Some retro-blogging...

I'm gonna do a little retro-blogging here if'n you don't mind...and some of it might be a little squeamish so keep this away from children under 12.
Retro-blogging?
Since the day or so after transplant the days and nights for a couple of weeks seem to run together, some of them are just gone and some of them I am aware of and know...at some level...what was going on but right now I couldn't identify those days on a calendar.
I'm remembering, with some clarity what some of those days were like and I feel blessed to have had a real live person who walked with me through those times to bounce things of of and to remind me of some things that were hazy and lifted the fog surrounding them.
Thanks, Bonnie.
Anywho, since about three day after cancer/Myeloma diagnosis I have confidently espoused that this wasn't gonna kill me.
I don't know how close I came to lying.
This is one of those days/times that I can't pinpoint...but Bonnie could, Sept. 4ish... .
Because of some erratic behavior and "fighting" the system I found myself whisked away from my 11th floor suite and down in the Intensive Care Unit.
Some time around then is when I "lost it".
I lost my will to live.
My son Matt showed up and I think I scared the heck out of him. He came to see how his ol' man was doing and left not knowing. I can remember telling him that all I wanted to do was die. I can remember crying while I was telling him this and looking at the puzzled frightened expression on his face. He left as abruptly as he came and I don't blame him at all...now, just a few weeks later I can sort off take myself out of the action part of the picture and observe it from a totally different, almost 3rd party perspective. I can see myself struggling in the bed, refusing to keep the oxygen mask on, tossing and turning fetal positions right to left and begging God to just end it all.
I can remember getting to ICU and having Bonnie show up and telling her that, "All I want to do is to go home." And being dead serious about it.
And all the while this is happening I am hurting both physically and mentally and hurting soooooo bad that no drug that they gave me, and they were giving me a lot, could diminish either pain.
I can remember having absolutely no hope that I was going to be able to endure any more "treatment" and that my bucket was empty and there was no use in trying to fight the fight any more and that the world, or at least my world would be better off if I were dead.
There were no thoughts of suicide, but seemingly endless pleading with God to just, "Take me home".
And in hindsight{Ain't hindsight wonderful?} it seems all so preposterous to be begging that which could sustain me, and did, to just "take me home."
But I did want to die, and with all the earnestness at my command, I wished for that to be.
The darkness of that place is still fresh in my mind and I have come to the realization that it wasn't a bad dream but was taking place in real-time.
I was dying, but I couldn't stop my heart from beating or from breathing with or without the oxygen.
I was dying, I know that now and the thing that I said wouldn't or couldn't kill me was certainly playing a role in my dying.
I didn't know that I was dying as it was happening because at the same time I had relinquished my will to live a terrific war started within me...I choose to call that spiritual warfare but others may call it something else, and if they do, that's ok...
Lying in bed being watched 24/7 was a defenseless 61 year old who had some of the cognitive abilities of a 6 year old, the physical strength of a 2 year old and the brattiness of a 16 year old.
What had happened to me was that, for whatever reason or excuse I had lost my personall one-on-one relationship with God and had just given up, or surrendered if you will, to the powers that be ans there are powers hat be who don't ride in the same herd as God.
I have for some time now I have referred to that as the Dark Side.
The Dark Side certainly had me...
I had simply forgotten//let go of/had/taken away from or whatever happened that Spirit, maybe a.k.a. attitude that I wasn't fighting this fight alone but that I had the Great Physician in attendance along with a host of His secular nurses/angels and that all I had to do was just rely on Him and them and that I would be "seen through" all this and that I would survive physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

This is/was the 2nd time in my life that my bucket has been empty and there's been a gaping hole in the bottom of the bucket and I had nowhere to turn.
The situations were different and the reasons for their occurring were different but there was a spirit component, both light and dark involved.
Both were incredibly difficult to be in and to get through, but I did and have.

This one, however involved an element of dying that the first one didn't.
At some level I think that somewhere along the line be it in ICU or on the 11th floor at the hospital I did die, maybe not physically but certainly to self.
To be in a position where I didn't care about anything or anybody, that I just wanted to "go home" and that it simply just hurt tooooooo much to live.
Lying in bed I can remember it feeling like I was in a cacoon, it was dark and I didn't have the strrength or the will power to try and break my way out.

I can remember two of the ICU nurses talking as I was pretending to be asleep and one saying to the other, "Is he going to make it?", and the response was, "I don't know."
Little did I know until the past few days that there were similar conversations being held in other places and other venues.
When I heard the nurses talk and the, "I don't know" answer to the question, I felt a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe "this" would all be over soon.

Somewhere in my library I have a book written many years ago titled, "The Dark Night of the Soul" and when I get home I need to dig that out and re-read it.

Although much of the time post-transplant runs together and I do have some blank spots, the memory of the awfulness of having no hope still lingers.

I am grateful that in that particular battle in that particular spiritual war zone that the Light Side won out...and it won out without my permission.
Good thing.