Mabon and the oh so bright Harvest Moon
Thursday gratefuls: Laurie, PET scan tech. The rickety metal stairs. PET scan on wheels. Handicap placard. Shadow, my sweet girl. Kate, always Kate. Farmers. Gardeners. Horticulturists. Bee Keepers. Arborists. Seed Savers. Heirloom Seeds. Vegetables. Flowers. Fruit. Nuts. Herbs. Artemis. Fungi. Light Eaters. Peace.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Moonlight
Life Kavannah: Wu Wei
Week Kavannah: Yesod. Groundedness.
Tarot: paused
One brief shining: Shadow lifts the miniature tire high in the air, firmly gripped in her sharp teeth, shakes it as she holds tight, then on the ground, rolls over on her back and the tire does not yield, she presses harder, rolls again, shaking, shaking, until she decides to go for another toy.
Peace: Don’t know much about it yet. Headlines. Pictures of Israelis dancing. Trump’s great bulk swelling with dreams of Noble Prizes. Gazans, I imagine, collapsing with some relief though wary, caught still between Hamas and Jewish fears.
Still reeling. Trying to imagine this as the truth, bring it into my reality. Hoping. That other shoe not far off the floor. Time, tincture of time as my Kate would say.
The Middle East has changed in fundamental ways though we don’t what they are just yet. My hope is for a return to the Saudi/Israel/Emirates peace deal. A new axis of the self-interested, Sunnis and Jews together against Shia terrorism.
Another hope: Netanyahu prosecuted and jailed. War as a crime. Lengthening it for his own selfish, evil needs.
A Palestinian state. May it be so.
Until more becomes evident I finish this.
Just a moment: The Burger King as peacemaker? Hell, let him have the credit if the peace holds. Yet. What about peace at home? What about his war on the poor, the Brown, the non-Christian? Give peace afar and take it away here? Not the mark of a sane man.
We cannot let any adulation he receives paper over cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, to burning food and medicine already allocated for 3rd world peoples, to pressuring the courts with threats and bad lawyering, to stressing the strongest and best functioning economy in the world, to his destruction of our reputation abroad.
Still. A. Scumbag.
PET Scan: I rolled onto Dry Creek Road at 11:50 am, forty-five minutes from home, drove a short distance past Pulmonary Intensivists who treated Kate now long ago, and into the parking lot of Rocky Mountain Cancer Care. All medicine all the time.
Checked in, paid my $250 copay for imaging, and sat down to wait. A young man sat nearby, a strained worried look on his face. He did not invite conversation and I followed my usual siloing by pulling out Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, my readers, finding my place, and continuing to follow Lily Bart’s journey through the Gilded Age with nothing but beauty to sustain her.
“Buckman.”
“Sort of,” I said under my breath. Jaggedness from the drive and the scan leaking out. Laurie guided me through the halls of this older facility, out a door to the outside, and up metal stairs to the mobile PET Scan unit. The same one I had my initial scan in so many years ago when it sat in faraway Aurora.
Laurie covered my legs with a warm blanket as she readied me for the injection of the isotope attached PSMA. First, a butterfly needle for an IV. A push of saline. Opening a lead cabinet with the same radiation hazard emblem on it I had on my red t-shirt from Los Alamos. A syringe with no more than half a teaspoon of a yellow liquid. In through the IV. Another push of saline.
As the radioactive yellow liquid moved into my bloodstream, it takes about fifty minutes for it to find and link up with the prostate cancer cells metastasized in various parts of my body, I tilted the chair back, closed my eyes, said my mantra-Stream flowing, White Pine rooting-and took a rest somewhere between sleeping and dreaming.
Laurie came back to see if I wanted to use the men’s room before the scan. Always a good idea. Back inside. When we returned, Laurie positioned me on the metal sled that glides in and out of the scanner. Again I closed my eyes, still a bit drowsy from my nap. Twenty minutes later, scan finished, I got back in Ruby and drove home.