Being alive is the best thing in the world.
I know I haven't really said anything about my life pretty much to most people. Most people read this to find out what's going on and I've really haven't been writing because I feel it's not that important, if you want to know about my life, then just fucking ask me. I still work at the comedy stop, I'm starting casino dealing school Tuesday, and I start my job at J Crew at the Walk Tuesday night as well. I don't go to school this semester. Which is actually really nice, because for one I FUCKING HATE ACCC. It's nice seeing people that I know, but overall as a school it blows. I'm not stressed out by homework or anything else I need to do too, so I've been a LOT nicer towards people and not thinking about doing school shit. It's like my summer vacation pretty much, except it's been for about a good two months now, and it'll keep going until May until I go back for the summer classes haha. Then summer vacation until September again, hell yes! (EDIT: Just letting you know this blog is divided up into MANY different paragraphs/parts, so BE PATIENT AND READ THE WHOLE THING.)
I felt the need to write because I have so many mixed emotions right now. I felt the need to write about some things I truly care about, my dogs. They're all unique in their own ways and they all have their different personalities. Until me and my parents started noticing that Demi started acting funny.
Demi has been biting at herself, like she had something irritating her on her skin. She's also been sneezing a lot recently, and we thought maybe she was sick and we should take her to the vet. It unfortunately gotten to the point that we started noticing she was sneezing blood. We figured maybe she was starting to get nosebleeds, but it was only when she sneezed the blood would come out. We took her to the vet to find out what was wrong, and the doctor's didn't really have a clue about why she was scratching at herself, until they found out why she was sneezing blood. They found out that she had a tumor on her upper jaw that also went into her nasal passage, making the blood come out of her nose when she sneezed. It would irritate the inside of her mouth, so she tried to scratch it against her skin whenever she would feel it. My mom figured the best course of action would be to obviously remove the tumor, to stop the bleeding from her nose. If we removed the tumor, cancerous or not, it would just make everything better, no questions asked, and she could live. Unfortunately, the bleeding continued.
My mom called me today around 4:30 and told me to bring Demi to the vet so we could find out the results from her biopsy. Let me tell you, any kind of hospital/vet environment, I can't stand being in. Vet it makes me a little less queasy, but regardless they both make me really sick to my stomach. It's just, the whole idea of disease and everything and how there's death, it really affects me and it just puts me in a really down mood. I just had a bad memory hit me while I was in there. I saw this one lady, a little bit older than my mom, who had this dog with her that looked EXACTLY like my one dog I used to have. I said "hey Mom, that looks like Teddy!" (Teddy was my old dog before all three dogs that I have now, but I'll get to that side of the story later on.) Of course, the vets were treating the dog all nice and trying to take the best care of it as they could. I was sitting down with my mom and Demi, waiting for the vet lady to come in and my dog anxiously pacing around, when that same lady came out crying her eyes out. My mom said "what a shame, that dog was only around 11 years old". My mom was saying the dog had kidney failure, and it couldn't pee anymore and it was just in so much pain. She got up to the front desks and all of the vets and they were saying "I'm so sorry" to her. It was one of the most sympathetic, yet strangest emotions I've felt for a stranger in a long time. Looking at that lady was like looking at a part of me in the past that I've been trying to abandon, and really negative emotions started surfacing again. It was like the same exact situation with Teddy, the first dog I've ever had, and the way that he died. I haven't really told anyone about him except for a few people that I truly care about, because it's quite personal to me. But I figured I should tell you because it'll tell you more about how I've grown up, because not many people know.
Not many people understand that I haven't lived in the house I live in now my whole life. In fact, I lived in two previous houses before. I used to live on Ash Ave in Absecon, and Club 1 while my current house was being built. Teddy was the dog I've had while I was growing up. In fact, up until I was 9, he's gotten the chance to live at each and every house I got to live in. I remember on Ash Ave I had such a good childhood. Riding my bike down the dirt hills, sledding down the hill in my back yard, going over my neighbor's houses all the time. I remember wherever I would go, my dog would be there. I was so lucky having a dog growing up, I look back at it now and I figured if I waited until now to get a dog, I would just ask myself how did my whole life I didn't have this experience? Up until we moved into Club 1 did we start noticing problems with Teddy. He couldn't climb up the stairs or do most of the things that he previously would do. He seemed lazy and wouldn't move around that much. We figured we would stick it out until we moved into our new house (my house now). Everything went fine until Memorial Day 1997, the day I can remember like it was yesterday.
