I'd just lie around all day. It's the chemo, the poison they pump into you. Sometimes I'd be walking across the room and think, 'There it is; I got to rest.' And I had to, right then.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I'd see an old person on the street and start crying. I couldn't understand how people could cope, knowing they only had so long left. It would be like dominoes and then the last one fell and I'm a little heap on the floor. Doctors put me on anti-depressants for a couple of years.
Sometimes I would make myself very still and try to imagine myself dead. I tried to invoke the feeling of the very last breath I would take.
If you woke up each morning, and immediately dwelt on your ills, what sort of a day could you look forward to?
Many nights, I would begin the evening fueled by caffeine and nicotine, which I needed to propel me out of torpor and hopelessness - only to overshoot into quaking, quivering anxiety.
I'd lie in bed in my dormitory and grab at bits of my body, wanting to tear them off... I was so large by then that, in the heat, my thighs chafed together and bled. I was very unhappy, and yet no one ever asked me how I felt.
I'd wake up in the morning and I would think, 'Where am I?' I'd have to gather myself.
I'd sit on a horse and forget I was even sick.
I would feel so guilty about lying that I would try to stress myself out and work up a headache so I wouldn't have the guilt of not having a bit of the symptom.
I'd stand in line for Confession with old people and little kids, and as the line moved up, I knew when I got into the box that I would lie! Again!
I would lying if I said I would laugh in the face of death.