Mabon and the Sukkot Moon
Wednesday gratefuls: Brother Mark. Ode in my dream. Dr. Buphati. PSA. No news. Labs today. Metabolic. TSH. Testosterone. Phlebotomy and me. Rich, red blood. Vampiric profession. Kate’s ABD. Kenton. Kate’s last days. Signing love. Kate, always Kate. Old man’s voice. IHOP. Tony’s Market. Vegetable soup. & with Chicken. The slow beauty of leaf abscission. Gold coins spread on roadways and Mountain Meadows.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Freeing myself
Kavannah: Patience
One brief shining: Another spontaneous morning found me on the road for a nostalgia breakfast at an IHOP in Littleton, then a visit to Tony’s Market where I picked up pre-cut Vegetables for my Bean and Vegetable Soup, a large antipasto salad, lox, a long baguette sandwich with roast beef and cheddar, and a can of Lemon Rose Tea; on the way home I considered matters of life and death.
A dream last night. Disturbing. My old and good friend Mark Odegard showed up. We went somewhere together and he told me he was disappointed in me. I didn’t get it. Yet he persisted. All right, I said, let’s take a break then. Made me sad and a little angry in the dream.
Brother Mark wrote me a touching response to yesterday’s post. In sum encouraging me to think of the people with whom my life is entwined. I appreciated the reminder to see the decision from outside my own considerations.
Drums of impending doom. This is the aspect of having cancer that is difficult to convey. Especially when you’ve had it for ten years and counting. The many tests. Of all sorts. Blood Draws. CT’s. Bone Scans. Axumin PET Scans. Then, PET scans with a newer isotope for a tracer. Getting the results. With breath held in just a bit. The treatments. Surgery. Radiation. Drugs. More radiation. Learning the results of the treatments. Side effects that are not pleasant. The continuous reminder, as if I’d forget, that within lurk cells that have their own future in mind. Death to the host if necessary. The statistics that now include me. My actual life. How likely am I to conform to the mean?
Getting a new doctor, another oncologist to add to my urological and radiation oncologists. Those relationships. Regular visits with them. Wondering about their work load, their skill sets. All throwing up uncertainty as if it were a chew toy.
No, these drums do not beat all the time. Often they go silent for long periods. But surveillance always finds them awakened. Not necessarily funereal, but not calming either.
The cumulative effect is an overburden, one that grows with each passing year. News that is rarely unalloyed good news. The only real good news I got over the last ten years was clean margins, no cancer outside the prostate when it was removed. That one proved untrue only a year later.
Not complaining. I want to emphasize that. All this has made cancer a chronic disease for me. And I’ve lived a full and complete life during all of these years. Not crippled by depression and not often despairing. Even so.
