Nothing Good Happens After Midnight

Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night. This is a normal thing people do. According to Science, we’ve been doing it since forever. It’s part of being a person.

According to History, people used to use the time to pray, or read, or meditate, but now we all use it for the modern version of those things: we google our medical symptoms.

Cancer keeps us up at night. Not only the weight of the grim reaper sitting at the foot of the bed grinning at us; the medication affects our sleep cycles, plus we get up to vomit, or just retch to no avail, or to rummage in the medicine cabinet for that bottle of opiates, hoping to dull the pain just enough to get back to sleep.

We google. We google our results. We google recurrence. We google all the different cancers that we might get as a result of our treatment.

When I was sick, I used to play Warcraft late at night. Some of the late-night players were so stinking drunk that it wasn’t much fun to play with them. Others were like me: cancer.

We didn’t talk about it much; people would drop hints,  and our avatars /hug or /cry, or, occasionally, /cheer, and then go back to the business at hand: slaughtering evil pixels.

I never googled cancer until after everything was over, and I had taken the first of many hiatuses from the World of Warcraft.

I stopped googling when I found an article that gave me the data to demonstrate that cancer patients in exactly my situation with exactly my response to chemotherapy mostly did not die from cancer, right away. That was five years ago.

I don’t want to find out anything to the contrary.