It’s Another Day At The Oncology Center

It is noon and I am hooked up to an IV again. The nurse says it looks like people like using my right arm and I smile and say it is better than having to use both.

She lifts an eyebrow and I tell her about my time in Grapevine at the Chateau called Baylor Scott & White where lucky people like me get not one, but two IVs at once.

The nurse tells me as soon as I suck this bag down I am free to go. I smile and ask her when I should expect to start feeling better.

She says it might take two or three bags.  I nod my head and say if they knew where I was bleeding from it might help.

Truth is I don’t know if I still am or not, I have another procedure that is supposed to help shine a light on that.

There are three more weeks of this. Three more weeks of pumping my body full of iron and then a period of waiting before we do blood work to see if anything has changed.

Thirty minutes of sitting with my work and personal phones in front of me. In between responding to emails I catch the tail end of Spiderman and watch Peter Parker walk through a world in which all who knew him have forgotten who he was.

Peter is staring at the woman who no longer remembers she once loved him and I think about a piece of fiction I wrote 14 years ago.

I have that crazy feeling inside my head now. It is an itch I can’t scratch and an ache that won’t go away. It is you. You are to blame. You are thinking about me or thinking about us.

Don’t know exactly what you are thinking. Can’t say whether it is positive or negative. Can’t tell if you are dreaming about what could be or lamenting what was. I just know that I am on your mind just as you know that I am on yours.

Sometimes this feeling makes me want to howl with frustration. I want to go outside and run with the moon and unleash my rage against the sky. I want to run until I am exhausted and just collapse wherever I fall but I can’t and I won’t.

I can’t because I am unwilling to share that side with anyone else. I am unwilling to expose it because it won’t be understood. It will be dissected, discussed and misinterpreted and I can’t deal with that. Not because I am not capable of it but because it is just too much. It is just more than I am willing to give and that is reason enough not to do it.

So I listen to Mick singing Visions of Paradise and I think about when this was one of our songs.

“Don’t tell me when
Something is beautiful
And don’t tell me how to
Talk to my friends
Just tell me the names of
The stars in the sky
What’s your favorite song
Tell me the names of the
Lovers you had
Before I came along

Don’t put your arms around me
And don’t hold me tight
‘Cause I could get used to
Your vision of paradise

And don’t ask me where
All of the pain goes
‘Cause you make me feel
That I don’t know myself
You say that you want me forever
And I say that love is no crime
So tell me the names of the children
We’ll have at the end of the line”

I wonder sometimes if maybe I am crazy and confused. I wonder sometimes if wishes and wants have got me so damn mixed up that I can’t tell what is from what was. And then Mick sings that line using your heart and not your head and I wonder if he is talking to us.

The sensible, grounded man that lives inside me says that it is just a song that was constructed to appeal to people. It was written so that we would relate and that is what I am doing, relating to it.

But goddamn it woman, I feel it. I sense it. I know it. Just as I could tell when you were about to pick up the telephone to call me I know now what it is I sense but I don’t know what to do about it.

Don’t know whether to walk, no run the other direction as fast I can so that I can try to forget. But here is the deal, life is nothing but a series of moments in time set against the backdrop of the people who share them.

We did more than share a moment. We built an entire universe and lived a thousand lives inside our secret world. We loved and we lived. Man loves woman and girl loves boy.

I don’t have to ask your permission to love you and I don’t have to live in the past. I can pretend that once was is just a memory and I can move on past the moment. That is the beauty of choice and free will. But I can also admit, accept and acknowledge that something more is going on and I can follow the signs through the mist and blaze a trail through the fog.

I can see if that helps that which once was morph into that which is and that is what I intend to do. Life is short and our grip is tenuous. So I will do what I do best and dance in the fire and dare the flames to burn me. I will climb the hills and walk through the valleys because that was the promise I made to you and I will hold myself to it.

And I will do what is required so that I can determine whether the ghosts I see are the spirits of the future or the shades of the past. And in the midst of it all I will continue to hold out my hand so that you can take it. Because I never stopped being your hero and I never gave up.

You Need To Fight

I’m thinking about the two Nigerian men who lifted me off of the gurney and put me on the Cat scan so the docs can figure out if I am still bleeding.

I am naked under the blanket and my legs are still covered in my own blood. I think one of the men says “you need to fight” and think you haven’t any idea who I am.

Fighting isn’t something you have to ask or push me to do, at least not if it is important to me. But I am also thinking that for a moment I gave up and was ready to let go.

It’s a hard thing to accept but it’s not something I perseverate on because I changed my mind. I am still here.

The night of my 57th birthday I took a second look at myself in the mirror because I thought I had something in my beard.

I was right, more gray and more white. I pulled out the picture above to do a now and then and shook my head. It’s less than two years since I took that photo so it seems strange to see so much change, but when you dance with death it leaves a reminder.

The phone rings and a guy wants to know if ever make it out to Cleveland Heights. I tell him not recently, but there has been discussion about it. Got a project out that way that I might walk.

I don’t mention Tommy’s, Bialy’s Bagels, Coventry or any of the 10,000 Cleveland references I could make. No burning river or balloon jokes.

I just tell him I might be heading out to New Jersey to meet with the purchasing manager for that project and that I might need to go to Mississippi.

****

It’s after 5 PM and I am standing in the gym catching my breath between sets. This is day three or four of lifting weights with my left arm.

I have to remind myself to be cautious about how hard I push my arm because I don’t want to reinjure it. It feels good and I know I can lift far more than I am but I hate the idea of having to deal with surgery on it again.

At the end of my workout I feel that familiar wave of exhaustion anemia brings and I head to the car and collapse in the driver’s seat.

I close my eyes thinking I’ll go home and take a nap. Twenty minutes later I open my eyes and realize the body decided we were going to rest.

It reminds me a bit of that hospital stay. Sometimes I would fall asleep mid sentence. It hits me in waves now, I am good for a bit and then it feels like I got hit.

If I need to force myself to fight through it I can absolutely do it but I am tired of feeling like I need to fight.

I am optimistic about the infusions working but there are moments where I wonder what happens if they don’t.

Sometimes You Don’t Need To Know

Got a guy who is trying to convince me to sign him up as a trainer. Been down this road a bunch of times recently.

His pitch is that if he teaches me a few things I’ll be able to use that information to immediately improve my health.

I listen and respond to a few of his questions and get tired of it.

“Sometimes you don’t need to know or to understand. Sometimes you need to cut ties, walk away and forget it all. Or sometimes you need to just walk away for a while.”

He tells me he doesn’t understand what I am talking about and I say “no, you wouldn’t.”

I don’t tell him that a bunch of things I had been fighting to understand aren’t a problem for me anymore.

I don’t tell him that something just clicked in my head and I feel more settled. I got a second chance and I am enjoying the adventure and doing my best to accept I have never had the kind of control over things that I want.

It is ok, I don’t need full control, I only need the faith in my ability to navigate it all. And I have that, I have beaten every bad day I have ever had.

Even beat the angel of death, I can ease on down the road with comfort, I am pretty good at it.