Another really big personal thing that not many people know, my mom is a struggling alcoholic. Well, WAS, considering what happened recently. I had an okay Christmas, but afterwards is when things started going pretty bad. My mom had to go to Florida to see my grandparents and keep them company, but afterwards when she came back we noticed my mom was depressed and wasn't acting herself. We noticed she was calling out of work and
then getting drunk to forget the things going on in her life. It went on for about a straight week, with constant fighting from my parents. Instead of trying to help, I just let them try to sort things out, avoiding conflict (typical of me), and figured my mom was just going through a phase. My mom then went to a doctor to find out what was wrong with her, and they said from the all of the drinking that she's done, that she was dehydrated and had extremely high blood pressure. He also said if she kept drinking it was really possible for my mom to have a heart attack. I walked in to talk to my mom
after I found out and my mom was laying on the bed crying. In one of the longest times , she actually opened up to me, and said that she didn't feel as if she was supporting her family enough. She works two jobs for both me and my brother, and she feels as if there's never enough food for us. I told her how I felt that if she kept calling out she wouldn't make any more money, and how it'd affect the family's income. I didn't want her to go to work because that doctor said to go to the ER at the hospital immediately to be treated and for her to feel better about herself, because she felt so weak laying there. She needed to go to work because it was New Year's Day, a holiday and she wouldn't allow herself to get fired. You're thinking to yourself "what's this have to do with the story of Teddy", but it was actually the first time I've cried since he died. I was just crying over the fact that my mom was sacrificing her health to be there at work providing for us. The whole time I wanted my mom to just be okay, because god forbid if something happened to her and she fainted at work, I would be COMPLETELY devastated and wouldn't want to be true about what would happen to her if she went to work instead of the ER. She was fine that day and the next day she went to the ER and got herself treated, like me and my dad were begging my mom to do. Ever since, my mom had a wake up call, and I have never seen her pick up a bottle of alcohol, since. That to me is my motherfucking role model. I made a promise to myself never to end up that way, to drink out of depression. If I'm upset, I write or tell someone about it, I don't just bottle it up and not tell anybody. I'm pretty much the one that made my mom go to the ER to get treated, she opened up to me and nobody else.
She wanted to provide for her two sons. I drink, but I really try to control myself when I drink around other people, because I always think to myself what if I hurt myself and hurt other people emotionally like my mom previously did. I hope after I turn 21 and see what it's like to get completely shitfaced, I'll try to stop like my mom did, because there's SO many more important things better than drinking.
I kind of got off track but I wanted you to understand the way my mom used to be for how Teddy died. My mom was a little tipsy and decided to take me and my brother out somewhere (where I don't know) and so I opened up the garage door so she could back my dad's truck out of the garage. I was only nine years old, so I didn't really know much about how drunk people acted, so I figured oh okay she's fine. She backed up the truck, and then all of a sudden me and my brother heard "YELP!" and me and my brother just stared at each other with horrified faces. Tim (my bro) was like "MOM DID YOU HEAR THAT?" and she said "I didn't hear anything!" so she pulled back into the garage thinking she ran over something but didn't know what. So we got out of the car, and just saw my dog lying there. It was the first and only encounter I've had with something extremely personal to me dying. I remember Teddy just lying there, my mom
on the phone frantically trying to call the vet to see if anything could be done. We then walked back outside and we just that his chest stopped moving, I could remember touching his chest and there was no more heartbeat. I remember putting him in the back of the truck, and the ride to the vet, not saying a word. We got there and they couldn't do anything, so we just took the ride home and buried him in the front yard. To this day I don't think I've ever forgiven my mom for doing something like that. Because I don't care what you say, but I think dogs are the same as people. Sure they may not have the same brain capacity, and they may not be able to speak for themselves, but if they can feel pain and give off the same basic emotions as we can, they have every right to be human as us.
