This documentary went underground for a very long time. Then there were just pieces of it floating around on YouTube, with Part 3 and Part 7 missing, always holes in it, perhaps due to copyright and perhaps not. That's YouTube for you, with whom I have a love-hate relationship. I finally had to suck it up and BUY YouTube, because my old ad-blocker suddenly stopped working, and the new one didn't work worth a shit. I guess everything costs now, but it still made me wince to pony up nearly $150.00 for a year ad-free.
I've been neglecting this blog for weeks, if not months now, having survived and scraped through very serious abdominal surgery. For the past four months, my energy, appetite, will to live, etc. have all been stretched as far as they could go, or farther. There were a few moments in hospital when I realized I could die from this. Weeks, months of recovery later, I see the surgeon for a checkup, and she informs me that if they had not removed that section of my colon, there was an 80% chance of it becoming cancerous. Almost certain, which is why I was fast-tracked from that first ER visit in November. Though I dodged the bullet this time, I suppose such a thing could return, and next time I might not be so lucky (IF that's what it was).
I'm not used to terrible health, or having to put my life on hold for four months. It's sobering and terrifying. Mortality was staring me in the face, and even now, when I go to bed at night a wave of fear breaks over me - the fear that this is the end, that I will never wake up again.
The scars are mostly mental, and though the surgeon was nice and helpful today, what I've had to go through seems to stand apart from any outside help. Something inside me, some powerful healing force, had to be activated even to get this far, with my digestive system completely reconfigured. Given how radical the rearrangement was, I'm doing remarkably well with things like eating and eliminating. But it doesn't mean attacking my meals with any great zeal. I lost a lot of weight after I got home from the hospital, and I've now joined the Eight Pounds Club - my husband has not yet regained what HE lost when he had abdominal surgery nearly a year ago, and my son Jeff was sick and unable to eat for weeks.
We all need to get fattened up.
I longed for the simplest things when I lay on my back in that dreadful place for 2 weeks (originally supposed to be closer to 2 days). I wanted to go outside. I wanted to walk beside Como Lake or the duck park or the lagoon, or even just sit beside the water. I wanted to play with my doll collections, just enjoy them. I wanted to spend some fun times with the grandkids. A recurrent image came into my head: standing on the dock at Burnaby Lake, my favorite place in the whole world, with red-winged blackbirds swooping down to eat out of my hand.
These things seemed light-years away, and very often I was convinced I would never experience them again. But somehow these simple pleasures have slowly crept back into my life, When Erica and Lauren and Jeff came over the evening of my birthday, bearing flowers, a cake, hugs and kisses, it brought me back to life and made me realize why I am here in the first place.
When I became a grandmother for the first time, I had just gotten out of a psych facility due to the most horrific manic episode I ever had, or ever hope to have. But something happened after that death of the soul. I did not merely realize that love is the most important thing - I became love, I moved forward into a way of love I had never know.
Those new lives, a grandchild born each year for four years, kept me here on earth, and though I am not as close to Caitlin and Ryan as I'd like to be, the others have been an absolute Godsend. I didn't need to strive for this, to do anything in particular, to "try". It was all like breathing, and for the first time in many years I was actually having fun.
"Fun is the one thing that money can't buy."
Something inside that was always denied, for so many years. . .
So here, today, I watch my Beatles show after 20+ years, and though I am physically tired and know I have weeks or months left in my recovery, I feel in one piece again. I dodged a bullet, I guess, or at least for now. But a cancer scare makes you wonder about another one, if it might just recur.
Right now I have to eat, even when I don't feel like eating, because the eight-pound loss isn't sitting well on me - my clothes are falling off, my arms and legs withered. I feel my age, or beyond it rather. I have spinal problems I haven't even thought about yet, and my eyesight is terrible, also needing surgery. How much time is left? Am I really wearing down this quickly, and what will come next?
