There I was in the examination room counting
ceiling tiles and not scratching an itch, when my radiation oncologist walks in
lugging what struck me as the most infamous cranium in all of literature under
his arm. He smiled, sat down, and my first thought was:
Uh-oh
… any second he’s going to tell me that because he moonlights at the local
community theater where he’s the understudy for Hamlet, and he’s just received
an emergency casting call at the last minute to perform tonight, would I mind
if he used the time to practice his soliloquy from the graveyard scene?
“Alas, poor Elwin! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy!”
The truth, which is often much less entertaining,
was that he’d brought in his cancer patient show n’ tell anatomically-correct demo
skull, complete with detailed facsimile rubber brain innards, all
sectionalized, to show me, if I wanted to know, exactly where my right
cerebellum tumor was.
Right about there, I turned my excellent fancy
and infinite jesting back to reality and we had a stress-relieving laugh (my
stress, anyway). Then on to the main event:
Without wallowing in a bog of filler material, it
looks like we’re going to proceed with, yes, a course of stereotactic
radiosurgery. Sounds rather like a military operation, eh? “Alright,
drop your meat, grab some heat and saddle-up, sergeant! It’s time for Operation
Stereotactic Radiosurgery!”
(I think Operation Hot Bot would’ve been mas macho, but I can’t compete with my own imagination.)
Cool! This means next week it’s back in the
terrible tube and I get a repeat MRI, this time emphasizing more sagittal
versus axial planes. Ahem, at least I think that’s what he said. As you know from our history here, whenever I’m distracted in the grip of an Alas, Poor Elwin! mode, I will
often mis-hear things. He might’ve said chewy caramel versus chocolate centers,
but I did get the gist of it:
But, this means a re-routing of things: different scheduling, applications, side effects, and a new drug that acts more
systemically than locally on my Candyland blood-borne gumdrops (oops … you see
… I’m drifting again).
I left there today feeling like I was torn
between two elevators: one for the brain, one for the body. So, screw it; I
took the stairs.
And, as if you needed more comic relief (I
always do), while waiting for the doc I spotted a jar on a
shelf across the room. From my vantage point, the label looked like it read:
“Feces.”
My logical brain (now suspect, but still mostly
intact) and my decades of nursing savvy knew that the jar did NOT contain out-in-the-open
poops, even though all the evidence, including the jar’s chunky contents, sure
looked like it did.
Can you blame me for having a moment of fearful
umbrage flirting with confused panic?
It lasted until I went over for a closer look:
The entire label read “Earpieces.”
More as we go, El
