Sad
My mother is in the hospital. I’ve known she was in there for a while, hence why I planted the Zinnias and picked her up a pink tote bag with a full bottle of Sunshine perfume.
Today I was told she has 24-48 hours to live. I’ve already made plans to go see her tomorrow. Maybe take her the husky toy I bought her. My stepfather says there’s no reason for us kids to go because she doesn’t know where she’s at or who anyone is. This worked for my brothers, but not me. There are some things I feel I should say to my mother before she goes.
I told my stepfather before he left to go to the hospital that I wanted only two things that belonged to my mother: the strawberry Coach key chain I got her for Mother’s Day back in 2008, and the rice paper butterfly Fossil watch I gave her for her birthday in March 2008. That is all I want, and I want her to know that I want it and am taking it.
I don’t know how I feel about taking those things before she’s dead. The watch stopped at 4:15:5. The battery died. I also have a stack of DVDs of her shows that she wanted me to record while she was in the hospital. My older brother wants her house, the other older brother wants her car. I want something the lawyer can’t give me: Time. My mother never got to hold Zinnia. We were going to take a “Four Generations” photo, but that is not going to happen now. My older brother tells me that our mom had a bunch of antique jewelry that I could sell. Unfortunately I don’t know who to give the money to to give her more time.
Please pray for my family.
Occupational Happenings
Again, still knocked up.
I’m starting to sound like a broken record, aren’t I?
I’m beginning to feel guilty of asking for so much time off from work, when the kid seems to be a permanent attachment to my insides. I read Carl’s FB post and he’s having a hard time grading papers, doing lectures and making PowerPoints for upcoming lectures, all while writing the third exam. I love his lines “I’d fucking fail this goddamned exam, if I had to take it! That’s how little I know this psychobabble I’m preaching to sleeping pharm students every morning and afternoon!” I think there was a GIF of my work ID photo burning as the icon. But, Carl, you wanted to be a full time professor! That’s what you told my boss! You even suggested that you be promoted just because you couldn’t get pregnant, in your own words, you were unpregnantable, a word that doesn’t exist, by the way, and therefore you were more reliable, responsible and respectable than I. Little did you know that I was over sixty percent of the meat in the exams, PowerPoints, Lecture notes, grades, and even the handouts and the agenda. I was that valuable.
Still, his brother is my dream man, so I’m going to forgive him this once, pretend that I was deaf at that staff meeting, and offer to come in and grade some papers or just go through the online grade book and assign everyone an F because that’s what they deserve if Carl is telling the truth and people are sleeping through his lectures. I say “if” because I know Carl lied about being more responsible than I (he’s behind in everything and it’s almost two weeks out of Spring Break!), he’s certainly not more respectable, naming names on his Facebook, friending students (my personal NO) and then linking to their profiles when he goes on a profanity-ridden fit when he’s frustrated, and forget reliable. Maybe Carl is pregnant? That’s got to be what’s wrong with him. He’s demanding help from other Assistant Professors tonight, and when they decline because they don’t want to get behind in their own work, he calls them irresponsible and lazy! Oh Carl, you are so not getting promoted in August.
So, since I’m legally going to be pregnant until August, and Mark told me to get rid of the brain tumor while I was off for four months, I feel that I should be doing something productive. Something. Anything. I even made Josh a PlayList for March because I just want something to keep my fingers busy, I’m sick of this …disease… that I caught from unsanitary Carl at the staff meeting a few weeks ago, and I need to occupy my mind. I need something to do. Something that makes me feel accomplished. Something that I can look back on and say, “I did so much while I was waiting for that kid to be born!” that I’m willing to sit down at my computer and write.
So I’m going to work on this site.
By “working on this site,” I’m going to start by changing my handle to “Acid Queen” but that’s not an LSD reference. Not for me anyway, and I’m not secretly Tina Turner nor have I fucked Roger Daltrey or any other member of the Who. I like the name, and I once drank a flask of hydrochloric acid in high school chemistry, I lived, cancer-ridden but alive, and still here to talk about it today.
Being the Acid Queen is one of what I consider one of my stories.
By stories I mean interesting things that have only happened to me.
