Well folks it has been nearly two weeks since I started my new meds after 13 years of one the same regimen. The phrase: “Better the devil the you know you than don’t know” keeps running through my mind like the crap in my guts. I feel like shit.

Every time I think I have turned the corner or begun my peace process with this new chemotherapy I am kicked in the balls. This is truly amazing to me. When I get up in the morning and stare at these simple ordinary looking little pills in my med box I think today will be no big deal, and then by the afternoon I have the energy and personality of kitchen sponge.

What is really beginning to scare me is that what if these pills are not the right ones for me, and I have to go through all over again after I check my counts in a couple more weeks? Will I do it? Today I am not so sure. Like I said I feel like shit and I am tired of it, and having very few people on my health care team really understand what I mean.

Several years ago I wrote a very popular article called “I am Having an AIDS Day”. The magazine that it appeared in was overwhelmed with letters to the editor praising the what I said in the article. The gist of the article was simple. In all the hoopla over advanced therapies for HIV, people like you and me, still taking these fucking pills wake up some days feeling like hell warmed over even through are “numbers are great!” There is the shortness of breath, loose stool, pain, and more pain (and did I say PAIN?), plus fatigue, and the fucking wonder of how you are going to put one foot in front of the other and do what needs to be done. Sometime “AIDS days” simply knock you so hard on your ass that that doing what needs to be done is not even a conceivable option. Today is almost one of those days. Today I want to hide from the world instead of going into see patients for 8 hours, walk the dogs, cook dinner, train at the gym, and hit an AA meeting.

So at 53 today I feel 83 and can barely move. My recovery tells me that I need to each day one day at a time. While this has been my mantra, and a good one at that, I sometimes get in the head trap of very short version of Serenity Prayer which is “Fuck it.”

So today the whole notion of God granting me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference has simply been boiled down to fuck it today.

So fuck it to one and all and I will see you a little later or maybe on the flip side. And days like today make the flip side look more and more appealing.