A confluence of garbage

I’d already written most of this post before relaying to a friend how this past week has been for me, but in the midst of that conversation knew I would need to go back and change the title I’d already given this melancholic scrawling. I am nothing if not a little bit dramatic.

First, I just want to say that this does not relate to my current health status. My neutrophils have actually been doing quite well now that they’re supported by the replacement immunoglobulins. When my doctor called last week, it was to alert me that it was all working a little too well, and that I could cut back my dosage of the growth factor injections. Hopefully that trend continues until the point where I no longer need supplementation (of the growth factor injections; I’ll still be taking the Cuvatru weekly for quite a while).

While the Cuvatru ritual is not pleasant, at least that’s just a weekly occurrence. I gather all my equipment, try to get in a comfortable position on the bed, load the syringe with the liquid, hook up all the various cables and gauges and things, insert four needles into my abdomen, and wait while the mechanical pump depresses the syringe for the next thirty minutes. Maybe next time I’ll try to document it for those of you who are curious. One thing is for certain: doing this last night felt like a sort of self-flagellative exercise after this past week.

One aspect of the week I can’t get into here, unfortunately. You’ll have to trust me when I say it was devastating news, and I am working on processing it.

Two other aspects of the week that I can talk about are, ironically, related. Monday (the 17th) would have been my mom’s 77th birthday. She passed in December of 2018. Wednesday (the 19th) would have been the 17th birthday of my beloved dog, Zeno, who passed in November of 2022. I doubt he would have lived that long, but still. Actually, I’m not sure why people still count up when an important person or animal is gone. Or maybe “people” don’t, but for some reason I do.

A photo of my Best Boy, Zeno, sleeping peacefully on his big round bed. One of my favourite photos I took of him. I have a human son who has usurped that role now, of course, but Zeno will always be the first.

This newsletter isn’t my therapist’s office, so I’m not here necessarily to process grief or trauma publicly, nor to garner sympathy. I mean, I am extremely concerned with the ways humans empathize with each other—I think this would go a long way toward curbing our obsessive fear of death. If I possess any pastoral instincts, I would say this is the Big One, and the reason I have relished working in ecumenical environments.

All of that to say: I type these words and you read them from your device as a shared act of recognition that sometimes life is a confluence of garbage. I’ll never have Audre Lorde’s reach, but I’m grateful for those of you who open the emails containing my words, don’t ignore the notification in the Substack app when I’ve said something, or who randomly stroll through here as an act of algorithmic fealty. Please know that we’re all wading through the trash heap together.

In a month’s time, two-months’ time, six-months’ time, I will forget about this week. Even despite sitting through an hour-and-a-half-long process of a CT+PET scan yesterday, and the potential for all sorts of news about my cancer to come likely next week—this week will live predominantly in my calendar app. I’ll have to flip through to remember when this scan happened when a doctor or nurse asks me a question. Then I’ll see the other things in a row, and for a second my heart will drop. “Ah, yeah. That week.”