Time is shrinking

Well here I am on day two after chemo, and it's happening again. The hours in the minutes and seconds are shrinking down to heartbeats. Glug. Glug. Baboom. Boom. Ugh. Ugh. Beat. Beat. Rebeat. Re.

It's a painful and anti zen way to get through the day when you get through it one heartbeat at a time. 

I read somewhere that each living organism that has a heart has about two billion heartbeats in it before it dies. I guess the muscle tires out. Can you imagine doing two billion arm curls or sit ups or steps in a row WITHOUT EVER STOPPING? It's enough of a thought to put you into a psychotic break. That's why animals that are tiny with rapid heartbeats like humminhbirds have such short ethereal lives, while the slow booming gigantor creatures like whales can live for many many years while their hearts beat very slowly. I read this in one of the best essays that I've ever read called "Joyas Voladoras," by Brian Doyle.

Here's where he talks about this:

"Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old."

But you should read his whole essay, it's much better than anything I could say about it. Please read it here:

http://nowimjustashotinthedark.blogspot.com/2008/02/joyas-voladoras-by-brian-doyle.html?m=1

Anyway right now I'm just kind of existing from one heartbeat to the next. I don't think I feel quite as badly as I did on my last cycle on this particular day. Not sure. I can't know. But I do not feel good. I do not feel that I can concentrate on a book or a movie or a piece of toast. Eating is very difficult. I endeavored to eat a tangerine today and had three snail entrail segments. 

I feel rather dejected with my scratchy child-repelling head and my slime coated tongue and my queasy fixing pills that don't quite work and my lumpy lumps of mountain boulder pillows that don't satisfy and my desires to eat to fill my hunger but no good goes in. 

Why is it that I'm so good at finding distraction when I'm living life well, but right now and I need distraction more than anything else I find myself looking inward and counting and feeling every painful heartbeat? I can't even read a paragraph in my mystery novel (perhaps the title W is for Wasted is too much now. Yes.) or watch a bad television show, which is been advised to me by many who know. What is wrong with me?

Not well enough to go to acupuncture. Canceled. Will try later. 

And my looks deceive me, I can look presentable, but I am not presentable.