Ecce Homo

Stood, walked. Ass not hurting so much. The walk nearly killed me though, glad I did it. Trying to build up an appetite: might have made me too sick to eat. This is kind of a preamble, because there is something I’ve been neglecting to do. Talk about my body.

Eech.

But of course this is what the whole thing is about, isn’t it? I talk about the interior, but I haven’t talked about the exterior. Umm… you have a hot exterior body etc. Anyway, looking at it, or acknowledging the changes beyond well, this is the chemo’s doing and the near month I’ve gone without eating a damn thing. 

That’s where it starts: three days before I even entered the hospital I wasn’t eating, doing little more than choke down apples and yogurt which was supposedly going to help with the unrelenting pressure of my interior body. Of course once I hit the hospital I get hooked up to those little nutrition bags but it’s not till after my operation I even try to eat and that was… checking… May 20^th, in which I record my failure to keep it down and then on May 28^th I write about my first experience with bread, so this must be something like the restart… yes it was, but cautious nibbling. It wasn’t toward the end I could proudly claim eating 50% of my food. So basically I haven’t finished a real meal in over a month. Oddly enough once freed from the hospital’s merciless clutches I started out pretty good, got downright ravenous. I went out for pasta for God sakes, slowly carefully. But I jumped too high too quickly… that’s kind of mess of a sentence there, thinking of a line running a graph and spiking dramatically, then plummeting soon after. It makes sense, right? Then more chemo and chemo fatigue down to my bones getting all worse and stuff. Whenever there was a bump in my appetite, soon my stomach got stuck after, got to feeling sick and it went down again. But it still manages to return. Saturday and yesterday, up on decadoron I was able to eat more and enjoy, then still on decadoron, I could barely eat anything all day and when it came to dinner… because I walked myself till I felt sick. Damn.

The whole point of this is not the eating damn it, but to describe how long it’s been since I was eating all normal like, consistently normal. Probably early May or even April. Ergo, ecce homo…

Emaciated, skull like around the temples, wrists like twigs, concave thighs. The bones on the back of my right hand are so clearly defined, like there are grooves between them. Left hand’s got in slightly lesser definition. But it’s more than that. Isn’t it always? When I get stuck writing or feel tired or just generally want to put my hands somewhere I apply them to my temples and that’s when I feel the skeletal indentations. Kind of unnerving. Or when I looked at my arms and see a kind of turkey wattles at the underside of both elbows. Or sit on my pipe chair or my regular chair when changing and those concave thighs stare back up at me. Worse is feeling my bony shoulders, the bones of my shoulders, like there’s no meat on them at all. Knobs, more like. Looking at them is kind of shocking.

So why am I writing about all these bodily travesties? Partly to take stock, give an account, that sort of thing. But the main reason is the third part o this tale. When I would look at my arms feel my shoulders etc etc, I just took it as a matter of course. Ah, this is me now. Passively accepting my fate like an idiot. Until my wife pushed me into my ten percent (in other words chemo might control 90 percent of your life, but you still got 10 percent, do something about it). It’s amazing and embarrassing I never thought about it before. So now I’m starting to do little exercises, and trying to eat more food. It’s going to be a long process, but I’m already seeing minor results. That turkey wattle is not so much a turkey wattle anymore. And that walking that made me sick put some hardness in my calves. Hey it’s a start.