Something Swift this way comes…

I have become comfortably numb.

Or at least I have tonight.  Been a rough day today.  Good news to report about mom though – doctors say she’s looking good, her sugar levels and electrolytes are good, but she’s going to have to be very careful in the future about checking her blood sugar and making sure that it doesn’t get so astronomically high again.  They say that she should be able to come home tomorrow, so that’s a week spent in the hospital for her, again.  I don’t know how she can stand to be in there…I mean, I know that the will to live over-rides everything, and now that they’ve got her levels in control she can think reasonably and realize that it’s saving her life; however, I don’t know if I could lay there in a hospital bed day in and day out, listening to the beep and wheeze of the machinery, the squeek of the sneakers all the nurses wear now and the the laboured susurrus of the breathing of a sleeping roommate.  I think it would drive me quite literally mad.

I was speaking with her on the phone two nights ago and she said something that struck a chord within me – “Jamie, these things happen and they take something out of us, these sicknesses take something that I don’t think we can ever get back.”  I think part of it is the tightly controlled insanity of any institution that we are forced to be in – whether we are forced against our will or grudgingly go along with it, I think that part of the thing that steals that bit of spirit (or life-force if you prefer the term) is the routine rigor of exhausting waiting while you’re tended by people who will forget your face as soon as their time to clock out comes.  My mother is one of the wisest women I know, and I don’t think she will ever come out and fully talk about the times of enforced madness, exhausting drudgery that she’s had to endure time and time again.  I don’t think she’s embarrassed by it, I think she probably just doesn’t want to burden anyone else with ‘her problems’.  The irony of the situation is that by talking about it, by lancing that boil and draining the wound of some of its poisonous feelings, she could likely gain back some of her dignity, self-respect, and peace of mind if not the physical strength she’s so sorely lacking right now.

I did make her promise to try and be a ‘good girl’ when she comes home tomorrow, that she doesn’t try to get up out of bed and take care of herself, to let dad take care of the things that needed to be done, to say ‘let the vacuuming and cleaning be damned’, because if she tries to get up and ‘putter’ all she’s going to do is exhaust herself and dad, and end up back in the hospital.  I think that likely scares her more than anything.  Talking to dad the other night before I called her and he sounded about at the end of his endurance – not hard for someone that’s survived a liver transplant and some of the other things he’s had to live through, but he sounded really rubbed raw.  It scares me sometimes to hear him like that…he’s always going to be (at least in my mind) the big man that worked until all hours of the night and then came home and watched TV with me while I read in the living room, or working out in the barn with something while I played with the neat tools and learned how to plane a board or hammer a nail straight in (still have a hard time with that one!).  To hear him sounding down like that reminds me that he’s getting older, hell we’re all getting older, but I hate to think of that.  Life seems to get harder every year I live it, and I don’t know who to write my complaint letter to about it.  I suppose my TS list for the chaplain will have to suffice.  When it’s all said and done my pitiable complaints probably won’t stack up against the sins I’ve committed through life, but maybe it’s not about keeping score.

Anyhow (hate to start with that adverb, but hey, who’s reading?), to tell you a little bit about my day – at least the rough part of it, at the end of work I started feeling really bad. Nauseous like I was going to puke my guts, head swimming, light headed.  Driving home, I ended up feeling like the top of my head was floating about three inches above the rest of my skull.   I suppose that my blood sugar had dropped low, at least that’s what the wife says.  When I arrived home, I had her test it and it was 107 – normal.  I guess I need to go get checked for diabetes, God knows I’m fat enough to have started worrying about that long before now, and the fact that it runs on both sides of my family is bad enough.  I can hear some of you – one or three in particular shouting at me from the back of the empty auditorium that I need to get up off of my ass and go see a doctor about it.  Yeah, that and the ulcer, and the trouble sleeping, and the….the list goes on.  Life is full of ailments and sometimes I just don’t want to have to sit there and hear the doctor tell me what I already know – that I’m slowly killing myself.  Thanks Doc, I guess that’s why they pay you the big bucks.  Dr. Obvious M.D. strikes again.  So now (see how I didn’t start out with ‘anyhow’ again?) all I’m dealing with is that washed out weak feeling and the slow burning pit of indigestion that my stomach is bubbling up at me trying to tell me I need to go get checked in case I really am developing an ulcer.  Ain’t life grand?  Peace of mind isn’t about being outside of all of the pain, distractions, anxieties and clamours of life, but about being in them and being able to cope with them successfully, to be able to be at ease with yourself and your surroundings, no matter the difficulties we’re facing.

