4....Dry Heave

Have you ever gotten really drunk, or just really sick and thrown up many times over, and then suddenly you feel that you need to continue the vomiting, but there is just no more to give?  There is simply nothing left at the bottom of the pit, but there you sit, arms outstretched hovering over the commode, waiting.

Well, that’s pretty much how today felt to me, without the nausea. No, it wasn’t due to the fact that Jen, the Howell Family “Glue” is out of town and I was on full time kid duty today from 6:15  a.m. to 8:30 p.m. minus 1:30 to 3:45 (radiation and quick trip to WalMart) with 2,  10 minute rests.  This included but was certainly not limited to 15 or so dependent lifts,  2 pureed dinners, 2 one hour feedings with the complete use of 1 roll of paper towels, 6 diaper changes, 5 dependent clothes changes, cooking and cleaning up a solid food dinner, and fighting with a 3 year old to "go the f… to sleep" (http://abcnews.go.com/m/story?id=13598906).

Should I even mention the ridiculous trip to WalMart? Probably not, but I will.  I was there buying a new stroller for Adaline to serve as back up for the wheelchair, because I’m so weak that I can’t get her wheelchair into and out of my car safely, now that I have to climb in and pop the back hatch from the inside and then lift the heavy chair up into the back. (Come On Ellen!) I was also there buying UVP 50 shirts, and more sunscreen for me so that I can cover up my radiation burn and go outside, and a car dash shade because it was like 103 degrees here today and my car said 109 degrees.  Anyway, of course, I’m carrying everything out, instead of using a cart and I had the stuff perfectly balanced when the old lady at the door began yelling at me to come back so that she can check my receipt.  That wasn’t really it either, although that did really irritate me as I was dropping everthing at her feet.  

You guessed it.  It’s the fact that I sat and waited, then sat and waited some more for the radiation treatment today.  It’s the fact that I had to soak and treat this skin 3 times today in between everything else I was doing. It’s the fact that I was lying there on the radiation table after 6 weeks of radiation, a major surgery, 24 weeks of hard chemotherapy, and continued “easy chemo” and as I was looking up at the eye of the radiation, I saw a reflection in the glass. It was my radiated chest with a big scar where the breast once was.  I was just lying there with arms outstretched, up over my head as if in surrender.  Numb. Weak. Tired. No real thoughts. Just waiting.

Benedicto: Quote from Edward Abbey: "May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you -- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls."

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