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

My last essay was posted on December 16 (2010).  Two days later – December 18 – I attempted suicide.  I never would have predicted that I would ever be “a suicide survivor”.  Attempt suicide? —  Sure.  Botch a suicide? — No way!

Any questions?

It really wasn’t all that bad a week, as I recall.  It sure wasn’t all that bad a day.  I was busy in the kitchen, getting ready to put the first batch of peanut butter cookies in the oven.  I had been on a peanut butter cookie kick for a couple of weeks, and was hopeful that this batch would, at last, hit the center of the target, having been less than completely satisfied with the previous two or three attempts to perfect a recipe that met my requirements for taste, texture, and “tolerability”.  I love really good peanut butter cookies, but I’m generally fussy about them, and was particularly picky about them, then, because of problems with tongue and throat irritation issues.  I had figured out that one of my favorite ingredients was irritating my mouth.  It was the generous dose of chopped walnuts I was putting in them, that was giving me trouble.  I had eliminated them from this batch, and had otherwise tweaked my recipe with regard to proportions of sugar, flour, and peanut butter.  This was going to be the winning combo, I was fairly certain.  This batch was going to be taken with us to a “Winter Solstice” pot luck dinner party at the home of some friends, later that evening.

As usual, with a cooking project where I was “messing” with the basic recipe, I was working at an amazingly slow pace.  After at least an hour of measuring, calculating, and mixing, I was finally measuring out and forming the dough balls, pressing them and arranging them to fit the cookie sheet.  Jan was in the living room, working at a project on the computer, having been home less than an hour, after being at a Saturday morning Restorative Circle practice-study group meeting.  It had snowed a good one the night before.  I stopped my cookie shaping for a moment and stepped over to the sink to cough up and spit out a gob of the ubiquitous mucous and crud that had become a fairly regular aspect of my condition.  To my dismay, I coughed up a rather good-sized gob of blood.  By the time I coughed and spat what seemed a satisfactory quantity, I realized that I was spitting up fresh, bright blood.  Dang!  I was having one of my hemorrhaging episodes – an annoying event, to say the least.  I grabbed a mug and filled it with cold tap water, and began drinking it, in order to cool the bleeding site and stop the flow.  After a minute or so, I realized that this one was stubborn.  I hollered at Jan to come help me.  I sent her outside to fill a large coffee mug with some fresh snow, which I then used to make an “icee”, by mixing in as much water as the snow would absorb, and then filling mouth with icy slush – guaranteed to shut down a bleeding episode.  After a few minutes of that, my mouth and throat were getting painfully chilled, but the blood just kept on pouring out.  It was One O’Clock in the afternoon.

For some minutes, I just stood over the sink and let the blood pour out – occasionally coughing to dislodge and expel another red gob.  Jan hovered anxiously, nearby.  I asked her to fetch me the small steel sauce pot from its drawer under the stove.  With that in hand to catch my outpouring, I sauntered out to the living room, and slumped into the big reclining chair beside the ever-present orange Nitrogen bottle and apparatus.  Thanks to Jan’s scurrying to fill my requests, I soon had a roll of paper towels, several wash cloths, and a bowl of water arrayed beside me.  By now, bleeding too copiously to talk without spraying blood all over everything within two or three feet, Jan brought me a pen and a yellow legal pad so we could talk (so I could talk).  I began scribbling my thoughts and questions for Jan.  We “talked” like that, off and on, for an hour or more.  We talked “some serious turkey”.  I wanted to make sure she understood that there was no circumstance in which I could imagine myself tolerating either a visit by paramedics, or a trip to a hospital emergency room.  She understood.  I then had some “what if questions” for both of us to work through.  The main question was: “What if this damned bleeding just wouldn’t stop?”  I had to answer that one for myself.  There seemed to be only one answer, generally.  All possible variants of answers ended up with the same conclusion.  One way or another, I was going to be dead pretty soon.  It was a sober conversation.  But, it felt good to be having it clear between us.

