thoughts – cranky and droll – from a feisty geezer determined to ride his quick cancer into the ground

Did you think I died?  Seems like a reasonable assumption, given the total lack of evidence of life here, since the 27th of September.  No good excuse – yet.

I have been tired, sometimes, if that gets me any slack.  I’ve been “to-die-for” tired, at times.  No fooling.  Some very bleak, dark days were staggered through at our house.  Over the past two months, I’ve been so low-down, crummy-feeling at times, that on more than one occasion, I’ve thought I’d not live through the week.  One day, back in early October, shortly after my last posting, I was so sure I’d reached the end of my rope, that I made several desperate phone calls to friends, looking to find someone to be ready to videotape my intended suicide, which I felt was an imminent probability.  Later that same evening, I was able to eat a piece of toast, and then perked up enough to amaze the chef and myself by eating two more!  I also had a bit of milk or water.  It was a “miraculous” revival.  The next day, after a fair night’s sleep, I felt better than I had at any time in the previous several weeks.

Throughout October, and much of this month [November], I’ve flown high for some hours, for some days, only to swoop and dive for the ground.  Sometimes, several days of “low down” would pass… feeling terrible, not hungry, not thirsty (not drinking), sure I was at the end.  Then, somehow, the grip of doom would lift and I’d perk up for another day or two, or three, or several.  All the while, the constipation/elimination boogyman skulked in the ground – fore and aft.  Jan and I, both, were puzzled by the highs and the lows I was experiencing.  What the heck was going on?

One day, about a month or so ago, I had a small epiphany, as I literally struggled through a session on the “pot”.  I thought I detected some evidence of dehydration – as I observed the process and the product of my efforts.  I decided that maybe my immediate troubles stemmed from a water shortage. I decided to make a concerted effort to increase my water intake.  Voila! Within an hour of beginning to “force” water down my craw, I began to perk up.  It was amazing.  It was astonishing!  It was like pouring water on a dehydrated, wilted house plant.  Wilting. That was the issue.  That was the concept.  Just like a dehydrated plant, I wilted when I didn’t have enough water in my tissues.  While I knew this was not exactly a major scientific breakthrough, the dramatic effect of adding water to my corpse was astonishing.

The trouble is – everything I put into my body has to go through my mouth.  That wouldn’t be so much of a problem if my poor god-forsaken tongue didn’t reside there – in my mouth.  Just my luck – to have cancer in a part of my body that I actually needed to have in good working order – in a part of my body that was used for practical purposes – a part of my body that is, now, at least as much a part of my problem as it is a part of my body.  How many times have I already mentioned this?… Swallowing sucks! Food, water, medicine… if it has to go in through my mouth, it amounts to something of an ordeal to get it down my gullet.  Occasionally, swallowing is very painful.  Mostly, though, it’s just very uncomfortable. Lately, it’s very common for me to take a drink of water, and realize ten or twenty minutes later, it’s still in my mouth, un-swallowed.  It is a very deliberate act.  I have to will myself to swallow most anything, most all of the time.  Bummer.  The result is that I can easily allow myself to go without drinking enough water to keep me sufficiently inflated with H2O.

Here’s the really cute part: I’ve come to the conclusion that I have to drink about twice as much water each day as I have previously, in my old life – before cancer.  Whereas I used to get by with a quart a day, more or less, (granted a lot more on hot, working days, for sure), I now seem to require at least two full quarts of water in order to get through a day without wilting miserably.  That’s without doing one blinking productive thing all day !   Just sitting around whining about my sorry life requires two full quarts of water ! (if I want to do it with any modicum of comfort)

Jan has tried to get me to monitor my water intake by putting out pitchers, or quart jars, of water in the morning.  The trouble is, I don’t manage to get all my water from the pitcher by the end of the day.  I habitually just go to the tap.  Or, I have a cup of coffee, or a can of pop (rare), or, I shoulder Skippy aside and slurp some water out of the toilet.  At the end of the day, no one has any idea how much water I’ve drunk.  So – I’ve tried something different.  I’ve set out two quart jars to pee in.  I seem to be able to stick to a routine that way.

I suspect I freaked out my friend, Tim, the other day.  Expecting him to arrive for a brief visit, I ditched the jars – which I’ve been keeping under the bench beside my living room bed (sofa) – putting the jars (one half-full of pee) in the kitchen sink.  I didn’t want Tim to freak out, seeing jars of pee sitting in the living room, so I thought it best to get them out of sight.  Tim hadn’t been here for more than a minute before he asked if he could have a glass of water.  Sure, I said, directing him to the cupboard beside the sink.  Too late, I realized my gaffe, and so I pointed out the obvious jar of pee in the sink.  From then on – I swear – Tim seemed barely able to contain his need to leave, right away.   C’est la vie chez Treecraft.

