Everybody Should Almost Die

You know, when you almost die, it changes you.  In my case, almost solely for the better.

31 years ago today my life plunged into chemo hell.  Week after week (For 3 1/2 years) of noxious chemicals being sifted into my blood, to every fiber of my body.  Radiation, such a dangerous type they don’t even use it any more, blasted my still growing, frail, frame.  Oral med’s – sometimes 24 pills a day, infiltrating i.v.’s backing up chemicals like Cytoxan into my flesh, spinal taps, bone marrow extractions, radioactive dye being blasted thru me.  Can I tell you that it sucked?  Can I make you understand that dry heaving every 20 minutes for 2 days is some kind of really really bad movie?  Anyway, the point of today’s entry is not to bemoan all that horrendous shit.  All I have to do is look at photographs taken in Nazi Germany’s concentration camps and I feel like a real pussy.  My life, was a cake-walk compared to that.  Someone was trying to save my life, not thrash me lifeless.  Unless you characterize cancer as a person (which sometimes I do) – Me vs. Cancer, battle to the death.  So — I killed IT, I guess.  I win.  For now.

Everybody should almost die because it makes you…a lot of things.  It makes you smarter about life.  Death bed perspective cannot be taught, picked up in graduate school, beaten into you or given to you by a loving party.  You have to EARN that motherfucking stuff.  And once you do, life can be a downhill run from there. Besides learning what is ‘most excellent’ in life, you also develop low tolerance for certain things.  Here is a list of things that I have ZERO tolerance for since kicking cancer’s ass:

• Whiners
• Weak Willed People
• Smokers
• Professional Victims
• Addicts
• Having My Chain Jerked
• Indecisive Morons
• Negative Ninnies
• Picky eaters
• Greed
• Money Hungry Bastards
• Spoiled American Brats
• Plastic Crap At Christmas
• RWNJ’s (right wing nut jobs)
• Liars
• Mechanical Object Which Do Not Do What They Are Supposed To Do
• Ignorance
• Complacency In The Face Of Evil
• Taco Meat That Tastes Like Artificial Smoke
• Cruelty To Animals And The Aged
• Indifference

And wow…I just realized I could probably go on and on like that…scary…..and it makes me sound kind of, well, grumpy frankly, but I’m not at all!  I think I can sum it up this way:

If you are an apathetic ignorant idiot who smokes & is mean to animals and gandy’s and who won’t get off their ass and do something about injustices that come your way and you always want more than your fair share and you’re willing to lie to get it and you throw your kids lavish, ugly birthday parties and you inundate your children with gads of plastic crap each holiday without instilling the gift of charity to them instead, while simultaneously complaining about the abundance of food served to you and you whine about your life yet have no idea what you want out of it while straddling the fence and enabling the weak around you to continue to be weak and you don’t have the guts to own your mistakes and you never do what you say you are going to do AND you make lousy taco’s….then I guess I have zero tolerance for you.

Shalom. 

If you were to almost die a lot, I bet you’d get a list too.

Love,

Feisty Housewife – 31 years out.

P.S.  Oh yeah.  And hunters.  I don’t think guys should be able to take guns and kill things while the things are trying to drink from a babbling brook.  Man, that’s just fucked up unfair.  Kinda reminds me of Cancer just kinda sorta….sneaking up on ME……BAM, FUCK YOU, BAM.  Unfair.

Laugh or Die

I write, tho no one’s reading.  And that’s o.k.  I still get to write.

I was e-mailing an old chum today (Mac) and was reminded of a time I laughed…too much I guess.

