05 - Something Is Wrong With Me, Part 2

I awoke just now, thoughts scattered, immediately gathered them and sat up in the dark and the quiet, trying to identify what is wrong. I felt different. I sat, eyes closed, and thought, and calmed the sweeping searchlights of my mind with a mental wave of my hand, set them back on a slower, more methodical course, and took two long breaths. Waited for one hundred and twenty seconds. Identify the situation, do not flee from it. Look inside. Listen.

...I am just hungry.

Very hungry. It's 5:23am, and I haven't eaten since around 8pm last night, and I am just hungry now. The remnants of the Prednisone steroids in my system continue to charge my appetite, so I got up and poured a cup of milk and microwaved a piece of a cinnamon roll to tide me over for a few hours until other people get up and a proper breakfast can be had... and only just now do I fully realize that I am living in tight wariness of the looming moment when whatever bubble of unnatural reaction I am living in pops and all I am left with is feeling very, very sick. I do not know why I have not yet experienced the nausea, the wasted feelings of fatigue and muscle ache, the cumulative ravages of having pumped a cocktail of precision-crafted poisons through my veins almost a solid week ago. And I am not confident that my continued presentation as an exception to that probability can continue indefinitely. Now I need to acknowledge that the weight of that wariness, the state of constant readiness for worse proceeding to worst bears its own weight and as such is a force in reality that I must deal with. It isn't fear, exactly, nor is it just meek or exhausted resignation in the face of a coming storm; rather I feel like a man in the jungle alone, surrounded by a hundred sounds a minute which could all or each or none represent a threat to me. It is unfamiliar, I am alone but for a knife, I can't know where to go or to hide since I don't know where I am making every direction more risk than tactic, and no one else can hear or see any of it, the vines, the grasses, the twisted trunks and darkened canopy above, the knife, or the darting look in my mind's eye... no one but me. I stand, poised, but how long can one remain on the pressed toes of one's metaphorical feet before one begins to cramp, slip, suffer, and lose that focus? Yet I can't stop watching. I will not be blindsided by my own selfish complacency, not while all around me others move mountains to ensure my future comfort and ease.

But this morning I am just hungry, so I've just eaten a bit of bread and sugar and if I can't sleep I thought I'd hike on down to the roadside for a bit and see who, if anybody, might be waiting there to talk a walk for a ways this morning.

Did you sleep well last night, Walking Buddy? Let's kick rocks awhile.

When we left off last night I had just hit the first barrier symptom of Something Being Wrong With Me, a sharp shift to shortness of breath which was somewhat in excess of what I should have been experiencing from such a break in my "training" for my "participation" in the Tough Mudder event. However, due to a combination of factors personal and self-perceptual, I was unable to see the warning for what it was, and continued to believe that my deteriorating condition was really just due to my own lack of dedication to the whim I'd followed dear dashing dauntless Andrew out on a limb to explore. It Was Probably Nothing.

A few weeks later, marked by continuing depreciating performance physically which were masked by a collapsing regularity with which I was willing to attend the gym, I got up one morning and took a shower, then got out to shave. And it was there in that moment that I happened to be staring at my own reflected eyes in the mirror when my fingers brushing over my neck first encountered a distended lump there beneath the skin, just above my collarbone in my neck, which had no predictable business being there. Because I happened to be looking at my own reflected eyes at the time, I experienced a very strange moment of mental feedback loop in which I clearly stared into my own eyes asking a question, waiting for my reflection to have an answer I did not. What the hell was this?

Finding a lump is never a good thing. I have encountered enough breast cancer awareness warnings out in the world to be able to determine that people should both:

1. Check themselves regularly all over for all kinds of problems of any sort anywhere, and
2. Be absolutely terrified of what they might find, 'cause that shit don't play around.

As you can see, my grasp of preventative medical precautions was a bit slapdash, but I had the gist of it. And the undeniable fact of the matter is, that isn't a two-step list you want to suddenly find yourself on Step Two of. I stood stock-still in the bathroom for a period no longer than sixty seconds, during which my computer brain went into brief overdrive producing forward event calculations and probabilities. That process would be impossible to transpose accurately, but I'm going to attempt a reasonable reconstruction anyway if only because I have recently become immediately and completely tired of having to pretend as though I think and reason as others might. That sixty seconds went a little something like this, my eyes never leaving their reflected twins:

This is an actual thing - not imagined - right now one person knows - controlled information - medical - without insurance medical options limited - priority: identification - more information needed - could be nothing? - impossible - nothing would be no lump - has a cause - potential reactions of others - parents will leap into action - clear action to take? - none yet - too many wrong choices - wasted resources - cannot allow - Kathleen - already in transition - currently brittle - unsafe for her - no benefit to me - Kathleen must not know - potential life changes - vast - too numerous to consider - retract sphere of consideration - limit parameter: current situation overview - no money no doctor negligible medical knowledge slim personal resources - identify impulse: pressure to dismiss as harmless - possible - not logical - circumstances cannot supersede logic - situation must not be allowed to self-determine - more information needed - DO NOTHING FOR NOW.

