Standing in the Doorway Just Killin' Time

I am coming up on my birthday.  Not that one, the other one.  See, four years ago, roughly about this time I was struggling like a mofo with some pain in my groin.  Longest story possible short, it was testicular cancer.  Turns out that there was a stage 1a tumor in there that was causing blood flow issues and causing my right testicle to go necrotic.  It hurt just a bit.  Just a little bit, like more than anything ever.  For all those with Y chromosomes, I am sorry I made you squirm.  February 18th is my new birthday.  I was born again, from the land of the emotional suffering delusionally.  Every year, we've had a cake with the kids to celebrate Daddy overcoming "Penis Cancer".  It is just easier to let it ride than try to explain to them.  :)

I mention it, and it will come up again as we aproach the date, but it comes with some very bittersweet news.  A person I'd worked with at "that place" who I liked very much and had kept in touch with over the last 3 years lost his battle with bone cancer last night.  At the risk of narcissism, I wanted to share how I feel, and how his passing is a real kick in the nut for me.  His wife blogged all the way through their ordeal, of his brief remission and their life together.  They were obviously very happy people and as I knew him, he was a wonderful person.  They had two small kids and she is a very successful artist.  When I found out he'd been diagnosed, I reached out to him and gave him some support from someone who'd had some of the experiences he was about to go through.  They both replied and thanked me, and it was sweet as can be.  But now, I am devastated and feeling like rat shit on the bottom of a dung beetle's shoe.  I survived where he didn't.  I have broken the one person who's always stood by me's trust and I am the one here.  It might sound like self-pity, but it is more my only known expression of my guilt and my grief.  

In the midst of all of this, I am better.  Depression, in its most devastating form has overrun my life and I appear to have lived to tell the tale.  I've turned the corner, but am still far from home.  I have rotten thought patterns, a self-esteem rotted with abuse and self-abuse, a skewed perspective on my place in this world and a thousand billion amends to make.  But I am breathing.   And that's a lot.