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TW emetophobia, pet injury, cancer, death, suicidal ideation, fucking hell what a really optimistic opening to a post!!
A belated but sincere thanks to those that commented on my post about my father's cancer; that I haven't responded is just because talking (in general, but about that in specific) is hard, and not especially personally productive. But one-sided condolences are. Cancer has been the worst thing in my life for too many years now—
which is such a truism: cancer, this one equalizer, this pinnacle of disease; I've never read it and now you could not pay me to do so, but I always hear in my head "the emperor of maladies." Not because cancer is worse than other diseases, but because it's so prevalent and diverse and always life-changing. It killed the first pets I ever looked after on my own (rats); killed my grandmother, killed my family's dog, killed Mamakitty; changed my sister's life; and now this. It's so common as to be memetic, which rouses its own sort of anger as I transform into the person whose anxiety is triggered by "this post is giving me cancer" jokes
—so it helps to have it validated as being as awful as it feels. I mean, I know it's awful, insofar as I can internalize anything. But validation and confirmation helps, even (especially!) from halfway-strangers who have no reason to lie to me about how awful cancer is.
Cancer on the day-to-day is pretty unremarkable, though. Chemo is going; I'd hesitate to say "going well" because my dad doesn't cope well with discomfort and has always aggressively treated his health concerns, and now here's something effectively untreatable where discomfort is a baseline. As Mum was telling me, when Allie did this the motivation was easy to come by; she could fight the system & the treatments because she was fighting cancer, and it was a fight she could win; she could come out the other side changed but victorious. Dad doesn't have so accessible a motivation because this isn't something he can win—so he's finding it harder to fight that tedium of daily discomfort, chemo side effects, tumor side effects, digestive issues. But the idea that he's never coped well or had to cope with daily discomfort just threw me for a motherfucking loop I tell you what, like, damn, that must be a nice—and it's one more reason that my dad had such a hard time understanding my life, because I've been dealing with chronic "discomfort" via chronic pain & mental illness for the last 15 fuuucking years; my sister and mother both have chronic pain, so there were more vectors to learning sympathy than there were for just me and my crazy, but it still explains a lot.
And in a way, because this is my literal position on a significantly less shitty scale, I feel like I should be able to answer the motivation question. I won't win my fights either, so how do I put up with slowly losing them? But the thing is that I don't: I stick around through a combination of inertia and love of my cat, and plan my suicide in intricate detail as a form of coping and so that when my cat dies my plan is ready to go! & how can that self-knowledge coexist with the stress of my father's illness? I think about dying every day and plan for it at the slightest provocation, and now life is provoking me in the grandest way possible. I don't mean to say that this is ~all about me.~ (I've frankly been surprised at how little about-me my crazy has made it, although it's hard to tell from my sincere exhaustion and gentle slide into a depressive episode. The knowledge that my dad feels guilty about his cancer because he feels like he's hurting us is an effective antidote.) But I can't do the "share small minutiae and build happy final memories" especially well, on account of being crazy. "Answer existential questions about finding purpose in hopeless situations" seems like it should be my strength! but it's not. It's not an answer anyone else could provide, anyway; but I still feel like I've let us all down.
We had a traditionally non-traditional family homemade pizza night for Thanksgiving; my uncle flew in for the weekend. And because literally nothing can go right, Devon got sick that evening with a stomach flu! and then I caught it a few days later, despite that we spent like four days in separate rooms with zero in-person contact and I was really lonely. Mine was comparably mild; either way I think we both prefer this to a chest or head cold. Throwing up sucks, rather a lot, but there's almost a sense of pleasurable privation to be limited to broth and eggs and crackers, and being able to breathe while sick makes it far easier to sleep it off.
Prior to that, Gillian had bitten his own damn self while going after a flea (and I knew cat mouths were full of nasty, but had somehow assumed that they were immune to their own nasty even though that makes very little sense; and indeed, I was hugely wrong because) and gave himself a huge abscess! which cleared up on its own, and in fact the vet didn't even treat it*, just the fleas (thank goodness, as Frontline/Advantage weren't working); so while the bald patch is now growing in beautifully and the fleas are almost dead and none of the cats are, my summary here is
could unrelated things stop being shit for, like, five minutes
we are all very tired, all the time.
* The vet ripped out mats and with it fur surrounding the wound, ripped off the scab that was forming, and said that because it was plenty open and the tissue looked healthy we could let Gillian look after it just like cats had been doing for thousands of years, not even an ecollar required. A vet after my own heart! as I am also of the school of "supervision is good but nature knows best for dumb stuff like this".