Fortunately for me this is the only time I've experienced death to a loved one. You may think that it was a completely traumatizing moment for me, but I was only nine years old, completely naive about how death actually worked. It hasn't really set in to me when I was that young that I would never see him again. He was sick and we figured it was his time to go, we thought he always had the chance to move out of the way. We didn't blame it on my mom for a while, maybe he just wanted to free himself from dying later in so much pain. I figured it was his time.
I've considered myself lucky my whole life, that no person close to me has ever died, and even though I've personally almost died ABOUT FOUR TIMES, people have personally told me that I got a damn good guardian angel.
Which finally brings me to Demi. I brought her back to the vet today. They took her temperature, weighed her, did all of the normal check up things. They then took her to look at her previous X rays, and then they broke the news to me. Demi has cancer. So many things started running through my head as I thought oh my god, please let her be okay. The doctor said she has melanoma, a cancer that attacks the pigmentation in your skin and runs in your bloodstream, and it caused the tumor to develop in her mouth. They said it's the most common form of cancer in dogs, and that there's a vaccine that we can give to her that can prevent the cancer from spreading to other parts of the body, and hopefully completely eliminate the cancer in her mouth. They also did X rays to find out if the cancer spread to her chest, typically where her cancer would spread.
Afterwards my dad called me and I told him the news, and I just heard how sad he was on the phone. It was just like here's something that can't fight for itself, diseased and doesn't know about it, yet it's touched all of our family's lives. He was telling my mom on the phone "I can't just leave her there, she's my dog, of course I'm going to come." I was just sitting there and I could hear my parents talking while the vet was doing her X rays, and my mom was saying if the cancer spread, that she'd pretty much be a goner. My mom couldn't afford to put my dog through chemo treatments. My mom was trying to keep positive and say that she was going to live however and the doctor said she was looking good, yet my dad was saying she might not make it home. The cancer however hasn't spread to her chest, so she was cancer free in that area. Even though that sounds good, the news about her having cancer came at an EXTREMELY bad time. The vet place we have to take her is up in Red Bank, about a good hour away, and my mom has to leave next week to Florida to help my grandparents move up to Mays Landing. She'll be gone about a good week or two. My dad works practically every day, I'm starting casino dealing school which is a good 4 days a week and starting having TWO jobs soon,
and my brother is gone at college and can't make it up to NJ for a good few months. I'm just scared since everybody is so busy and my mom's away, that if we don't take her to the vet in time the cancer's going to spread. The vet we went to today didn't give us much details about the whole cancer treatment options, as they could only do so much to
try to help us, but if we went up to Red Bank and they can only do chemo, putting our dog down, I don't know how I would take it. I don't know if I can go through with it.
So that's about it. What a fucking good start to my weekend. =[
I felt the need to write because I have so many mixed emotions right now. I felt the need to write about some things I truly care about, my dogs. They're all unique in their own ways and they all have their different personalities. Until me and my parents started noticing that Demi started acting funny.
Demi has been biting at herself, like she had something irritating her on her skin. She's also been sneezing a lot recently, and we thought maybe she was sick and we should take her to the vet. It unfortunately gotten to the point that we started noticing she was sneezing blood. We figured maybe she was starting to get nosebleeds, but it was only when she sneezed the blood would come out. We took her to the vet to find out what was wrong, and the doctor's didn't really have a clue about why she was scratching at herself, until they found out why she was sneezing blood. They found out that she had a tumor on her upper jaw that also went into her nasal passage, making the blood come out of her nose when she sneezed. It would irritate the inside of her mouth, so she tried to scratch it against her skin whenever she would feel it. My mom figured the best course of action would be to obviously remove the tumor, to stop the bleeding from her nose. If we removed the tumor, cancerous or not, it would just make everything better, no questions asked, and she could live. Unfortunately, the bleeding continued.
