DAY 019 -- "It's Nothin' But A Lateral Climb"

Not sure why the emphasis the last two days on critters: yesterday the Broad-winged Hawk, and today in the radiation waiting room with aquarium fish and a stuffed Blue Heron.

Maybe I’m now more in touch with my animal impulses dealing with this brutal invader in my body. It feels that way sometimes, like there’s a backroom cockfight going on in my lung, or crawdad stampedes that come and go in unexpected places, or I’m a whale feeding on anti-plankton, whatever I mean by that. I think I know, but I’m too tired to be sure.

Or, maybe it’s because I often relate better to animals than humans. Note the Blue Heron looking askance but keeping me within beak’s length. Very wise bird, even if it is stuffed. I’ve known stuffed people who’ve been less attentive.

Or, the captive fish swimming in the illusion of vastness. That’s maybe too close to where I go when I let my mind play out worst case scenarios, but I am a sucker for the poetic, light or dark. In this photo, I’m pining for some fins and a way to breathe underwater, if all else fails.

Lastly, the Radionettes nailed it again with a guitar blues feed as I stretched out on the terrible table (I’ve now dubbed this my lateral good iron maiden), and they piped in Robben Ford’s “Lateral Climb.”

What once was a dollar
Is lookin' more like a dime
Heads up people
It's nothin' but a lateral climb

 More as we go, El

DAY 018 -- "If You Can Get Through The Twilight"

Before leaving to accompany me to chemo today, Diane snapped this photo of an immature Broad-winged Hawk perched in the dead pine. (We're pretty sure of the bird, after checking our home bird book library).

The “dead pine” is an inside joke here. It is so dead (how…dead… IS IT?) Thanks for asking. It’s SO dead, that its needleless branches have become a modern art masterpiece, but it also sports ideal branches for lots of our other fly-in friends. All-size perches, with unlimited views into it and out of it. Good for preys. Good for predators.

For the hawks, it’s a prime overlook/launchpad for swoop-downs and keeping their role in the food chain intact: nesting birds, chipmunks, snakes, mice, insects, frogs, and other hawk fodder – all of which abound hereabouts.

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**Warning! Liberal Blogger’s Political Privilege, Confidential To Everyone**:  Am I digressing? You betcha, but nobody digresses better than I do. Everyone will tell you that I digress longer and better and smarter than anyone anywhere in the world, that I can tell you. When I digress, no other digression even comes close in all of mankind! No, in all of history!

(See how stupid that sounds, Donald?)

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Okay, entering the infusion room for chemo today, and the nurse smiles, points to the corner of the room, and says: “All ready with your usual chair.”

“Nooooo! Not that!” I said, with all the mocking fun I could muster: “Please, can’t you move things and give me an unusual chair? I just don’t feel usual today, and I hate being a usual anything.”

Good laughs had by all, then we got to the usuals: Insert IV port, blood draw, lab report reviews, twenty question weekly update, weight (gained 2 lbs!), pre-treatment nausea meds, then the big chemo guns, and later the best and most unusual hospital cheeseburger I’ve ever had. Food eaten during infusion, for some reason, is particularly satiating.

Later, on to my irradiation. New development (not permanent and not unexpected) as an itchy diffuse rash has appeared on my upper chest where the treatment is focused. I’m given moisturizers, anti-itchers, additional pain meds as needed. This is temporary, so I’ll quote directly from my favorite humorist, no frills: “If you can get through the twilight, you’ll live through the night.”

Both treatments otherwise uneventful today. Visit with oncologists: “We’re still going for a curative.” Yippee (I’ll hold the exclamation point for now. Wouldn’t want to provoke the cancer gods. They’re fidgety enough already).

Meanwhile, there’ll be a few more weeks of cancer treatment fallouts through these courses, all influencing appetite, bowels, skin, thinking, sleeping, effects, side effects, and yes, because medicine and our bodies are such capricious lovers, side effects of the side effects. Egads.

This sign in the bathroom, one we're all now accustomed to, just hit me as deeply funny and ironic and profound today as a metaphor for life, death, love, all in one sentence. I'll let you figure it out.

Oh, and the hawk that Diane spotted up there? She now informs me (her research biologist history slip is showing) of the marked variance between the sexes. She’s just played a recording of their respective voices for me. “Ah! Listen, El! The male voice is an octave higher than the female! What does that tell you?”

Hmm … I don’t know where she's going with that, but I’ll bet it’s great. I do know what I'll try to do with it tonight, however. Maybe, when she’s on her oboe and I’m at the piano, we’ll play an octave apart.

Counterpoints.

Thanks again, Ma Nature.

More as we go, El

DAY 017 -- "In The Wild From Nowhere"

 A fifty-fifty day: sitting one half of it atop a Harley rolling thunder road, and one half inside a kayak on the Ompompanoosuc River. In the background now comes a paraphrase of my favorite Yogi Berra quote: “Cancer is 90 per cent physical; the other half is mental.”

Up popped another rule for good living, and because I'm taking the time these days to not let life's little big things get by me, I followed it. It's simple enough:

Look up in the sky occasionally.

We don’t think to do it routinely, and even then, not without cues (a bird, a plane, a passing superman, the usual) but we should.

This picture is why. Spectacular … and I made it my own:

The afternoon’s sky was Parrish blue, painted with an airscape of cirrus cloud tails like this one, wisping every whichaway. This is how it presented vertically, and if it isn’t a ringer for a pair of lungs with an exiting trail of cancer cells draining away, then I don’t know my imagination.

Cool, eh?

