Sometimes, when it’s me, it’s me.
It’s not someone else’s negligence. It’s
not the neighbor’s pranking kid. It’s not a falling anvil. It’s not the notion of
an act of God (and notions are about as far as I ever get with Godly notions of
wispy divine interventions).
No, sometimes, I just screw up. This wasn’t
a big boner, but when she saw the bloody dressing from my chemo treatment today,
it did bother the bejeebers out of Diane. “You could have exsanguinated! That’s
not funny!”
I attempted a classic soothe: “Oooh, I love
it when you talk bigly, but you know I’m a good clotter.” (True, lately my
blood counts, especially what I call the blue values of my reds & whites have been on the low & high sides, and we should honorably mention my daily
home blood thinner belly injections. Any bleed needs a little extra attention).
Then, my bridge-too-far personality took hold,
and despite me I had to add: “And, whoosh, honey, it could’ve bled through the new
Harley jacket. Oh, the horror! I checked my sleeve, though. All okay!”
She surrendered with a classic eye-roll, knowing
that I was incapable right then of seriously taking her seriously taking me
serious serious (I know … clunky, but grammatically correct.)
And, just as an inkblot whatzit away, when
I look at it I see a red puppy chasing an oversized hairy egg. Diane sees a moose
backing up. Neither helps this case either way.
Since my last chemo, I’ve had some outboarding innards with a little too much wake; some tidal fatigue, a few sidebar headaches, but otherwise I and my daily pursuits (and evasions) have been largely unreportable as being driven by anything cancer-ly. I’ve passed the days and nights as part of the minor majority.
Today at chemo infusion, my oncologist instructs
and informs:
--Down-tweak daily prednisone dose.
--Status quo everything else.
--Repeat CT scan of my lung tumor in ten days.
--Up-tweak chemo doses at next
treatment
--For the lab rats, my fucking magnesium is
1.6. mg/dl.
--For me, I’ll never again use “status quo”
as a verb.
I did press him today about THE issue: where
is my Stage IV cancer and where am I in it? He recoiled invisibly. I saw it,
because I’ve done decades of nursing care for terminally ill patients and I’m
old friends with what isn’t seen or heard at beginnings and endings.
I asked him all the lethal questions that all Docs
don’t want to answer and patients don’t want to ask. I know. It was unfair all
around:
Unfair to him, because Hippocratic magic is
always cloudy. Unfair to myself, because my need-to-know brain lately has been
pounding the ground of my worried heart.
He’s a good doctor. He answered through the
clouds.
I’m a good patient. I listened in the earth.
More as we go,
El