I suppose that’s too long to carve on my headstone.  Maybe just something like:

cat Swift > /dev/null

s

Visited mom in the hospital tonight after work. She’s still in ICU, but she looks better. I’m not going to say she looks 100% better, but I can’t count the bones in her hands anymore. I have to say that seeing her laying there in the bed with all the tubes and machines hooked up took me back to the time after her first cancer surgery – worrying that she wasn’t going to be strong enough to make it through, but the last thing she said to me tonight before I left was ‘don’t worry about me baby, I’m going to be fine and you don’t have to worry’. That’s my mom for you – laying there in pain and trying to console me. That’s a hell of a woman for you….of course, that’s my mother. She’s always more concerned about what someone else is suffering/dealing with than she is with her own situation. She’s a blessing to me, my family, and everyone that knows her. I know she doesn’t see herself as such, because we’ve had conversations before (even one recently) about how other people have told her she’s such a blessing to them, that she lifts them up, and she just doesn’t see herself in that way. She doesn’t understand what it is that she does that makes people love her, that makes them want to be around them.

What did we do to deserve such a blessing in our lives? I don’t know but I’m just thankful that even in the pain and misery that she’s in that she still has the heart to worry about someone else’s troubles. That shows me that she has not given up on wanting to strive to get well, to get better, to get over. It’s those times that I know she has to lay there in the dead of the night thinking that it might just be easier and less painful to go on – we’ve all had those nights (at least the people in my family have) but the fact that she hasn’t withdrawn into herself that much gives a bit of light at the end of this dark path. She’s still the same beautiful, loving mother that I’ve always looked up to and respected for her wisdom and strength. Hopefully one day I can impact others lives as much as she has impacted mine and the people around her.

I know that here lately all of my posts are centered around my mom, and if she were coming here and reading all of this, she’d probably give me the 3rd degree (did I mention that I also got my amazing sarcasm and razorsharp tongue from my mother? *grins*) for airing her situation to the entire world, but on the bright side, I don’t think she’ll have to worry about it. Only a few people know who I am, or even care, and those few people generally know what kind of woman my mother is, and know the struggles she’s had with cancer. You guys keep praying for her, keep the pipelines open and the words going up for her speedy recovery…from this and all the other problems she might face along her recovery from cancer.

I hope that anything you might be going through isn’t as bad as all of this, and for those of you who will pray for her, thank you for it – whether you think it helps or not, it does.

S

Sorry about the long post title, but it’s applicable.  Talk to dad just a few minutes ago and mom is resting in the hospital right now.  She’s fighting with really high blood sugar – don’t know the number yet, but ‘really high’ in that serious tone of voice from dad tells me that it’s bad.  She’s literally dropped 10 pounds in a day or so, so I don’t know what’s going on.  Dad says the doc’s are saying that it was caused by the high blood sugar, compounded by the fact that she wasn’t really able to swallow much of anything after her surgery.  All I can say is that last night when I was there at the house with them before they took her off to the hospital, she was as bad as I’ve ever seen her.

Sometimes I have to wonder how such an atrocity could befall my sweet loving mother, whose laugh is the beauty of a sun touched day.  How can something so horrible happen to such good people when the monsters of the world seem to thrive on chaos and pain – never falling to the touch of something so utterly banal as cancer.  Then I remember that all things serve a purpose higher than what I can sometimes see when I’m so close to the situation.  Sometimes the things we suffer strengthen us for the fight ahead – not always, but sometimes.  Maybe there’s some nugget of truth, some lesson to be learned through this suffering.

