I've been sick again all week, this time with nausea. I was unable even to slake my thirst, and could take only two or 3 small sips of water or liquid lest I get immediately sick and throw up. After 3 separate medications for nausea, I finally got very serious with my nurse and demanded that I have something that would quell the nausea, telling her that I could not live this way and demanding in a desperate tone that I be given something more effective. The same day they sent over something that is normally used for anxiety, but the small print says it can also be used for nausea as a result of chemo therapy.
So okay, that's what I'm talking about. Maybe we were now headed in the right direction. I started the pills immediately on Tuesday afternoon and I have had no more spells with throwing up. I was in such awful shape that it took me all week to settle down and feel well and I went from nausea to diarrhea. While not pleasant, it was ever so much more tolerable than nausea and vomiting. So I'm mending again, but much better now than I was the previous 2 or 3 weeks. Cancer is a peculiar disease to try and stay ahead of. Because all the chemicals in your body undergo severe changes, all kinds of normal are thrown completely off. Nothing smells the same or tastes the same...and it's not the medications...it is the disease. That in itself will throw your eating off. Two more pounds and I will have lost 70 pounds since the middle of April. I'm still wearing the same clothes, they just hang on my body a bit differently. I could care less.
Bobbi and I spent a lot of time this week going through photographs both for my memorial service and to give to my children. Family photos. I found some of me at all ages, thinking that might be an interesting look at my life for my friends who didn't know me my entire life. We also went through 2 or 3 large boxes of jewelry. During most of my life I loved jewelry, the bigger and more glamorous the better I liked it, and people enjoyed seeing me wear it. It's a little difficult to find people who have the same flare for jewelry that I have so we separated it into different boxes. One box I will give to my friend, Lynn, who wants to make her own jewelry, and this will give her beads and bits of jewelry she can play with and have fun reinventing her own style. One box is for my boyfriend, Benny, who is African American. A lot of the jewelry is his or some that he made or that I bought for him. Other pieces of it are all African made which I bought for myself and wore with pride. We sometimes had dreams of going to Tanzania or Tobago or Jamaica and wearing dashikis or muumuus...someplace where we might have been better accepted into their culture than into the racist culture that still permeates the U.S. I saved a few pieces of the jewelry for my sons who have memories of me wearing or, in the case of my oldest son who yearned to be a rock star in his younger days, wore some of the jewelry so he could pretend to dress for a stage appearance. Neither my makeup nor my jewelry was safe from Reese when he was hungering to be the next KISS band. Reese never did become another KISS or even a rock star, but he did venture into country music where he became hugely successful as the best song writer in Nashville. Other writers might challenge that but, in my humble opinion, he was and still is the best. He had a number of #1 hits on the charts for years. Just go to any store with albums and look for Reese Wilson as a writer on various albums and you'll be sure to find his name. Or you can Google Reese Wilson and see some of the wonderful music he eventually made.
I could not have accomplished all this without Bobbi. More each day she is my strength. I find I am becoming weaker each day and when I asked if she had noticed it, she confirmed it for me. One day soon I won't be able to get up from the chair or bed without being pulled up. My legs grow weaker and weaker. I'm wondering now how much time I have left on this earth. Two or three months would be my guess, though there are many days I don't think I can last that long. As an observer perhaps she can judge it better than I can. Maybe it's not fair to ask her, though she seems to be very tough. Of course, things haven't been as tough for her as I know they will be. I hope those days won't be too much for her.
I'm waiting to hear from Benny about tests that he's been having done. The doctors have acknowledged a lump or nodule on one of his testes. I pray he does not have testicular cancer and only further tests will prove that. I hope they hurry. Cancer is a stern taskmaster and it does not give you time to dilly dally around and waste time. I hope we aren't destined to die at about the same time. That's not fair to Benny. He's younger than I am and he needs time to have a life of his own outside of prison walls. That is a story I will tell before this blog is finished, but for tonight I will save the details. I haven't made myself sick with worry about it. A part of me almost wants him to complete this journey I'm on, yet despising how selfish that seems, the real truth is, I choose for him to have a decent life even without me. I do love him that much and do want the best for him.
