Just keepin’ it real…
Rhymes With Orange
You can be given time.
You can take time.
You can spend time.
You can save time.
You can waste time.
Time can move achingly slow. Or fast. Minutes tick by like hours. Hours fly by like seconds.
Time changes over time.
And time can suddenly stop.
I went to call my oncologist since I wanted to find out what the scan said from last Thursday. The receptionist I knew picked up and I said hello.
“Oh, Mr. K”, she said, “I was just going to call you.”
Suddenly I had that same inside sinking feeling I had two years ago.
“They would like you to come in and have an MRI done.”
This was not what I wanted to hear, not what I expected, not what I wanted.
“What did they see?”
“They want you to come to discuss,” she said, “I don’t know if they’ll talk about it on the phone.”
“Please don’t make me wait, Linda – is the doctor there?
She paused a moment, “I don’t know if the doctor is here but I’ll see if I can get Kathy (the physician’s assistant) to give you a call. Give her some time to get back to you.”
We made a date for me to come in Thursday, in two days. Two days. Time to let my imagination weave a tale.
I left my office and went for a drive, to spend some time in the quiet of my car.
I returned about an hour later and called back.
“Were you able to pass the message on to Kathy?”
“Hold on.”
She came back a minute later and said, “call back in 5 minutes at this number.”
I did, called back, and got the doctor on the phone.
“They saw something on the scan, a hot spot, some glucose being taken up.”
“What does it mean.”
“It could just be sinus disease (which I have) or possibly some bone necrosis from the treatment. The radiologist wants to do an MRI to get a better look at the area.”
“Is it in the same area as the tumor was?
“Yes.”
“Is this a red flag?”
“Don’t think so. He didn’t see any abnormal tissue in the scan, any disease. Just an area of concern. Do you have any headaches?”
“No,” I said. I lied. And rationalized.
“Then if you’re asymptomatic, you should be fine.”
“Do you need to see me on Thursday or should we just make an appointment for the MRI now?”
“Oh, you can do that now,” he said. “But you’re always welcome to stop in to talk if you’d like.”
I thanked him and called Linda back to set an appointment for next Tuesday – the earliest time available and giving them a few days to get the OK from the insurance company.
Suddenly, I’m a patient again.
© Manish Desai
Last excuse was used yesterday. Time to get that book started.
Now. Today.
Poetry, prose, fiction, non-fiction, business, historical romance – even that idea you had for your favorite magazine. Start putting it down on paper.
And the guy to help you is Nicholas Bate in his series, How To Write & Publish Your Book.
Whatever the subject, Bate will get the engine going…no nonsense, no fluff…no excuses…
I’m feeling a bit better this morning – the swelling in my right knee has gone down and I don’t have that pain in my left hip anymore. I don’t know what Oedipal circuitry burst into play when I challenged my son to a few games of bowling at the local lanes. But the challenge was met and a date set.
Understand that there are about thirty four years between me and my son. He also earns his living as a personal trainer and lacrosse coach, thinks he’s all gangsta because he has a tatoo of a grenade on his bicep, wears his pants too low and his hoodie too high, and no doubt could bench press three times my bodyweight – as a warm up. The really frightening thing is that I realized he’s me times ten at that age. Or, as a mentor of mine once said, your children inherit your absolutely worst traits. Or my mother’s interpretation – one day you’ll have children just like yourself…
So we headed down to the bowling alley which, judging by the amount of cars and bobbing heads, the entire elementary and middle school population of Nassau County had decided to do the same.
Back in the day, you checked in at the desk, where you got your shoes, an oversized scoring sheet, a stub of a pencil, and change back from your dollar. Yesterday we were faced with the digital equivalent of air traffic control where we not only had to provide our names and shoe size, but we also had to tell them what size ball we wanted. I was expecting that, as we used to do, go from rack to rack finding the perfect fit for our chubby fingers with either two hole or three hole configurations.
I turned that one over to my son. “Just give him a ten”, he said, embarrassed as if he just had me on a day pass from the retirement village.
With shoes and balls in hand – don’t go there – we worked our way to the lane given to us. What I thought we would find was a molded plastic u-shaped lounge with a slanted table in the front where we would clip our score sheet. What we got was a round cafe table with four chairs and an overhead high defnition display of our names and scoring grid. No pencils, no paper, no arguments over how you scored a strike or a spare, especially in the last frame. The machine did it all. Including some cartoon puppetry between the frames.
Not only that, since we were surrounded by the Sesame Street set, all the lanes had these metal gates raised so that a literal sluiceway was formed for the ball to travel down without going into the gutters on the sides. In fact, I noticed that one third grader next to me had figured out a strategy of banking her shots off the back third of the gates to score a hook strike nearly every time.
“Hey,” I said to the older woman watching over the group, “I want a pair of those on my lane.’
She grinned and then immediately starting tapping on her Blackberry no doubt to see if my picture appeared on any of the local sex offender web sites.
My son and I played our games although I had asked for, and gotten, a handicap equal to the spread in our ages. I figured that with a few decades worth of pins to start with, I’d at least have a chance of beating back the obvious advantages of youth. Beat him by one pin in the first game, but my offense completely collapsed in the second, along with my knee and hip. Amazing how stiff you can get in just thirty years of inactivity.
