Get an entire grip on yourself
Anyone remember that old L7 song from the 90s? “Pretend We’re Dead”? I’m here to tell you it mostly holds up. Like if you’re just seeking a kind a grungy/ugly-synth-pop rock song, it’s decent. It’s no “Smells Like Teenage Spirit,” but what is?
Today I got my PET scan. The young woman who handed me my glasses as I sat up on the scan board (sidebar: can’t they make those gurneys look more like cool ass skateboards? i would enjoy this) told me the results would be “read today.” Not READY today, but read today, and that’s totally cool. I’ve already mentally prepared to get them on Election Day.
Now that is when I want them.
It’s not like I can do anything anyway
on a Thursday or a Friday at the drop
of a hat. Yes! Radiation! Today! Targeted chemo! Surgery! Stat —
like that can’t happen, so why do I need to know
about it right now? I don’t.
My veins were shot this morning after two days of stress and upset and revelation
and probably not enough water and still enough Crohn’s symptoms as to be uncomfortable
so my veins kept blowing — in my arm, my hand (they only use my right arm — had lymph node removal in the left arm years ago and the jury is still kinda-sorta-still out on whether you should stick needles and shit in an arm without lymph nodes. Which makes me think of that Billy Idol song, “Eyes Without A Face . . .” What the fuck was that song even about? Maybe someday I’ll partake of a medical edible and attempt to decode it. Today is not that day.) So my veins kept blowing and
after about seven tries they decided to get the ultrasound machine to find a deep vein
and folks, to build on some of my sentiments from yesterday’s post, these were nice fucking people good people people who felt really sorry that they kept having to poke me.
So the PET scan was pretty delayed and by the time they got a deep vein through the ultrasound I was a crying mess and I kept telling the sweet nurse “You’re not making me cry, I’m just really tired and hungry” and that was pretty much the truth. I was tired. Body, soul, and I really wanted a fucking cheeseburger. What is it with Americans and our addiction to cheeseburgers? Like did we all, raised here, go from breast to cheeseburger so it’s some Freudian primal comfort thing?
(Though I’m mostly trying to eat well these days — healthy, I mean — I did have that fucking cheeseburger today. It will probably hurt my stomach, but it was really fucking tasty,)
Anyway, I was crying and the nurse felt really guilty and I kept telling her “No, no. You’re great.” Because she was — she was telling me all this bizarre shit about her family that was going down on Facebook and whatnot all the while she was looking for a vein and you could totally tell she knew just what she was doing like she’d done this so many times and she knew how seriously to take it and when to not talk.
And she speared a vein.
And when she hit it, it hurt like hell because it was deep and the catheter was bigger than what they normally use, and it shocked me and I started to cry again, like an actual baby.
I cried because I was startled.
It wasn’t like the worst pain I’ve ever felt — just unexpected because I’ve had lots and lots of blood draws in my life and none have ever felt like that because I don’t think any vein jabs have ever needed to be quite so deep in my arm.
And I’m not even squeamish about it anymore. I usually try not to look because honestly who enjoys seeing their blood leaving their body? Okay, I know some of you Lord-Byron-fuckers are probably into that shit, but it’s not my jam.
No judgement. No hate.
It’s like the whole kink/bdsm thing — you’re fine. Do what you like, but I do not get you.
I’ve had enough fucking pain. I don’t need to borrow any.
Anyway, I wasn’t looking when they finally got the vein. I was moved back to the room with the recliner and the picture of the sea where you’re supposed to “lie perfectly still” for an hour so the nuke tracer can zip around your body looking for weird interceptions like in Alien when the stupid ass computer wakes everybody up because it found some demonic shrimp in the road on the way back to Earth.
Whatever.
Some admin lady came to “visit” me today. I don’t know what her title was and I don’t care. When she walked in I just shook my head back and forth and said, “Thank you, I’m fine.”
I don’t want to fight.
I just want to get out of here.
At 4:55 I turned off my phone. It is 4:55 p.m.. I do not want any calls or I am busy writing
a prose poem because I am NOT just a fucking cancer patient I am a writer and a teacher and a spouse and a friend and a daughter and sometimes a really funny motherfucker and my life does not revolve always around phone calls from doctors and their assistants. I cannot —
no, I refuse — to live that way anymore.
I shall avail myself of doctors when I need scheduled procedures and have scheduled visits and scheduled calls and tests because I am a human being, a teacher, a writer, a spouse, a friend — not a professional patient.
This is my time.
Mine.
My god I wish it didn’t take a cancer diagnosis, pandemic, damn near failure of the country
to elicit this truth
from the universe. The gift we are given
from the moment of birth
is the gift of time — time we may use
and play with however we wish.
My eyes get all watery because I’m feeling something my teenagers often say but I thought I was too old to believe in anymore: “we always have a choice.”
