“Cowardly little atheist finds God 20 minutes after being told he’s dying”

I know. You saw it coming, but you haven't heard the details, so here goes. I made the following to-do list when my second PSA came back:

1) Run in circles while screaming and flailing my chest with my fists.

2) Find God so I check item number one off the list.

While I was still on number one, Peggy said, “You’ve done this same stupid running amuck display for years now, but am I imagining it, or is this the enhanced version? Also, did it ever occur to you that the reason your shoulders hurt all the time is that you’re forever swinging your arms?”

So it was that with my dear wife's gentle encouragement, I moved on to item two—I found God. I found two gods in fact, one male and one female (the Wiccans taught me that deities come in the same genders as people). Their names are Aphelandra (top) and Aglaonema (bottom), and I can’t tell for sure, but I think Aphelandra is the goddess because she’s shorter and because Aglaonema's stem is big and erect.

My first houseplant was a Spathiphyllum (peace lily) that my father left when he died in 1994. I didn’t want a houseplant, but it was a living celebration of him, and it was also evidence of a love for beauty that he seldom displayed. I saw caring for it as an extension of caring for him. Besides, I asked myself, how long could a houseplant live anyway. It’s now 19, and I wouldn't be surprised but what it survives me--after which Peggy will probably kill it with love, aka too much water. 

My Aglaonema is simply too beautiful for words, and despite its look of fragility, we get along famously (I don't do high-maintenance plants). I’ve even been looking for another Aglaonema (one called Silver Queen) for a year now and am starting to think I might have to drive to Portland for it… 

If I were rich, I would live in a conservatory. The beauty of plants inspires in me the desire to make my own life beautiful, and their presence fills me with joy. 

Maybe cancer; maybe not

My prostate antigen level in April of 2011 was two. This April, it was 4.5. This week, it’s 4.9. I’ve had a few biopsies over the years—including one of my lower abdomen and another of a neck vertebrae for which the surgeon had to go through the front of my throat—but I never believed I had cancer. This time, I think I do.

I would hate like hell to leave Peggy alone. I would also hate to leave my "bloggy friends" as Nollyposh used to call them (she was one of four bloggy friends I lost to cancer). A lot of people will find out that they're dying just in the time it takes to write this post, and that won't be long because I'm still doing my experiment with minimal editing.

A few years ago my 56-year-old neighbor, John, drove three hours, climbed a 10,358-foot peak (3,157 meters), and drove home. I saw him that evening, and he complained of fatigue. I laughed, but he said that, no, this fatigue was different. He died a year later of prostate cancer. (I can hardly hold out to clean house anymore, which is one of the reasons I think I have cancer). John died next door, but I never went to see him because I didn’t really know him, and I wasn’t sure I would be welcome. He was also a lawyer, and I hate lawyers. I now wish I had gone because it would have been the right thing to do. I also like being around people who are dying.

Doc Martin is phobic of blood; Nurse Peggy is phobic of cancer. She's so scared that she’s been having to struggle to keep from hyperventilating. 

I've often wondered whether it would be easier to have a terminal illness than to live in pain. One advantage of living in pain is that I have a sense of time stretching before me, and that gives me reason to hope that I will either beat the pain eventually or at least learn to tolerate it better.

My odds of survival are probably good even if I have cancer, but there’s still that 3% chance that I’ll be dead within five years. After ten years, the chance is 30%, and it keeps going downhill from there. As cancer goes, only lung cancer kills more Americans than prostate cancer.

I won’t be getting any more teeth crowned until I have a prognosis. The damn dentist crowned one in January, and that alone drained my insurance for the rest of the year. He wanted to crown another one in April, but I said no, so he squirted some gook into the hole in the hope that it will last until January 2013.

Helter Skelter captures my mood today just as it captured the mood of America in the late ‘60s. To represent the early ‘60s, I chose Johnny Angel. How, in a single decade, do you go from songs about cars and teenage romance to songs about drugs, death, defeat, confusion, alienation, insanity, and injustice?