This week brought treacherous wild fires all over California. Thousands of people were evacuated, over 1,000 homes were burned to the ground. Of course the governor and President Bush rushed in with all help and promises to help them and made the remark that they didn't want the same thing to happen in Orange County that happened in New Orleans after Katrina. Two and one-half years ago when Katrina decimated New Orleans everyone in the country knew, as we watched the horror that New Orleans was living through, that Orange County would never have been allowed to suffer in such a way. Orange County, after all, houses some of the richest, most elite of this country's citizens. Katrina merely wiped out hundreds of thousands of poor, impoverished people who all this time later are still trying to overcome the devastation. My strong feeling is that some of the instant help that's being fed into California should be sent to New Orleans instantly, for they still suffer and there's been no way they can recover without additional help. Obviously Bush and the majority of this country do not care if those poor blacks in Louisiana recover. A friend of mine made the mistake of saying to me in an e-mail that it's so awful what's happening in California, that it's just as bad as Katrina and I had to respond...unfortunately too harshly...by saying No, it's not nearly as bad. The people in California who are being wiped out are in a position of not needing shelters...many of them have multiple houses they can get away to. And they all have insurance. They will all recover in 6 months time and they will have cars and jobs waiting for them, totally unlike the working poor in New Orleans.
I'm worried tonight about Ana's mother. Ana writes to me every day, but she took off work two days in a row to take her mother to the doctor. Her mother is in her 90s and was only getting worse. I did not hear from Ana today and now I'm worried sick about her poor mother. I pray she is not in the hospital or worse. I cannot bear to think of Ana going through the grief of losing her mother. She treats her mother like a fragile flower and would be crushed and disconsolate should something happen to her. May the angels surround her as she battles her illness.
My own impending death does not make me mellower. I thought it might. Yet I find that I still get just as angry over the same injustices I got angry about before. I still worry about those I love who are sick, and about those I do not know who are being mistreated simply because they are poor or black and part of the working class. One day I will be unable to work up a good fit of anger simply because I'll be too weak to give it the force it needs, but inside I guess I will always weep for my fellow man and those too selfish and stingy to treat them as brothers and sisters.
Tonight was just a little foray back to my writing. Tomorrow night, God Willing, I will resume more of my life and how I came to change course and give up some of the resentment that dogged my heels. Until then, know I love you all an I am trying very hard to stay with this writing.
1 comments:
Princess of CJ said...
hi brooks, i really admire your strength and positivity.
it's surreal for me to read that you're planning for your memorial service, when I can still read your thoughts here.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
So okay, that's what I'm talking about. Maybe we were now headed in the right direction. I started the pills immediately on Tuesday afternoon and I have had no more spells with throwing up. I was in such awful shape that it took me all week to settle down and feel well and I went from nausea to diarrhea. While not pleasant, it was ever so much more tolerable than nausea and vomiting. So I'm mending again, but much better now than I was the previous 2 or 3 weeks. Cancer is a peculiar disease to try and stay ahead of. Because all the chemicals in your body undergo severe changes, all kinds of normal are thrown completely off. Nothing smells the same or tastes the same...and it's not the medications...it is the disease. That in itself will throw your eating off. Two more pounds and I will have lost 70 pounds since the middle of April. I'm still wearing the same clothes, they just hang on my body a bit differently. I could care less.
Bobbi and I spent a lot of time this week going through photographs both for my memorial service and to give to my children. Family photos. I found some of me at all ages, thinking that might be an interesting look at my life for my friends who didn't know me my entire life. We also went through 2 or 3 large boxes of jewelry. During most of my life I loved jewelry, the bigger and more glamorous the better I liked it, and people enjoyed seeing me wear it. It's a little difficult to find people who have the same flare for jewelry that I have so we separated it into different boxes. One box I will give to my friend, Lynn, who wants to make her own jewelry, and this will give her beads and bits of jewelry she can play with and have fun reinventing her own style. One box is for my boyfriend, Benny, who is African American. A lot of the jewelry is his or some that he made or that I bought for him. Other pieces of it are all African made which I bought for myself and wore with pride. We sometimes had dreams of going to Tanzania or Tobago or Jamaica and wearing dashikis or muumuus...someplace where we might have been better accepted into their culture than into the racist culture that still permeates the U.S. I saved a few pieces of the jewelry for my sons who have memories of me wearing or, in the case of my oldest son who yearned to be a rock star in his younger days, wore some of the jewelry so he could pretend to dress for a stage appearance. Neither my makeup nor my jewelry was safe from Reese when he was hungering to be the next KISS band. Reese never did become another KISS or even a rock star, but he did venture into country music where he became hugely successful as the best song writer in Nashville. Other writers might challenge that but, in my humble opinion, he was and still is the best. He had a number of #1 hits on the charts for years. Just go to any store with albums and look for Reese Wilson as a writer on various albums and you'll be sure to find his name. Or you can Google Reese Wilson and see some of the wonderful music he eventually made.