And, don’t forget to purposefully look down once in a while, too. Not just to be sure you sidestep the dog poop, spot that oil leak, avoid the pothole or notice your mismatched socks, but because you otherwise just might miss the lily pad flotilla floating in the right light and shadow.

 No Photoshop required. Ma Nature will always entertain us for free, and with no help from us, if we’re wise enough to let Her.

Lastly, don’t forget to look straight ahead on ground (or water) or you might not capture that pocket of rock-rooted black-eyed Susans, or the birdhouse jutting up in the wild from nowhere, or a girl and her dog on a paddle-by barking.  

** Blogger’s privilege: I deliberately wear mis-mated socks these days. After a near lifetime of conforming to a dumb standard, I’m done with ever considering it again. Who says socks must match? Not me. Not anymore. **

Let’s close this vision-fitting day with Yogi. No paraphrase necessary:

“I want to thank everyone for making this day necessary.”

More as we go, El

DAY 016 -- "Potato-Potato-Potato"

Today a real seriocomic gem, as I took the new Harley to the dealer for installation of my Stage I High Flow Exhaust System/Air Cleaner kit and a new pair of Screamin’ Eagle mufflers. That’s bike fancy shmancy talk for more power, smoother sound, cooler lines and a bitchin’ new look.

I had a few hours to kill before my Rad Chemo treatment, and what better way to pass the time than to hang out with my buds in the Harley shop showroom, talking HOG and spending 100 bucks for a t-shirt. That’s always been the not so inside joke among Harley owners: “What’s the HD in Harley-Davidson stand for?”

“Hundred dollars.”

I don’t care. It’s what I want. It’s what I need. It makes me feel free and most uncancerous, riding my iconic soulmate over these country roads on days like this, rising above the sore throat, shortness of breath, chest pains, bruises, nausea, needles, drugs, and as I mentioned in yesterday’s post: all stirred up by headaches in my stomach. (See Day 015)

This Stage I exhaust system upgrade is Harley entry-level coolness, as all good bikers begin tailoring their new rides with the endless options and add-ons available. I’m no exception.  

But, today a defining moment. That’s when the sad semantic hilarity of it all hit me: There I was, spending serious bucks for a Stage I upgrade to fine-tune how my rolling beauty breathes and rumbles, and meanwhile, back in the other saddle, I’m wrestling with a Stage III+ cancer that is roughhousing how I breathe and stumble. A good day for Cosmic jests, eh?

And, what’s in a word? Today, all of my life is standing right here (a fine place for profundity, next to a Harley dealer’s waiting room’s coffee pot).

Staging.

I’m staging my bliss in the service department and staging my bondage at the parts desk. Deeper in, I see this as how we all breathe, rumble and stumble along in every “normal” day, tweaking ourselves, adjusting our internal mirrors, dancing with our demons.  

*Confidential to everyone: Sure, science made the world, but poetry spins it.*

Every day, I’d like to give a nod each to the roles poetry and science play in our lives, how we act, and how we’re acted upon. Right about here in this blog, you can see this is where I’m working hard to take your mind off what I’m thinking.

   

So, screw it: get thee to staging, knees in the breeze, make your own magic, and I’ll meet you on down the road. Let’s ride!

Oh, I almost forgot the other defining moment today, when I rode off in that sweet new staged and upgraded potato-potato-potato sound, the bike sounding more like my body’s science, and me looking more like its poetry.

More as we go, El    

DAY 015 -- "This Tall, Silly"

A new medication today to treat my latest Rad Chemo’s entertaining new side effect: it’s an oral solution I can “swish, spit or swallow as needed.” In the bedside biz, it’s called “magic mouthwash.”

The side effect is this persistent sore throat that has moved in like a bum uncle on the couch. It was predicted. As we progress and the radiation works on the tumor, it also disrupts my surrounding structures, and because of the proximity, settles in my throat. It will eventually pass when I come to the end of treatment, but for now, it’s a bugger.

First, I used the solution wrong, even though the label’s directions allowed it. “Swishing” this liquid did a quick and strong job of easing my achy throat long enough to allow painless swallows through mealtimes, but it also worked very well, thanks to my wrongly using the “swish” option, in delivering a numb-tingling to the wrong characters:

Like a pre-extraction anesthetic at the dentist relieving gum pain, it also drags your lips and tongue into the fight and knocks them out, too.

Today, this all reminded me of the six-year old boy in clinic who once told me: “I’ve got a headache in my stomach.”

Made perfect sense to me, and his description helped the doc get right to the boy’s ailment, and combining this with other diagnostics, to treat him with the right applications. If the boy had said that his pain was a stomach ache in his head, well, that would’ve changed everything.

You get the idea. As patients, we can best help ourselves and our caregivers if we’re as descriptive as possible, using lively images and clear language when describing pain. A “dull push” is not the same as a “throbbing stab.” Or, a “heavy wringing” is entirely different from a “deep stiffness,” and being specific truly does help the practitioner to accurately diagnose and treat.

That’s the crux of medicine. Ruling things out. The paths to finding healings and cures always begin with determining what the affliction isn't, enroute to finding out what it is. And, because no two of us have all identical everythings, one size never fits all. In medicine, each one of us is a cosmic fingerprint.

That’s the art side of science, and enough metaphor abuse for now.

So, I got a liquid syringe and targeted the dose to my throat directly, bypassing my innocent buccal bystanders.

Tomorrow, I’m continuing my quest for simplicity in the way forward. A good way is to return to the wisdom of floating organ boy. Children have a knack of teaching us when we least expect it.

I also asked him if he knew how tall he was. Placing his palm flat on top of his head, he looked at me puzzled, but answered perfectly:

“This tall, silly.”

More as we go, El