Our lives are meandering trails through valleys of sorrow, highlighted by bright shining moments of high happiness.  Sometimes it feels like the valleys are longer than the hilltops, but in the end, I suppose they both impact our lives, touch our inner souls and make us what we are, who we become, who we’re meant to be in the end of things.  Sometimes I wonder what all the struggle and fuss is for, why we strive and strive to gather things about us in a never ending orgy of greed and materialism when those around us are the true things in our lives that matter.  Who have I touched in a meaningful way? Whose spirit have I lifted up in a time of trial?  Who have I helped through a crisis into a place of relative calm, peace, and happiness?   Are we all so doomed to focusing on the things that don’t matter in life to the detriment of all else? To the waning light and life of those around us? Until it is too late to reach out and touch a soul, and be damned to the darkness of useless narcissism and greed of our base materialistic paths for the rest of our shortened and pointless days?

Mamma, I love you, and I pray with all that is within me that you make it through this, that you can walk out soon and I can see your beautiful smile once more, hear that wonderful voice singing in the kitchen again, see the well-loved face that reminds me of the sunny days of my childhood.  You have to get better…who’s going to eat homemade ice-cream with me and exclaim that it’s as good as it ever was?  I love you mamma.

Your son,

Jamie

S

Some crappy things hit me today.  Mom’s back in the hospital is craptastic #1.  For those of you that pray, please pray hard for her.  For those of you who check here with any kind of regularity, you may notice that at some times it’s accessible, and others it’s not.  My ISP blows.  Trying to get the issues ironed out.  Maybe you’ll get to see the resolution via better uptimes for this site.  If not I’m going to keep their phonelines hot.  Not that the pakistani on the other line gives two shits about my service.

S

One small thing, fixed a bug with the comments section where the ‘Submit Comment’ link wasn’t showing up at the bottom of the text entry box for this theme. Now all my non-existent readers can continue to leave all their non-existent comments! Thanks Bru for letting me know about the bug – it’s not like I’m egotistical enough to go and comment on my own newly made posts.

For everyone else out there – I hope you all learn to live, love, laugh, and get along with each other reasonably peaceably. Thank you one and all, good night.

s

So I’ve been playing around with wordpress.  Updated the look of it to something as stark and simple as I could find – maybe that’ll drive even more people off!  Also updated the internal wordpress core to the newest version and everything seems to be working fairly well.  Like the new layout, though the colours in the dashboard are kind of weird.

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So sometime in the past few months, I’ve managed to move, acquire a total of 4 beautiful children, excel in my new job, find out what the true meaning of exhaustion is, finally get my network up and running, and lose touch with a few really good friends who I occasionally talk to but miss like hell. Sometimes things change and while it feels like it’s for the better on the most part, it’s the relationships that slip past us that we miss the most. I don’t know how to stop getting out of touch, and I don’t know how to hold onto the things I have. Sometimes it seems like maybe if I shut my eyes really tight and clench my fists around those people I love, I won’t crush them, only hold onto them with all the inhuman strength I have in my body. Then when I open my eyes it turns out that the things I was clutching was merely sand shifting through my grasp.

What a depressing thought.

Not the ‘first post back!!!’ I was hoping to do, and maybe I’ll wise up and delete it before anyone reads it. Not like anyone’s going to come here /to/ read it anymore. Seeing as how I’ve been down and out for the last few months.

New thoughts: Julia Nunes /rocks/. It’s hard as hell to get a linux LDAP server to authenticate windows workstations in the domain. People who want the ability of a server OS should buy a server OS. People should check what their software supports before trying to try something new. People should come out and say what they mean and what they’re thinking, worry about the repercussions later – just get it out on the table. I’m losing my hair, and I’m kind of ok with that, but only kind of. I like being a daddy – even when I’m tired and working on something trying to get it done. Filing taxes sucks. Random thought streams like this really don’t mean anything to anyone but the person having them, and the other people subjugated to them quickly grow bored and tired of the subject as he drones on and on extolling wisdom-less bits of half-lies and made up self-truths. The hyphen is an under-rated part of our writing.

That boy, that boy is full of woe.

S