Plague

Is it just me? is it just the universe? is it just bad timing?

One of my colleagues made a joke last year, saying 'hell! I'm scared to be your friend! Look what happens to them!"

Now i'm wondering if it's really funny. A close friend has come out of remission, and is about to go into the scary phase described by Predator 5 years ago, and quoted by me 2 years ago:

Cancer treatment is a stop/go journey.
Find something wrong, chop it out. Wait.
Find something else wrong.
Try and find someone who'll chop it out.
Chop it out.
Wait until, inevitably, something else goes wrong.
Can't chop it out this time.
Cry a lot. Get dead. Zzzzz.
My story has been played out in a million other abdomens and I've never heard about them.
Maybe it's like mine.chop it out, what do I do

but wait, that's not all! Over the past 6 weeks, or 8 now - during some kind of weird late feb, march, now april time slowing, spinning weirdness - the missus and I have been facing another Mack truck, creeping slowly, slowly, slowly forward, growing inexorably immense and scary (and I don't mean the linfox supplychain behemoths outside the front windows). My Missus's mum went into the Palliative care unit this week. the missus cries, cries again, and copes.

I never imagined the end of the tome would be dwarfed by so much... err.... ok cloaked in a miasma of anxiety, helplessness and grief. I started the tome as predator quickly succumbed to cancer, and now, as I finish, I'm watching people close to me wrangle with the implications of scary mutant organ eating cells.

The horror of this mutes my capacity to describe it, or to even try. I send kind messages, hug the missus, cook meals, chase up foontotes, consult my style guide and plug away at the tome, watching, waiting, working towards things that come to an end, even if I don't want them to.