I’ve been having trouble sleeping since my surgery. I can’t get comfortable to relax enough to drift off. Tonight I compounded the problem by relapsing on late night coffee. Now the sky is greying and birds are chirping outside my window and I am terrified of life.
I’m not terrified at all the aspects of my life, but just enough that I have been staring at the ceiling with clenched teeth and rocking back and forth trying to find a comfortable position to lie.
Now that I’ve had health problems I’ve become terrified of death. Not the ultimate passing on, but the possibility of a slow painful death. I’m terrified of having to spend years in hospitals and doctor appointments giving blood and getting tested and treated.
I’m not a young man anymore. My body isn’t the invincible meat armor it once was. I still am not allowed to lift anything heavier than a full milk gallon. This time my body will repair itself and I’ll be strong again. This time.
Next time I might be stuck being weak and unable to walk at a brisk pace. I’ll face the time that I won’t be able to run. The most horrible outcome is when I won’t be able to play softball anymore.
I am heartbroken so I thought about how I’ll never find love. I have this disgusting scar running down my torso and I only have one testicle and I’m old, so love has passed me by. I now grow old alone. My luck with women has run out.
The problem is I don’t want to even try to find a new love; I want the old love. I was thinking about how I’d be at work, sitting at home, in the hospital getting chemo or even sitting on the bus going somewhere and I’d think about her and I’d feel this feeling of everything is ok because she was out there somewhere and she loved me. It made so much ok. I slept well because I knew she was there. Now that is mostly gone and I think about how I’ll never come close to that again.
I also gave myself a panic attack when I realized that I haven’t worked since basically August and that I’ll have to get a job and I might not remember how to work. I pictured myself showing up to some job and standing there with no idea how to do anything.
I also thought about being interviewed and the interviewers all being unimpressed with me because I couldn’t answer anything right.
I tried putting on some Philip Glass to calm down and it helped a little. The repetition helps sooth the wandering mind.
Ever since I got to my parents house I lie in bed not able to sleep until I start hearing the birds and my window lightens up a little. I sleep for a bit and wake up around 8 or 9, go to the bathroom, then sleep till noon. I can only be on one side or the other for a few minutes before I get uncomfortable. I lie on my back, but I can’t sleep that way. That’s my thinking position, and thinking isn’t doing me any good.
I’ve been trying to hang out with people, but I feel old and misunderstood. I don’t feel like I’m on the same page as anyone. I’m not into the same things as other people and I certainly don’t view the world like anyone else. I feel like I’m 38 going on 68 in 1959. I feel like a dead man who forgot to lie down and let the nice people cremate.
I try and be strong. I’m trying to get to the other side of this cancer, heartbreak, unemployed thing, but I just feel depressed and sad about it. I feel so fucking beat up and lonely. There are a thousand people loving, supporting and reaching out to me, but all I can see is this ceiling and all the patterns.
I know things are going to get better, but goddamn it I want them to be better now. It seems like it’s taking forever. I’m tired of being in pain – both physically and emotionally. I’m tired of not being comfortable. I’m tired of being tired.
It sucks today and it will probably suck tomorrow. At least I fixed the homeless thing. I’ll be moving next week and I’m excited to get that chapter of my life going so at least I have at least one thing going right. Then I can heal up and finally start working again.
It is just taking too long to get to the rest of my life.
100% familiar with each of those ‘terrors’. Living through them…occasionally—well, actually, more frequently than that…brings the occasional wry smile to my eyes and mouth. Grateful for the bright sunlight, for Portland’s relative lack of
crowding and it’s relatively slow pace, for friends, and great coffee, and getting t h r o u g h one more doctor visit, one more ‘procedure’, having the remains of the day to my self. Softball may go, sobriety and expanding its’ uses—that’s going to remain. Yea for you!
I know what I would like to say, but you already know what that is .
I have felt some what as you, with my situation ever since my 5th year sober at the firehouse when I started to get sick with Psoriatic Rheumatoid Arthritis.
I too am terrified of having to spend years in hospitals and doctor appointments giving blood and getting tested and treated, I had this treatment similar to chemo called Remacaid a slow in arm drip medication almost as bad as the disease now I just inject my self into my stomach twice a month.
I feel so jipped!
Here I was , I had gotten sober, I was learning to treat people with respect , learning to be honest , had reunited with my children and my wife and started reconstructing a life I destroyed with drugs and alcohol …and then this disease…It begun to take it all away.
Again the loneliness had returned, the fear was back ..but something odd had happened, the desire to drink did not ?
…WHY? Had given that part to God ?
I started to think about it ..”Yes that terrible thinking!!!”
Am I not praying enough? , “was I that terrible of a person that God wished to smite and crush me so badly for my past? Why would he want to hurt these Innocent little children of my wife and I with this disease ?
The wife and kids had already been so damaged by my drinking, but now having them to loose everything they thought they had regained after my sobriety to this disease,and divorce ? WTH “Their house, “their mother and father living together and loving each other as a family.
Well. I guess its not that simple and I am not that bad, Or at least that’s what I was told.
It’s just life, they said. You need to take all the good with bad ….And I just need to try to find peace in praying and turning it over to God.
((Oooo K’)) So I refocused
I took to it the same approach to it when I got sober, I was again powerless and my life had became unmanageable!
That same God that help me get sober, when I had no hope. That same God gave me hope in those days YOU and so many great folks at the LG/firehouse and other places had showed me. You showed me how to live life the AA way!….leaning on God..Giving it to him, even when I was all messed up, and didn’t know who or what God was for me !
The one that I said “my life was unmanageable” when I began doing the steps.
I did find love again and am remarried to an awesome lady that God sent me , my kids are going to be ok and the ex and I are friends so things can work out just not the way I planned it !! Ha ha !!
I still feel so jipped David and to the day I die I believe I will . I just cant shake it, because I know I will never get that man I was back again . I have had both feet surgically altered . I will never run again, I cant do any sport activities and feel emasculated daily when my disease pops up and people notice it and treat me differently then who I feel I am inside !! Screaming I AM HERE !!!!!
David I do not have cancer , But my ordeal will eventually kill me and painfully and I will have to violate the one thing that gave me my life back “SOBRIETY” , The more and more as I get worse , Yes doctor prescribed, but nun the less, not exactly sober either or as I see it in my head to be!! But I will keep praying to God for his will in my life and to give me hope ! and the strength to share that hope with any who suffer from anything !!
My two cents ,
Bill J
1994 brother…you are not alone. our bodies are different, but our brains are freakishly similar. and by “our”, i mean the collective “our”. doesn’t change anything, but at least when i recognize that, i don’t feel so alone. strange how shared pain is better pain sometimes. xxxx