Grade IV Glioblastoma Multiforme

The following is something I wrote a year after my mom passed.  It is kinda long, but it is a testament to how I still feel.  I do not think I deserve sympathy, I know there are people out there far more deserving than I.  I am going through a tough time, THAT IS ALL.  Regardless of the outcome I know I am stronger than ever before.  Please feel free to share this with anyone you want.     *Warning, it has some bad language.  


It has been one year now.  I thought I could run.  My feet could't carry me fast enough.  If you tried all your life, you could run 60,000 miles and your fears would just smile and become your shadow during the day and your lonely silence at night.  This last year my life has changed more than any past 365 days.  I went from destruction to depression.  From faithless to lost and back again.  Every corner I turned  I felt like I was being hit by a new truck right in the face.  Epiphany  after drunken epiphany I thought I had everything tabbed, filed and correlated.  Every balance obtained and I need to accept my shitty life.  My shitty life…  Around the 10th or so 'acceptance,' this is when I realized and figured out my ultimate and unreeling selfishness.  I had nothing but sympathy for myself- bull shit.  I could't even validate my own thoughts anymore.  Coward isn't the right word, but it is the first that comes to mind.  How much more sleep can I endure?  Maybe one day I can wake up in another state? Country? World?  Fuck that, you need to get your head straight and realize this is NOT about you.  Here is the reality, your beautiful mother of not even 50 having a good and normal life with some typical struggles is now dead.  She woke up on day and found out she was going to die within the next 6 months.  TKO blow to your face.  You will never see your kids marry.  You will never get to see your grandson have his first anything.  You will never go to that tropical island your have dreamed about for so long.  No dream car, no retirement and sure as shit know there won't be anymore extravagant dinners.  All those retirement plans become last second heeds trying to live 50 years in two months because you already know the last 3 or so months you will be so drugged up that you are either too tired, sick or simply can't function to do anything else.  Your newborn grandson, guess what?  You won't even see his first birthday.  You hardly even see him anymore because you will be sleeping your life away or trying to figure out where it all went so terribly wrong.  

Now that you are open to all of those thoughts, lets throw in some extremely aggressive chemo and a couple sides of radiation.  Lets poison you nearly to the point of death and take away any smidgen of health you had left in the hopes that you can 'live' an extra 25 days.  You are now a walking, talking, living pharmacy.  The link between man and medicine in person!  Torture isn't the right word, but it is the first that comes to mind.  Now lets throw in your day to day hatred for what you have become.  Helpless.  Delusional.  Sad.  So sad.  Depression is not even in your vocabulary because it does not even begin to explain the anguish and hate you feel every time you lay in your bed and feel yourself slowly killing yourself from the inside out.  

Fuck it, those would be my thoughts.  I have suffered enough and this is getting to be a bit ridiculous.  But what about your family?  6 months is a long time on a scale of 6 months and if that is all the time you have to say goodbye to the ones you love than you better live the shit out of what you can.  But lets not be foolish, we all know you can only pray and hope to be in an induced sleep state the last few weeks because the pain will be so bad you will pray for more drugs so you can just overdose and get it over with.  Looking in the mirror and you seriously, 100% hands fucking down don't even recognize your own reflection.  You don't know what you have become.  You do, but you try not to accept it.  You are the walking dead.  Every time you see your newborn grandsons face, every time you see your daughters smiling face, every commercial torturing you with that bright blue sky and white sandy beach is just another pitiful reminder of what you will never see again.  Another reminder that your last resort is seeming more and more like your first choice.  Put yourself in this situation.  Accept the fact that you are going to die without going crazy and killing yourself first.  Thats a task in it's own. . .  Then be willing to open your eyes every time after the hundreds of times you sleep and wake.  Days don't even make sense anymore - it just become sleep interrupted by the attempt to force feed yourself the food your body needs to 'survive'.  Sleep, food, pills, pills, pills, pills.  Sleep.  You find yourself hoping you can just sleep the rest of your life away by this point.  At least in your dreams you can find a smidgen of false hope or happiness- thats if you are lucky.  And so thats it.  Thats all you have, all you get.  If you can imagine, your one bedroom apartment has become the death ward of yourself- that is until your children can no longer care for you and you need to be transferred to a hospice care facility.  There you are, if you can imagine.  Denial, not the right word, but sure as hell the first that comes to mind.  Fucked.  Bed ridden, dirty, hurting, depression, the kind of depression that seems more like torture.  The dead living.  Thats you if you can imagine.  Your goodbyes to your loved ones.  Holding your grandson for the last time and trying to hold onto him for as long as you can.  Every breathe you take brings you one step closer to the end.  All of a sudden your life starts being measured in 'lasts' as opposed to 'firsts.'  Hold on as long as your piece of shit killer will let you.  As long as you will let yourself, because thats what you are.  You are your own murderer sentencing yourself to death.  You are taking everything you love from yourself and have no choice.  6 months of _ _ _ _ _ _.  <---Insert worst imaginable word here.  A word that hasn't even been thought of.  Maybe a series of words, but we all know there is no word.  Nothing can describe this.

