Take me Away-- Wait, No...

I-- want someone to take me away. I want someone to take over my life and make it work. I want a new career, and I want money to survive or better, and I want my daughters to have enough money, each, to survive on their own, but I want them to live close enough so that we can all eat together often and go to movies and work on movies together. I want someone to fix my writing so it all works wonderfully and grabs the reader or audience member by the throat and keeps them captive until they've had their fill of laughter, tears, suspense, surprise, and terror and relief... and grief...

BUt really, if I were to live my life passively, just letting everything happen to me and for me, I don't think my life would turn out the way I want it to.

On the other hand, I just feel completely paralyzed to do anything-- even to apply for assistance while the current disaster renders me unable to survive without massive infusions of cash from my mother, who really can't afford to keep it up.

I'm unemployed, and I'm a little too tired and sick to really pound the pavement looking for a new job. Not only that, but I keep having these daggone doctor appointments. I am finally getting over the infection that's responsible for the postponement of my chemotherapy, and now I have three appointments this week. Well, two. I have to make sure someone sets the third-- the one where they'll remove the drain from my butt. I guess I can pick up the phone and call the surgeon to see if he's requested it yet.

Tomorrow I have an appointment with Dr. Botnick at 2. Dr. Botnick is the radiation oncologist. He's just following up. Thursday at three, I see the oncologist about starting chemotherapy. Sometime Thursday or Friday I'm going to have to get this drain removed.

I'm tired, today, and I keep wanting to eat, as if that will mafically make me healthier or happier... but it doesn't. Now I want to quit eating... or I want to take a pain pill and see if my pain will all go away. My lower sacral spinal area is truly in excruciating pain. I guess I'll take a pill and make it go away... or at least decrease it a bit.

I wish I could do something that would fill my bank account with cash, so I oould pay my bills and all these nasty copays for the doctors I'm seeing. I have zero income. None. Zip. Everything I eat or put in the gas tank or wipe my nose with... is all paid for by my mom or my daughters.

And whenever I lie down, the room tilts and then spins, for a moment. I only got a few hours of sleep last night.

I've called the insurance company. They said an urgent request was placed Friday for the CT scan and the procedure at Providence St. Joseph's to remove the drain. So I should hear by Wednesday, at the latest, about that.

I want to open Craigslist and see a gig that's tailor made for me.

I want it to pay big bucks. I want to be the woman they're dreaming of, for the position. BUt look... I've got a doctor appointment tomorrow, another on Thursday, and an outpatient procedure on Friday, unless someone wants to screw up Thursday's doctor appointment by scheduling the procedure at the same time... which would suck. So I hope they just try for Friday.

Meanwhile, I'm in pain and I'm dizzy and I'm depressed. I think I'll just put on a Netflix movie and probably fall asleep.

Somebody, take me away. Somebody make all the medical issues go away. Somebody, give me a few thousand dollars... and fix my car. The radiator leaks and the axle is fractured... and other things are leaking. The brake light is always on...

I'm almost falling asleep as I write this.

I want everything to be wonderful.

But I guess I'm going to have to try to make that happen by myself. Last I looked, nobody was passing out tickets to an easier, painless, beautiful, wonderful life. A few fishermen just drowned in frigid water off the coast of Antarctica... They never had a chance. They didn't have life jackets or immersion suits. The longest they could survive was ten minutes, in that icy water. Their families at home were depending on the income they'd have earned, had the boat not sank. Now they'll have to figure out another way to survive. What do I have to complain about?

Nothing Extraordinary

"She had always been an unusual girl..." is the opening line I penned for my future autobiography when I was eight years old. When you're eight, it's easy to imagine that one day you'll be so astonishingly popular and successful that everyone will want to read about your life. And I knew, from Mrs. Marlin, the third grade teacher who had effused over my opening line in an essay about the Chicago blizzard of 1967, that a gripping opener was essential to capturing a reader's attention.

I guess a great title is probably needful, too. In that case, maybe "Nothing Extraordinary" shouldn't be the title of this blog... or the title I'm contemplating for my autobiographical novel. I'm calling it a novel because that will give me the freedom to launch into any fantasy that pops into my noggin as I'm writing, and it will also give me an opportunity to write the absolute truth without letting anyone know with absolute certainty that I actually did any of the things I might confess to having done.

And since I've had two complete psychotic breaks this year, during which time I experienced an alternate reality that I later found to be entirely fictional, I am fascinated by the possibility that some of my most traumatic memories might actually be the product of temporary insanity, despite their life-altering effects.

I made major changes in my behavior and character after horrific experiences that are indelibly etched in my memory. The possibility that they might never have occurred is slim, I'd say. The difference between those experiences and the brief periods of delusion is that, during those delusional episodes, what I thought was real seemed more like an extended dream... and made less sense than the stories of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, while the experiences of my shockingly wild youth are as memorable as any of the more ordinary experiences I recall-- like the births of my children, the building of our house in Illinois... and the many other events I might chronicle for my children's children in an autobiography that I might or might not claim is factual and accurate.

Life could be short, from here onward. I should do something with the time. I'm not making any money, and I'm not creating any incredible art... so maybe I should write my memoirs, call them fiction or not... and see if there's a publisher who will be as gaga over my writing as Mrs. Marlin was. She pronounced me a writer at the age of eight. I have never been willing to relinquish the title, no matter how badly written any of my material might be.

The first thing I wanted to do today was to blog.

I'm not sure why the cursor on this laptop likes to jump around while I'm typing. All of a sudden, in the middle of a sentence, I find the last several words have leaped into the middle of a previous sentence. I woke today, and reached for this computer, beside my bed. I wanted to blog. I wanted to start the day blogging and blog every day for the next 365 days.

