Tales from the Dark Side
Something weird is happening. Sometimes in the day or in the night, I feel a touch. It’s like someone laid a hand on me, or poked me with a finger. That’s definitely the sensation anyway. Then too, at times I see movement in the extremity of my peripheral vision. It’s there and then it’s gone. It’s like just for a moment the shadows were caught in the light and vanished. It’s downright spooky, is what it is.
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.
