clusterfuck

Spending your holiday vacation with the flu is no fun, especially when you are not at home in your own bed and are afraid that you are going to give your disease to the entire rest of your family. Poor Doc had it really bad; I was luckier.

I’m thinking about getting started on another book. Maybe that’s jumping the gun; I don’t know. I’d like to say that I have a really good feeling about this first book, but my “feelings” seem to be wrong as often as they are right. Maybe this feeling is just some sort of sheer blind panic hope type thing. I had this dream a few nights ago, in the midst of the flu. Sick dreams are really odd, and the line between dream and reality is a lot more blurry than usual. I dreamed that a bookstore placed an advance order for 50,000 copies of our book. I couldn’t believe my ears and, secondary to that, had a realization that the money I would make from it was beyond my wildest dreams. I woke up as I was trying to calculate what I would make in royalties, and kept calculating after I woke up. It took me a while to realize that it didn’t freakin’ matter because it never happened.

Grrr.

Doc got a Really Awful cluster headache last night. Please let this just be a fluke, a one-time thing, and not the start of another bad bad cycle, please please please please please please please pleasepleasepleaseplease I would give up all my worldly possessions to make this go away, I swear. There is not much that I wouldn’t do to make this go away. Doc is destined for Great Things and these cycles consume all his time and energy, both mental and physical. It’s crushing. I rarely resort to cries of unfairness, because I’m old enough to know that life is rarely fair… but this truly isn’t fair. There’s so much other… there’s just so much other stuff on top of this that it’s just excruciating to think that he (we) has to deal with this too.

And I know people mean well and all, but it would be nice if everyone would stop offering advice and “have you tried (insert cure here)?” OF COURSE we’ve tried that. We’ve tried everything. It doesn’t work. Please know that unless you’ve experienced a cluster yourself, you can’t possibly understand what it’s like. It’s nothing like a migraine. I probably come the closest to understanding, and I’m still on the outside. I see the results of the pain, but I have no idea what it’s like for him to actually experience it. It’s some of the most excruciating pain a person can experience, and it’s heartbreaking to have to watch it and be able to do nothing to help.

Please just offer some words of kindness and support instead. Thanks.