in a stranger's face, "I feel like I'm trying to play the trombone with only one arm! How do you THINK I'm doing today!?"

That's how I feel: like I've been amputated. And phantom limb syndrome for me involves walking around the house like a mental patient, talking to thin air and anxiously waiting for an answer that will never come. 

Cancer: An Obituary

Cathy Day lost her fight with ovarian cancer on 10/15/2020. She was 56 years old. 

Catherine Day was born in Dallas, Texas, the daughter of Richard Day and Diane More, and attended Vernon High School. After graduating in 1983, she attended the University of Texas, where she received a master’s degree in Speech Language Pathology. She taught in various public and private schools in California, Maryland, and Texas, helping learning-disabled children to read and speak, for two decades.

 Cathy was a lifelong student of the theater and she acted in plays throughout her school years. As an adult, she was active in community theater in Austin, appearing in Different Stages productions, and later with the Violet Crown Radio Players, of which she was a founding member. In Wichita Falls, Cathy was proud to call the Backdoor Theatre her creative home and she appeared in several productions, including “Sordid Lives” which earned her a Genesius Award for Best Actress in a Non-Musical Role, and “Dirty Laundry,” where she co-starred with her husband, Mark Finn.

Cathy met Mark in the Summer of 2000 and they were married in October, 2003. They later moved to Vernon as co-owners of the Vernon Plaza Theater where they lived and worked. Cathy was a member of First Presbyterian Church of Vernon and was active in the community as a founding member of Leadership Vernon, The Vernon Main Street Program, and the Vernon Farmer’s Market. She always had a smile and a laugh for everyone she met, and the memory of her kindness, her gentle nature and her warmth will be a comfort to her mother Diane; her step-father Pat More; her sisters: Susan, Barbara, and Erin; her brother Mike; her many nieces and nephews, and her husband, who survive her, but will never forget her.

 In lieu of flowers, the family has requested giving a donation to the Backdoor Theater in Wichita Falls in her name.

My thoughts are below. Fair warning: this is uncomfortable, and I don't recommend  you reading past the break unless you want my raw, unfiltered take on all of this. 

Hospice: Our New Normal

 Cathy has been in Hospice for five weeks now. It feels like forever. I am struggling with watching Cathy's gradual shutting down. She is at the point now where she is bedridden; her leg muscles can't support her and so any scenery changes she wants to make are done with nurses and a wheelchair. Her short term memory continues to fade, as well. People, faces, events and things are all crystal clear to her. But she can't keep up with her phone. In bed. She can't quite remember from day-to-day how to work it, either. She learns it in the morning, but by the evening, she needs help again. Hospice keeps telling me it's "disease progression." It's getting on my nerves. She's not sick, she's hungry. 

Cancer: The Devil Defeated

In the middle of all of this insanity comes the best good news we've had in a while: Cathy is through with her course of treatment on the Red Devil. That doesn't mean we are done with chemo, or done with cancer. Only that we are done with the horrible poison they were putting into her body for the past seven months. Or to put it another way: we're not out of the woods, yet, but the deranged mutant bear that has been pursuing us this whole time finally gave up the chase and we can take a minute to catch our breath before resuming the hike to get out of these woods.

Health Update: Cancer and Quarantine

Cathy and Sonya, rocking the matching sweaters.

It's been a while; too long, in fact, and I sincerely apologize. 

We're all friends here, so I'm just going to dive right in. 

I'm not in a good place right now. About two month ago, I realized that with the stress of the recurrence of Cathy's cancer so quickly on the heels of the successful surgery, and the subsequent difficulty of Cathy's chemo treatments on her (and by extension, me) this time around, I had slipped back into a state of depression. 

I wish I'd caught it sooner. This self-diagnosis was a result of some tangential health concerns popping back up and me realizing that I'd not been addressing them like I had been before. Mostly therapy stuff, but also some physical symptoms, too. 

Man, this whole ordeal has just sucked. 

Cancer: A Long-Overdue Update

I met Cathy in 2000, which makes it easy to compute our anniversary and our wedding and all of those other days. Weirdly, in our relationship, I'm the one that tends to remember those things, so this works out great. Today is our 16th wedding anniversary, and I can't quite remember what the 16th year present is, but I'm going to call an audible and wish, instead, for a break from all of the crap Cathy's been dealing with.

This second brace of chemotherapy has been, in many ways, worse than the first round. Chief among them has been the nausea. Cathy didn't have severe nausea the first time around, not like this. Two weeks ago, I woke up to the sound of Cathy throwing up. It was horrible. I mean, any time you throw up, it's bad, but this was scary. I sat up with her the rest of the night, and every time she ran to the bathroom, I dutifully wetted some paper towels and waited for it to subside. It's a helpless feeling, to say the least.

We are also battling the new schedule, because it's a twice a month deal, but they have been calling her in for iron infusions and blood work. So, in effect, it's been more or less weekly anyway. We have tried five times to move the treatment days to Tuesdays, to no avail. The self-populating schedule making program that Texas Oncology uses will let you change one appointment date, but not all of them. Very frustrating, considering that I can do it was Google's calendar app and I'm not a medical facility.

We are trying to focus on the upside, which is this: Cathy gets a CT scan at the end of the month. They are looking now for any shrinkage, rather than waiting for six months. That means we'll know very soon if all of this horrible poison is working. If it's not, we get to try a different cocktail of chemicals. If it is working, however, we will soldier on through and get more anti-nausea meds and all of that fun stuff.

In the meantime, we are trying to live as best as we can. We have an evening planned for our anniversary, and I'm crossing my fingers that we'll get to go through with it.

