all alone, father

The way some people write love poems, I have written poems about my lonliness.

Ahh what the hell I'll post this one:
*
left alone here
I see the future
I am the only reason
I can't fall in love
id resurfaces
wreaking havoc
nightmares
beyond what you can imagine

I sit alone again
in front of the machine
pouring away heart and soul
and in a way
it isn't really there
there's nothing on the screen
I'm just imagining my thoughts appear

I slowly begin to realize
years from now
I will still be here
sitting alone
in front of my computer

no one (not even me)
would seem to care enough
to change my fate
*

I cannot have that serenity to accept things which I cannot change and the power to change that which I can. I can only have one or the other. My own worst enemy is damn near impossible to overcome.

Waztching a parent decay over a period of 15 years really eats at you. My situation seems so unique. My father's condition is now preventable I believe. If you don't already know, my father suffered from chronic progressive Multiple Sclerosis from 1981 until he died in 1998. I don't know of any other diseases where the decay is over such a long a period of time. It's hurt me somehow. When I say decay: I mean slowly - very slowly at first, you lose the ability to move certain muscles - the nerve messages just don't get to the muscle. It starts out with an arm going numb every once in awhile for no apparent reason. Then, you have trouble with your legs. At first, you can make do with just a cane, but it just gets worse over the years, until you need a wheelchair. At that point, you probably don't have enough strength to push yourself around in it. If you fall, neither your young son or your wife has the strength to pick you up, so they must call a neighbor to help. Even the ambulance service famous for the line "I've fallen and I can't get up" won't pick you up because "someone elsewhere could be having a heart attack. So you lie there on the floor, helpless. As more time passes, your intelligence and memory will start fade. You'll need help going to the bathroom. Thisis about 10 years after the inital diagnosis. Around this time, if you're being taken care of at home, your caretaker probably will realize she can't afford to pay someone to take care of you at home, so she puts you into a home where you're probably the youngest guy there (my dad was 51 when he started living there). Then things really start to go bad. The environment isn't exactly helpful to your situation. Essentially left with nothing to do all day or even with the diginity of being dressed by mid-afternoon does not help. A few years there and then you have trouble swallowing. You don't want a feeding tube, so they purree your food. Because of the catheter, you get urinary infections regularly. One of those gets into the blood which nearly kills you. You don't want the machines, so why go on?

Welcome to my world. Maybe if I knew how it screwed me up, I could fix it.