The latter life
Remember when I used to blog about my “ass shots”? Yeah, well now I get abdomen shots once-a-month until I can find a good time to schedule more time to see another doctor about getting my reproductive organs removed. I have to make that appointment at some point, and I have to do a great many other things and sometimes when I lay out my life’s To Do List I want to hide in a bottle of Maker’s Mark and weep.
All I really want to do is make art and teach.
Once upon a time, I was selected for jury duty. This is back when I lived in Chicago. I asked a lawyer friend how to maybe get out of my jury service and she said something like “just be yourself” and while people lied their asses off in that juror pool, I told the honest fucking truth with a stupidly level fucking head.
Guess who got selected for jury duty?
Me.
Guess who got put on a boring ass, seemingly endless trial?
Me.
And why?
Because I was honest.
So this morning, thinking it might lead to an easy-access-booster while I was already at Ye Olde Cancer Centre, I stupidly fucking mentioned that I had, in fact, been exposed to COVID recently. And this was true. I got an expose. I get exposed constantly. I work with children, which is to say, I work in a potential COVID-sauna, and this scares me because based on all the scientific literature women who have got (as I do) and are being treated for (as I am) metastatic breast disease, have a lowered resistance to shit like COVID and other weird diseases that only, like, rare tropical birds and cancer patients develop. And I do not want this for myself. I know I can’t live in fear, but I am particularly scared of getting COVID because this chronic medical issue called Allison-Gruber’s-body makes me more susceptible than other fairly healthy women in their mid-forties.
I mention to medical staff at Cancer Corp that I’ve been exposed to COVID and when they ask if I’ve had any symptoms, I say, “just allergies,” and when you say “COVID exposure” plus “allergy symptoms” in Cancer Corp, it’s like saying “bomb” on an airplane (or do they allow bombs on planes now? from what I’m hearing about air travel in the media, seems possible). They don’t take kindly to the information, and they tell you, “Ma’am, I’m sorry. I’m going to have to ask you to leave and go to CVS.”
“Wait . . . you can’t just give me a rapid test here?”
“No, you’ll have to go to CVS or maybe Walgreens.”
“So I cannot get my treatment today?”
“Not until you’ve had a negative COVID test. You really should be quarantining.”
And I get it. I get that this is a place of Cancer (it’s like a place of worship, but infinitely worse), and I can’t come bringing my gross public-school-teacher germs into their place of business.
And I did burst into tears when they told me I was “going to CVS” which then meant I wasn’t going to work which meant work was going to be harder on Friday because when you miss a day, you’re a day-and-a-half behind — that’s the nature of my profession.
And I was polite because I do “get it.”
I know “why.”
But is it just me or is there something incomprehensibly absurd about an American healthcare facility telling a cancer patient to “go to CVS or Walgreens” for a simple, quick, medical test? Like are you telling me the good folks working Walgreens can perform medical services my oncology team simply cannot? It feels a bit like if a kid asked me for a bandaid and I replied, “Geez, Billy, I am sorry, but you’re going to have to find a corner store or some shit, because I literally only teach English.”
It is no one’s fault.
It is the nature of the fucking system.
The system is rotten to the core. The system is worse than “immoral”
it is indifferent — indifferent to anything that does not spell paper money gain.
So I sat in my car, in the parking lot of Cancer Corp, and pulled out my computer (had it on me because I was fully planning to return to work) and connected it to Cancer Corp’s weak ass WiFi because my iPhone is too old and busted to handle scheduling a Walgreens or CVS appointment.
And I was not at all Zen about any of this.
I was crying and cursing in my car like a fucking lunatic, and thinking all sorts of crazy shit about how I was just-going-to-quit-cancer-treatment-because-it’s-ruining-my-life.
And it does kind of ruin my life but it also sustains it and isn’t that the paradox of paradoxes, fuckers?
I’m not “quitting cancer treatment” — that was just a thought I had while frustrated and sad and angry at myself for being so naively honest when maybe what I just should have said, when asked, was “COVID? What? Anyone still getting that anymore? You don’t say!”
The honesty was, in fact, the correct choice. For my conscience. For my health. For the people I might breathe on when they’re trying to take care of me or for the people I am trying to teach or, God forbid, socialize with.
My body does, in fact, have a track record of not doing what I might “expect” it to do.
