Personal Journal

Another day

Walter is an ass. Not an asshole, mind you. He's an ass. He means well, but he is such a basket case of immaturity (he's 50 but behaves somewhere between 13 and 18) and obsessive compulsiveness that he's impossible to like.
I'm glad he's here for this reason: It has helped propel him past denial, and he's angry now about it. Good, get him on the road of grief and get him the hell out of here because he makes me uncomfortable. His wife is an angel, but strange in minor ways (talks to everyone like you're in second grade).

Walter said to me last night, while he and I were alone and I was folding laundry:
Some day you'll find someone new and you'll be happy...

I cut him off immediately and said to him that since he doesn't know me, I won't take offense, but he had better NEVER bring that line of discussion up with me again, or I WILL take offense, and I will make him regret it.

Jean is upstairs fucking dying, and he wants to talk about me having another woman someday. And see, he didn't meant to be a giant twit-asshat, he just cannot help it. He's like a teenager, and his wife is like his mom. Fucking creepy. CREEPY.

I had to get that out of the way before I forgot.
I did get a good night's sleep yesterday eve. On and off over 9 hours, because Jean had an easy night. Not sure yet about tonight, though. Morphine doses are up now - maybe four or five so far today?

Deterioration continues - less moments of semi-alertness. None of alertness. Breathing showing signs of breakdown. Temperature fluctiations more frequent.

I had an episode of my own today that I can't really explain. After Walter and Patty left me alone some, I was cleaning up Jean and talking to her, telling her as I do that it's okay to move on. I told her of my plan to get a kayak after this is over, and that I'm going to name it after her (Jean's Unsinkable Hope, for how she lived when she was given this diagnosis), and I started crying.
But what was more strange, and I don't know how to truly describe, is that every ounce of strength in my body left me, and I became weak and wobbly. I had a hot flash and a cold sweat, and I was incredibly hungry and noticeably nauseous at the same time. I had to drink 24 ounces of liquid immediately, and I had to eat something right away. And still I was shaking and wobbly for another hour, I could barely move my legs to get up and down the stairs.
Earlier tonight I went out to get myself some food to have here for the wee hours of the morning, when I tend to get hungry and have nothing. And while I was out, I drove over to a friend's house from work - Joyce, a woman almost 60 who I'm somehow connected with in a way I don't really understand (except that she lost her husband in a freak car accident 10 years ago).
I told Joyce, and she said that it sounds like my talking about the future disturbed the mindset that I live in day to day. I saw too much into the future, and something of reality snapped in and tore me up that way.
Maybe. Maybe I'm guilty for thinking of a future at all. Maybe seeing less and less of the best friend who I know is in there somewhere already setting up shop in the afterlife has started to make me realize that soon I'm going to be alone. I know that I like solitude. But I think I'm starting to realize that this solitude that is coming isn't something I'm choosing; it's being forced upon me, and it's going to be unlike a solitude that I choose.

My best friend is dying. My neighbor called me today to tell me that she and her family are going to Nebraska to be with family and will be gone for 2 weeks or so. My friend Cindy and her sister are also going to Wisconsin. And so the people who I would turn to are going to be gone, and I'm frightened and depressed.

The nurse said that she estimates Jean to have about a week left. And I'm starting to feel the sadness that up until now, I hadn't conceptualized. Truly - I hadn't conceptualized it... And it's starting to touch me - it's frightening - it already knows ways past my first line of rational defenses. It's going to tear at me, and I don't know how I'm going to resist, or if I cannot resist, rationalize, or if I can't rationalize, to at least endure until it passes.

And I think that's what started to happen today. The first wave of its onset seeped past, and it stunned me.