I know that all it is, is remnant of the effects of chemotherapy; it’s a case of  peripheral neuropathy visits the Twilight Zone.

I can see how some people might think that ghosts are afoot or that the Other Side is reaching out to me, but I don’t think that. Instead I think it’s just another float in the endless parade of distractions, inconveniences and  annoyances that go with the chemo territory.

I’ve been pretty depressed for a while. Okay, very depressed. I keep telling people I’m not some courageous pillar of character, I’m just some guy who caught cancer. Certainly it’s an uncommon kind of cancer; I think it was designed by Stephen King because whoever thought this one up had a sadistic SOB of an imagination.  But cancer is awful for any who have it, even the cancers we know how to deal with. Learning you have cancer changes your life forever, irreparably. Anyway, I can feel as down as the next person and I’ve been doing just that. Come to think of it, I still am.

Something as simple as a bogus sensation can add to the weight of malaise sitting on one’s shoulders. It causes me to wonder why I get the manifestation and that, of course, leads me to the many things it might be. That is, until I apply Ocham’s Razor. The ‘razor’ is a logical test of science in the face of choice. It says that the obvious answer is the most likely. Ergo, I suffer hallucinations, not visits from ethereal beings come to welcome me to the endless black of nothingness.  Even if it were dark angels come to bear my soul away, things where I was headed would probably be a lot more interesting than they are here.

I realized that some small part of my fascination with robots has to do with the movie Short Circuit and the star of the show. No, not Steve Gutenberg, the robot, Johnny 5. It’s mantra was “Input! Need input!”

Dude, I totally relate. Being held away from experience is deprivation of the worst kind, and for reasons plentiful enough to fill volumes of psychological tomes.

More than the cancer eating me, and it’s doing a pretty good job so the doctors all chorus, –what it stops me from doing is infinitely worse. That affects the one place I can’t readily sedate or shoo the pain from: my mind.

I’m smart enough to know that depression is, in its own right, a killer. But I’m too set in my ways to forget the loss and move on. That’s what you do when you get ripped off on eBay, not what you do with your life. In life you just have to be allowed your feelings and expressions. They are what will keep you sane enough to remember why it isn’t easier to put a plastic bag over your head and turn on the helium. As long as the brain is still trying to find things to feed it, it hasn’t given up. And so long as my brain is willing, I tend to go along with it.

Life is becoming a view outside a train window. Everything is speeding by with little stroboscopic moments that sit static and viewable for a second, before being whisked away by time. My friend Bud is coming over sometime today. He’s going to fix my wife’s car. My step-daughter ripped backwards out of the garage in her big-ass Suburban and smacked the little Chevy Cavalier hard enough to put a hole in the radiator, crimp up the hood, and bend the fenders around the headlights giving the car an oriental sloe-eyed look. My fine Ford Taurus is the only car now. Actually, I guess it belongs to the wife now; I just pay for it and wish I was well enough to drive the damn thing. Not like I enjoy it or anything. The Taurus is the epitome of basic transportation with not much more going for it than it usually starts and takes us where we want to go. I got ripped off on that car just as much as life. It was sold to me as a little driven corporate lease return. Come to find out it was a rental car at SeaTac Airport before I bought it. So it suffered a very difficult 30,000 miles before I got it. Now that I have 32,000 miles on it, it wants new tires, brakes, exhaust, engine and transmission work. There’s that caveat emptor thing at work again. All caveat emptor has done is sour me even more about my fellow Americans and their attitudes. No wonder the world hates us so; we’re dishonesty and ego wrapped up in one convenient package.

My next doctor appointment isn’t until next month. The doctors can’t do anything more for me, so they only want to see me every 30 days or so to refill my pain medications. I don’t even have a weekly trip to the VA to look forward to. I just keep sliding farther and father into this tiny corner that defines my life nowadays.

So much sleep is disorienting me. I’m not sure whether it’s day or night. I look out the window at the gray sky and don’t know if it’s dawn or dusk. Television looks the same all day and night, so that’s no help. Only in the wee hours when Paid Programming takes over the vast wasteland of channels can I tell that it’s nighttime. I was looking forward to having new glasses and a mobility scooter to start off the new month. But the VA hosed my glasses up and it will take another three months or so to send them back through the system to be made right. So much for vision. My mobility char was supposed to be delivered after three weeks. It’s been five. Doctors, Physical Therapy, Optometry; all of the VA has pretty much written me off.

