Jan 23

 Been very ill. Nausea. Just feeling absolutely awful. The days blurred badly into dotted hours of wakefulness but mostly sleeping away the awfulness. Exhausted. Ill. Sleeping lonnnnnng. At it's worst I was getting around 4 hours of wakefulness in a day. Day. After day. After day.

The end. Surely has to be nigh.

Slowly this week I have started to feel a little better. Not good. Far from good. But up from where I was. The nausea lesser and greater still dogs me. My sleep schedule is again utterly ruined.

On some of the days I have managed to drag myself online to play a game for a while with a friend. But it has been hard. He noted I was struggling.

I have been so ill that all thoughts of doing anything but sleep and getting through a few hours a day were impossible. Everything stopped. I lapsed into not eating. I got to that familiar place where I couldn't eat. A strange place where the psychology suddenly flips and eating becomes awful. Something you don't want. Shy away from. There is no hunger. Just a recoil from food. I understand that not eating anything is very bad. And so. At times. I have just sat there. And struggled to eat a single bowl of soup. A rice cracker. I don't want it. It's an odd place. The opposite from when you usually eat and it's a nice experience. I have been here before more than once. It gives me insight into how easily you can get a problem with eating - from both points of view, too much and too little.

It's the nausea. And the unwellness. It makes food an abomination. It kills any appetite. And the pavlovian response - you don't want to eat anything because you fear the consequences. The flinch. Because of repeated kicks.

I am, for the moment, a little bit better. Eating a little better. But the unwellness and nausea hover. Flickering everyday. Threatening at any moment to become a huge issue and send me into the arms of oblivion via sleep and watch the days whirl past. It is fortunate I have so little going on in my life that I can afford to spend basically weeks in bed. It is very unfortunate that my life has put me here in the first place.

Hazel is still here. Her mood has gone down, then back up. She was mean some days ago. Proper danger level kick off mean. In my weak state, ill, no energy, I can't deal with an abusive Hazel. At all. I avoided her. And a few days later slumping hard, I just asked her to be kind if she can. That's it. Just be kind. For the moment this has abated her. And she has been better. The meanness stopped. For now.

So far it seems that Hazel is going to be staying with me for sometime. I suspect. Probably until the end. I asked what her plan was, she didn't know. Just that Poppy was better here than at her place with the stairs to get to and from a place to pee.

Poppy herself has been put on all the painkillers. Including librella. The librella - the wonder drug - has lifted a lot of her pain away. And she has improved, but obviously not fixed. She still has life left in her in so many ways. Just. The ruinous cancer cutting her life short. For the moment. Her pain is being well managed. But a deterioration is due and expected. We shall see. It is just up to the whims of fate at this point, how far, how fast. No one can say for sure. End of life care, the clock ticks, and the clock ticks so very fast for dogs.

In any case. I am fine with Hazel and Poppy staying. So long as I am not abused. I don't need any special care or attention. Just. Not to be kicked. Most of the time I am just in my bedroom. Asleep. Or dozing. Ill. I am in so many ways an invalid. The curious thing is at times I can do a passable impression of being functional on my feet. But it's a scam. I can't maintain it. Pay for it. And the planets have to align these days for me to pull it off.

My life is an absolute misery. I am trying. And. I have got to the defensive place of maximum mental meds, not thinking of anything other than not being ill or trivialities of some sort. A rejection of the misery. But it is miserable. It has crossed my mind so many times that this point, everything would be better if I wasn't here. I would be put out of my misery. Some people would get a financial boost from my passing. Better all round.

I can feel myself drifting further and further away from people. Where I do not surface for a week. Two. Is it three ? I can't tell. Sometimes a day feels like several. Sometimes several feel like a day. Time for me passes in a blur of illness and dreams. I say something one day, only to find a week has passed, I gasp for air, before being consumed by illness again. I will eventually be entirely isolated I think. I am. Kind of ok with this. Not in a fuck you I don't need anyone kind of way. But in a much more resigned kind of death spiral kind of way. People do not need or want to watch me decline and sputter out. Better that is done in the darkness really. So. In that way. I am kind of ok with being isolated. And truthfully, I am feeling so ill so often at the moment, that that level of thought rarely crosses my mind anyway. My mind just focused on not feeling ill. No other thoughts beyond anxiety riddled dreams.

I cannot stop what is happening. I have tried everything 3 different ways. The only thing left is defeated acceptance.

Perhaps, as ever, the optimistic side of the coin. Maybe I will feel better. Turn a corner. Maybe someone will find something one day. Maybe I will fix myself.

Life does not work like that. But. Who knows.

I don't let myself dwell.

But Athena ghosts across my thoughts. Ares. My mom. I miss them all terribly. But for my beautful mutts I think perhaps it is better they never got to see me like this. Not being able to take them out. Or play with them. Perhaps. It is an awful mercy. I absolutely hate that life runs like that. I would gladly sacrifice my life for theirs. But it is what it is, and I am powerless. But at least they are not suffering. I miss my mom. More it seems with each month that passes. I think perhaps in some childlike reflex, hurting, and sad, I look to my mom. Even though we never super had that relationship, albeit it was a lot better towards the end. I think thats who I miss. The mom from the end. The one that would listen. And understand. And I could talk to. As it turns out. Like no one else in my family.

I miss all the connections I no longer have. It is part of my issues. Always focusing on the rear mirror and the sense of loss. Easy to do when the path ahead is bleak, barren and only fully of suffering. There are no happy signposts in my future. No wonder I only gaze backwards. 

If I dwell for any length of time at all on these things I spiral down hard. I have to let it go. And drift. Into sleep. The only thing I look forward to. The oblivion of sleep. I crave oblivion. What. Does that tell you ?