This week, I’ll be back at Rad Chemo Central, where you and I spent
a few weeks darkening in the light a ways back.
Now that the recent MRI of my head found a new cancer (see Day 56),
we have to shift from lung to head for the moment, hoping that the new affected
lymph node in the lung treads water, or at least doesn’t sink further, as we
get into the brain.
Yes, yes, yes ... we all know how surgical resections, stereotactic
radiosurgeries and fractionated radiations work (if we don’t, not to worry, we didn’t
know either until we checked), but we also can’t help getting clobbered
with answers like the following, if we’re bold enough and curious enough to stand and deliver
the questions into their line of fire:
“Unfortunately, in most cancers, once a person develops brain
metastases, the tumor is not curable. With current treatments, patients can
live from mont---"
Right about there is where the mind stops processing the spoken
word into sensical sounds and written text into understandable language, and
everything coming at us looks like flaming spears and sounds like screaming
meemies.
(Yes, I had to look it up, too, just to sidetrack my brain long
enough to stop vibrating and come back to front and center. A screaming meemie
was originally a WWI artillery shell that sounded like … well … a meemie screaming. You’re welcome.)
The point is: our imaginations, when driven by anxiety and worry,
are capable of so much more than simple reality. In literature, this is what
makes great fiction.
In real life, this is the stuff of non-fiction nightmares.
Still, the editors and publishers of hope and optimism also have
their sub-stations in our thoughts, so if we’re lucky, we can at least tread
water (remember that dog-paddling tumor up there?) until everything gets to dry
land.
More as we go, El