My mom called me today around 4:30 and told me to bring Demi to the vet so we could find out the results from her biopsy. Let me tell you, any kind of hospital/vet environment, I can't stand being in. Vet it makes me a little less queasy, but regardless they both make me really sick to my stomach. It's just, the whole idea of disease and everything and how there's death, it really affects me and it just puts me in a really down mood. I just had a bad memory hit me while I was in there. I saw this one lady, a little bit older than my mom, who had this dog with her that looked EXACTLY like my one dog I used to have. I said "hey Mom, that looks like Teddy!" (Teddy was my old dog before all three dogs that I have now, but I'll get to that side of the story later on.) Of course, the vets were treating the dog all nice and trying to take the best care of it as they could. I was sitting down with my mom and Demi, waiting for the vet lady to come in and my dog anxiously pacing around, when that same lady came out crying her eyes out. My mom said "what a shame, that dog was only around 11 years old". My mom was saying the dog had kidney failure, and it couldn't pee anymore and it was just in so much pain. She got up to the front desks and all of the vets and they were saying "I'm so sorry" to her. It was one of the most sympathetic, yet strangest emotions I've felt for a stranger in a long time. Looking at that lady was like looking at a part of me in the past that I've been trying to abandon, and really negative emotions started surfacing again. It was like the same exact situation with Teddy, the first dog I've ever had, and the way that he died. I haven't really told anyone about him except for a few people that I truly care about, because it's quite personal to me. But I figured I should tell you because it'll tell you more about how I've grown up, because not many people know.
Not many people understand that I haven't lived in the house I live in now my whole life. In fact, I lived in two previous houses before. I used to live on Ash Ave in Absecon, and Club 1 while my current house was being built. Teddy was the dog I've had while I was growing up. In fact, up until I was 9, he's gotten the chance to live at each and every house I got to live in. I remember on Ash Ave I had such a good childhood. Riding my bike down the dirt hills, sledding down the hill in my back yard, going over my neighbor's houses all the time. I remember wherever I would go, my dog would be there. I was so lucky having a dog growing up, I look back at it now and I figured if I waited until now to get a dog, I would just ask myself how did my whole life I didn't have this experience? Up until we moved into Club 1 did we start noticing problems with Teddy. He couldn't climb up the stairs or do most of the things that he previously would do. He seemed lazy and wouldn't move around that much. We figured we would stick it out until we moved into our new house (my house now). Everything went fine until Memorial Day 1997, the day I can remember like it was yesterday.
Another really big personal thing that not many people know, my mom is a struggling alcoholic. Well, WAS, considering what happened recently. I had an okay Christmas, but afterwards is when things started going pretty bad. My mom had to go to Florida to see my grandparents and keep them company, but afterwards when she came back we noticed my mom was depressed and wasn't acting herself. We noticed she was calling out of work and
then getting drunk to forget the things going on in her life. It went on for about a straight week, with constant fighting from my parents. Instead of trying to help, I just let them try to sort things out, avoiding conflict (typical of me), and figured my mom was just going through a phase. My mom then went to a doctor to find out what was wrong with her, and they said from the all of the drinking that she's done, that she was dehydrated and had extremely high blood pressure. He also said if she kept drinking it was really possible for my mom to have a heart attack. I walked in to talk to my mom
after I found out and my mom was laying on the bed crying. In one of the longest times , she actually opened up to me, and said that she didn't feel as if she was supporting her family enough. She works two jobs for both me and my brother, and she feels as if there's never enough food for us. I told her how I felt that if she kept calling out she wouldn't make any more money, and how it'd affect the family's income. I didn't want her to go to work because that doctor said to go to the ER at the hospital immediately to be treated and for her to feel better about herself, because she felt so weak laying there. She needed to go to work because it was New Year's Day, a holiday and she wouldn't allow herself to get fired. You're thinking to yourself "what's this have to do with the story of Teddy", but it was actually the first time I've cried since he died. I was just crying over the fact that my mom was sacrificing her health to be there at work providing for us. The whole time I wanted my mom to just be okay, because god forbid if something happened to her and she fainted at work, I would be COMPLETELY devastated and wouldn't want to be true about what would happen to her if she went to work instead of the ER. She was fine that day and the next day she went to the ER and got herself treated, like me and my dad were begging my mom to do. Ever since, my mom had a wake up call, and I have never seen her pick up a bottle of alcohol, since. That to me is my motherfucking role model. I made a promise to myself never to end up that way, to drink out of depression. If I'm upset, I write or tell someone about it, I don't just bottle it up and not tell anybody. I'm pretty much the one that made my mom go to the ER to get treated, she opened up to me and nobody else.
She wanted to provide for her two sons. I drink, but I really try to control myself when I drink around other people, because I always think to myself what if I hurt myself and hurt other people emotionally like my mom previously did. I hope after I turn 21 and see what it's like to get completely shitfaced, I'll try to stop like my mom did, because there's SO many more important things better than drinking.