My friend Donnie Harbeck had urged me to do so, last night, during our hours-long conversation. He's been blogging every day, and it's changing his life. Or... he's been changing his life and blogging about it. Anyway, he's DOING something, which is more than can be said of me. I've become incredibly unproductive, and while I'd like to blame it on my health issues, and probably nobody would argue... I have to think that I could be doing a lot more than I've been accomplishing. Maybe blogging about it will shame me into taking action... spur me on to achieving goals...

I have a lot of things I need to do immediately, and I don't want to bore you by listing them, but they're things critical to my family's financial survival... and I keep putting them off and watching movies.

The movie-viewing, I tell myself, is research. I'm learning the craft of screenwriting by watching others' results. One of my goals is to support myself and my family members who need support, with my screenplays. I hope they'll sell and get made into movies and this will become a lucrative career... and sometimes, or maybe all the time, I want to act in the movies I'm writing... and in others that I didn't write..

Sometimes I attend local free movie screenings hosted by Creative Screenwriting Magazine. They have a Q&A with the author(s) after most of these, and that's very informative. I just wish I wasn't so fatigued by the end of these movies that I can barely stay awake for the Q&A's.

Still, I like to go to as many as I can, and I do have several screenplays in various stages of completeness... or incompletion... on my computer. Not this one. They're on my i-Mac. I had them here, too, but this thing crashed a number of times and I had to reformat it. Every time I install Movie Magic Screenwriter, it crashes again.

I might use Celtx, if I decided to write on this computer. And I might do that, because sitting on my butt still hurts too much, and the i-Mac is a desktop.

Today I'm lying on my left side, sinking into the nice memory foam pad beneath my red, knit sheets. The sheets feel soft against my thighs. Last night I was feeling very menopausal-- sweaty and hot, so I slept in nothing but my bra, a tank top, my panties, and my bags. Yes, my bags...ostomy and other... and my hose-- not footwear. An actual hose protrudes from my left buttock and connects, several feet later, to a catheter bag that is conveniently equipped with a belt, in case I should need to conceal it under my clothing and go out in public, which I'll need to do, sometime today.

Meanwhile, the bag lies on the floor next to my bed, slowly filling with clear orange fluid and a few, tiny, red clots. It's not at all disturbing to watch this fluid collect in the bag. It's a relief, after seeing what the doctor collected in syringes at the hospital.

With the help of the CT scanner, the radiologist located a large collection of pus that used to drain out of my body through a hole in the top of my vagina. The hole had been t-- I interrupted the writing of this blog to shower and wash my hair. Correction... I took a sponge bath and washed my hair. I smell all minty now, from Dr. Bronner's peppermint soap, and my hair is all slimy with leave-in conditioner that will make it soft and not frizzy when it dries. I was born with naturally curly hair, but since the cancer diagnosis, and possibly as a side effect of the chemo, my hair has been insanely curly, and I've decided I like it that way. I will no longer use my flat iron to straighten it... unless an acting role demands it.

So anyway, now I'm dressed in a skirt, tank top and sweater. Yes,it's the same tank top I slept in. In fact, I'm also wearing the same panties and bra. The panties are pretty fresh because I'm still wearing and changing the gigantic, extra long,overnight maxi pads that used to collect the pus that was draining through the hole in my vagina, which brings me back to where I was taking you before the bath...

The surgeon tore the hole in the top of my vagina while he was performing the permanent colostomy surgery. It wasn't his fault. Radiation had fused the vagina to my rectum and my rectum to my spine. It was a hellishly long surgery, and a gynecologist came in near the end and repaired the hole and took out my ovaries, to prevent cancer from taking up residence there. The hole must have blown itself wide open, right away, because before I ever left the hospital, liquids began draining from my vagina.

First, it was clear fluid tinged with blood... just like what's in my catheter drain bag, right now. After a couple of months, I hemorrhaged... and giant clots of blood were followed by what looked like a really heavy period for a couple of weeks. But soon, the bleeding gave way to pus. Thick, gray-green, gooey pus. It stank. I went back to the gynecologist, who sent me right over to the hospital ER. They cultured the pus. It was e-coli. I stayed in the hospital a couple of days, receiving intravenous antibiotics and pain meds. I became constipated, vomited, and went home. Oh, they also did a CT scan then, and elected not to insert a drain at that time, since my vagina seemed to be acting as a natural drain. But the pus drained on and on for weeks, a couple of months, maybe, and every time I ran out of Bactrim, a potent antibiotic, I would start to run a fever and feel really sick.

So, finally, Dr. Pourshahmir, the surgeon, decided I should have another CT scan and when he saw the collection of fluid in that scan, he arranged for me to have the abscess drained in the hospital. So that's what happened, and it's why I now have a hole in my butt with a pigtail drain hanging out of it, and why I'm going to be wearing baggy skirts and dresses until the thing comes out, in a couple of weeks. At home, I'll wear whatever I want, because I'll put the bag on the floor. Right now, it's belted around my hips because I'm going out to argue with the Unemployment Insurance office... who totally denied that I earned any income at all, over the past year. Morons.

But that's another story.

If it smells like poop in here, it ain't me, babe.

My 20 year old daughter just walked in the front door and said, "It smells like poop in here."

Her sister piped up, "I just farted. Sorry."

I knew it couldn't be me, even though I've been farting every few minutes and pooping constantly... because all of my gas and excrement empty into a plastic bag that's glued onto my gut... and it's sealed, doesn't leak, and doesn't smell.

I'm getting really sick of emptying and cleaning the bag. I've have very prolific intestines today. ANd right now, about ten minutes after the last time I emptied and cleaned it, it's filling up with gas again. I guess I'll go see what else is in it, and empty it again.

I'll do that, and then I'll take out my contacts and go to bed.

So there you go, Donny. I blogged. I might do it again soon. I will. I will do it soon, again.