A belated but sincere thanks to those that commented on my post about my father's cancer; that I haven't responded is just because talking (in general, but about that in specific) is hard, and not especially personally productive. But one-sided condolences are. Cancer has been the worst thing in my life for too many years now—
which is such a truism: cancer, this one equalizer, this pinnacle of disease; I've never read it and now you could not pay me to do so, but I always hear in my head "the emperor of maladies." Not because cancer is worse than other diseases, but because it's so prevalent and diverse and always life-changing. It killed the first pets I ever looked after on my own (rats); killed my grandmother, killed my family's dog, killed Mamakitty; changed my sister's life; and now this. It's so common as to be memetic, which rouses its own sort of anger as I transform into the person whose anxiety is triggered by "this post is giving me cancer" jokes
—so it helps to have it validated as being as awful as it feels. I mean, I know it's awful, insofar as I can internalize anything. But validation and confirmation helps, even (especially!) from halfway-strangers who have no reason to lie to me about how awful cancer is.
Cancer on the day-to-day is pretty unremarkable, though. Chemo is going; I'd hesitate to say "going well" because my dad doesn't cope well with discomfort and has always aggressively treated his health concerns, and now here's something effectively untreatable where discomfort is a baseline. As Mum was telling me, when Allie did this the motivation was easy to come by; she could fight the system & the treatments because she was fighting cancer, and it was a fight she could win; she could come out the other side changed but victorious. Dad doesn't have so accessible a motivation because this isn't something he can win—so he's finding it harder to fight that tedium of daily discomfort, chemo side effects, tumor side effects, digestive issues. But the idea that he's never coped well or had to cope with daily discomfort just threw me for a motherfucking loop I tell you what, like, damn, that must be a nice—and it's one more reason that my dad had such a hard time understanding my life, because I've been dealing with chronic "discomfort" via chronic pain & mental illness for the last 15 fuuucking years; my sister and mother both have chronic pain, so there were more vectors to learning sympathy than there were for just me and my crazy, but it still explains a lot.
And in a way, because this is my literal position on a significantly less shitty scale, I feel like I should be able to answer the motivation question. I won't win my fights either, so how do I put up with slowly losing them? But the thing is that I don't: I stick around through a combination of inertia and love of my cat, and plan my suicide in intricate detail as a form of coping and so that when my cat dies my plan is ready to go! & how can that self-knowledge coexist with the stress of my father's illness? I think about dying every day and plan for it at the slightest provocation, and now life is provoking me in the grandest way possible. I don't mean to say that this is ~all about me.~ (I've frankly been surprised at how little about-me my crazy has made it, although it's hard to tell from my sincere exhaustion and gentle slide into a depressive episode. The knowledge that my dad feels guilty about his cancer because he feels like he's hurting us is an effective antidote.) But I can't do the "share small minutiae and build happy final memories" especially well, on account of being crazy. "Answer existential questions about finding purpose in hopeless situations" seems like it should be my strength! but it's not. It's not an answer anyone else could provide, anyway; but I still feel like I've let us all down.
We had a traditionally non-traditional family homemade pizza night for Thanksgiving; my uncle flew in for the weekend. And because literally nothing can go right, Devon got sick that evening with a stomach flu! and then I caught it a few days later, despite that we spent like four days in separate rooms with zero in-person contact and I was really lonely. Mine was comparably mild; either way I think we both prefer this to a chest or head cold. Throwing up sucks, rather a lot, but there's almost a sense of pleasurable privation to be limited to broth and eggs and crackers, and being able to breathe while sick makes it far easier to sleep it off.
Prior to that, Gillian had bitten his own damn self while going after a flea (and I knew cat mouths were full of nasty, but had somehow assumed that they were immune to their own nasty even though that makes very little sense; and indeed, I was hugely wrong because) and gave himself a huge abscess! which cleared up on its own, and in fact the vet didn't even treat it*, just the fleas (thank goodness, as Frontline/Advantage weren't working); so while the bald patch is now growing in beautifully and the fleas are almost dead and none of the cats are, my summary here is
could unrelated things stop being shit for, like, five minutes
we are all very tired, all the time.
* The vet ripped out mats and with it fur surrounding the wound, ripped off the scab that was forming, and said that because it was plenty open and the tissue looked healthy we could let Gillian look after it just like cats had been doing for thousands of years, not even an ecollar required. A vet after my own heart! as I am also of the school of "supervision is good but nature knows best for dumb stuff like this".