Back in the day, before the perils of being forced to upgrade to WordPress because Josh is a cunt and makes me do uncomfortable things, I had pages on here of my stories. They were 100% true fascinating things that had happened to me in my twenty-eight years on Earth. I’m going to be thirty-three, the Jesus age, this year, so I think I should have an accomplished and full website like I had once before. Oh yes, this site, due to my own negligence, has become just a shell of what it was just a mere five years ago. When I first had my own .com and was in college and thus had a lot of time on the computer to write, I frequently wrote about things that made me interesting. I edited my own HTML (remember that? do you even know what that is???), made layouts on the college’s Dreamweaver, uploaded with Blogger.com and an FTP client. I had to link to all my own pages with my own editing. Nothing was automatic like it is with WordPress. You kiddies don’t know! Blogging and site maintenance was once something that required time, skill and patience. Now anyone with a fucking keyboard can be a site master and appear to be good at it.
What will my stories contain? That’s the wonderment of you’ve got to keep coming back here and checking things! I can give you a taste, though, for example, did you know that I had a lover who died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York? That I’ve fucked someone super-famous (it’s not Roger Daltrey, I promise!)? Actually two someones, but sex no longer counts once you marry the one you’re fucking. That there is a famous love song out there that is about me? That for the first fifteen years of our relationship I couldn’t tell my husband from his brother and his brother regularly got sex from me because of it? Okay, that last one is just me being a horny bimbo, but, hey, it’s interesting, right? I could make something of it some day! The best of all of this is I am considering naming names. Famous names. That are on Wikipedia and you’ve probably not only heard of, but that you’ve got songs by on your computer or your CD shelf.
Now that you know all that, aren’t you just itching for me to dish, dish, dish?
Of course you are! But I’m doing this as a side pregnancy project and only through August, though I can probably whip up to thirty pages per month, if I’m really dedicated to it.
Oh, and I promise not to write about drug experiences, with the exception of the prescription drug I was given that caused amnesia. That was a pretty fun experience. I could do shit and not have to feel guilty about it the morning after. I pissed off a pretty good amount of people while I was on that drug. Oh well. The true ones stayed.
Have a good night everyone. Don’t stay up too late!
I’ll Always Love You
“People come and people go, moving fast and moving slow. I’m in a crowd, yet I’m all alone,” ~Micky Dolenz
My dreams are vivid. I am told by the first one I gave my heart to is ready to face eternity with me. He died almost twelve years ago. I won’t write out his name; it’s all here, all on my pages, along with the circumstances of his death. It’s a worn-out tragedy that I am not going to contribute to tonight. Tonight, I write about Love surviving death into Eternity.
What do you do if there is more than one soul you loved who has crossed over? Who do you spend Eternity with? So far I have two waiting for me, and a third whom I hope that I don’t have to cross that path for a long, long time.
Even my dreams are confused. In them I reject Dennis after the tragedy, and he walks away, into a fog of unknown, with Chloe, Ashe and James holding his hands. The children do not look back at me. They just follow their father. I know what that dream means; without Dennis, I wouldn’t have the wonderful children that I have to this date. But at the same time, if I had married either of my other two loves, they may be alive today. If I had insisted Peter take me out to eat that night, if I had insisted Paul stay an extra two weeks in Las Vegas with me, one of them would still be alive today. Right? Death and hindsight plays heavily on my thoughts these days. I’m not sure why that is. My declining health? My lack of Risperdal? My constant research into the death of others? There is a reason I am having these dreams.
My last haunting dreams were of Dennis abandoning me. Of me being alone, in strange, dark, cold places and no one was there to help me. Dennis would lead me to these places, and then walk away. I wake up just as I am panicking in the darkness. No one ever rescues me. I am just there. Some times I wander around in the dreams, but the scenery is just all that more unfamiliar.
I have people who tell me that dreams are not prophetic. They tell me that dreams are just made up of the things that one is exposed to during the day, and that anything could cause them. The tragedy is in the news every single day, despite it being over a decade old, so I could be exposed to it unknowingly. I download songs from my past, constantly, so that again could trigger me thinking about my past subconsciously. I have transformed some home videos to DVD through the miracle of my VHS to DVD recorder, and that again, the past may be replaying in my mind subconsciously. I have not studied therapy, psychology and psychiatry enough to fully diagnose myself. I do know that the images scare me. I know that they haunt me. I know that I want the hauntings to end.
Then there’s the part of me who thinks that Love is keeping those memories alive. That when I get too focused on my present life, Love reminds me that there were two men who loved me more than life itself, and that I get to go on and have a full marriage, children, a career, and experiences that they will never have. Love can do strange things to a person, and their memory, and their mind, and their way of thinking. I am sure of that.
