Sunday, August 24, 2008

Like It Is.

It's like this. I've been out in the shade once or twice. Bent the rules. Snapped the rules in half. I do not judge people. At least I try real hard not to judge other people. When a guy like John Edwards holds himself out to the rest of us as some kind blue collar hero who swept the floors at the mill and went on to college so that he could reach back and lift us all up where we belong. When a guy like John Edwards turns out to be just another slick player who should at least give us a reach around if he can't reach back. Well, that just pisses me off.

The nurses who work in "The Chemo Room" call it Kool-Aid. They call the chemo Kool-Aid. My wife can't drink any red juice. She can't eat red yogurt. Strawberry was her favorite, the kind with the fruit on the bottom. Red is the color of the chemo that is injected into the port on the front of her right shoulder. The syringe looks like a turkey baster with a six-penny nail on the end. They shoot the Kool-Aid into her with that.

I knew this guy once. He was one of the cops I worked with. He cheated on his wife a lot. He was pathological about it. He was a serial cheater. His wife was so nice. She was pretty and sweet. She was the mother of this guy's children. What a surprise, a cop who cheats on his wife. I never really liked that guy. It had less to do with him cheating on his wife, it was more like, you just knew you couldn't trust him. He was the guy who would give you up in a second to save his own ass.

My wife is crashing right now. You really can't call it sleeping. It's a crash. Her hair fell out weeks ago. Her eyelashes started falling out shortly after that. Her eyebrows are going now. Our younger daughter called them "eyebrellas" when she was little.

I knew this other guy. He was a cop too. He cheated on his wife once. She found out about it and swung a golf club up and into his groin. I bet that hurt. He was so worried that she'd do it again that he had his two brothers go with him to move his stuff out of the house. His grandmother was going to rent him an apartment in the three-family house that she owned. When his grandmother found out why his wife had cracked him in the nards with a golf club and thrown him out of the house, she said he couldn't live in her building. When he told me about the whole situation I laughed. He had it coming to him and he knew it. I still trusted him.

On TV and in the movies they always show the chemo patient hooked to an IV. In my wife's case the IV comes before the chemo. It's the IV that takes the longest, up to an hour or more. There is no chemo in that IV. That IV has four different types of anti-chemo-symptom type drugs on board. The chemo, or Kool-Aid in a turkey baster comes last. At least that's how it is in my wife's case. Everybody is different. Everybody receives different treatment and it all depends on any number of variables.

It's like this. I am not some kind flawless character. I've got flaws as big as the friggin' Grand Canyon in some places. I can say that I have never harmed anyone who didn't really have it coming to them, like self defense. I can also say that I've never played those kind of games, like those guys I was telling you about. Or like John Edwards.

Fewer than five-percent of the more than one hundred thousand woman who are diganosed with breast cancer each year are under forty years old. My wife is thirty-nine. She's a Stage Two at least. It's already been found in her Lymph Nodes and that's not good.

1 Comments:

Blogger Liz said...

I was just stopping by to see how your wife is doing. Take care

10:14 PM  

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