Luckily I had my choice between a rapid COVID test at a CVS at 6 pm (thus causing me to miss my treatment altogether today) or a rapid COVID test at a CVS at noon that was only like 5,000 miles from home. Feeling like a leper, I left the Cancer Corp lot, drove home to pee, then drove half an hour to a CVS for a scheduled COVID test and the woman who administered the test seemed visibly upset which didn’t . . . I don’t know . . . calm my already agitated nerves. I mean she was shaking and dropping shit.
Fortunately I got to “pilot the swab.”
Blessedly, I do not have COVID (if that test was accurate), and I got my treatment. I missed another entire day of work. I wasn’t even making art. I was driving around the city of Tucson trying to get my cancer care which has many times been interrupted, delayed, and denied by forces much bigger and stronger than me.
I just wanna teach and learn cool things and make art. That’s the truth.
I just want to teach and learn and make art. That’s all I really want to do with my life.
It’s really that simple.
And there was a moment, as I walked, crying, from Cancer Corp back to my car, with the flimsy medical bracelet still on my wrist, when my Angry Brain said, “Just go to work. Do not pass CVS. Do not proceed. Fuck it. Let nature take its course with you.”
And then I thought of this picture I keep in my home “studio” (talk about bomb explosions) of myself at maybe three or four, and I’m looking right at the camera, and my eyes are very big and very clear. And I thought of that girl, who I still am, and I was like, “Goddamnit. I will get my treatment today. I will get my treatment today.”
I got my treatment today. Blood draws, plus an infusion in the abdomen. I’m getting a “better” drug now called Rolodex or some shit . . .
It all sounds terrible, and it is terrible, and it’s also not so bad.
There are worse things in life than having to drive around in Tucson in November looking for a nasal swab so you can get an abdominal injection.
I am trying to be more grateful for the medical advancements that allow me to live longer, and I am often confounded at why sometimes such simple things — like a needle through skin — must be so indefatigably complex. I know how to survive, but man I get so fucking tired of fighting for every last scrap.
I keep thinking what I could have done differently today, to have made my day easier, and I guess I could have gone to get the COVID test after work once I found out I had been exposed. But there was a meeting, and I had an errand, and before I knew it, it was six p.m. and I was tired from teaching all day, and I figured, “Well, I’m going to Cancer Corp tomorrow. I’m not bleeding out my eyeballs or even slightly coughing. I’ve been sneezing a lot. That’s it. They’ll just test me at Cancer Corp.”
And maybe this was the point of today: suffering is unavoidable. I was so cocky today, I left the house with the faculty bathroom keys in my pocket (I’m always forgetting them and having to use the kids’ bathroom, and if you have read anything about American public schools, y’all know all about the student bathroom situations right now), stopped at Starbucks for a coffee before heading in the direction of Cancer Corp. Like I was just some “busy-business-lesbian-dropping-in-for-a-little-cancer-care-ahead-of-work.” Like I was going to go in there, flash my ID card (I do have a Cancer Corp ID — jealous?), push up my sleeve, drop my pants, get a few jabs, go be with kids, come home, eat cereal for dinner, pass out from exhaustion.
Not so fast, bitch, a voice said. Only this time, the voice wasn’t mine, and it wasn’t coming from inside my head it was coming from outside my head. It was the voice of America. It was the voice of hubris. Or maybe it was God. I will likely never know. Whatever it was, it totally fucked up my plans so that I could learn . . . what? That I know how to be broke and survive? That I am adaptable? That I have a more appallingly high tolerance for bullshit than I ever had for booze? There’s gotta be a lesson in today somewhere, damnit.
Got my cancer care, though. By hook or fucking crook, I got that shit. And I didn’t come home and drink about how mad I am at the American Healthcare system, and I am mad, and freaked out and shaking and dropping shit like the CVS clinician. I’m not entirely okay with what happened today, and what can I do?
I got my meds.
It’s over.
NEXT.
And probably that was the lesson of the day: in order to live, really fucking live, you sometimes have to cope with bullshit even when you are so-not-in-the-mood to cope with bullshit. (This could also be a Confucianism.) Maybe today was an in-real-time reminder of that shit I’m always telling myself about how I can steer my boat, but I can’t steer the sea.
And I can do forward. I really can.
Also I have no choice.
Forward and Onward has arrived, and arrived, and arrived.
And Forward and Onward will be, and be, and be even if I am gone,
and I don’t want to be gone just yet. So I’m doing what I can to survive. I’m playing all the cards I’ve got. Every fucking one, currently. And I wish life didn’t have to be so hard. And sometimes life’s not very hard at all. Sometimes, life is effortless.
The latter life is, for damn near everyone these days, shockingly rare.