For two of the past three days, I’ve felt “pretty good”.  Those were the two days when I filled more than two quart jars with urine (in 24 hours).  The day that I only managed to produce a little more than one quart of “product” turned out to be a day when I felt lousy.  With my weight now down to as little as 110 pounds, and assuming that two quarts of output ought to represent somewhat more input (given respiration and perspiration losses), it appears that I have a significantly elevated water requirement. [Do we all know "The New Water Rule" ?  Your s'posed to drink (in fluid ounces) half your weight in pounds.]  At 110 pounds, I should drink… uhh,… 55 ounces of water a day.  Hey ! … I’m just barely ahead of the new rule !  I’m peeing out about 75 ounces in a good day.]   I should add, here, that my own requirement seems to be quite constant – if I let half the day pass without getting “a good dose of water” in me, I’m sure to wilt and start falling apart.  Apparently, my cancerous state has upped my water needs quite significantly.  I’ve got no tolerance for dry spells.  Makes sense.  ”Garbage in” (cancer) begets “garbage out” – with water being the vehicle that rinses and floats out the crud that the “cancer battle” produces… around the clock.  A few hours, now, for me, without added water intake and my face is on the floor.  Just by noting the garbage that I manage to cough up, over the course of the day, is enough to give me the idea that there’s a lot of trash to haul out, around the clock.

Since I feel fairly chipper today, it’s a bit hard to get “into” how crappy I feel on down days.  On down days, I feel too crappy to sit down and write.  Lots of down days, recently.  Not much energy to spare, then.  Not good writing days, those.

All this talk about pee, reminds me of an erstwhile favorite topic – POOP!  Did you think I might let you down?  Really?  One might think this shabby excuse for a blog ought to be re-monikered: “The Shithouse Chronicles“.  Alas, Gentle Readers, we will not stoop to such lowbrow stunts as trying to grow readership by badging ourselves with such crude Anglo-Saxon handles as that.  If you want to go for serious lowbrow, you’re going to have to invest more effort than just looking for a shitty-titled blog.  You are going to have to actually do some reading.   Onward !

I will, now, admit – I had no idea just how absorbing a topic constipation could be.  I do believe I could spend the rest of my life doing nothing but writing about constipation.  [Did it seem that way to you, too?  I don't really want to spend the entire remainder of my life mired in this topic, but, it just seems there is so much to be said.]  I find, as I grow older (consider the difference between age sixty-one, and age sixty-one & one-half), that topics too intimate or vulgar to mention at age thirty, are fair game by sixty-one & one-half.  This is where I find myself, now.  Mired – at the end of my life – in perennial constipation.  And trying to compensate by running my mouth about it…. non-stop.

And, so, I write about what I know about.

Before I launch into all that, though, I must tell you a (now-amusing) little story of a night back during some of the dark days of early October.  (I wish I’d put this to pixels sooner.  I think it may have lost some of its freshness.)  As of sometime late this summer, I had taken to sleeping in the living room, on the sofa, so as not to rumple Jan and Skippy with my seemingly-ceaseless up-and-down-gettings, throughout the night – mainly to pee, but also to re-hydrate, and to cough and expectorate, and so forth.  Soon, it seemed sensibly handy to fetch a jar – a peejar – into my sofa-lair sleeping area – to pee in during the night.  Soon, there followed a line-up of coffee-mugs of drinking water, plus one distinctively-shaped mug, dedicated to use as a spittoon (probably a good idea to have the spit mug identifiable, even with one’s eyes closed !)  The indoor-outdoor bench I made several years ago, served nicely, to array all my mugs, etc.  As befits my typical mode, all sorts of other paraphernalia quickly appeared, to complete my bedside secretary.  My cell phone resode there,overnight, as well as pens, paper, notes, magazines, mail, keys, spectacles, wallet, snacks, etc.   Seeing as how I’m only going to be here a little while longer, Jan has apparently re-calibrated her orderliness gage to allow for the proliferation of my assorted bedside kittage.  As long as the pile stays on, or neatly-arranged under the bench, she lets it pass.  So far.

After a visit to our friends Buell and Donna, I came home one evening, with a Mason jar full of assorted mixed nuts which they had gifted me.  The jar of nuts subsequently moved about, from time to time – sometimes on the adjacent bookshelf, sometimes on the floor, occasionally on the bench.  Jan occasionally raided the jar, but mainly confined her forays to liberating the Brazil nuts, some almonds, and a few Macadamias.  In the midst of one seemingly unrelenting bad spell, among my various other trials, my sensitivity to salt jumped off the chart, and the nuts – previously delightful – became all-but inedible.

