Friday 20 April 2012

Rage subdued

So I got a phone call saying my father was taken into hospital today.

It has been a long time coming. He has terminal cancer and spent the last couple of years undergoing all sorts of treatments in an attempt to stop it. Unfortunately there’s nothing the doctors can do to stop it, so he’s undergoing a major operation in order to try and give him a few more years of life before it catches up with him and kills him. From what I’ve heard from my mother the operation itself went smoothly, but he’ll be stuck in hospital for a little while yet, and even after they let him go home he want be able to be up and active for another two months. Even then, it’s going to be several months of further check-ups before we know whether or not the operation successfully gave him some more time.

The rest of the family is going to visit him in hospital but I can’t do it. I fucking hate hospitals more than anything, in my mind they are where people go to die. They reek of an obfuscating sterility in a futile attempt to mask the pervading decay.

The notion of my father, a strong figurehead in my life, reduced to a state of helplessness and vulnerability in a hospital bed has a profound effect on me, it chills me to the core, like icy fingers clasped tightly around my heart. I am all too familiar with mortality and have readily come to accept my own, but to see my father in a state of weakness is more anathema to me than death ever could be. That’s why I’m not going to visit him, it would shatter my worldview and cause me to break down, I’ve been through too much fucking suffering in the last two months, for various reasons, to compound this on top of it, so I’m going to wait until he’s out of hospital being going to see him.

This whole ordeal is rather testing. There’s a very real possibility that he’s not going to live long enough to see me achieve real success with my life, never see my chase my dreams, never see me change the world, never see me find another beautiful woman and get married. That bastard, he had better fucking live long enough to give me away to some pretty young thing or I swear I will dig up his maggoty ass corpse and drag him to the ceremony myself.

Not my usual ragey update today I’m afraid, with all of this going on there has been too much on my mind for me to bite anyone’s head off.

"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

3 comments:

  1. damn... i'm sorry to hear that, it's all i can do through the internet. I hope for the best, and if you need a break or something, atleast me and i'm sure everyone else too will still be here to read your updates.

    I hope your father recovers, wish him and everybody well.

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  2. I hope that things go well with your father. I can relate a little bit with your situation; my grandpa died from a cancer two years back. I wish I had gone up to see him more often. I wasn't very close with him, so I'm sure that the pain I felt at him leaving the world is nothing compared to yours waiting to see if he will make it a few more months or years. I felt sick for the entire time I was up there for his funeral and couldn't eat enough to feed a small bird. I have the same feelings about hospitals as you do. Can't stand being in them, or even near them. I have too much academic knowledge of hospitals and won't go even if I have a broken bone...

    I hope for the best for your father and you. Let us know if you need morale support, for I'm sure that we, your faithful readers, will do what we can to give what emotional support we can muster.

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