Waiting for george
On November 1st, I was driving around town with my man, checking out the Halloween decorations that people still had going. We were taking photos and such. At one point, I leaned forward in the driver seat of the car to look at a house, and cried out loudly in jarring sharp pelvic pain. I sat back and whimpered for a moment, and my man was all worried. I explained to him what happened. George will be here soon.
On November 2nd, I began getting pelvic pain and moderate lower back pain throughout the day - enough to want to take meds, and I was feeling VERY tired and rundown. I had to check myself all day to see if george had arrived because it felt as if he had. I packed my medicine and pads wherever I went in case george showed up.
On November 3, I went to a memorial for Lori, who died of cancer on October 27, 2007. Our friends J&G drove us up to Nevada city, where we met up with our friends H&B, sister- and brother-in-law to Lori. Again, I was feeling the back and pelvic pain, feeling like george would arrive at any second.
In our group of friends, we only got to meet Lori a couple of times, but we’d been following her journal since June 2005, when H told us about it.
I started this journal eight months later, and over time focused more and more on my disease in this journal. The reason is partially due to Lori - by reading her journal, I realised I had to stop feeling sorry for myself, and I had to stop whining in my journal about my condition, and I had to get to the business of really chronicling my disease - to be of help for myself and others.
The sad thing is, I wanted to thank Lori all these months for being strong and inspiring, but I felt like I’d come off too petty or lame.
When the time came to meet her in person, all I could say was that I had been following her journal and wished her continued good health (at that time, she’d been in partial remission). I was still too afraid to mention my own disease, because I didn’t want to appear that I was trying to understand her situation. Because I can’t ever understand what she went through. I don’t have cancer. I have an incurable disease but I never had to have poison injected into my system (chemotherapy) to treat my condition. Sure, hormones are a poison of their own, but still. You know what I mean, right?
But when she died, I regretted not telling her that she’d been a source of strength and inspiration to me with my own disease. So when we were at the memorial, I made sure to tell her husband. He hugged me and told me to please check out the special diet that Lori was on, because he says it helped her immensely. He said what ultimately killed her was too many chemotherapy sessions, and without having done that, she might have lived much longer. We hugged again and parted ways.
On the drive back downstate, I began to get moderate lower back pain, and when I leaned forward to try to stretch out my back, I had the pelvic pain. So I couldn’t win. I was so exhausted from the day already. I’d cried during the memorial. So I took a short nap in the car. My back hurt worse than my front, so I did the ‘grin and bear it’ sort of thing and continued to lean forward to stretch out the back.
When we got home, we were both hungry, so we went out to dinner for Mexican food. But I so did not want to be there. I ate what I could of the nachos but forgot to request whole beans, so I got refried beans. Of course, the refried beans excited my intestines - something about it - the lard perhaps - and I was anxious to get home and sit on the pot. The urgency wasn’t too bad because I cleverly avoided most of the beans. So we got ice cream from Tucker’s and dropped a pint off for our friends who’d driven us up to the memorial, then went back home where I went splodey in the bathroom. :(
I sat like a zombie in front of the computer for a few minutes, then declared I was going to bed. I wanted to read a bit before sleeping but that didn’t happen. I went right to sleep.
I woke up around 4am, then again at 6am with really bad lower back pain. I thought for sure george was here, so I got up, went to the bathroom - nope, no george. Went back to bed, and had to get up again around 7:30am because I was near tears with the pain. Had a good movement and sitting in a chair helped the pain to subside, so I decided to journal…
And now here I am… it’s friggin ten minutes to 9am on a Sunday (oh hey, we had the time change, didn’t we). I should be sleeping in. My back feels better, so dammit, I’m going back to bed for a bit.