Blah, blah, blah...

"It's nature's way of receiving you
It's nature's way of retrieving you
It's nature's way of telling you
Something's wrong..."
~ Spirit

Hi there...

Sorry I haven't been posting lately. I had sort of a bad week last week, mostly due to the damned steroids, I think. I've been steadily reducing my dose, trying to get completely off the damn things before I am forced to go right back on them when they start up the Whole Brain Radiation.

I can hardly wait.

I've been awake since 2 AM. Although I am an insomniac and am often up at hours like this, it is intentional this time. I have to take an EEG test at 8 am this morning which means I will need to be able to fall asleep in the doctors office. This is so they can study my brain waves as I sleep.

I'm not certain what they hope to gain by doing this but what the hell, I'll play. I just hope I can fall asleep when they want me to.

So this new Doc I have seems like a good one. She's a neurologist and is checking me for seizure risk originally but now has taken up an interest in my entire case. Apparently, one of her specialties is brain tumors, mostly primary ones but she is, she says, knowledgeable about metastatic tumors as well.

Perhaps because she noticed that I didn't even have a doctor lined up to follow-up my upcoming MRI, she has sort of taken me under her wing and will be reviewing the MRI results with me next week.

It's sort of comforting to finally feel like someone has taken specific interest in my case and I am very grateful to her for that. But she's a very direct, no-nonsense doctor and our visit left me thinking a little more seriously about my condition and prognosis.

All this has led to me getting myself into a not-so-good state of mind. I feel like my health, both mental and physical, is declining. But then I wonder.. is the way I feel from all the drugs they have me on? The steroids? (I'm nearly off them for now - taking a very small dose and will be completely off them in another week or so. Just in time to go back on them when or if I start the WBR treatment).

I seem to have more mental fogginess, I feel weaker physically.. more headaches. My new Doc says some or all of this could be a direct result of just being a person that has cancer and brain mets. But there's no way to really know. I could be a mixture of all of the above. Much of it might be depression - you know, thinking myself sick again.

Whatever it is, I don't like it. The end result is, I'm spending way too much energy and time thinking about my own death..

Am I dying? Eventually, of course. But more and more, I get the feeling that it may come sooner than anyone, including myself, wants to admit. I've learned too much. I know what my odds are and they are not good.

But the small part of me that wants to be more optimistic knows that anything could happen. I know that there are people out there that have lived on with worse odds than I have. I also know that all this death-talk is not helping me at all and I want to knock it off. It is not an easy thing to do though.

Screw this. I have no idea where this post is going now, though I knew when I started out. I sure didn't mean for it to become so depressing. I think I'll stop now and hope that my original idea comes back to me because this is not what I started out to write about today. I didn't intend for it to become such a bummer, as we used to say back in the '70's.

I'll try to come back to it later...