A beautiful act of charity, open yet cloaked in anonymity.

Makes my evening!

My front door is the door to an asylum.

 I'll leave it up to you to decide which side of the door the asylum is on.

03/28/2017

 The mood is low.

 I'm going to have my entire digestive system scoped the day after tomorrow. It's a gastro-something and an endo-no idea. This is because of the drastic weight loss. I seem to have stopped at 192.

 It looks like I'm putting some fat back on but the weight isn't changing which means I'm losing muscle. It's like that self-cannibalization. The body begins to devour muscle to get protein to stay alive.

 And this concerns me.

 My Pops, Jim Price, was one of those kind of people who would go out to his car in the morning, find a parking ticket, blow a fuse, and it would be down-hill from there. His whole day overshadowed by a fifteen dollar ticket.

 Anyway, I'm getting off the subject.

 My mum had a similar trait but her's was being a disaster diva.

 This is a phone conversation I had with my mum, she called me. Pops had been in the hospital for injuries sustained in a fall. This was day three.

 Me: Hello?

 Mum: Jim's got cancer

 Me: Who told you that?

 Mum: Jim did.

 Me: And who told him?

 Mum: His doctor.

 Me: Who else was there?

 Mum: No one, just Jim and the doctor.

 Me: So, what you're saying is that Pops, who is so stoned on morphine he doesn't remember anyone visiting him for the past two days, says his doctor told him he has cancer, right?

 Mum: …

 Me: Feel better?

 Mum: Okay.

 Me: Please talk to the doctor as soon as possible.

 The rest is just personal stuff.

 As it turned out, what the doctor had said was there was something showing up on the X-Ray and they needed an MRI. Then he did that thing that doctors do that really, really annoys me; they run down the list of –possible-- problems before they know what they're dealing with.

 What the doctor told pops was a range anywhere from a completely benign cyst to a cancerous growth.

 Guess which possibility Pops latched on to? He'd probably already planned his funeral a half-dozen times in his head before he even got Mum on the phone.

 So the cancer diagnosis was made by Pops, not his doctor. He forgot everything else the doctor had said because he was whacked-out on pain meds.

 Hence the call.

 The “something” turned out to be a cyst. A very small one. Nothing wrong at all.

 That was just how my folks were. And, strange as it seems, this is a very pleasant memory. I believe they would call me specifically so I could talk them down. And I really didn't mind doing it.

 Anyway, the point of that entire rant is that I'm not the kind of person who is prone to leaping straight to disaster every time I'm sick. But I feel something about this. I just don't know what.

 I'm still working on the social life

 Right now, there is no social life. I sign up for the office Bunko group every month. I played last year and t was comfortable...and sometimes profitable. Unfortunately, the February and March games were both canceled.

 Hoping the next one will work out.

 I've been trying to reach out to people but I'm having little success. I'm okay with it because at least I'm trying. Even making an attempt to talk to people is something I never would have considered two years ago.. It's progress and I'm happy with it.

  Tomorrow my system is being flushed of everything I've eaten since 1974.

 It's not going to be a pleasant two days.

 And I'm still not sure how to feel about it.

 Thanks for listening

Tarnation wrote:

Lent is a time for purging, albeit of the passions, not just the bodily poisons.

So getting "flushed out"....not a bad thing. 

Too bad there isn't some lemon-lime flavored elixir to drink that flushes the mind of all that bad stuff from 1974....or whatever year is the pivotal, "coming of age".

In the Orthodox Church we have the Sacrament of Confession for clearing the spiritual crud.   But it is no magical elixir; you have to work hard at recalling not just the sins but the patterns of thoughts and emotions that lead up to the sins.   

It is hard work.   A lifetime work.

So daunting that one could easily despair....and that would be the worst sin of them all.

 

Being an atheist, I manage to get confession done on a daily basis.

I have to be able to look myself in the eye in that mirror every morning so I do my best to examine my life on a daily basis.

Tarnation wrote:

My problem is that when I look into the mirror I see what I want to see.  

Sometimes I tilt the mirror so that the flaws are hidden and the finer features augmented.

I have a terrible, terrible ability to see what's actually there.

Can't count the number of times I've wished I didn't.