At this point, maybe it
should be raw run and hide.
We’ve arrived at the penultimate
day of radiation. One … more … treatment! That’s worth at least a ta-da!, if not an
attaboy or two. I wanted to show you, at the risk of abandoning whatever vanity
I have left, where we are, six weeks out. Once upon a body, I’d have been mortified
to have this image out there.
Today? Poobah. Yes, publishing
this unfettered exposure of my naked and irradiated meaty parts (uppers) should feel risky,
guarded, embarrassing, and just plain oodgy. Who wants to see this? I don’t,
and I’m in the skin.
No more. All that matters
is the truth. Pretty or not. I’ve tried to give you that since we began. No
point in doing anything else.
This picture, taken an hour
ago, is where we are: me, and this thing I walk around in. It’s the truth, but
still unnerving to me, like that first time years ago I looked in the mirror and
saw my Dad.
Look closely: even if you
remove the cancer, the burn, the pudgy corners, the neck waffles --- even if
you put back the hair, sat me up straighter and subtracted forty years --- you’d
still have this near wreck of a man, some of it Ma Nature’s fault, some of it
Father Time’s, some of it the hard luck of the draw. And, some of it … a stupid
human trick.
Still, even at this plateau
(I’m not quite ready for a crevasse or a precipice), I’m going with the future
as an opt-in add-on.
One more treatment and we’ll
begin to know less of what we don’t know, and more of what we can’t know just
yet, all as we set sights on the next plateau. Today, my white blood cell count
is one-point-two.
1.2 is low-low.
“Normal” range is 4.5 to
11.
Low enough that the Docs
are again giving me the needle (they’re good doctors) about what I should and
shouldn’t be doing. Infection is always lurking when a WBC gets this low, and that
could mean big trouble at this stage.
Okay, Doc. Yes, I’ll drink,
eat, do everything in sub-moderation, and behave myself until the next horizon.
Worried? Scared? Angry?
Resolute? Sad? Hang-dogged? Upbeat? Woebegoing? Every which way?
You betcha.
And, this picture? No
Photoshop fixes. No filters. No touch-ups. No softening downs. No enhancements.
No airbrushing. No attempts at artsy-fartsy. Nothing here but my hide.
Raw.
See you at the next first
finish line.
More as we go, El