Next week is my birthday. I'll be turning 50. I haven't decided if I'm going to write about it or not. But I know some of you like to do nice things for people, so if you want to do anything, you can either drop a few dollars into Cathy's GoFundMe account, or head over to Amazon.com and buy one of my books. My author page has all of the things currently available that I have stories or essays in, as well as things like Blood & Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard, the Con-Dorks trilogy, and all of that other stuff. Recently some folks have re-discovered the Con-Dorks trilogy and have been saying nice things about the books.

Cathy's GoFundMe page.

Mark's Amazon Authors page.

That's it, really. I'm sorry the update is so short, and that it's not very funny. I just wanted to let folks know that we are still here.

Cancer: Well, Shit.

It's back.

Talk about counting some chickens. I had always thought I might have to deliver the bad news again; after all, Cathy's cancer of choice was particularly pernicious and there was a high chance of recurrence. But after she responded so well to the chemo and the surgery was so positive, I thought--we thought--we'd have a year or two before we had to worry about this again.

We sure as hell didn't think the down time would be three months. Not even an "All-Clear" to the end of the year? Come on, Cancer. I know you're an asshole, but do you have to be such a fucking asshole?

Here's what we know: because of the quickness with which the cancer has returned, it means that Cathy has developed an immunity to her chemo drugs, so we are going on to treatment option number two: different chemo drugs, with side effects that are a cause of concern. Specifically, blood clots, which are already a problem for Cathy to begin with.

This is a six month treatment. Not sure what that will fully entail, but she's going to start the week after next. And just like that, we are back in the barrel.

In an effort to provide balance to this shitty update, I have two pieces of news that may offset some of the existential dread I feel right now.

Numero Uno: Since we caught this new cancer (still in the lining between her organs) inside of three months, it's much smaller and so hopefully we won't have to deal with any surgery.

Numero Two-oh: My edema continues to shrink and has in fact reduced size and density by two thirds. It's still deformed looking and horrible, but it's a much smaller horribleness.

I'll put more up when I know more. This week we have two different tests to determine if there are going to be any complications with the treatment. I've also updated the GoFundMe account, as we are already getting static from the insurance company.

Well, those three months where Cathy was okay and I was getting my mojo back were pretty swell while they lasted. Looks like I'll be seeing everyone on the other side of 2020.

Health Update: Cathy First, and then Quasimodo

It's been a while since we had an official update, mostly because I've been in and out of consciousness like Robert Di Nero in Sleepers. But while I am "sitting," and before the pills crowd me out, I want to report that Cathy will be going in for surgery on February 7th. We expect to be out of pocket for a week or so. There's a lot of logistical things to work out while we set all of this up, but we are excited to be moving forward with her treatment plan. It's the shortest part of the process, if you don't count the recovery time, but it's certainly the most nerve-wracking. I will keep everyone posted if things change.

I will now give you an update on my condition, so for those of you who do NOT want to read about scrotal edema, please veer off.

Health Update: At the Last Possible Second...Some Good News

Let's close out this year on an up note, okay?

You could have knocked me over with a feather when Cathy called me on Friday to tell me that the doctor's office called her to say that MY surgery had been scheduled for (get this) MONDAY, DEC 31st, at 8 AM.

Christmas at the North Texas
Apocalypse Bunker. Happy despite our
Year's Worth of Woes. XOXOX!

Unbelievable. I mean, I'd given up on my insurance company even talking to me until 2019, when the deductible reset and we were back on the hook for everything. Don't get me wrong; I'm still paying out of pocket for this; just not as much. But if my hospital stay continues, I am sure we'll take the brunt of that in the shorts as January 1st, 2019 hits.

But that's not important right now. And I don't wish to seem ungrateful. I am reeling, to be honest. I spent most of November gearing myself up mentally for this double-decker two-in-one surgery, only to have the rug pulled out from under me two days before it was supposed to happen. And right after that, Cathy got sick with pneumonia. So I've not been able to much of anything except call for updates between dealing with Cathy's slowly-improving health crisis.

Now I'm getting it. And my head is not where it needs to be. I'm a little panicked, and I suspect I'll spend most of Sunday in a meditative state to get ready for this. The stress of the hospital and surgery takes a toll on me and I need to be in my best place to get through it quickly and heal speedily. I can't be out for too long. Cathy is still on oxygen. We're about to be a pair of shut-ins.

Health Update: Well, Shit.

It's been a difficult month. I've been prepping for surgery for the last two and a half weeks. Lots of logistical loose ends to tie up, everything from assigning various theater duties to minions and/or training them, to dealing with insurance companies and the vast sums of money that prop up the medical health profession, not to mention my own normal fears about doctors, needles, surgery, and body invasion that have been hounding me for as long as I've been aware that I will need surgery.

I've done my best to embrace the change: "This is a good thing," I told myself, over and over again, usually whilst rocking in a a near-fetal position with a glass of bourbon. "These are necessary for your ongoing health, wellness, and recovery." I've used every moment of physical discomfort or an inability to lift something as a way of reinforcing the idea that soon, this will be addressed, and then you'll have some mobility back as well as a quality of life that you haven't had in years.

Friday Night Flight or Fight

Some people have a monkey on their back. I also have
a monkey on my front. Basically, I'm all monkeyed up.

I know I’m not the only person that struggles with anger management, depression, and anxiety. Many of you have shared with me your own stories, either recently or throughout the course of our friendships, and I confess, I haven’t always completely understood your struggle. I have sympathized, of course, but it was difficult for me to really empathize with what happens in your brain until I found myself on the other side of it.

I had a meltdown recently. It came quickly in a barrage of incidents that piled up too fast for me to deploy any of my practical tactics. I wanted to share what happened so that those of you who maybe don’t quite understand yourself can sneak a peek behind the mask and get an idea of how things can quickly escalate.