I just got a new robot. I was hoping the addition of a 3pi from Trossen Robotics might lift my spirit. But the $120 device worked for a few minutes and then gave up the ghost. I’m asking them to replace it, but I don’t expect much. The Trossen website screws up the checkout, telling customers their payment failed and tells them to make the payment again. Except that the payment does go through, so if you do as they ask you will pay for your purchase twice. When I reported it, they tried to blame it on PayPal, but since I use the PayPal system and know how it works, it was easy to catch them in their lie. So I’m not expecting them to replace the robot they tried to make me pay twice for. The company appears to like things as they are.

Trossen and eBay are conspiring to get me to stop buying online. Being handicapped, online purchases are right up my alley for convenience and ease of shopping. But I’m getting ripped off too often. It’s that caveat emptor thing again. I’m giving serious consideration to shooting the next person that tries to hide their dishonesty with that phrase. Fraud is fraud and I’m tired of the bullshit. Being further victimized doesn’t set well with me, I have enough crap in my life.

Actually, it’s a cute little robot, the 3pi (three – pie). But the manual, available online and not shipped with the device, is actually cryptic and badly written. It assumes you already know everything it says, and so it more gives little reminders rather than instructions. I don’t expect them to cover additions and modifications to the robot, but simple “how to properly connect it to the computer and how to set up the computer to program it”  would be nice. Instead, they want us to use the Force or extra sensory perception to learn the robots workings. For what they charge for the robot, they should send someone over to the house to demonstrate how to work it.

There was an episode of Star Trek I saw ages ago where reality for the starship Enterprise was shrinking. They created some sort of quantum bubble with their warp engines that replaced the universe the ship was in. Then it started shrinking. In the end, it left the June Cleaver-ish Dr. Crusher alone on the bridge with the bubble getting smaller and smaller. At the last second, her son Wesley McGuyvered a quick fix and they pulled Dr. Mom through the breach just before the universe ate her.

I feel like it’s my turn to sit on the bridge of a ship that’s going nowhere, as the universe contracts and stalks me. Like Dr. Crusher, there are things I can do to while away the hours, but in the end they’re kind of pointless. With no one around much, I don’t have a Wesley to pull me out at the last minute.

I wonder what the new unverse will be like.

The VA doctors have pretty much thrown their hands up in surrender; their bag of tricks is empty. Radiation is on the horizon, but solely for pain control. It’s a win-lose situation because in order to stop the chronic pain in the worst areas, they have to kill all of the cells because our technology isn’t up to selective cell irradiation. Killing off bone cells means killing the marrow, and that means I have even less immunity to issues. The atrophy and deterioration of my body will speed up as blood activity wanes.

I realized the other day that it winded me simply going to the bathroom, and pain makes it harder for me to stand or walk for any length of time. Because of this, my musculature is shrinking and the mass of my bones is shrinking right along with it. Like becalmed mariners, fighting scurvy and lolling abut the decks with nothing to do invariably waste away, the same thing is happening to me. It’s a downward spiral.

It’s difficult to talk about this and not sound whining and woos-like. But this is a part of having Multiple Myeloma, the point to this blog.

While pneumonia or other infection is often the last straw for Myeloma patients, depression is a vicious facilitator on the sidelines; a parasite feasting voraciously on hope and confidence. It makes me seek more of the isolation visited on me by cancer. Like a mushroom, I thrive on segregation from the world, existing in a quiet darkness while awaiting the concluding harvest. It’s difficult be tenacious about life when living is little more than trying to find ways to pass time. I’m alone for abut 22 of 24 hours each day. That’s a lot of time to fill.

I have my robots and my Kindle, together with my television and computer they define my plane of reality. There is little to look forward to and much to be apprehensive about, so trying to think in terms of the future can be excruciating at times. One can’t help but include further physical deterioration in time passage thinking. Thinking of the future is like sitting down to eat cheesecake –right after you sprinkle it with shards of broken glass.

I could probably reach out and get more people involved with me. Perhaps that would help the bouyancy of my thoughts. But something makes me reticent to do that; I don’t want to feel like I’m inflicting myself on others. If they have the time and inclination, they will make it known. There’s more to it than just worrying whether I’m inconvenient for others but it is difficult to describe. Suffice to say that I probably could be less isolated if I did something, but I just don’t feel like doing it.

I have been giving thought to moving to a new city. A weird idea, perhaps. But maybe a new place that has things I want to see would help me avoid the self-reinforcing funk I keep falling into. Being depressed isn’t a new experience; I’ve been pretty depressed since they told me I was dying from this crap and there was little to be done. I think I know what it feels like to be in prison and on death row. Except they have bigger rooms and people to talk to and spend time with.

