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This is turning out to be the most harrowing breast cancer week I've had since the beginning of the recurrence.  I seem to be focused on my issues and limitations at all times, acknowledging some for the first time.  It blows me away to suddenly discover the overpowering changes life has brought to me in the past 18 months.  Without too much attention to consequences, I've changed my entire viewpoint on certain aspects of my life, made subtle and strong determinations of what can be changed and affected, and how.  I'm trying to live within entirely new confines and often have not taken the time or energy to grasp their meanings. 

I've always been bitter about losing my teaching career before having it genuinely start.  I never joined the union, never had the tenure track, never had the same group of kids from September to June.  I never heard a teacher call, "Mrs. Friedman's class, head that way!"  I never had the luxury of buying an item, knowing it would be used for more than a couple months.  I never will.  I won't experience any of that, or the cameraderie, or the mundane of the day to day in the classroom, the assemblies, or more.  It wasn't just a job change for me, it was the recognition of what I'd thought was a calling.  Never getting to discover it is my bitter pill.  Anything else goes from there.  I'll die a wannabee teacher.

Today this is on my mind because I am trying to get social security disability, which marks the permanent end to my career plans.  I spent the afternoon explaining my condition and limitations to the kind attorney.  Hopefully I even made sense as I rationed out vomiting, trying to hide the images that strike my thoughts on such occasions.  It created an epiphany.  I cannot teach.  I cannot rely on my body to carry through the simplest functions reliably.  Several times in the past few months I've sat with my students praying they'd leave so I could high tail it to the bathroom.  On other occasions it was all I could do to pretend to stay awake.  When did I become struck by all of this information without realizing it? 

I realize now that I don't go far to make plans.  I want to go, but I temper my desire with my ability.  Sure I wanted to have Thanksgiving with my family, not spend the evening in the HUP ER with my mom.  I knew better than to count on turkey, right from the start.  I've simply adapted.  Turkey is not a given, not even presented as beautifully as Jill is able and willing.  I want to have a gathering, but I want it to be a well-timed gathering.  I can't plan a big party, certainly not on my own.  But I want one, because one of my greatest decisions in this age of vanishing future is that I don't want everyone showing up for my funeral and I miss them.  If you come by I deserve the hug, wouldn't you say?

Yesterday I met with a researcher for hours as we discussed my life now, how I plan, how I look at breast cancer and treatment options, and so forth.  It was me, talking onto a video.  I don't know how I sounded, but I know the panic attack that followed the hours I spent.  I was typing to my email loop when I felt overcome by the most suffocating feeling of self strangulation.  I am going to die.  Not in a lifetime, but during what should be my lifetime.  I am going to die.  The time I have left is nothing.  What do I do with nothing.  Thank goodness the panic passed.  So now I get to think. Is it nothing.  Does the time count?  My cousin Ben, he never heard of facebook.  I'm so glad I didn't miss facebook.  Will I miss the next big thing?  I watched Philadelphia last weekend.  Tom Hanks died, and then AIDS went away.  He'd still be alive now.  But he missed the big thing.  Steve Jobs felt that he was dying at the precipace of the end of cancer deaths.  He thought he'd either be the first to survive it or the last to die from it.  He sounded retrospective.  He'd made peace.  Look at me, making these changes to my life.  And yet I'm not making any peace.  The truth is, I don't want peace in the end.  Just more life.