Happy Crappy New Year

When I started my blog last November (which now feels like the equivalent of a million years ago), I never intended it to be confessional or overly personal. I just thought it would be a good venue to introduce little illustrations and slowly begin to promote and market my artwork. And get my mind off the fact that my boyfriend, Paolo, had just been slapped with a succession of negative medical diagnoses. But three days before New Year's Paolo died. He was diagnosed with lymphoma of the stomach last July and had undergone five chemotherapy treatments since then. In early December, just before my last blog entry, he'd had several biopsies taken from his stomach and they all came back negative. Hurray!!

Two days later he went into the hospital---the beginning of a series of late-night hospital admissions and releases and readmissions; and an unceasing series of transfers from the ICU to the cardiac unit, back to the ICU, back to the cardiac unit and so on.... Beginning December 14, every day seemed to begin and end with a new chaos of frantic medical activity and uncertainty. Not to mention the endless phone calls from concerned colleagues, family members in Italy and friends whose well-intended but helpless apprehension only heightened our sense of panic and doubt. Paolo and I had been together for eleven years (as of December 12) and never in my life had I ever seen him pessimistic or filled with anything other than complete optimism until the second week of emergencies and overwrought phone calls began to take their toll.

Ultimately he wasn't killed by lymphoma or any of the other medical ailments that had so disrupted his health and his life and his future, but by a blood clot in his heart that had become untreatable because of the chemotherapy he was undergoing. Paolo was only forty-one years old. He had just won two research grants from NIH, which is apparently unheard of since competition is so severe and funding so limited (thanks to the BUSH administration) that receiving a single grant is a major accomplishment. He was just on the cusp of becoming an independent research scientist. His research into the causes and possible treatments of Huntington's disease (a degenerative neurological disease that affects millions of people and for which there is no cure or treatment as of yet) had just begun to be respected by the scientific community at large.

It's difficult not to be angry. I could drown my sorrows in booze and indiscriminate acts of self-destruction, but I think I'll probably just immerse myself in working on the portrait of my boyfriend that was going to be a gift after his recovery and which will now be his memorial. Hmmm... weird how life turns everything around. As Christine would say (she who was made famous in Mr. Peenee's "Ahh, Home to San Franceeesco" blog post), "Whoever you are, stop shaking the snowglobe!"

And as Paolo would say, "This kind of thing happens in life---now what do we have to do?"