Every fucking English teacher on the planet has taught a book and asked this
question, “But does the main character have a choice?” It’s a kind of failsafe: when all else fails, talk about choice. And my eyes are watering because my young people almost always say “there’s always a choice” and I do believe this even though “true . . . yet not quite.”
I don’t have a choice to not have cancer. Like my bod is deciding that. Biology and shit. No choice there.
But I do have a choice about how I use the time
I still have. I can flip out every second about cancer
in my body, I can keep checking my phone or I can write
prose poems on Medium or I can play with Abe or look at rental listings with my wife or
plan a really fun and weird English class tomorrow or I can text my sister
this meme I saw about the person who
loses ONE shoe on the highway. Or you can make a friend laugh
when you describe the “cancer center” on the mountain as a
“fuckin shed in the woods.”
Sheds in the woods are great, don’t get me wrong, but just not where
I want to get my western meds.
My uncle Al, who is one of the best people and storytellers I know, has a shed in the woods where I have healed a great many times. (shout out to uncle al who got a clean PET scan himself yesterday.)
The headline on CNN, currently, “We Are Not Rounding the Turn”
I think it’s about the pandemic.
“We Are Not Rounding the Turn”
No. We’ll never be rounding the turn or the bend nor shall
the twains ever meet especially when filtered through the lens
of television programming that is being fed to an American society
that is so tweaked out on fear it’s losing its goddamn, everloving mind.
It’s okay
to be scared right now, America. It would be a little weird
if you weren’t, but really I think when this election is over (please may it
be okay) we all need to check on each other for signs of fear addiction. We’ve
been forced this year to hit that pipe pretty hard like that haunting episode of Six Feet Under where David gets kidnapped by that weird trucker who forces him
to smoke meth. Dark shit, but I watched that show in the good old days, smoking a
cigarette in bed in my apartment on Hermitage and Ashland, old radiator clanging
and hissing, thinking, That’s some fucked up shit.
Anyway we’ve been through our real-life version of that episode this year, but way worse.
So feel your feelings, America. I know I am.
But if this ends well, we have to get an entire grip on ourselves.
This is an expression my wife and I use at home: “get an entire grip on yourself.”
The expression takes its origins in my first year teaching 7th graders at FALA. I hadn’t seen a seventh grader since I, myself, was a seventh grader. Half the time I had no idea what to do with them. Were they child or teen? How did their feelings work? What did they eat?
Anyway, one day this kid who I totally loved came into class all pissed off because he was convinced someone stole his root beer. I doubt it, but maybe that happened. Doesn’t matter. Anyway this boy is having a major flip out. Stomping his feet, kicking desks, punching his own legs all over this fucking root beer, and so I shouted his name.
“Hey,” I said. His name wasn’t “hey,” but I’m protecting anonymity here.
“Hey,” he said, quieting. We had a good rapport by that point in the year. He knew I wasn’t out to be mean.
“The root beer.”
“Yeah someone stole it — ” he started totally going down meltdown road again and I stopped him.
“You need to get an entire grip on yourself,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say, and this just came out first. I’m not a child psychologist, but Weirdly, it worked. It made sense to him. I sent an email up to the front desk asking our admin assistant to keep an eye out for a liter of root beer.
Ten minutes after his root-beer-flip-out, this kid was asking to have selfies taken with me. It was the last day of class. I remember now. It was almost summer. It was the last day of school. Soon the science teacher would play Alice Cooper’s School’s Out for Summer on the big audio system in the amphitheater and kids would be running up to each other and to some teachers to get their yearbooks signed. I think it was the same year we had the total eclipse of the sun. Maybe I’m conflating all the memorable moments.
Memory is just a messy amalgamation, anyway. It didn’t all happen on the same day, you just organized it that way.
Or in 2020 maybe it did happen all at once, all on the same day. Cosmic punch that’d been surfing the waves of space time for generations. (I think I sound like a scientist when I write shit like that, but I probably just sound like a burnout who has listened to too much Pink Floyd — partially true. I have listened to far too much Pink Floyd in my lifetime.)
So where did I begin.
“Pretend We’re Dead.”
Every time I get a PET scan I feel like
that’s what I’m doing or at least
playing dead because the more still you can
be in the machine the better and clearer the
visuals. So I play dead.
And I close my eyes because
they make me take my glasses off
so I can’t see shit anyway. Or I’d just see something
I didn’t understand and my Anxious Mind (thanks lynn and buddhists for introducing me to the term) would take advantage to wax philosophic about that “blurry green light”:
“This probably means the cancer is back worse than they could have ever imagined. Everywhere. Absolutely, everywhere.”
I do not need that kind of negativity in my life, Anxious Mind.
Anyway, I closed my eyes. Arms raised above my head. Stayed
perfectly still and thought about cheeseburgers and pools in Tucson
and that things are bad, yes, but not so bad you won’t get out of this
tube and drive yourself home and feel well enough
to eat a cheeseburger and sing to the dog.
So relax.
Relax.
Get an entire grip on yourself, Allison.
Get an entire grip on yourself, America.
