today we parked in the parking garage at 9:25am and rode up the elevator area of trauma. at various times we’ve tried to run and hold our breath to be spared that rear brain memorial to the past terrors. the smell near the elevators at kaiser interstate holds in its little weird elevator molecules, the essence of raw fear. how does one thing come to smell so much like itself and then insist, year after year, on maintaining that smell? like a complex and unreproducible combination of a thousand flavors. the mole of bad times. the smell of ending your regular complex life and submitting yourself to cruelty at the hands of people who are actually trying to help.
they said it hasn’t really spread beyond the lungs and the neck node. i think of the neck node as some kind of usurper head. coming to take over control of my life. running on a platform of ousting the do-nothing entrenched establishment. i suppose it is partly right. i could have led a more ambitious life. and there is some small army of tiny lung node pawns who are reactionary and easily stirred by colonialist rhetoric. manifest destiny. they are charged with multiplying. occupying. a wild mad pack. they are not deterred by reason. i am not anti-immigration. i am anti-home-grown-terrorism.
perhaps i can arrest them with star shows. with the perfume of fresh wet cherry blossoms. with the distant sound of thunder that could just as easily be someone’s ecstatic homage to the joy of living. la petit mort. or the smell of rain on hot pavement. perhaps i can speak back to their medulla. to the primal ooze from which all life spawned. perhaps i can appeal to our common roots. the dna that we share. remember, this common life is ours. we share this life. this body. if i die, you die. remember? it is hard to speak well to fear.
this is to say, that there are many options on the dry erase board. 4 options for treatment at this time. some of them so unpronounceable as to make me wonder if they are a phonetic translation from the original alien gray. yes, carbo/taxol. and taxi somebody else. and then phenoma and cisboombah as a combo plate. and then the taxi again with somebody else as a clinical trial. but i might not be eligible. waiting to hear.
i tell the doctor that i don’t care about these details. i give her my vein to pump full of whatever she and my cadre of dear lovely friends think best. i am blessed to have people paying attention to things that suck the life out of me just to hear. i go to my happy place.
this is not my business.
meanwhile, the world goes on, as ms. oliver has noted. and i mean to see what it goes on about.
love,
val
Thank you for the update Val. I am both relieved and devastated. Relieved it has not moved throughout the landscape that is your body. Devastated that it is there at all, again. Had decided during my evening swim (when real life can return as work day and stress goes) that the not knowing was deafening. Tried to make it okay to feel scared and sad. I maintain that mortality is hard. I am trying to be graceful about it, and gentle. I’m so glad you took the time to tell me about the scan, and the cisboombah whatchamacallit. I love you and can’t wait to see you, sometime soon. (and on an entirely different note, this comment looks to be like 28 font on my screen – can only hope it won’t loom large when posted. 🙂
You are so right, we are all connected. The roots that hold me firm are somehow connected to your roots. Hang on sister. We are right by your side.
Oh Val G. Oh, Val. If there ever was a being who could charm the fight out of cancer, it’s you. I love you.