I kind of got off track but I wanted you to understand the way my mom used to be for how Teddy died. My mom was a little tipsy and decided to take me and my brother out somewhere (where I don't know) and so I opened up the garage door so she could back my dad's truck out of the garage. I was only nine years old, so I didn't really know much about how drunk people acted, so I figured oh okay she's fine. She backed up the truck, and then all of a sudden me and my brother heard "YELP!" and me and my brother just stared at each other with horrified faces. Tim (my bro) was like "MOM DID YOU HEAR THAT?" and she said "I didn't hear anything!" so she pulled back into the garage thinking she ran over something but didn't know what. So we got out of the car, and just saw my dog lying there. It was the first and only encounter I've had with something extremely personal to me dying. I remember Teddy just lying there, my mom
on the phone frantically trying to call the vet to see if anything could be done. We then walked back outside and we just that his chest stopped moving, I could remember touching his chest and there was no more heartbeat. I remember putting him in the back of the truck, and the ride to the vet, not saying a word. We got there and they couldn't do anything, so we just took the ride home and buried him in the front yard. To this day I don't think I've ever forgiven my mom for doing something like that. Because I don't care what you say, but I think dogs are the same as people. Sure they may not have the same brain capacity, and they may not be able to speak for themselves, but if they can feel pain and give off the same basic emotions as we can, they have every right to be human as us.
Fortunately for me this is the only time I've experienced death to a loved one. You may think that it was a completely traumatizing moment for me, but I was only nine years old, completely naive about how death actually worked. It hasn't really set in to me when I was that young that I would never see him again. He was sick and we figured it was his time to go, we thought he always had the chance to move out of the way. We didn't blame it on my mom for a while, maybe he just wanted to free himself from dying later in so much pain. I figured it was his time.
I've considered myself lucky my whole life, that no person close to me has ever died, and even though I've personally almost died ABOUT FOUR TIMES, people have personally told me that I got a damn good guardian angel.
Which finally brings me to Demi. I brought her back to the vet today. They took her temperature, weighed her, did all of the normal check up things. They then took her to look at her previous X rays, and then they broke the news to me. Demi has cancer. So many things started running through my head as I thought oh my god, please let her be okay. The doctor said she has melanoma, a cancer that attacks the pigmentation in your skin and runs in your bloodstream, and it caused the tumor to develop in her mouth. They said it's the most common form of cancer in dogs, and that there's a vaccine that we can give to her that can prevent the cancer from spreading to other parts of the body, and hopefully completely eliminate the cancer in her mouth. They also did X rays to find out if the cancer spread to her chest, typically where her cancer would spread.
Afterwards my dad called me and I told him the news, and I just heard how sad he was on the phone. It was just like here's something that can't fight for itself, diseased and doesn't know about it, yet it's touched all of our family's lives. He was telling my mom on the phone "I can't just leave her there, she's my dog, of course I'm going to come." I was just sitting there and I could hear my parents talking while the vet was doing her X rays, and my mom was saying if the cancer spread, that she'd pretty much be a goner. My mom couldn't afford to put my dog through chemo treatments. My mom was trying to keep positive and say that she was going to live however and the doctor said she was looking good, yet my dad was saying she might not make it home. The cancer however hasn't spread to her chest, so she was cancer free in that area. Even though that sounds good, the news about her having cancer came at an EXTREMELY bad time. The vet place we have to take her is up in Red Bank, about a good hour away, and my mom has to leave next week to Florida to help my grandparents move up to Mays Landing. She'll be gone about a good week or two. My dad works practically every day, I'm starting casino dealing school which is a good 4 days a week and starting having TWO jobs soon,
and my brother is gone at college and can't make it up to NJ for a good few months. I'm just scared since everybody is so busy and my mom's away, that if we don't take her to the vet in time the cancer's going to spread. The vet we went to today didn't give us much details about the whole cancer treatment options, as they could only do so much to
try to help us, but if we went up to Red Bank and they can only do chemo, putting our dog down, I don't know how I would take it. I don't know if I can go through with it.
So that's about it. What a fucking good start to my weekend. =[