In sixty seconds, I took responsibility for myself in my life alone staring into a bathroom mirror, and I made what turned out to be a rather calm and solid overview judgment call, all things considered. I didn't know what was happening, but I had stared into my own eyes and watched no fear cloud them as my brain rapidly flipped through successive pages of its own data readout, and I had reached a conclusion that had in its genesis required the discarding of several alternatives for being ill-considered... a good sign. The unstable mind, the mind which cannot be trusted, it does not methodically consider and discard options, it grasps as if falling. Clutches, regardless of qualifying factor. I had learned something about myself.

For some reason, while I was surprised by this, I was not afraid. And it was only later that I would remember the underlying reason why this was. It turned out that I had considered this scenario (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) before.

Kathleen Herring is my best friend. She and I found our lives intertwined some years ago by a series of unusual events made just beautiful enough by individual choices to be irreversibly cemented. Back then I was the older guy, the one who knew things she did not and saw the world in ways she's never dreamed, and for my part she was like this human-shaped young doe of a girl, all innocent liquid deer eyes and wandering wondering unarmored unpreparedness for the world. Whatever she saw in me, in her I found an instinctive but totally elective protective need... the world was going to eat this young woman alive if she was left unattended, with the likely rapidity that I would have to watch it happen if I didn't actively try and prevent it. The story of our meeting and the genesis of our friendship is one I enjoy telling, though I wouldn't bore you with it unasked, Walking Buddy. If you'd like to hear more about it, though, or for that matter about anything else in particular along the road here, please always feel free to let me know in the comments. I love all the feedback and replies I get there, but I do want to mention that questions are perfectly okay too. I don't have any grand plan in this storytelling here that would be interrupted by dialogue, and isn't a part of seeing this whole thing as a stroll the idea that we can just talk awhile? If there's anything along the way you'd like to hear more about, put it in the comments below and I'll be glad to address them as I'm able.

Anyway, by this point Kathleen and I had lived together for six years, barring one in which she'd moved back home with her parents while I was working at Rosetta Stone. We were everything we were going to be (best friends, confidants, trusted and trusting, in possession of the fullest road map of one anothers' strengths and inadequacies), and beyond all the things we would never be but which simple people perpetually feel the urge to slyly hint at knowing we really are deep down (lovers, secretly-for-no-goddamn-reason romantic partners, etc.) until I want to punch them in the face. You wish you had a best friendship like mine.

This is Kathleen, if you don't know her personally, Walking Buddy:

Here she is looking happy at Renn Faire.

She and I at her JMU graduation.

This whole process, the situation, it hasn't been easy on her.

And before any of you think some misaimed noble nonsense about "why is he spending his time worrying about how she is doing when he's got all this on his plate" or some like variant, you need to understand that I am not going to change my program now. Not because of cancer, not because of anything. I first joined this gentle, beautiful girl's story by willfully interceding into a situation that had as a likely ending her rape, and I have spent years living alongside her, experiencing her emotions, learning her every way, and by any method be it subtle or sledgehammer guiding her into the ideas of personal competence, strength, self-reliance and capability that I myself hold dearest. She is not my project, she is not my subordinate, she is not and has never been my girlfriend or my lover, but she is my responsibility. Because she gave me that power in her life, and because I chose to ask for it. And since then she has kept me alive when I would have fallen after trying to walk alone for too many years. She has survived underneath my piercing gaze, my laser-focused perceptions that slice right through your defenses and pretenses and comfortable self-deceptions before you've even been made aware how many there are; that is not a comfortable or easy way to live, nor I such a person to live with. She has weathered the storms of my enduring sense of loneliness and disconnection from my species, my gender, my family and my life, and tried to help me make sense of the many myriad mysterious ways that I am and to always be able to remember the odd beautiful things I am capable of which look like magic to others before sinking into the darkness and the limitations and the ways in which I am destructively different. In many ways, if I am still as this new stage rises up into my life capable of thinking it possible that I am not just innately broken as a person, irreparably destructively different, it is because she sustained me in that belief and kept me from falling into the darkness through years without the outside world providing any evidence of it on its own.