All of a sudden my 'fucked up' life doesn't seem so bad.  My broken heart seems more like a paper cut.  Your failed relationships and fucked up problems with your parents become minuscule compared to what it could be.  I don't know if you get it, but yes- there are most certainly people out there that are worse off than you in every way imaginable.  Even at the end my mother had us.  She had her family and the people who love her to stand by her side and make sure she was as comfortable as possible.  There are people all over who don't even have that.  There is most certainly people out there deserving of sympathy out there, but you are not one.  Nor am I.  If you can read this and walk out of your room or work with your family and people who love you and truly care about how you are, you have more than enough.  This is why I got those words tattooed on my arm. "No Sympathy"  Not because I am a dick, or think I am superior in anyway, it is the opposite.  I looked at my life and knew I didn't deserve even a sorrowful thought.  I deserve no sympathy, much like you deserve no sympathy.  When you lose your job, your car breaks down, your $500 Louis Vatton bag is stolen, and your boyfriend dumps you, I will say I am sorry.  I will do my best to console people who need to be consoled, but I will not be sympathetic.  I know deep down that there are people far worse off than you and you need to realize this as well.  The arbitrary conflicts with your friends and family all start to seem more and more pointless.  All I am saying, like the millions who have said it before me is that you need to realize what it is you have before it is gone.  I never really understood this as much as I do now.  It seems to resonate so clearly now and I truly know it has been an awakening.  Everyday I wake up and look at a picture, the last picture my  mother took.  One with us as a family sitting on her couch, her bald from the wears of chemo and all of us smiling.  It is all I have left and I wish for one more day.  One more chance to hold me and tell her I love her.  Tell her how awesome of a job she did raising her family and let her know that her children will be ok without her.  Let her hold her grandson one more time and let her have one last cigarette.  One more laugh.  One more touch.  But I can't.  She is gone and all I am left with now is a slowly detereorating camera in my head that will eventually start to wear.  I am thankful for that  at least.  

6 months of living not knowing what was going to happen next.  6 months to live a whole lifetime of memories with the women I love the most does not seem fair.  Trying to hang on to every smile, every second and the rare laugh.  My mother is my hero.  She is the strongest human I have ever known and went through hell and back like a champ and held her head high.  Knowing that she is no longer suffering brings a small amount of relief to me.  Only enough to hold back the tears that want to come flooding to my head every time I see her picture.  She is watching over me and keeping me safe.  This is not a cry for sympathy or anything of that nature, I am simply having a shitty day and I am sick of listening to people tell me how bad they have it.  If your friends are dicks, stop being friends with them.  For most all our problems there is an easy solution.  My mother's only solution was death and that was what she faced for 6 months.  A 6 month death sentence while being tortured... Prisoners on death row don't even have it this hard.

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On a lighter note, Thank you to everyone for everything.  I love you all exponentially and I hope I get to hug and kiss you all feverishly on Saturday.  

Ryan

xx