For my part, I’m still waiting to grow up, but suppose I never fully will.  I guess I’m kinda-sorta ‘always waiting to die’ in the farthest recesses of my mind.  My toe has been on that line and I think it fuels my behavior.  For years I was treated for Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma and was really not expected to live, so it was a 3 1/2 year ritual of needles and puke and pain and then…aaa, maybe you die anyway kid. I daresay growing up like that changes you.  Coming out of that “normal” would be like coming out of other traumatic fights as if nothing ever happened.  Aint gonna happen, boys.  Anyway, I am much like a child who won’t go to bed because they don’t want to miss anything – - I’m always the last one to fall asleep at the slumber party. Being all grown up I don’t have the occasion to attend slumber parties any more and I think that’s a total gyp man! Youth is a wonderful thing.  What a shame to waste it on children!!  (O.K, I just ripped off George Bernard Shaw, but I admitted it, so it’s all good.)   Here is an example of my dedication to fun: Once, as a teen, I had to be taken to the hospital with exhaustion because I physically could not walk.  It scared my mother to death.  I had gone to a slumber party, staggered home the next day and collapsed in my bed.  When I tried to get up, I could not.  Not only was I incapable of standing on my own, all I could do was cry rivers.  Cry, cry, cry and mumble, “What’s wrong with me?”  So off we went to my pediatric oncologists office.  I sat there weeping like a freak – mind you, I’m the kid who wrote English papers while they were extracting bone marrow from my backside.  With the pain tolerance of a mule and the disposition of Hawkeye from MASH, I was the ever joking, sarcastic, tough as nuts chemo patient.  So, Dr. Pecoraro asked me what I’d been up to.  I, between sobs, told him that I’d been at a slumber party the night before.  I ate Nacho Cheese Dorito’s (NEW back then), & orange sody pop.  Gee, maybe I was trying to kill the cancer with some combination of red dye #2 and yellow #3…..Anyway, tho not the preferred diet of a cancer patient, one night of evil orange foods certainly could not be the culprit.  I confessed to staying up until 3 or 4 and laughing a LOT.  He grilled me on this, and as I began to regale him my evening I started laughing again, rather uncontrollably, but I was also still crying, so then I was laugh-crying and my gawd, what a side show!  He took a moment and looked at my mother then at me and said, “You’re suffering from exhaustion.  Plain and simple.  Get home and get in bed.  Do not get up for at least two days, otherwise we’ll have to hospitalize you.”  The exhaustion was caused by laughter and lack of sleep. But mostly laughter. I had cackled myself sick!!   Do you know how many hours you have to laugh for that to happen?  Many many many.  And here’s something scary.  I have a cassette tape from portions of that evening to help me remember.  It’s a tonic like no other.  I put that tape in, take a listen, and suddenly I’m 15 again – my friends and I and our littler voices, innocent and goofy and sublimely unaware that we would probably never laugh like that again.  We thought we were so funny, we cracked ourselves up at every turn – singing to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and doing ridiculous dances to make each other laugh.  I have a similar tape which I made when I was actually in the hospital.  I carried my tape recorder everywhere with me. The hospital tape is, listening back, so sad.  I was sick-dog-sick with cancer and pneumonia on top of it, yet I was sharing a room with another teenage girl and in the middle of the night we were whooping it up like drunks!  You can hear my wheezing as I’m laughing, you can hear my I.V. dripping/clicking in the background.  The first time I heard that noise on one of my hospital tapes after I’d long been cured, I almost threw up.  That tick tick tick of my I.V., sliding poison into my veins, gave me a physical reaction to a psychological trauma.  Even writing this I’m feeling sick.  After you dry heave a few thousand times your body never forgets and old sounds/medicinal smells can bring it smack right back atcha.  Yick.  Double yick.  Anyway, the nurses had to come in and tell us to shut up numerous times, but after spending hundreds of hours in hospitals as an adult, I can only imagine how laughter coming from our room was perhaps so refreshing for those nurses.  Not only that, now I know  laughter was probably theeee best upper respiratory therapy in the world!  They’d come in and beat on my back every few hours, but my raucous laughter couldn’t have hurt that congestion any.

So I’ll make a point.  I think everyone should be taken to the hospital and diagnosed with “laughter” at least once in their lives. I had a great doctor, saints as nurses, and they threw every toxic chemical in the book into my veins, but if I had to put my money on the thing that cured me the most, I’d have to say it was laughter.  Studies now show it actually changes your blood for the better – but I could have told them that in 1977.  Not to be naive, but I believe laughter chased cancer right outta me.  For cancer is evil, and it could not abide in such a happy place.  My challenge as a ‘grown up’ is to manage to find enuf laughter to make all the woe’s go away.  And damn it, sometimes I just can’t.  This quest for fun gets in the way of being a grown up…No, being a grown up get’s in the way of laughing my ass off all night.  That’s what it is.  So “Middle Age” – get the fuck out-my-way.  Laughter calls.

BINGO! Sport of The Disabled

So I escaped the house tonight. To do charity work. But hey, it’s still NOT fixing dinner at my house and doing the bedtime routine. An escape of any ilk is still emancipation from the pattern – that one I’ve been sucked into. Suck, suck, slurp and there goes my brain, being vacuumed right outta my wee little head. Anyway -