About 4 PM, I had a sudden intuition that I needed to make my way to the “big pot” in the bathroom, a notion that seemed undeniable.  Shit!  This was not something I wanted to be distracted by, at this time.  Tough!  In I ran, down I sat, soup pot sitting on my lap, with a bit more than a pint of blood and mucous coagulating in it.  I sat there for some time, with nothing to show for my compliance or effort, except a slowly filling soup pot.  I sat for nearly an hour, finally having a calming thought: What if I simply sat there and quietly let the blood run out without worrying over it?  I was not in any significant pain – in fact I was actually quite comfortable, sitting there with my pants down around my knees, quietly catching my steadily-dribbling blood.  This didn’t seem like a bad way to go – setting aside any aesthetic considerations.  By golly!  Why not?  More calm settled on me.  So, I just gave into relaxing and letting nature take its course.  My only fear was that at some point I would topple off the toilet and fall on the floor, or into the bathtub.  I puzzled the problem while letting the blood do whatever it wanted to do.

By now, I had stopped coughing and spitting, trying to keep clots of blood from gumming me up.  Blood was beginning to clot inside my mouth, building up under my upper palate, and here and there.  Rather than cough, I tried prying the clots from their attachments with my index finger, and pulling them out by grabbing between finger and thumb.  Boy!  There’s a challenging occupation.  I cannot conceive of any slipperier combination than tug-of-war with a chunk of clotted blood, coated with a fresh flow of live blood.  Catching a live, wet trout, barehanded would surely be easier.  I managed, somehow, to detach the one clinging to the roof of my mouth, though – with much persistence.  Pulling it completely free of my mouth, eventually – that would have made a pretty competitive “funny home video”, methinks.  I got it!   And then – I realized that the blood had stopped, at last!

It was about Five in the afternoon, by the time I extricated myself from the bathroom, having failed to accomplish what I had originally gone there to do.  Fair enough.

Back in the living room, I sat down with Jan and considered my future.  This was not the first time I’d been assaulted by a bloody flood.  It was the worst, though.  Jan and I were both pretty wrung out, after 3 or 4 hours of non-stop bleeding.  The thought of going through another such episode, some future event being, perhaps, even worse – this was too much to reconcile, at this point.  I was “shot.”   I told Jan I thought it was time to concede defeat.  I thought, “Today is a good day to die!”  I felt completely determined, with no second thoughts.

“Time to call a meeting of the posse, Jan.  Would you please get on the phone and call the ‘loyal witnesses’ to come over, now?  Ask them if they can assemble here within an hour.”  It happened.  Within an hour, we had six of our closest friends sitting anxiously, in our living room, while I set up my deliverance apparatus.  With little fanfare, and no waste of time, I set up my kit, on the floor beside where I sat on the sofa.  Jan sat down beside me.  Our little coven of devotees arrayed themselves before us.  Aside from some alleged harp music, the room was very quiet, until I summarily said thank you and goodbye to the group, and then told Jan I loved her, and gave her a tearful hug.  By now, I was on a fast running “auto-pilot” setting.  No fooling around!  After looking over my “fool-proof as the space shuttle” equipment, I put on my respiratory therapy mask, cinched it up, and turned the valve to open the Nitrogen gas bottle, and began breathing very deliberately, deeply.  It didn’t seem to be knocking me out as quickly as it had when I tested the apparatus several months earlier.  After what was later reported to have been about four minutes, someone hollered to me, “Dan, your Nitrogen bottle is now empty!”  Groggily, I thought to myself, “Dead people surely don’t hear anything, no matter how pleasant, or otherwise.”  I opened my eyes, reluctantly surveying the scene.  I’m not enough of an optimist to have believed that my loyal coterie decided, all of them, to come with me.  ”Shit!  I’m still here!”

It was a Saturday night.  My failed stunt had derailed the solstice party.  My poor stressed friends all vowed they were willing to take another call, another day.  Jan and I went to the Unitarian Church the next morning – a lovely day.  For several days afterward, it felt somewhat odd to be alive.  For some reason, my resolve to go through that again… isn’t as sure of itself as it was before.

Sorry to have kept you all waiting for so long, to hear the next installment.

More, later.

dbt