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I think '04 was also my first non-Barbelith year, don't think I came here once, cuz I moved away from home and was scared of Macs (which is what my girlfriend has).
Right, anyway, two major things happened to me in 2004, at the end of the summer (end of summer is a bad time for me, some may remember that at the end of the summer '03 my longtime girlfriend died via a truckwound), these were:
1. After trying, with my siblings, at an intervention of sorts, to have my mother get psychological help, and we even wanted it so we'd go as a group so we could get better together, and failing miserably -- it ended with my mother screaming at us that she's not going to get help, and, also, that she's never going to stop wanting to kill my father -- my older brother, my little sister and I decided not to speak to my mother anymore. This decision actually came about two weeks after the intervention, when we found out that my mother stopped buying food for the house, and this is while my little sister was still living there, which prompted my older brother to let her move in with him and his fiance (now wife [my mother wasn't even invited to the wedding]), and from there she moved in with my father. My little brother (who's older than my little sister) still talks to her, in fact he just moved back in with her, he also tries, from time to time, to make us feel guilty about the whole not-talking-to-mother thing, but he's kind of a douche sometimes, so whatever.
2. I went to the doctor's office because of severe back pain, the doctor did an x-ray and found out what was wrong: I had a tumor pushing my lung into my back. After a battery of tests, including one minor surgery, they determined that it was cancer. To be exact it was sarcoma (which was the name of a thrash band from Rockford IL in the 80's), which usually doesn't occur in the chest area (it usually appears in the leg), usually doesn't show up in youngins (I'm 22), and apparently tends to show up around shrapnel wounds (I'm totally gringo as fuck and have never even seen a loaded gun in real life). So, I quit smoking, using the Smoke Away product, which really works, in case you were wondering, about a week and a half before I went in for major surgery. Major surgery happened in October and they removed the whole tumor, half of my left lung and clipped a nerve in my vocal chord that the tumor was growing around, which paralyzed my left vocal chord leaving me sounding exactly like Harvey Pekar (until I had another surgery where they put an implant in my left vocal chord so now I sound almost exactly like me); the tumor, all in all, was the size of a volleyball by the time they took it out. I was weak as hell for a little over a month -- it even winded me to bend over, seriously. After recovering fully and sperm banking I began chemotherapy and shortly after that I began radiation therapy; they attack sarcomas extremely aggressively because they have a high chance of coming back, so they wanna kill all the cancer goin' 'round. I have a little over three weeks left of radiation (I go five times a week, I go in, they zap me and I get to leave) which is lame, because even if I bring in my own spider to get radiated and bite me, there's no chance of getting super powers, in fact, it's starting to wear me down a lot, not to mention that it's burning my esophogus, making it rather painful to eat (imagine having a sunburn on the inside of your throat, and that's where I'm at, and I have three more weeks of it doing that). Chemo is a fucking cakewalk; chemo is my bitch. I still have all my hair, which fucking rules, but it is getting pretty fucking long, cuz I haven't gotten a haircut in a while because the doctors told me that it was probably gonna fall out; fuck that shit, I own chemotherapy. It does make me really nauseaus sometimes, but they gave me pills for that, and they gave me liquid morphine for my throat, and I still have oxycontin left over from the surgery; 2005 is looking like a good year. I'll be done with the chemo around early April, and then I get to call myself a cancer survivor, which I think means I can kick puppies with impunity.
None of this would have been possible without my lovely girlfriend, who hates my mother for being a crazy abusive bitch (on the real, she used to beat the hell outta us when we were younger, then, when we got older started doing suicide attempts around holidays [one time on my birthday, because the dishes weren't done]), and urged me to not talk to her as well. But, more importantly, was the one who got me insurance from her job at the Chicago Tribune, who offer domestic partner insurance, which I qualify for because I live with her. Also, I haven't been able to work through this (the doctors said so) and she's been supporting me, which kind of rules. |
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