I think tomorrow is looming, and I am trying to bank as much of this as I can: the food, the care, the kindness of strangers. Tonight will be fear again, after a few days where all I have had to worry about were hours of sleep.
I am on Ambien now, and it breaks my heart. Breaks it. For reasons not worth going into I take it upon myself as a personal defeat that I need...drugs.
I know. I know it is the silliest thing in the world to be worrying about a half pill (I make the nurse crack it in half and the Drs make fun of my 'infant dose'). The head oncologist on rounds suggested my dose would be as valuable waved around my head as ingested into it. I know that I have enough medically-sanctioned poison flowing through me once a week to kill people. I know that the pediatric version of the disease that I have calls for harsher doses of the chemo: that adults are not as stong as kids; that the further I am from the 12 year-old this cancer thinks it is eating, the worse the cure will be. I know that I am on enough steroids to win an Olympic sprint and probably get into the NFL hall of fame next year as well--Rafaeil Palmiero's useless burnt-peanut testes have nothing on my bloodstream, pal. The roadmaps of Mark McGwire's neck flesh are just launchpads for my mood swings.
I know all this. But somehow that still lives in a world of 'medicine' and 'disease.' All the drugs they pump me full of somehow live over on the lab-coat side, and the tiny sleeping pill I cringe that I cannot get by without sits right here on my own slumping shoulder. I am in the idiot, prideful position of worrying more right now about coming out the other side not addicted to Ambien than I am about the cancer.
Trust me, a few seconds in the dark and it all rolls back around to what could really be trying to kill me off, but it is a strange stance across error and pride. The control freak trying to control the one last little thing he can. And I can't. When the night comes I am raring off the 'pred and as likely to walk another mile down the halls as lie still and hear every sound in the halls. We are near the elder-care unit now and there's a woman who shouts in her sleep--ow ow ow ow ow. Almost a song, almost a call to the night, and it fades quickly, but the 'pred can keep me waiting for the next one: waiting with the ear plugs in and the bandanna across my eyes, lying silent and sweating like a criminal as the shoes squeak in the hallway and the night crawls and crawls.
My only honor right now is that I am hacking it with the half-pill. The fluttered, slightly broken hours are some sort of badge that I am at least a little responsible for getting to bed. I mean, I'm on less than I am supposed to be, right?
I know I have friends who palm Xanax and flick Ambien like tick-tacks who are--I honestly hope--getting a bit of a chuckle from my predicament. It is a comeuppance. It is the inevitable end. It is the small male, justifying. It is me, having to take my medicine.
If there are those out there who can get a grin from this, please, you are more than welcome to it. That at least allows the performer in me to have gotten something out of the angst.
Sleep well. Here comes Wednesday.
