And hollow, hollow, hollow all delight

Melissa sent me a text at midnight, her time, which said, "Happy New Year! May it not be crappy or suck." I was so enchanted with this that I used it as my Facebook status this morning. I told her that I'm going to send out holiday cards next year saying just that. Aim low, and you may not be disappointed.

Thirteen more shots. And counting. A week or so ago I got my most recent lab results and learned that I'm so severely anemic that I may need a blood transfusion. Oh goody. Judy was concerned enough that she wanted me to go in right away, but Dr H said to give it another week and see if it stabilizes. Meanwhile, I've been taking an iron supplement and eating tons of dark green leafy vegetables, legumes, egg yolks and raisins, in the hope that I can bring my hemoglobin back up to an acceptable level. I had more blood drawn on Tuesday, but as of yesterday afternoon I still hadn't heard from Judy about the results, which I'm taking as an encouraging sign. She's forgotten to call me before, but it seems to me that if there was something terribly wrong with my results she would call me right away and not make me wait through a three-day weekend.

I was actually relieved to find out that I'm anemic. It explains a lot, like why I'm light-headed, why I get dizzy every time I sneeze, why I'm so tired all the time and why the breathlessness has been worse than ever for the last few weeks. Not to mention the general malaise. Most of these symptoms have improved in the last few days, which gives me hope that my efforts are paying off. After April I may never eat another raisin, lentil or hard boiled egg, but if they help to keep my hemoglobin stable I'll continue to shovel them in until then.

It's increasingly difficult to stay in the moment. I'm so close to finishing now that I can almost taste it, yet every day I'm tempted to quit. The breathlessness, the fatigue and the depression drag me down and before I know it I'm pouting and wallowing in self-pity, trying to convince myself that it doesn't matter if I finish this treatment or not because the Hep C was never going to get any worse anyway, and besides, I'm tired of feeling sick and tired and I can't afford the co-pay and I just want to feel good again. I feel like I've been cheated out of my forty-fifth year by this fucking disease, after my addiction already robbed me of sixteen valuable years. I haven't got enough left to spare. Every moment is precious and I don't want to waste any of them feeling sick and not up to much.

At the women's meeting a week ago I talked to a woman I haven't seen in awhile. She asked me how I was, and I said, "I'm good," which was true. At that moment I felt pretty okay. But then she asked about the Interferon, and my response was sort of like, "well, I'm tired and I'm deaf and I can't see very well and I'm having trouble breathing and I have insomnia and my hair is falling out and my voice is thrashed and my memory is shot and I haven't had a period in four months and if my hemoglobin drops any lower I'll need a blood transfusion, but I'm okay." She said: "I can see that you're exhausted."

"Can she?" I thought, feeling a bit put out and wanting to argue with her. Because, really, Camille is not the look I'm going for. I felt so damned good last summer, despite the Interferon, once I got my thyroid levels back up where they were supposed to be, but since then it's been a slow slide downhill, until now, when I resemble a consumptive courtesan. I know I look awful because I deal with it every morning in the mirror: without makeup I look like a corpse, pale as marble with deep purple shadows under my eyes, and with it I look like a clown because the color is all painted on. A clown with two black eyes. My indignation with Monique was for pointing this out. I want to hold my head up throughout this treatment. I don't want people to know how rough it is, and pity me. My vanity wants me to appear to sail through it, no matter how hard it is really, and as long as no one said anything I could pretend I was pulling it off. I suspect that no one has said anything because the people who see me all the time haven't noticed how bad I look. It was only because Monique hadn't seen me in several months that she was able to see the decline.

There's another reason why I wanted to put my fingers in my ears and yell, "La la la! I can't hear you!" The way I felt was, don't tell me I'm exhausted because I didn't know. I was sort of like the cartoon character who runs off the cliff and keeps running as long as he doesn't know where he is, and now, although I haven't given up, it's just a bit harder. Sometimes denial can be a good thing. Until I had that conversation, I would have a moment of doubt and despair every few days, a moment when I would think, "I don't know if I can do this." But the moment would pass and I would soldier on regardless. And now I have those moments several times a day. It's possible that I would feel this way whether I'd talked to Monique or not, though, because the breathlessness is what causes those moments of despair, nearly every time. It's when I can't breathe that everything seems impossibly difficult and exhausting. As long as my lungs are working okay, I can deal with the rest, but the breathlessness is the one symptom which just keeps getting worse. Well, that and the deafness, but the deafness doesn't cause despair.

I'll do my shot tonight and I'll keep going, a day at a time. I've made a commitment to myself to continue this treatment until it's finished, and that's what I'll do, no matter what kind of pity party is taking place between my ears. Thank God for all my recovery training. It's really paying off this year.