g.

in case you didn’t know.

it slowly spreads and eventually it kills you.you’re not the same person you once were and everyday you start to change. One day you’re up and ready to take on the world, the next you won’t even be able to get out of your bed. And that’s what it does to you. you feel hopeless, helpless, weak, scared, confused, angry, and you ask God why, and you keep wondering what it would be like if you were gone and how they could live on without you and you’d never dare to think about those things but you end up thinking anyway because this is what it does to you and now you regret all those times you said out loud ” God I wish was dead” or ” just shoot me” or ” you’re killing me”, because in reality it really is killing you. You start to lose your appetite, and then you start to lose focus. You start to forget where you put your keys and then have to ask your daughter to find them for you because you can’t get out of your bed today or tomorrow. It turns out you left them in the freezer and you think “how strange” because you’ve never done that before. You get mad at yourself because you can’t even take a shower, and have to ask your husband to scrub for you. There are certain things you can’t and can eat and you wish you could cook like you used to but you’ve forgotten how real food tastes and everyday you’re stuck with the same kind of soup and it tastes like shit but you eat it anyway because you have to. You have to, because you wan’t to get better. You have to because you want to heal. You have to because they need you here. You stay in your room for days without end, and when you want to take a walk in the park, it takes every ounce of your body to walk even a mile, and you feel bad because your family thought it was going to be a nice day spending time outside of the house with you; but you end up having to go home after 15 minutes because you start to lose color in your skin, and you start to get tired and breathless. You blame yourself for being so weak and your kids start blaming you too because they want the old you back. But you’re never the same. You have no hair, and lost so much weight that people stare at you when they walk past by you. You don’t have the strength to argue or fight with your husband like you used to and eventually you just let him win all the time. Eventually, you start to lose faith in yourself and then you prepare yourself for the worst. You worry about what to say to them before you’re gone and you worry that they won’t be able to take care of themselves when you’re gone. Sometimes you cry, actually you cry almost everyday in small increments because you feel like you’re just waiting for an end. You miss your long wavy hair, it’s time to take a last picture and you put on your best make up and try to smile for the camera in hopes that they will remember how beautiful you were. You hate the fact that you have needles, and tubes going in and out of your body and you hate the way the nurses look at you and pity you. You hate the fact that they’ve stuck a tube up your anus and also attached a urine-bag because now, you can’t even control when your body has to go. Your body slowly breaks down and the kemo is excruciatingly painful. You go in and out of consciousness and sometimes you forget their names. You forget what day it is or how long you’ve stayed in the hospital and when you wake up it’s only for a mere five minutes to see if anyone is there to visit, then you go back to sleep because you don’t want to feel the pain. You tell yourself when you wake up and get better you’ll tell your daughter exactly what it does so that she knows what to expect and that if there is a chance that it might get to her, she’ll know and not be surprised and maybe she’ll know what to do then. And yea… it’s kind of like that. In case you didn’t know.

-G