I like things that mess with my head, so I like Helter Skelter. The good thing about music is that I can turn it off if it gets too intense. With real life, I have to divide myself into two parts. One part thinks, feels, and acts; the other part dispassionately observes the part that thinks, feels, and acts. Pain can become so consuming that it draws my observer part into it, and that's when I go to pieces. I assume that this can also be true of cancer. I really must learn to do better, and I think I'm succeeding. I've felt stronger than ever since my meltdown on Sunday.


P.S. Shelley Fabares is a goddess.

Today's barely edited

I didn’t feel old until a year or two ago. I attribute this sudden oncoming of antiquity to the pain. Except for misdiagnosed sleep apnea (which cost me two needless surgeries) and the pain of the last six years, I’ve been healthy as an adult. In fact, I used to marvel at my good health because I would — sometimes for months—feel such sadness that I was just sure it would eventually eat its way from my heart and into my flesh, causing me to sicken and die. The fact that I stayed in such good shape was curious to me.

Then came the sleep apnea, and I grew increasingly desperate over a period of five years until it was diagnosed and treated. Three years later came the pain. For the longest, I thought I would beat it. I told myself that my species, despite its many faults, is very clever in various ways, and that medicine has been one of the major benefactors of the explosion of knowledge that has occurred during my lifetime alone (I would have died had the sleep apnea hit 15 years earlier). How hard, therefore, could it be to eliminate my little old pain? It might be impossible as it turns out.

For much of my life, I held doctors on such an intellectual pedestal that if a doctor couldn’t cure me of something, I would assume that he wasn't trying hard enough—maybe he hadn’t run the right test or asked the right question. I later met doctors whom I trusted as good men as well as good doctors, and when they told me there was nothing they could do, I believed them. Even with this recent pain and the urging of one reader to see a pain specialist, I have no thought of seeing a doctor. For what? Pills? I’ve got pills, and if there were other pills, I would know about them. Dosages? If I want to dicker with those, I have more confidence in the Internet than I do in any given doctor (I've discovered two serious errors in my prescriptions by looking them up on the Internet). Tests? Diagnoses? Surgeries? I could probably get several more of each if I wanted to start from scratch with new doctors, but I don't.

Maybe my "barely edited" experiment is connected with my need to transcend the pain because while I've lost all hope of escaping it completely, I haven't lost faith in my ability to someday live well despite it. I think at least one of you might have worried about me euthanizing myself after my last post, but I wouldn’t do that. I thought a lot about it for a long time, and I must have decided against it because I don’t dwell on it much. Not that I was ever really close to suicide; it’s just that I considered it a reasonable and reassuring option. If you hurt as I do, and you killed yourself, I could respect you for it if you only had yourself to think of (If you were married, I would consider it necessary for you to get your spouse's blessing to kill yourself it unless your spouse opposed suicide on principal). But even if you were alone or had your family’s blessing, I would suggest that you hang in there. You’ll be dead-meat in a few years anyway and you'll stay dead for all eternity, so why not stick around? You might do some good, you might have a few laughs, and you can always decide to off yourself later.  

The photo is of me, from yesterday. It did me good to go to the woods.

A second experiment with posting in the moment

Given how much I bitch and whine, Peggy might not realize that I try to spare her from the worst of what I feel, but I can’t do it today. I had a horrendous night last night that followed a day spent trying to recover from another bad night. Dilaudid didn’t help, so I lay awake for hours and I am just about through the roof right now. I smoked some pot an hour ago hoping it would help, but unlike yesterday, I’m experiencing something similar to a bad acid trip. I feel like I’m caught in a nightmare, and I don’t have the strength to find peace in the storm. I work everyday to stay calm and hopeful, but when I’m really hurting, really exhausted, and really without any means to control the pain without knocking myself out, I just can’t find it in me. I’m unfit for anything but to shake and cry, yet, there’s something here for me. I know it, but I can't find it even after years of looking.... I've heard enough Mary Wells and going to listen to some Goulet. Before marijuana, I didn't care about music. Now, it's one of my main comforts, it and plants.