The end of the beginning

Six more weeks. I'm officially in overtime and getting more impatient by the day. My fear now is that I'm building up my release from Interferon hell so much that it's bound to be a disappointment. I'm afraid I expect too much. I know I'll feel better, but Interferon isn't the only thing that's wrong in my life. It's not as though finishing the treatment will make my job any more interesting. I've decided that as soon as I've made my final co-pay I'm going to polish up my résumé and start applying for jobs in Santa Barbara. I can't stand my job any longer and I just want out. I'll just have to take a chance and live with no health insurance for a couple of months.

What's odd is that I'm not even really sure what's so bad about what I'm dealing with. I just feel sort of generally wrong. I'll start to talk about it with someone and when they ask "where does it hurt?" I'm forced to say I don't know. The best description I can come up with is that I feel half-alive. My mind is dull, my sense of humor is dull, my body is tired. But somehow I can only see that in hindsight. In the moment I just feel what I feel. It's only later that I can see how tamped-down I was in this or that situation. When I compare how I felt last summer to how I feel now, I can see the degeneration. I feel like I'm hanging on by my fingernails. I shared some of this at a meeting the other night and my friend Randi emailed me the next day to say that I sound depressed, which is, of course, common on Interferon. Okay, I'll buy it, but if I'm depressed, it's not like any depression I've ever experienced before.

I don't want to be half-alive. I'm not even irritable very often anymore because I can't be bothered to care about much of anything. Mostly I just want to sleep, but my insomnia makes that difficult. I'm often tempted to take naps on the weekends but I'm afraid that if I do I won't be able to sleep that night, so I walk through my days like a zombie. I still force myself to get up and jump on my trampoline every morning, which means getting up at five every weekday. It's a penitential hour to get up, but I notice a difference if I skip the trampoline even one morning.

So...let's see. I'm tired and I feel dull and I can't sleep and I can't breathe and my fingertips are covered with cuts and I'm deaf and blind...and so forth. Okay, I'll allow that things aren't so great for me at the moment. It's sometimes hard for me to know if I've got a legitimate gripe or if I'm just wallowing in self-pity. Whatever I'm going through seems less than dire, simply because I'm going through it. I mean, I'm surviving it, so how bad can it be? But sometimes it really is bad, and I think this qualifies. What really pisses me off is that I'd be finished by now if my virus hadn't been so stubborn, but I'm doing my best not to think about that. It doesn't matter how long I've been on this medication; all that matters is that I have 39 days left. I've got 78 doses of Ribavirin, five shots of Interferon and one co-pay left.

I can do this.