My bounce back

Isn't.

I am definitely in a slog here.  Something happened after chemo was done when, I think, everyone collectively was ready for me to be done, most especially me.

But I wasn't. 

And life decided to keep moving on.

And work kept working.

And daily stresses kept stressing.

And remodeling kept... well, actually, it didn't... which was a problem.

And, you know... business as usual.

But it wasn't.

So then I had surgery and that was... well, not a big huge surgery, just regular surgery.  Which, by this time, ain't no big thang, just something we do a few times a year.

But... you know: surgery.

So then I'm trying to get over surgery and, somehow, I just wasn't able to.  I was getting better, but not as fast as before.  And I was tired.  And my various cut up muscles hurt.  And I started getting depressed because life was still business as usual, and it felt like no one remembered that I was going through shit. 

Mainly, really, because I didn't remember any more.

Or I didn't want to.

And I realized the other day why I wasn't writing so many blogs.  It's a really depressing reason. 

It's because this is all getting to be normal.

Something, recuperation, something, recuperation, something, recuperation. What's so interesting about that? 

Life, death, life, death, life, death.  After awhile, you get kind of used to being in a foxhole, fighting the incoming.  You get kind of used to being poisoned, or cut, or nuked, or recovering from same.  Not much to write about. 

Being afraid is the new normal.

Being tired is the new normal.

Being abnormal is the new normal.

I started radiation last week.  It's fucking weird.  And neat, at the same time.  But mostly weird and creepy. They position me (lining up the four tattoos now on my body with the laser beams coming out of the ceiling and walls of the treatment room), and then this huge machine moves around and points itself at me, and then splats out this looooong moment of radioactivity, right at my body. 

It doesn't hurt, exactly.  It's like getting a really long xray at the dentist, like 15 seconds long, about five different times and angles.  Which doesn't seem all that long just saying it like that, except while it's going on I just can't help having images of Nevada desert test sites and weird extra-terrestrial tractor beams and deformed Hiroshima babies and burnt, crackling skin falling off of corpses.  You can think up a lot of stuff like that during 15 seconds of radiation.  I always hop off the table thinking I'm glowing a little, and... you know... not in a good way.

My bounce back isn't bouncing back.

Radiation is tiring.  Like, really fucking tiring.  Don't ask me why.  And, like the eskimos and their 25 words for snow (or something like that), I now have a wide variety of words and descriptions for fatigue.  If chemo fatigue resides in the bones, aching you from the inside, dragging your femur and your spine and your pelvis down to the middle of the earth... then radiation fatigue is like the color bleeding out of film.  It's like Marty McFly seeing pieces of himself disappear from the photograph in Back to the Future, just... fading away. 

Radiation fatigue is like being erased.  The colors are muted, moving to grayscale, and eventually to a sickly white haze.  Nothing is sharp.  Everything is depressing and dirty, like smog, coating everything with a dull, dumb apathy.  The will to live gets weaker.  Not in an absolute sense, but in a ground down attitudinal sense.  Nothing seems worth doing anything for.  Going somewhere involves parking the car: not worth the hassle.  Eating something involves deciding what exactly to eat: what's the point?  Even sleeping seems somewhat stupid, in that it won't really do much good except for the first five minutes after waking when I can sort of pretend that I'll spring up and not feel like gray Star Trek antimatter has infiltrated the spaces between the cells of my body.

That moment in the late summer, when the air has been thick and the moment between day and night is not so much twilight as just a silent resignation that another day has gone and won't ever come back again. The cars drive home and seem depressed, their drivers destined for another night of falling asleep in front of the tube, or fighting with their wives, or wishing they had a wife to fight with. 

Futility. That's what radiation fatigue feels like.  The futility of life.  The what the fuckness of it all.