Our Relay For Life team does an annual bingo fund raiser for The American Cancer Society which garners great numbers and is in honor of a courageous gal from our town who passed away from cancer, leaving two young children behind and THAT should be illegal. I am a cancer survivor myself. (Diagnosed in 1977 with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma which had a nasty survival rate so they gave me odds of 1000 to 1 to survive. HA! Showed them, eh?) Don’t tell me I *can’t* do something….even like, survive. I’ll kick your ass. So I’ve had more chemotherapy than anyone I’ve ever met, hundreds of spinal taps and bone marrow extractions, yadda, yadda, yadda – they inflicted theee most prehistoric chemo on me. Dumped the entire kitchen sink into my veins, and then some. Radiation from hell. No surprise I’m a nut job – I glow in the friggin’ dark. Nothing quite as fun as being a bald 15 year old albino girl. Well, I’m not a true albino but I’m a mere gene twist away. But I digress!! I am not talking about cancer survival in this blog, on-account-a I figure I could write a friggin’ book. What I want to talk about is the phenomenon I’ve observed about BINGO and it’s place in American weeknights.

It’s the sport of the disabled. I say this because of who plays bingo. Gandy’s (my sister-in-law’s slang word for the elderly. I’m not sure where she got it, but we use it around here. Example: Someone’s creeping slowly down the road in front of you in their floater-mobile such as a Towncar or Crown Vic and they are wearing a HAT and they are drifting ever so slowly within their lane to every extreme – so as to not cross over any line but yet you can’t predict exactly where they are going to float to next. You can either call them a “hat driver” or a “Gandy”. It’s a thing. Anyway, Gandy’s play bingo and that’s an internationally known fact, I’m not being prolific here. But who else plays? O.K, I’ll tell you, because I know you are fixin’ to wet yourself with anticipation….People who drag their oxygen tanks behind them, that’s who! And they arrive extra early to get the best seat at the cafeteria tables with the institutional metal chairs. I mean, I’m setting up the kitchen food (I always work the kitchen at this event) – Jeeeesus, I guess I don’t actually get out of the kitchen EVER, do I? Anyway, so here they come, pulling their little tanks of life. They are followed by the “Limper’s”. They are in walkers, using canes or in wheelchairs. They gimp in and make camp in choice locations. As I observe these poor folks, I realize that my daughter who is currently in a wheelchair could also participate. Why, this could be HER sport! She’s 9, not 90, but the crippled-up part applies. Even after her accident where she tried to get killed by a riding lawn mower, bingo was the first thing they dragged her to in the play room at Johns Hopkins. She had 3 out of 4 of her limbs down. Only her right hand escaped the ravages of that goddamned mower. Sigh. Cry. My Stella. Moooovin’ on…..don’t get caught there tonight, you are too tired. In addition to the Gandy’s, the Barely Breathing’s and the Limper’s are the….now DON’T get your panties in a wad over this, but let’s just put it delicately and say the “larger” Americans. By large, I mean they have their own zip code. No lie. I feel sorry for them, as they squeeze their way between the lines of tables and chairs but I also feel sorry for those damn chairs, – stop it! Not nice, not nice. The metal chairs release squeaks of pain and strain as our larger friends take a load off. And of course I’m standing back there in the kitchen/snack bar area with my head into my 3rd helping of nacho cheese dip and chips so who the hell am I to talk? As the evening progresses the irony strikes me that we are here to raise money to cure and help prevent cancer and the entire place is full of colon cancer nominees and I’m serving them hot dogs, nachos and soda pop! To be fair, we also had fruit cups, fresh veggies w/ dip and home made chicken salad that was not too evil. One guess as to what item was most left over at the end of the night? Aw, you got it. Fresh veggies. I finally had to break down and eat a fruit cup and some veggies because I could actually hear my arteries beginning to harden from the cheese sauce I was inhaling.

These people are also very serious about their bingo. They are “hard core”. They do not joke when they play, they do not look as if they are having any fun at all. (Just like people at slot machines who always look like they are at a wake or really boring church and I’m always hopping around at my money sucking machine shouting, “Come on baby, mama needs a new pair of Sunday-go-to-meetin’ shoes” and other highly obnoxious quips that amuse and entertain me.) Do NOT get between these Gandy’s, Barely Breathing’s, Limper’s and Larger’s and their bingo for they have perfected the art of the death glare and they are heavily armed with bingo blotters. Or dobbers. Or whatever the hell they are called.

So as we age my darlings, we can look forward to a fabulous sport that’s tailored to our special needs. A sport that mandates you sit on your ass, eat snacks, and only requires one good hand to make it happen. BINGO! My future awaits. And I hope it waits a long long time.

Yours,

D. Feisty Housewife

Sidebar: Geneva cannot play bingo. The scanning and dobbing specific numbers is simply too much for her brain. She’d have greater success sitting inside the bingo ball blower trying to catch the numbered orbs as they flew by. In fact, she’d rock that out. I’ll probably need to find her a job like that in about 5 years or so….