now with .02% more haterade!

Nothing goes the way you’d expect with cancer. Nothing is simple, or easy, or straightforward. I’m sure this is a lesson that cancer patients and survivors learn quickly. It takes a little longer for loved ones to learn.

When Doug’s dad announced the weekend of Father’s Day that he would be going into the hospital for his first round of chemotherapy on Monday, I was glad to hear it. I thought, “Good, he’s going to fight this.” His first treatment would be entirely in-patient. Apparently this is common for the first few treatments, so the doctor can keep a closer eye on things and there is staff on hand in case anything happens. He’d had a transfusion a few weeks before to up his white blood cell count and that had gone well. The Thursday that we went up there his dad and I sat on the couch talking about Scotland and work. He’d gone through the past few weeks putting everything in order at his work and at home. They got him a La-Z-Boy to sit in the bedroom so he could relax and watch TV but didn’t have to sit in the bed. Doug and I stayed at his parents’ place that week, but came into the city to work and bring his parents anything they needed or wanted from the house. His mom stayed at the hospital with his dad. We helped out with the cleaning and anything else they might need.

I realized this was going to be more difficult than I thought when we went to see him in the hospital last Thursday evening. He was loopy, not only because of the chemo, but also because of the sedative they were giving him so he would stay in bed most of the time. While we were there, he made a few wisecracks, and even managed to sit up and eat dinner. There were a few drawbacks, but the hospital was handling it. They were expecting to discharge him Saturday.

I don’t like hospitals. I never have. I can tolerate a clinic setting, like when I go to my doctor, but visiting people in hospitals just feels wrong. Even if I’m visiting a friend that is there for good reasons, like having a baby – I can only stay there so long before I just have to GO. The smells of disinfectant and waste, of human flesh and fluids, that sticky-sweet smell of sickness…I can’t deal with it. I want to go draw giant breaths of outside, to run down the street with my arms stretched out wide like a madwoman, to talk and scream and laugh and cry. I don’t associate hospitals with life and health, I associate them with death and weakness. When I walked in and saw Doug’s father, who was always so full of life and laughter, dozing in a hospital bed, plugged full of tubes and IVs…the desire to turn tail and run leapt into my throat. I didn’t see Doug’s dad, I saw Paw-Paw.

Paw-Paw (my mom’s father) died in 1996 of lung cancer. I don’t want to call it lung cancer, because by the time he passed his whole body was riddled with it. I saw him in 1995, before the diagnosis. Due to college and my foolish desire to play around with friends, I didn’t see him again until two days before his death, in the hospital. His legs and arms were sticks. He had extreme dementia and didn’t recognize anyone most of the time. My mom told me not to cry in front of him. When I saw him, he was having one of his lucid moments, and asked me why I was there and not at work or school. I ran outside when Paw-Paw said that, and sobbed until my tear ducts were bone dry. Only since Doug’s dad was diagnosed, did I find out that my grandfather tried chemotherapy. He hated it so much, he decided to stop. This was why he went from healthy to dead in a year. I just thought the cancer was so far along that the treatments didn’t work.

Doug and his family knew basically what to expect when his dad was discharged from the hospital. His dad would be extremely weak at first. He’d probably lie around, need help moving, and wouldn’t want to eat very much. After a week or two, his body would recover from some of the poisons, and he would feel better. Well, until he had to go in for his next treatment, that is.

Doug’s dad came home Saturday. I was out doing some shopping for work clothes and meeting my mom for dinner. When I got home, he was watching TV on the couch. He was weak and needed a little help moving around, but he was doing well, all things considered. He’s gone dramatically downhill since then – he hasn’t been drinking water, hasn’t been eating, and he refuses to get out of bed. All he does is sleep and take the pills the doctor gave him. He’s not fighting anymore, and we don’t know what’s changed. Mrs. B doesn’t know what to do. She said she was going to call the doctor this morning and find out what we need to do to get some kind of nutrients in him, and Doug and I really think he may be re-admitted to the hospital for dehydration.