Amid the worst patch of a bad spell, I made up “my dog’s bed” one night, relying on kinesthetic memory more than vision, to arrange everything.  Slowly, laboriously, foggily – I lined up my glasses, wallet, mugs, flashlight, and jars, in their various habitations, turned out the light, and crawled into my bed.  A few hours later, I woke up, needing to pee.  Thanks to generous street lighting and photon-pervious living room window shades, there’s no need to turn on lights to navigate our living room during the night.  Operating half-asleep, foggy – I reached under the bench for a pee jar, unscrewed the lid, and began filling it, savoring the reduction of bladder pressure, pleased with the simple pleasures still available to me.  Presently, the pleasant aroma of roasted nuts wafted warmly into my consciousness.  How sweet!  Ahhhhh…!   Then, in time… it hit me.  I squinted critically at the dimly lit, warm jar… of nuts!! Sheiss!! I woke up fast.  Quietly-but quickly cursing my way into the kitchen, I turned on the light, to reveal a quart jar half full of warm, salted almonds, Macadamia nuts, cashews and Brazil nuts.  But, it was also half full of fresh warm urine.  Sheiss!! Fortunately, I’m gifted with the ability to function in difficult circumstances.  I tipped the jar over the kitchen sink, strained the pee through my fingers, quickly re-filled the jar with tap water, gave the jar a few swirls, strained the rinse water through my fingers again, and ran to fetch the “D” section of bird-cage liner to lay out on the dining room table. I can’t remember if I turned on the dining room light or did all this by flashlight – but does it really matter?  I laid out the wet nuts on an open section of the paper, blotted them as dry as I could, pulled out the top two or three wet layers of paper, and arranged the nuts carefully, to dry overnight.  I think I even managed to laugh at my good fortune, having found a novel way to amuse myself at 3 AM, while significantly de-salinizing my otherwise inedible jar of nuts.  The next morning, Jan remarked at my apparent burst of entrepreneurial energy during the night, actually guessing that I had genius’d a way to make my jar of mixed nuts more palatable.  I noted her apparent approval, and let it go at that.  A couple of runs through the toaster oven, later in the morning, and my revived nuts were ready for a try-out.  Not bad… could use a little more salt, but even that deficiency was mitigated by an interestingly exotic aroma they’d picked up in the process.  I don’t think Jan bothered to raid the jar after that.  She has never seemed to trust my experiments with food.

Now then – I believe I’ve hinted at the recounting of some further poop tales.  Nothing too heavy.  My butt’s not so well suited to many hours of bearing my entire 110 pounds.

Constipation:  Oh, the tales I can tell you !  Now that I don’t have to worry about carrying a tainted reputation for two or three more decades forward.

Back about the time – just after my posting of essay 12, I began to have really awful sessions in the bathroom.  Events which, including self-administered enemas, and lasting for multiple hours, started to become “standard”.  Life in Hell must, surely, include such marathon orgies of procrastinated defecation.  Ugh… there’s a word I don’t like to speak (or hear).  It sounds unpleasant, even disgusting. but, hold on – I’m just getting started, here.  As long as I’m setting myself up as an Icon of iconoclasm, I might as well let you have the whole enchilada – which I intend to do.

It was while sitting on the pot one day, that the idea of dehydration, and its ramifications, really took possession of my speculative processes.  My turds (Is that too clinical? The spellcheck doesn’t like it. Tough.) were, notably, hard, as well as dense.  I suggested to my dentist, that they might be hard enough to be able to carve teeth out of them.  She didn’t bite.  I next suggested to some of my more law & ordered friends, that my well-aged masterpieces could make great billy-clubs. That didn’t stick, either.

Seriously, I’ve discovered things that would make a nubile young proctologist blush.  For example, I discovered that I have some apparently significant herniation of some furthest component(s) of my lower end.  Fortunately, I don’t expect to have to live with this problem for a very long period.  That’s one of the great – sometimes-overlooked – blessings of my situation… not having to worry about athlete’s foot, skin cancers, herniated rectae, bad teeth, and so forth.  Supposedly, the hard-core pain-killers I take are possessed of the magical ability to all-but shut down one’s lower-gut’s peristaltic rhythms.  I may have done some rectal damage prior to the onset of The Great Malady, but I do suspect that some of my recent athletic endeavors, aimed at working around my peristaltic partial paralysis, may have caused some further (unnecessary) mayhem down under.

Some additional good news - is that since the digital breakthroughs I’ve made, spelunking my own interior cavities, re my retarded excretory performance, I have actually trimmed hours off my previous recent “standard times”.  From two, three, and four-hour sessions, which have left me utterly exhausted for many hours afterward, I’m now down to “getting in” and “getting out” in an hour or less.  Believe me – that’s progress I can feel good about.  It had got to where I dreaded pooping, even more than I dreaded eating.  I was being torture tested, both coming and going.

I don’t know about you all, but I thought talking about poop again might be fun.  But, now I’m not so sure the preceding revelations were all that spiritually uplifting.  Sorry if I brought undue sobriety to what should otherwise be a fun topic.  Perhaps I can keep it a little lighter next time.   Yeah – that’s more like it!   Step on it!

I see the Word Counter has counted a few dozen more than 2700 words, this outing.  I probably should give it a rest for the day.  Maybe I can get back, to write another fun-filled, action-packed, spiritually ambiguous, nail-biting episode of Dead Man Talking, before Christmas.  God forbid I should tarry down here for that long !   I don’t care much for Christmas, anyway.  It lasts too goddamned long, for one thing.  And, it wastes way too much electricity.  And….  Oh – never mind.  I think the word counter just popped a fuse.  Now, it reads: “2851″.  Ooops – 2855.  2856.  oops.  2857.  Dang!  (Oh, never mind!)  2863!   Sheiss!!

(Oh, I don’t know…)  dang it   2870.   ???   !%&##%&!      [ dbt ]