The days have slain the days

Well well well. It seems I still have a viral load. I can tell by Judy's voice if the news is bad, and even though she used her best "it'll all be okay" language, I know she's not very hopeful about my case. Continuing the treatment is still my best option, but the odds of clearing the disease become less favorable every time I have a test which shows a viral load. My current viral load is "less than ten," which of course is minuscule, but it adds another two weeks to the length of my treatment, bringing it up to a full year. Fifty-two weeks. Still, there are no guarantees either way. A friend of mine had no viral load after four weeks and had what looked like a successful treatment in every way, but her virus returned within six months. There's still more of a chance of a successful outcome than an unsuccessful one, so I'll keep going.

I got the news on Thursday afternoon, and not too long after I hung up with Judy I found myself in a Mood. Even before that I'd been feeling disgusted with the world I live in and wondering what the hell I was doing in it, repulsed as I was by the media frenzy surrounding the death of Michael Jackson. I wasn't busy at work, so I was idling away the afternoon on the internet, and everywhere I turned people were talking about nothing but this overrated pop star and what a tragedy it all was. A tragedy? Please. I went into mourning for six months when Paul Wellstone was killed, and also after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. But I'm afraid that the death of a pop culture celebrity leaves me cold. After I talked to Judy my gloom increased to the point where I was in danger of a full-blown attack of existential angst. "Why?" I wailed to myself, "Why am I trapped in this particular time and place? Why do I live in this celebrity-obsessed society, surrounded by illiterates, half of whose conversation is about what they watched on television last night?" My entire life seemed tinged with futility and I wondered why I bothered with any of it. I live in a time and place where I don't fit, where much of what I say and think is incomprehensible to most of the people I know and where the accepted recreations bore me nearly to death. Why couldn't I have been born a hundred years ago? Waa.

Eventually I recognized that I was feeding something that should not be fed, and I stopped. Depression is a common side effect of Interferon, and I'm grateful for the anti-depressant I'm taking. I can't imagine what I would feel like without it. I was able to stem the tide the other day, and even in the middle of it I reminded myself that, despite its seeming to be endless, it was just a mood and it would pass. It did pass, but it left me with a hangover, and I see now that my mood has been gradually darkening over the last couple of months. That's a relief, actually, because, no matter what I'm feeling at any given time, I have trouble recalling that I ever felt any other way. All of my memories are colored by the current emotional state, whether it's joy or grief or despair. So I'd unconsciously assumed that I'd spent my whole life trudging through the days without much enthusiasm for anything, and it was a relief to see that not only was it not true but the current lack of vim and vigor was probably caused by the Interferon.

I don't always lack vim and vigor, either. I haven't got as much energy as I'm used to having, but even so I manage to get quite a lot done without feeling overwhelmed. I feel that I haven't got enough time to get everything done, but not that I don't have enough energy. It's only occasionally that I succumb to the downward pull and find myself wondering why I was born. I know the way to deal with these passing moods, too. On Thursday on my way home from work I had a little argument with myself about whether or not to go to the women's meeting that night. "I'm tired," I whined. "I want to go home and cozy up with a book and go to sleep early." But now is not the time to upset my routine. I have a habit of going to the women's meeting every Thursday night, and I don't want to break that habit at this point in time. So I went to the meeting and when it was my turn to share I talked a bit about my afternoon, after which another woman shared a bit of her experience with Interferon. She said the same thing I feel, that she was grateful for the anti-depressant, and she was grateful for the habits of recovery which she'd established long before she began the treatment.

So I'm not alone, and the bad days come and go, just as they do under other circumstances. The viral load will disappear and I will make it through the next nine months of treatment without succumbing to despair and hopelessness.