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Saturday, January 26, 2019

DAY 057 -- "Into The Brain"

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.

Sigh. Here I’ve gone again, abusing my writer’s license and bracing against a pre-whirlwind of metaphor enroute to the calm before my pending brain-storm, unable to even get out of this sentence without mixing one. I’m not apologizing.

More as we go, El


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