Y'know what the weirdest part of all of this is?

(First of all, thank you, each and every one of you, for your thoughts/prayers/offers of scotch/offers to let the dog out/et cetera. It means so, so much right now; you can't know.)

So, yeah. I was having dinner with The Man of God and his Lovely Wife, and in the middle of the second bite of pizza, with us all trying to make polite conversation, I burst out, "Can we all please stop pretending that everything's okay? Because it's not."

Regardless of what happens next, I have four days ahead of me in which things will not be okay. Maybe, at the end of it, this'll all be some huge false alarm, and I can spend a couple of weeks in relieved bliss and then go back to fucking up the way I always have. Or maybe I'll get a diagnosis that mandates whiskey and gardening, and I can continue to fuck up the way I always have.

Either way, until one or the other happens, things are Not Okay.

I've spent all day apologizing to people for having to give them the news that things are not okay. I have--and this is rather a shock--more people than I expected that I wanted to tell.

(And secondly, if I didn't tell you in person and you found out about this through Facebook or the grapevine, my apologies. I didn't go in any sort of order, and at about two o'clock I found myself utterly unable to repeat the same words again.)

Can we please stop pretending that it's all okay? Thank you. I feel better now.

My pal Jo, who works the night shift opposite me, had the most appropriate reaction: a moment of silence and then the word "Shit" said calmly and without emphasis.

This is not okay.

I fear losing my airway, or worse, my ability to swallow. I fear chemo and radiation and enough of a chance that going through those things would seem like a good plan. I fear losing. I fear the process of dying, even though I've seen it more times than I can count and mostly, it's been an okay thing.

And I *have* to think about these things now, because if I get a nasty diagnosis on Tuesday, I'll be too shocky to think about them then. It's like putting an emergency kit in your car: you do it early in hopes you won't ever have to use it.

Meanwhile, the cats are playing with their toys and Max is lying on the floor staring at me and wondering why I didn't bring him more pizza bones. I have Rob and Adam and Shannon coming over tomorrow, and I don't have to pretend that things are okay with them. I do have to cook, which might be a bit of a challenge, given how much alcohol I've consumed today, but what the hell: the Chinese place delivers.

So most things are okay. This right here, this thing I'm doing with the whole breathing and digesting and metabolizing bidness, is not okay, but most things are. And they will continue to be.

So maybe it'll be okay after all. Either way, at some point it'll cease to matter, right?