On the way home, during which my son accused me of acting like it was the first time I had driven a car, we stopped at the supermarket where he picked up some ground beef for burgers and I a box of linzer torte cookies. I figured between the cookies and a handful of Advil I’d be ok in a few hours. As it turned out, he left for a Saturday night out, while I fell asleep in the recliner while doing the Sunday NY Times crossword.
Total cost for a couple of games and two pairs of rented shoes – $29.95 plus gas. It would have been cheaper, and lasted longer, if we’d gone to the movies.
If I’d used the senior discount, of course.
Which I don’t qualify for.
Yet.
It was an ordinary day.
I had to be at the diagnostic center at 11:30 for a scheduled PET scan yesterday. The physical exam with my oncologist had no surprises. At the two year anniversary of ending treatments, I’d reached an important checkpoint. If the scan came out clean, then the odds of my cancer ever reoccurring dropped dramatically.
“If the scan shows no evidence of cancer, then you should celebrate,” he said. “You’ve come a long way. Somebody up there must like you.” He pointed to the treatment room ceiling.
It was only the second time he ever expressed anything that resembled doubt. When we first met, he sat across from me at a small round table, hands folded, told me what I had and what we were going to do. Diagnosis. Plan. Action. Exactly what I wanted. But last June, about a year and a half after end of treatment and many positive meetings, he turned to me and said, “You’re doing great.” Then he paused and said, “You know, we had a lot of hills to climb with you.” It was almost startling – the plan had always been so simple. The outcome never questioned.
I realized also that for him, and the others who took care of me in this new country, the outcomes were not always so positive. Not all their patients survived. They, along with their patients, faced the most serious and frightening diagnoses to be had. Lives were literally put in their hands. Day after day after day. I almost felt as if I had a responsibility to them as well – to recover and return to good health. Oncologists, nurses, PAs, radiation technicians, nutritionists, social workers, even the receptionists at the desk where you checked in – they become as much part of your life as you theirs.
And as odd as it may sound, it was hard to leave them behind as my recovery progressed.
But for now, I wait patiently for the report, waiting for the satisfying sound of the passport being stamped and told I can move on…
© Marcin Stawiarz
Inventory
2 pairs desert camo boots
sleeping bag
assault pack: NODs, ammo, night-vision goggles
wind-stopper gloves
These don’t belong to me.
Camelbak backpack for water
Kevlar helmet
MICH helmet
grenade pouches
magazine pouches
I have no place here. This is not my life.
9-millimeter holster
equipment vest
same old ruck
He can’t bear my worry. Like the rucksack he carries
on his back, it seems
to suck the life out of him.
socks … green/black
PTs — shorts, shirts for workout
SPEAR silk underwear for cold weather
SPEAR body armor … ergonomically correct
barracks bag for laundry
rain poncho and linerblack wool cap
I was always asking if he was warm enough.
Put a sweater on, I’d say. Your jacket …
duffel bag
entrenching tool
kneepads
elbow pads
uniforms
Nuclear, Biological, Chemical suit
I can’t protect him.
Vaccinations:
anthrax
hepatitis
flu shot
meningitis
tetanus
typhoid
smallpox
TD
No one could explain his nosebleeds. They always seemed to
come when I was packing
for business trips: Pittsburgh, Chicago, Detroit …
CDs: Springsteen, Sarah McLachlan, U2 …
DVDs: “In the Name of the Father,” “Boondock Saints,” “Elf” …
Marlboros
chewing tobacco
Tissues fell from him like crumpled doves.
pin light
“Case for Christ”
“Onward Muslim Soldier”
“Salem’s Lot”
“Catcher in the Rye”
laminated four-leaf clover
He tilted his head back, pinched his nose
between thumb and index finger:
“Don’t worry, I know what to do.”
Officer Record Brief
Hazardous Duty Orders
Zero Your Weapon
He’s given me his dog-eared copy of Komunyakaa’s
“Neon Vernacular,” underlined:
“We can transplant broken hearts/
but can we put goodness back into them?”
Life Insurance: to be split between Mom and Dad
Emergency Records … who gets called
battalion wants to know what to read
at your funeral, what songs to play
He looks up from the paperwork,
hard into my eyes:
“You said you wanted to know.”
- Frances Richey, from her poetic memoir, “The Warrior: A Mother’s Story of a Son at War.”
[Frances Richey wrote this poem after visiting her son, Ben Richey, an Army captain and Green Beret, while he prepared to deploy to Iraq in the fall of 2004. Ben did two tours of duty and returned home safely in August 2006.]
Ben is one day old. October 11, 1974; Nashville, TN
Old man: You paint the wall, you make it look beautiful.
Me: Thanks
Old man: We don’t want it to be beautiful, we hate this wall, go home.
1. The odds against today were insurmountable, until it happened.
15. I’d listen to my conscience if I could be sure it was really mine.
27. Nothing important comes with instructions.
39. The will has a will of its own.
47. As for my writing. I like it enough to keep going. I dislike it enough to keep going.
50. Closing a door very gently, you pull with one hand, push with the other.
- James Richardson, Vectors2.3: Fifty Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays, via American Poetry Review
[h/t to What's On Your Bucket List?]
Tooling around the web on a Saturday night. And thought – wouldn’t it be fun to put down some words with this stamp pad set? On paper, walls, refrigerator doors, subway stops…
From Magic Cabin…imaginative toys for girls and boys.
I am such a child…with a little bit of an anarchist running thru me…
[h/t to Maggie May Ethridge at Flux Capacitor...always in the realm of fascination...]
