PET scan reveal party
This evening I texted a friend that tomorrow is my big “PET scan reveal” event and that it feels perhaps more abhorrent, I imagine, than having to attend a gender reveal “party” . . .
I have strong feelings about “gender reveal” parties. I shalt not enumerate said feelings tonight. Trying to stay calm and sane. Going apeshit over the batshit that is “gender reveal parties” will not help me as I breathe my way into tomorrow.
There are four possible readings. This is not a deck of tarot cards. Either 1) the cancer has progressed 2) the cancer has regressed 3) the cancer has remained, unmoved and/or 4) there’s a new weird and horrible thing happening in my body that the PET scan oh-so-helpfully found. Thanks, PET scan!
I know what I want the PET scan to show.
I know what I want sometimes does not align with what I get.
Furthermore, sometimes the things I have gotten in place of what I wanted have been better than and beautifully outside of anything I could have imagined left to my barest of individual devices and mechanisms and . . . machinations.
Today, part of my job involved teaching about World War I. My young students are very interested in the children who enlisted to serve, and we are currently learning about some of the British child soldiers. Yesterday, one of my youngest students, upon learning that some children, during the First World War, started a fund for horses injured on the battlefield remarked, “It’s like a GoFundMe, but for back then.” (Amazing observation, truly.)
This led us to the following question: “Why is it that kids have always cared, more than adults, about the wellbeing of animals?”
You know why. They know why. I know why.
As my students begin the difficult work of leaving childhood, we are studying World War I from the lens of children, children’s lives, children’s experience. This was their idea, not mine. I simply found the seed and had an informed sense of where to plant it.
Tomorrow. 9ish in the ante meridian, so tonight, I am talking to myself like a student: You know nothing about your PET scan until 9 a.m.MST. Nothing. Soon, you will know something new about your PET scan, but right now, you know nothing. Everything you think you know is a layperson’s guess.
Tomorrow will be uncomfortable, scary, possibly unpleasant. However, reader, most of my days are relatively happy. Many of my days are full of shocking abundance — abundance of material needs, abundance of beauty, abundance of love.
While choosing a Spotify playlist, I lazily selected “Best Rock of 1987.” I was sick of 70s shit, and genuinely wished to be reminded what was popular in 1987, some random year from my childhood.
As I concluded this post, I paused to think about where I was in 1987, hoping perhaps the year held some significance for me. Turns out it did. ’87 was my 6th grade year, my first year of middle school which, back then, at my school, we called “junior high.”
I think 6th grade is when I really started sinking my teeth into music because I do remember listening to even some of the more obscure tunes as a middle schooler. I probably had one of those penny cassette tape subscriptions that introduced me to a world of new music and to the world of predatory lending . . .
And with that, I’m off to maybe watch some Motley Crue (apologies to the mandatory umlaut), or maybe watch Friday or whatever silly music or film will keep my monkey mind from racing off places it doesn’t belong.
Wish me good vibes, reader.
I’ll update you on the other side.