I would not be who I am without Kathleen. I would not be here, and I would not be strong.

I tell you all of this in such rapid-fire fashion, Walking Buddy (and I am sorry for the barrage of it all, actually; you didn't actually go any say any of those qualifying misperceptions, and here I am correcting you sharply as if you had), because you need to understand something that I came to understand a few years ago. Everyone wishes to tell me about how remarkable it is that I am bearing up this well, how incredible my spirit is and amazing that I can still make a joke with the same readiness that I could two weeks ago, and I find it all terribly warming but not entirely accurate. I am not what I am because of my own will and development alone; I am the sum of my own will multiplied by the goodness of the people around me. People like Kathleen. It is the others in my life who changed me, those lives which impacted mine and bounced away, or those which have traveled alongside mine for a time, which had as much to do with who and what I became as any independent decisions I made on my own. Not that I don't acknowledge that I, as a person, have actively chosen to mine every ounce of every lesson my abnormal brainpan can process from each and every single event, interaction, and encounter of my life. Because I do that, and I do it with a focused purpose that would look like a freaking laser if it were to be made visible. I am an experiential laser-miner of self-improvement and -expansion, and that is by choice.

But it's the good people in my life who give me experiences to process. My part is just to learn ~150% from every one, so that I might grow and change and adapt and always be more useful to the next person I can be of any assistance to than they could have possibly expected me to be, so that when they look at me with that expression of surprise at my understanding or insight or whatever I get that little thrill of knowing I am living my life remarkably and not just disappearing into the ocean of the forgettable average. There is no greater death to me than that.

I kept my initial observations from Kathleen because I logically assessed that she would not be able to process the ramifications of the situation to a degree which would leave her unharmed, better prepared, or able to assist me in any notable way. I did so with a heaviness in my heart, as well, as I do not lightly or comfortably keep things from the one person in my life (at that time, and for some time) who can by her unique placement veto my executive decisions with the legislative power of alternate perception. But I knew in this case my decision was correct. Kathleen and I were right in the absolute middle of a heavy transitional period that had been coming for some time and which I was running operational point on: the separation of our two young lives, for the future health and maximal growth potential of both. It was time for us to go separate ways and carve out from the world our own individual corners for ourselves, and the truth is that Kathleen was already suffering widespread debilitating effects from the upcoming realities of that transition. Even with weeks and months to go where we would be living together in the new apartment she'd picked out in Staunton before I set out to get my own place, there was no turning away from the fact that we had deliberately chosen a place she could afford on her own... the fact that she had signed a year lease and I had not... the fact that the place we'd chosen was too small to fit me and my life as well as her own for any longer than we had planned. The wheels were already turning, and Kathleen was already feeling frightened and ground between them before my health problems had even begun to arise.

So there I was, staring into a mirror, inarguably proven solid in sixty silent seconds of Real Life Test... but also completely alone as I'd always been and always been afraid I'd be forever. The reverse of egotism's coin is the other side where if you truly have the guts to believe you are the best man for a particular situation, then you had better be prepared to stand alone if need be when the fires rise around you. The floor grew warm.

I wasn't going to tell anyone yet. But there was no more question whatsoever, and could be none. I had a lump in my neck. Something Was Definitely Wrong With Me.

...This is far enough for today, Walking Buddy. I'll come back down to the roadside when I can sometime soon and we can stroll on a bit farther, but we've made good ground today anyway. I continue to have an unbroken string of "good days" where I could be experiencing mild to moderate chemotherapy system shocks, and yet am suffering none beyond a general lowered sense of total energy and a kind of passive mild heaviness of the muscles all over. And then on top of all of that, I am writing this now lying on my brand new bed (which felt like waking up in a cloud this morning; I've never been so comfortable sleeping before), in my ridiculously clean Extreme Junk Room Makeover Home Edition bedroom (complete with fresh-painted walls in a soothing pale jade, a brand new 55" smart television I've done absolutely nothing to earn but must... not... feel... guilty about elating at having, and my just-today completely reconnected Xbox 360, PS3, and surround sound system). I have nothing I could even begin to reach to complain about.

...Cancer's probably getting a bit jealous, come to think of it. All it's gotten out of this attention explosion so far is a massive dose of poison.

We'll continue this tale soon, Walking Buddy.

- Gabriel, Replugged And Shinier For It