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

Last night I awoke, around 1 AM, with a dose of acid reflux indigestion (my diagnosis).  I was coughing up some of the usual throat-crud, along with some stinging, astringent partly-digested chow from my too-much, too-late dinner.  Not fun.  I got up, coughed and spat some more crud, and guzzled as much water as I could, occasionally rinsing and spitting more crud.  I then collected up a couple of bath robes and some hand towels, and decamped to the reclining rocker our neighbor, Eileen, loaned us a couple of months ago, when I was having a bad patch of midnight hemorrhage episodes, the idea being that I might be less inclined to strangle on my own blood if I were sleeping in a more upright position.  Once nestled into the recliner, bundled in bathrobes strategically wrapped around my upper and lower body, and with the angle set to keep my head up a bit above my torso and feet, I nodded off quite comfortably for most of the next 9 hours.  I didn’t sleep like anyone’s proverbial log, but I did sleep and was comfortable.  What was interesting, was that I spent much of the night, and a few hours of dawn and morning, in and out of a comfortable hallucinatory state.  Lucid dreaming, I suppose.  It was like an endless stream of little film clips, one after another.  It all seemed pleasant enough, as I dozed in and out.  I kept wondering if I was being treated to some sort of pre-mortem scrapbook-slideshow of my life – something, perhaps, common to the experience of someone who is slipping out of active, conscious life, into…. some sort of hallucinatory limbo-land.

Around daybreak, Jan got up and began puttering around the kitchen and living room.  I was conscious of her presence, even spoke a bit, but was very happy to stay right where I was, cocooned in my chair, watching the ongoing hallucination carnival.  Finally, around 10 AM, I got up and began the hour-long process of getting dressed.  Food was not interesting, nor was anything liquid, though Jan kept plying me with same.  I felt like I could have just stayed right where I was, for the rest of my life.  No need for a book, a movie, music, conversation, a walk — all blank.  It’s now 1 PM, early afternoon.  It’s a warm, sunny, early Fall day.  Nothing moves me, yet.  I wonder if this is what the end will be like… if this is the end.  Or, will I pull out of this state of physical and mental torpor, to get up, perhaps tomorrow, and be inspired to do something, anything.  If not, then I fear that the coming week may be a very long, tedious waiting for our little entourage of most-intimate friends to drift back into town from their last late-summer sorties and junkets, so that they can huddle around Jan and I as say my very last good-byes, and slip peacefully away.

Is it just me, or does the whole world, near and far, seem to be falling apart?  I know that the economic landscape seems pervaded by gloomy scenery (duh!), but what I pretend to notice is a widening, lengthening, deepening sense of ennui, malaise, distress.  Friends and relatives, left and right, seem to be falling apart, somehow, in depression, physical dysfunction, accidents, calamities.  Am I not the only one “tanking”, lately?  Has everyone been drinking the same dark Kool-Aid?