I could not have accomplished all this without Bobbi. More each day she is my strength. I find I am becoming weaker each day and when I asked if she had noticed it, she confirmed it for me. One day soon I won't be able to get up from the chair or bed without being pulled up. My legs grow weaker and weaker. I'm wondering now how much time I have left on this earth. Two or three months would be my guess, though there are many days I don't think I can last that long. As an observer perhaps she can judge it better than I can. Maybe it's not fair to ask her, though she seems to be very tough. Of course, things haven't been as tough for her as I know they will be. I hope those days won't be too much for her.
I'm waiting to hear from Benny about tests that he's been having done. The doctors have acknowledged a lump or nodule on one of his testes. I pray he does not have testicular cancer and only further tests will prove that. I hope they hurry. Cancer is a stern taskmaster and it does not give you time to dilly dally around and waste time. I hope we aren't destined to die at about the same time. That's not fair to Benny. He's younger than I am and he needs time to have a life of his own outside of prison walls. That is a story I will tell before this blog is finished, but for tonight I will save the details. I haven't made myself sick with worry about it. A part of me almost wants him to complete this journey I'm on, yet despising how selfish that seems, the real truth is, I choose for him to have a decent life even without me. I do love him that much and do want the best for him.
This week brought treacherous wild fires all over California. Thousands of people were evacuated, over 1,000 homes were burned to the ground. Of course the governor and President Bush rushed in with all help and promises to help them and made the remark that they didn't want the same thing to happen in Orange County that happened in New Orleans after Katrina. Two and one-half years ago when Katrina decimated New Orleans everyone in the country knew, as we watched the horror that New Orleans was living through, that Orange County would never have been allowed to suffer in such a way. Orange County, after all, houses some of the richest, most elite of this country's citizens. Katrina merely wiped out hundreds of thousands of poor, impoverished people who all this time later are still trying to overcome the devastation. My strong feeling is that some of the instant help that's being fed into California should be sent to New Orleans instantly, for they still suffer and there's been no way they can recover without additional help. Obviously Bush and the majority of this country do not care if those poor blacks in Louisiana recover. A friend of mine made the mistake of saying to me in an e-mail that it's so awful what's happening in California, that it's just as bad as Katrina and I had to respond...unfortunately too harshly...by saying No, it's not nearly as bad. The people in California who are being wiped out are in a position of not needing shelters...many of them have multiple houses they can get away to. And they all have insurance. They will all recover in 6 months time and they will have cars and jobs waiting for them, totally unlike the working poor in New Orleans.
I'm worried tonight about Ana's mother. Ana writes to me every day, but she took off work two days in a row to take her mother to the doctor. Her mother is in her 90s and was only getting worse. I did not hear from Ana today and now I'm worried sick about her poor mother. I pray she is not in the hospital or worse. I cannot bear to think of Ana going through the grief of losing her mother. She treats her mother like a fragile flower and would be crushed and disconsolate should something happen to her. May the angels surround her as she battles her illness.
My own impending death does not make me mellower. I thought it might. Yet I find that I still get just as angry over the same injustices I got angry about before. I still worry about those I love who are sick, and about those I do not know who are being mistreated simply because they are poor or black and part of the working class. One day I will be unable to work up a good fit of anger simply because I'll be too weak to give it the force it needs, but inside I guess I will always weep for my fellow man and those too selfish and stingy to treat them as brothers and sisters.
Tonight was just a little foray back to my writing. Tomorrow night, God Willing, I will resume more of my life and how I came to change course and give up some of the resentment that dogged my heels. Until then, know I love you all an I am trying very hard to stay with this writing.
1 comments:
Princess of CJ said...
hi brooks, i really admire your strength and positivity.
it's surreal for me to read that you're planning for your memorial service, when I can still read your thoughts here.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
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