Part of me wants to go in that bedroom, shake his frail shoulders, and tell him that if he won’t eat, I’m going to force food in his mouth and move his jaw myself. That if he won’t drink, I will pour water down his throat. That if he won’t move, I will pick him up out of the bed and drag him around the house until his legs move themselves. I want to ask him that if he hates the goddamn hospital so much, why is he forcing himself back in there? If he hates the chemo, then he needs to speak up and say so – but if he wants to fight, he has to at least make an attempt, not lie down and let the cancer and poison run ramshackle over his system. I want to scream YOU CAN FIGHT THIS, GET UP AND FIGHT GODDAMMIT!

Another part of me wants to run. I want to pack my bags and go home, play on the computer, watch TV, drink myself into a stupor, make love to my husband, throw myself into my job, get on a train and go to California. I just want to GET AS FAR AWAY AS I CAN. I feel like a cornered animal, eyes wide, looking around for a way – any way, any direction – to run. Just fling myself at the nearest road and look forward, not back.

The third part of me – the rational thinking part – says I should stay out of this because this is not my birth family, be there for emotional people, and just let Doug’s dad choose his own path. It informs me that I’m a terrible person for even entertaining these thoughts. As each day goes by, this part gets just a little smaller. I don’t want to snap, I really don’t, but if I stick around I’m going to lose it on the people that don’t deserve it. Who the hell would I lose it on anyway? If I need to take this out on anybody, it needs to be that damn cancer. So here goes:

Get out. You are not welcome here. Leave and take all the pain and sorrow you’ve toted in with you. Give us our loves and lives and families and joy back. I will wrestle you to the ground and kick you out the door myself if I have to. Get out and don’t come back.

FUCK YOU, CANCER.

Last Sunday I woke up up mighty early (well, early for a Sunday) and headed out to the local fabric, craft, and hardware stores. I came away with some good things last Sunday, thanks to my coupons and checking out the sales flyers online. One of the things I picked up was some velveteen ribbon and lace from JoAnn’s, which turned into this:

I was surprised to find that I was completely content hand-sewing lace on ribbon. The afternoon flew by, thanks to that and an NCIS marathon on USA (an Abby-centric marathon, no less, which pleased me to no end).

It’s a bit rough looking – my stitches need to be evened out – and it ended up being a tad more snug on my neck than I’d like. It’s not bad at all for my first one, though! I bought five yards of the ribbon and lace, so I’ll be making more. I’m thinking about buying a few cameos and pendants to add on as well.

The other week, I picked up about 7 yards of this fabric…

…which I will be using as the base for my next costume. I started cutting out pattern pieces this weekend. I kind of wish I wasn’t going to Slidell this weekend so I could start sewing, but oh well.

I can’t tell you how excited I am to start sewing again.

I have decided that I need a hobby. Jon offered to get me into ham radio and guns, and even though the thought of heading to a shooting range, learning how to shoot a gun, and squeezing off some rounds sounds AWFULLY tempting, I was thinking more along the lines of the hobbies one can find at Michael’s or Hobby Lobby. Crafty kind of hobbies. Hobbies where you need boxes of patterns, paint and brushes, and X-Acto knives. Last week while Doug and I were staying with his parents, the urge to go to Hobby Lobby and grab jewelry-making supplies was INTENSE. I needed something to do while I was there, and sitting on the computer or watching marathons of NCIS just wasn’t cutting it anymore.

(Off topic: NCIS has become my new TV crack. If it’s on, I will watch it. It doesn’t help that USA runs three episodes a day. I’ve also got a bit of a girlcrush on Pauley Perrette / Abby Sciuto.)

I’ll be cleaning off the spare table in the office this weekend to use as a sewing / craft area, and I’ll also be going through my craft case and patterns to see what I have available. I also have a container of fabric that’s been sitting around for a few years that I need to go through and see if anything can be used. I also have a project to work on – this year’s Halloween costume. I won’t go into detail now, but if it ends up how I see it in my mind, then it’s going to be pretty impressive once it’s completed. I’ll post bits and pieces as it comes along.

