Run Silent, Run Deep
Stealing from the title of a classic movie, I’ve been silent for almost a month. And, in part, it’s because I went deep…. into a blue funk. I was tired, and down, and depressed. And was feeding on the anger and depression of my wife, who’s been struggling for a bit with her job. And then, she took last week off. For the first few days, she hid, spending the entire day and night watching Japanese anime downloaded from the net. She watched the entire Monster story, all 76 episodes, as well as many other long-lost favorites.
Since it was her first break in a long while, and the first time we’ve had time to spend together in many months, I decided to take the week off as well. And it turned out to be a good thing, as we finally got more information on my mom’s cancer. My mom was diagnosed with peripheral T-cell lymphoma. This rare (7% of all lymphomas) cancer has an untreated 5-year survival rate of 0%, and a treated 5-year survival rate of 20%, which are truly horrible statistics. The good news is that, for some as yet unknown reason, my mother is not sick. In fact, the swelling in the lymph nodes has shrunk. There is a possibility that she may enter a clinical trial on a modification of the standard CHOP treatment.
Unfortunately for me, however, is the fact that I don’t deal with this type of news very well. For the first few days, I was “unaffected”, or so I claimed. In reality, I was just keeping all my feelings bottled up and ignoring it completely. On about the 4th day after getting the news, I lost it. I spent the morning in bed crying. After talking with my wife about it for a long time, I’ve finally come to terms with it, and am now functioning much better.
So, this week sees me coming up from the deep, and starting to talk and work again.