2/3/09 Thursday update, from Joe

[Gay Haldeman]

(An old friend who has gone through the cancer mill asked me about  
how I felt
immediately after surgery, and then later . . . )
. . . my earliest recollections after I went under were a series of  
ghastly
dream images, where I was involved (as a third-person character) in  
painful
and disgusting ways. But for some reason I think that those were only  
in the
first hours after surgery. When I slowly came out of it I was of  
course drugged
to the gills, but my memories are mostly pleasant, a succession of  
close friends
coming by. I could spell out responses (couldn't talk because of  
tracheotomy)
on a Speak 'n' Spell board.
A measure of how out-of-it I was . . . when they prepped me for the  
ambulance
ride to my recovery hospital, they pulled out -- yanked! -- the tube  
than ran
down my nose to my stomach, and the catheter up my penis. I hadn't  
really been
aware of either! Good thing, I suppose.
When I was recovering in the bed-rest place, I went through a kind of  
dreamy
fugue state. I was aware that I had come extremely close to dying  
several times,
but my feeling about that was eerily positive. "If I had died I  
wouldn't even
have known it," and so forth. That calm acceptance has evaporated,  
replaced
by my normal state of mild anxiety.
I'm still experiencing a variety of post-op depression. Mostly a  
constant desire
to sleep, some of which is just physical recovery, but I recognize  
that part
of it is "if I'm asleep I don't have to deal with anything." I'll  
talk to the
doc about it tomorrow. I don't want to join the Prozac Nation, but I  
wonder
if there's a short-term, less powerful medication that could make me  
a little
more peppy and productive. I hate creeping around like a fucking  
invalid, and
don't like the application of that word to myself, with its double  
meaning.
I'm still in constant low-level pain, which is manageable with  
naproxin but
never goes completely away. It's a distraction, but I can't blame it  
on my
low productivity. The current novel's in a rough patch anyhow, and I  
wish I
could bring 100% of my ability to it. Fortunately, everyone around  
me, very
much including my editor, is forgiving and understanding. So I inch  
along knowing
this, too, shall pass.
Love, Joe 
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