Slightly off-topic, but not really – here are some pics of my steampunk ensemble I wore at MobiCon. This is something I pulled together from stuff I already had on hand. I was planning on wearing it Saturday night, but I ended up wearing it Saturday before we went to McGuire’s.

Doug’s dad was diagnosed with cancer this week.

He has two spots in his lungs, one in his femur, and another in his intestine. The doctor said that if he doesn’t do anything, he’ll have about a year, maybe a year and a half, to live. His options for treatment are either chemo/radiation therapy in NOLA for a while, or six months of intense radiation in Houston (I’m thinking at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center). The cancer is from a melanoma that was supposedly removed about 5 years ago. They didn’t get all of the cells, and the melanoma metastasized.

Doug and I came over to stay with his mom and dad Wednesday night. Doug’s brother is living with his parents now – the move was done before the diagnosis. We’ll be with them all weekend long and are going back home Monday afternoon. His dad is surprisingly chipper and matter of fact about the whole situation – to our faces, anyway. His mom is a little more emotional about it. Doug…well, the best word to describe his emotional state right now is numb. He seems to be trying to keep it all together, but I can tell that it is tough because he’s incredibly close to his family.

As for myself…I’ve gone between crying and numbness. Doug’s dad, in the 9 years that I’ve known him, has been more of a father to me than my dad ever was. I’m a little embarrassed to say that I cried in my manager’s office when I told her the news Wednesday. I asked her if I could work from home Thursday and Friday so we could stay in Slidell with Doug’s parents. She was extremely understanding and said of course. I felt extremely guilty for asking considering I was off last Friday and Monday for MobiCon, and I apologized, but she pooh-poohed my guilt and told me that family is always important. I’m really glad to have an understanding manager, but I know that I can’t push my luck too much.

I’m trying to stay positive. I’m telling myself that medical research and cancer treatments have become amazingly better over the past 10 years. These days, cancer is not an automatic death sentence anymore if you catch it and treat it early. The M.D. Anderson Cancer Center is an excellent place for treatment, and there are many people that go into remission and stay in remission after going there. Then I think about my grandfather. He passed away in 1996 from lung cancer. In about nine months, he went from working outside on a daily basis and playing with his grandkids to wasting away in a hospital bed with dementia. This is what’s been running through my mind over the past few days. Back and forth, over and over.

We’d offered to take his parents to dinner last night but they said they just wanted to stay home, so he and I went to dinner instead. Over dinner we talked a little about what we could do. I told Doug that if he wanted to move in with his parents to help them out while they were going through treatments, I would be okay with that. We also discussed our plans for children. Our original plan was that we were going to start trying in 2012, but the thought of pushing it up came to both our minds since his dad’s diagnosis. We both came to the same conclusion…we simply are not financially stable enough to have kids right now. We’ve also been planning on saving up for another London trip in 2011 but I think that might be indefinitely postponed.

Why am I writing this? I guess because no one is really talking about it. It’s kind of like the elephant in the room…everyone knows it’s here but no one wants to mention it. I just can’t do that. I need to speak out. Doug isn’t really comfortable discussing it in detail yet.

Keep Doug’s dad and his family – our family – in your prayers, whatever deity or pantheon you speak to. If you don’t believe in a higher power, just keep us in your thoughts.

Twilight fans Stab, Choke, and Beat Haters Into Submission

This is just terrifying. Is there something in the book or the movie that drives these girls insane? Does Robert Pattinson’s sparkly dirty hair hypnotize tweens into violent zombies doing Stephenie Meyer’s bidding? We should respect and fear the effect Stephenie’s writing has on others and prevent her from writing ever again because apparently she has control over the mindless teen hordes.

I tried to slog through the first chapter online. I’ve read bad fan-fiction that’s written better than this. OH HAI THER I R NEW PRITTY GIRL N TOWN PLZ LUF ME VAMPIRE BOY-MAN YES.

…although I think one of the things that would have me fleeing in terror would be a herd of raging tween girls screeching like the Furies.

~shudder~