Fourteen Years Ago
Today is my oldest daughter’s Fourteenth Birthday.
Or it would be, if she were alive.
Poetry Rose died of a barbiturate overdose, just a dose and a half of what was prescribed for her, in the wee hours of the morning on May 20, 2009. She was ten years old.
Suffering from multiple tumors that were causing her severe pain, PoRo’s doctor had told her father and I that chemotherapy would just prolong her suffering, and wrote us a prescription for her of high dose barbiturates, a dose so high that I once tried it and found myself sobbing and “out of body” for hours. The doctor informed us that if we tried to pursuit chemotherapy from another physician or cancer treatment center, he would personally report us to child services for child abuse. Our parents also threatened us with a report to child services if we did nothing and just let our daughter die.
It was a horrible time for me, for Dennis, for our family.
PoRo mimicked my medication taking. She had watched me take pain medication for a long, long time (since July of 2003), and she was certain if I did it, it had to be right. I was her hero, another mistake she made. In mimicking what I do many times with my invalid pain medications, she took just a half a dose higher than was recommended, and it killed her.
Her death was ruled an accident.
Dennis and I both turned ourselves in to the police after the paramedics took PoRo’s body away. We blamed ourselves, and each other, at the same time. No charges were brought because PoRo had written in her journal hours before taking the fatal dose, that she had saw not only myself take multiple pain medicine pills, but her father usually over medicated, and so did her cousin Jess. We were all fine. She was never aware that medicine could be lethal, and if you died in this world, there’s no reset button, and you don’t get to come back. She thought she had super powers, as she thought the same about me, because she had beaten cancer three years before she died. I still cry for her because she died like an unwanted animal. With the same overdose they get. Except she wasn’t an animal, and she wasn’t unwanted. She was dearly loved and much wanted.
Not a day goes by that I don’t think of her and the situation, and how tragic it turned out. There are many days that I wonder if there was something I could have done differently, that would make her alive to this day. When she was seven, she had several tumors removed from her breast, and was given a clean bill of health after six months. But the cancer came back. It has a nasty, bad habit of doing that. I was happy when Chloe’s tumors were declared benign. I don’t think I could live through another innocent life being sick, weakened by a disease that is almost always fatal.
Because they were the best of friends on this Earth, in this Life, PoRo and Jess were interred next to one another, so their spirits need not wander too far to be together again.
Every February 25th since her death, I make a birthday cake for dessert at dinner time. I made one this year. As a tributing tradition, we, as a family, all blow out the candles on the cake at the same time. My hope is that she will be remembered because of this tradition.
I’d also like to point out, even though it is irrelevant in this whole thing, that a freak from the far ends of the web harassed me to tears over me taking extra pain medication for my severe pain. They mocked me, telling me that my kids were going to get into my medicine and die from drug overdoses. That person was not right. In both telling me that I was this apathetic bitch who partied down on prescription pain killer, and in accusing me of not caring for my kids. I care for my family. Just because I don’t update my blog every day with how much I love and cherish them doesn’t mean that I do not feel it, that I do not care for them. I don’t know where that person (or her other two personalities are, the ones that pretended to be my friend(s) to get info out of me) is now, but if she does want to come mock me for her being “right” I really don’t care. I don’t have to let her comments through. And I can ban her second set of IPs as well.
Oh, and if he were alive, George Harrison would be 70 today.
Thirteen years ago, I was contemplating sex with a stranger, at the risk of being labeled a slut. Today I am contemplating screwing the lead guitarist of a band that my father bought every album of, just because I will be covering the band’s concert here this spring. Open relationships mean one thing: Trust is more important than monogamy, and “hunk o’ burning love” is taken literally. The problem arose when Dennis did not want me sleeping with any man except himself, something that wasn’t fair, as he confided in me that he had had several “encounters” on the road, then “clarified” that they had all been between bandmates. What? He’s screwing other men? It’s not surprising to me, but it really threw our therapist back a few inches.
But if I had sex with another woman and he could watch, that was fine.
Isn’t it always?
I have been in conversation with the guitarist that I am planning on conquering this spring, and he’s really a nice guy. He doesn’t know what I’m planning, yet, and a good groupie doesn’t divulge what they are planning until the moment happens, but he offered to buy me coffee and talk about the tour. How nice. I needed a shot of insulin after that conversation.