But no matter where I go,  I will need some kind of help because of my disabilities, and I end up back thinking again that I don’t want to inflict myself on others. Plus that, I keep being told how I’m not viable, so I don’t even know if I can make it through the set up of living in a new place, what with the deposits and credit checks that go along with relocating. Of course, I’m not rich and so the expense of moving is a bit daunting as well.

That’s depression for you. No matter which way you look, its a dark and gray-lighted place that offers foreboding more than welcome.  While depression may give a bleakness to forward vision, but it’s merely the frosting on a cake of reality.

I actually had an adrenaline rush of fear when I saw the little black hole from which colored light had moments ago been glowing, I feared the worst; a dead Kindle. You see, the USB port is how you charge the Kindle. You may use a computer or the little white wall voltage to USB voltage transformer they provide with the eBook reader. I knew with creeping dread that if the USB port failed, the battery would continue to lose charge until it eventually succumbed. There would be nothing I could do, short of hacking the reader’s case open and physically removing and charging the battery from a home contrived source.

I went through a series of tests which sought to eliminate different possibilities. To make sure it wasn’t just a cable that went bad, I tried a different cable, known to be working to use instead. Nope, no go. The light stayed off. So I tried a different USB port on the computer, just in case the one I was plugging into before had a problem. Nope, still broken. So I used the little Amazon transformer and plugged the Kindle into the wall with it. Then I tried two different cables with the transformer. Finally, I tested to see if it was charging in spite of the light not working. By now I had chewed off a third of the battery charge, so I left it plugged in for an hour and then checked the battery icon on the Kindle. It was still sitting where it was to begin with; about one-third low.

It was time to call in the experts. I’m an engineer so I knew that there was an issue with the USB circuit. Perhaps a trace or pin became disconnected. A break in the ‘wire’ will certainly cause failure. Or perhaps some component failed; whatever it was, it exceeded my ability to fix it so I contacted Amazon Kindle Customer support. I wanted to get an idea on what repair costs might be. The people at Amazon were spectacular. They listened as I explained the testing I had done, and when I finished they agreed with me. The Kindle was broken.

So, I said. Just what will it cost me to have my Kindle fixed? The immediate reply was that they had just placed an order for a brand new Kindle for me as a warranty replacement. They overnighted it to me, already registered. It took me mere minutes to have it looking and reacting like my old one.

In these days of having to go through excruciating gyrations to reach customer support, no less have your issue resolved quickly and conveniently, and in your favor. Amazon was outrageously spectacular. My part in this is to return the broken one to them. They gave me an internet URL to go to with my web browser to get a pre-printed, prepaid shipping label to return the old Kindle with. They sounded almost apologetic that if I didn’t return it within 30 days they would have to charge me for a new one. I think that’s totally fair.

My Kindle is important to me. It is more personal and utilitarian than my smartphone, and more dear than my steroid-grown computer. It was with me through the thick and thin of my treatments, the hospital stays because of my treatments, and the moments in between. It was good to be able to lose yourself in the characters and plot of a well crafted story. My Kindle kept my mind occupied when even watching television was too much. Frenetic and fraught with attention deficit syndrome, television bounces quickly from subject to subject, often with rising and falling and oh so irritable soundtracks. It was nice to mute it and put it on a channel that focused on the planet or the space it sits in as a backdrop for my reading.

My Kindle has been from Spokane to Seattle to San Francisco and Boise. It has traveled with me on three different airlines and made it through security xray 8 times. It has pumped a total of 130 books into my head as well just during the first year I’ve owned it. My Kindle is the best present I ever gave myself; I have used it more and more consistently than any other device I have, including my computers and home theater.

My new Kindle, now charged and anxious to go, is even better than the first. Running the latest operating system update, it is faster. Following instructions I found on the web, along with Amazon agreeing that it would not violate the warranty, I changed the screen saver images that came with the Kindle. Now my family members, robots and places I have enjoyed being are displayed when the Kindle powers off or goes to sleep. It was nice to have it come back after the reset required to make the photos display, and to see my son’s smiling face looking back at me.

And lastly, with the new Kindle also came the invitation to being able to offer my blog to others through the Amazon Kindle store as a free or low fee. That means that people with Kindles (and the interest) to be able to get Deludia delivered directly to their Kindle. So this morning I started the process to make Deludia available to interested people.

What started as a gut wrenching loss of a companion turned out pretty good in the end.