One Day at a Time

Whoever came up with this bromide should be shot and then shot again the next day. How's that? Which day was which? We don't live life one day at a time, we live it in great big spoonfuls of tomorrows and yesterdays. What if in this precious one day your kids happen to be acting like total jerks, and you'd really rather spend the countdown in bed reading fetishistically about other young moms with metastatic breast cancer to see if their plights are worse than yours? Or digging deep to try to pull out any evidence that this diagnosis might not be your fault after all, and that you are merely the victim of some very very shitty luck which, actually, you DO wish on your worst enemy, and many other enemies besides? Why the fuck does that asshole get to live to be 70 and I don't? What could I possibly have done to deserve this? Is it possible this is actually just fucking random? And why won't my kids stop singing Weird Al?

There was a brief period a few nights ago where I literally couldn't read anything except death and dying stories. I tried to watch Scandal on TV, then tried to watch ANYTHING on TV, but my brain couldn't process it. I tried reading the NYT or Glamor or the Onion but the words didn't line up on the page right and I couldn't make heads or tails out of them. I managed a few pages about dying the buddhist way and then that failed too, and I slipped into a state where I knew that if I stopped making little sounds when I breathed out I would forget to breath in and surely die. Matthew tried to talk to me through it but I knew that if I broke off to talk I'd forget to breath, and you know, die. We had a meeting with the social worker the next day anyway, and when we told her about this little issue she brought us right to the ER and admitted me. Turns out you can take a LOT more Ativan than they had led me to believe. So maybe one Ativan at a Time?

The oncologist swears there will be days I don't think about this. Where I won't think about dying. She says once radiation and Zometa (sp?) have helped heal my spine, I won't need so many painkillers, and though I'll never get back to myself I will get back to something closer. That there will be day when I don't resent my kids for taking up some measurable percentage of my remaining lifespan whining and moaning and fighting. Because if it's one day at a time, really, those days better be fucking good days. And in my world good days don't include Weird Al.