Hey, my manager says I have to be nice to the bands that I interview! It’s out of my hands! If we give them bad publicity, they may shit on our publications, and we’ll lose readers. Normally. Knowing today’s youth, if a band said “[This] magazine sucks!” millions of people may jump out and buy it or order subscriptions. Unfortunately, the managers don’t think like that, and if we get bad publicity from a band, the reporter who caused that bad publicity is fired. Permanently. So, it’s my motto to be a groupie in disguise of a reporter! Besides, I’ve been a groupe since I was fifteen, and I’m still waiting for that one “bad thing” to happen to me to spoil it all.
Dennis has been trying to get me to rethink many things on my agenda. Things such as sleeping with this guy, packing up and leaving the family, and other “mistakes that I am going to regret” in the future. I replied that he sounded like a middle school teacher, preaching about “the future” all the time. I’m at that point in my life where I don’t care about the future anymore. I just want to make it through the present and learn to let go of the past. If that means that I am a whore or a slut, or a “druggie whore” as one of my lovely blog visitors has referred to me as (I can see those referrer logs, dumb ass!), then so be it. It’s amazing that people really care that much about what I think of them that they are willing to insult me over an invisible media. There’s the discussion of what this may be “setting for Chloe.” I can honestly say that my own mother’s promiscuity had no effect on how I grew up, other than I wish she had not physically and emotionally abused me in the process. Other than that, it’s her body, her pussy, her choices. I’m not married to her just as Chloe is not married to me. If Chloe grows up and has sex with Marilyn Manson, good for her! I hope she at least gets his autograph out of it all!
My biggest concern is that I don’t know if I can go through with it. I’ve been having that problem for a long time now. Call it a conscience, call it chickening out. I don’t know what to make of it. Ideas?
Before any rumors start to fly, why yes, I did some dumb shit and hurt myself this week:
Full Circle
Today Dennis was released from the hospital. I wasn’t ready for that. I wasn’t expecting him to call me and say that he got a ride back to our place. Getting that message at 6pm, I packed up what I could from Vance’s place, gathered my little ones, wrote a letter to Vance explaining where I was going, and left. He’ll find it at about 6am, when he gets home from work. It was harder to leave Vance than it was Dennis. Vance always kissed me good morning, good night, hello and good bye. He kissed me for no apparent reason other than I was there, and he felt like being affectionate. Dennis, on the other hand, thinks that by marrying me, he never has to tell me that he loves me anymore.
My mind has been wandering tonight. First from the medical tests that revealed Stage III cancers in two more places, to discussing surgery, alone, in that huge hospital, to knowing that I am going to have to see the therapist tomorrow. My tits are sore from the mammogram and the biopsies. My armpit is sore from the biopsy. I feel as though I will be alone in my battle, had I not gotten back together with Dennis when he called me. Vance would not miss work, no matter what, even the day that I had my Gamma Knife surgery. He dropped me off at the clinic, went to get coffee, and came back in about two hours and picked me up, distorted and disoriented. I was essentially alone. Today was a horrible reminder of this.
The thoughts that raced through my mind kept me anxious. When I heard the technologist tell me that lumps were found in my breasts, that a lump was found in my side, I wanted someone there, someone familiar, to hold me. I wanted someone to be there to tell me that yes, the road was a frightening and strange road, but that I was going to get well, and I didn’t have to go down it alone. That would have made the entire procedure 100% less frightening for me. The only person there was the technologist and I, and I certainly couldn’t hug her. She was so cold and sterile. The x-ray machine was cold and sterile. My nipples bled during the procedure. I was shaking by the end of the procedure, wanting to sit down between shots, but the technologist kept telling me to stand there, we were “almost done.” Forty minutes later, and much blood on the x-ray machine, I was told we were finally “done.” I was shaking. I’m not used to standing that long. I’m not used to something squeezing my tits that hard for that long, in those exotic positions. But I survived it. Alone. In that huge, cold, lonesome hospital. As I was walking back to my car, I saw that it was pouring rain out. I walked slowly to the car, feeling embarrassed that I had just shown my tits to a stranger, and that I had to face said stranger. I also felt as if the hospital was going to swallow me up, with the twists and turns and such. I just wanted to get home, change, and sleep it off. But then Dennis called to tell me that he had been released from the other hospital, and was at our house.
Gamma Knife surgery was as bad as the new diagnosis. They screwed a box to my head. Underneath the skin. The box was to keep my head still, and only allowing movement when the huge CT-esque machine was ready to move my head. Couldn’t they do this some other way?! I could feel the screws grinding against what I could only logically assume was my skull. I wanted to faint, but I’m not wired that way. I stay awake for the whole gore-y situation. No matter what is being done to me. The same thing happened when I got my root canals done a few years back.
Somehow, things just feel like they should be this way, you know? I feel as though I should be here, in this house, digging through a mountain of laundry, lightly teasing Dennis, while we watch worn-out, has-beens in rock. It just seems like this is they way things should be. Even though my heart is craving kisses and smiles and someone who doesn’t scream at the kids at every opportunity, the Continuum is no longer in danger of Chaos.
If you don’t get that last reference, it means that all life as we know it would cease to exist because I wasn’t playing my part in the Universe. Now that I am, I have saved mankind, somewhat. Be thankful.
She Hates Me
Vance tells me to write. He tells me that if I sit down and pour out what has happened to me over the past three days that I will feel better. I tell him that I will never feel better, because I really think that things are just going to go downhill from here, and get worse and worse.
Of course, that’s not the right attitude to have, I am reminded, several times, by my friends.
But how many times have my friends had to go through any of this?
So here’s a (semi) complete history of the whole thing:
A little over a week ago, our house guest beat the snot out of me, and I left to stay with a male friend. The friend and I have developed feelings for one another, but we have not acted on said feelings, yet. On Sunday afternoon (I think), I moved the kids in with me and my friend after Dennis refused to acknowledge that my broken bones were his fault for not defending me. Monday morning, the portraits were in, and my initial promise was that after the portraits were reviewed and our house guest left, I would come back with the kids. Monday afternoon, I am still working with students, my phone is on “Do Not Disturb” and Dennis flips his lid, mixes several medications with some household chemicals and drinks the entire cocktail. His younger brother came by and found him vomiting “foam-y blood” in the living room, called 911, and by the time I had woken up yesterday morning, I was informed that Dennis was in the ICU of the hospital. During that afternoon, I was pulled over for expired tags on my car, and given a hefty fine after the deputy found my prescription medication in the front seat. After my labs were done for the day, I went to check on him, and he was awake and alert. No one at the hospital knew what he had taken, and the nurses asked me to find out. When I asked him, he wouldn’t tell me. Frustrated, after several moments of attempting to get an answer, I actually shook him by the shoulders, demanding an answer. When I let go of him, he just smiled and made a remark that I’d always come back to him, no matter what. Still frustrated and now visibly upset, crying, I slapped him with all my strength. Which wasn’t enough, since I had not eaten anything solid since Monday morning.
Again, he just laughed at me. The nurses came in shortly afterwards, and asked me to step out while they attempted to insert a foley cath. I sat in a chair outside the ICU doorway, and listened, in distress, as Dennis begged, cried, screamed and pleaded with the nurses to stop. Little One must have heard him as well, because they became distressed too. Thirty minutes later, the nurses gave up, and asked me to leave.
This morning, I was notified via my phone, that I had to give consent for a PIC line to be inserted. I was told that Dennis had gone into respiratory distress last night and had to be sedated and then placed on a ventilator. His potassium levels are dangerously high, and after talking with his nurses tonight, I discovered that they had tried to wake him last night for his meds, and he was not responding, which was why they put him on the ventilator.
I then made the bad decision to tell Chloe that her father was ill and had attempted to hurt himself, which had caused him to be in the hospital on machines that helped him eat and breathe. She demanded to see him. I debated this, and then against my better judgement told her that she could come to the ICU with me later on tonight. As we talked in the car, she seemed cold and distant. I asked her if she no longer loved me and her response was nothing I could have guessed: “No. I’m saying I hate you. I wish you were dead!”
Making good on my promise, I took Chloe to see her father tonight. She did not go near him, but stood there and watched just inside the room. We came home in silence, and she’s now in her bed area here, asleep.
Some pictures of the monitors. Dennis’ heart-rate is irregular and not as strong as it should be.
The ventilator monitor:
This notebook was open on his bedside table:
Medications:
There’s more. Lots more. More pictures, more to say, but I am exhausted. This is all I can blog for now.
★
