Thought about things, August 11 by Lady
Lady wrote this this morning trying to process the 10″ thing growing inside me that most likely has to be removed and possibly radiated… they mentioned chemotherapy as well but I’ve never read a postitive thing about chemo so told the doctor that wasn’t going to happen and she replied that it doesn’t seem to work all that well anyway. Going to get another cat scan with dye, and then they’re going to stick a needle through me to sample it for deadliness before deciding which way to go.
I beat throat cancer in 2005. Lady beat eye cancer in 2017. Our 1st cat died of cancer in 2016. Into the ring re-go.
(I lucked out when Lady knocked at my door in 2005 ignoring my GO AWAY unwelcome mat. She’s at minimum as talented as I in word, foto, and art (some say better), and she’s 3-7 IQ points smarter than I… AND, she has a goodness about her, a kind heart, a sharable sweetness. I am one lucky outlier. May you all be so fortunate.)
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Thought about things, August 11
by Lady
My hope is that it is benign and they decide to leave it in or can even break it up and drain it some way if it is benign. If it isn’t benign, maybe it’s sufficiently slow in growing and encapsulated so that we don’t have to worry about it.
The doctor woman says she needs more images. She showed us slice show slices of his body, a progression of an MRI, then a CT scan, how one kidney is pushed inches to his front by an unusual gray area, a gap that persists through a number inches in slides. She showed me how his upper stomach is up near the heart. They need a new scan with dye to understand more about the various grays and what they mean. There needs to be more clarity. I asked her if his scoliosis could be making things all funky. Maybe the body is just trying to cushion him. Do you think?
My husband is really tough. To give you an idea, when we traveled, he walked around for three years with a 60 pound backpack all the time even though he needed a hip replacement and didn’t know it. He also had a hernia at that time, and he’d hold it in as he walked!
We finally fixed the hernia in Mexico in a small clinic that looked like it came out of the forties. We handed the doctor $1800 for the whole thing. Husband said that during the operation he heard his heart monitor stop which really freaked him out, and then it came back on. I guess he must have been under twilight sedation? His clinic bed was this flimsy thing like a war time hospital bed from the old times with bouncy springs and tired, thin sheets. I had to help him out of it as we left. We were in and out the same day but I remember waiting for him to come to liveliness enough to help him up. Then we hailed a taxi and returned to our temporary home in Oaxaca.
The water in Oaxaca was not safe to drink from the faucet. I had dysentery twice there until I finally learned about pills people take as a proactive measure to get rid of the amoebas. We picked coffee in the mountains with a family, and they said the water was safe from the faucet. It was not so safe for me and resulted in much time working slime out in the bathroom and bushes as the others put the coffee cherries into their hanging buckets a mile down the mountain and a mile back up again to their house.
They had a kitchen camp at the shade grown field, and a pineapple grew right out of the ground and lizards made love on a log. The woman made chicken soup with vegetables I’d not seen before. We marched back up the mountain.
The man sang in the morning on the roof, drying out the laid out cherries.
In their kitchen the tile was a beautiful turquoise blue and an orange cat would amble across the floor. We pressed masa from a cauldron at a local vendor into home made tortillas. We poured and spread masa onto something that clamped it down and cooked them into corny papyrus. We drank grainy homegrown coffee from large ceramic cups. I do not understand the economics of their heavenly place on this planet and their whitewashed walls. Richer than many people here somehow, yet poor. There was a banana plant on the side and they showed us how the plant is macheted down and grows back up again. Voila, more bananas.
The first time I had dysentery I was in a bed for a week and I remember the bed. It had a huge carved headboard, but I don’t remember the week.
After my husband’s surgery week a year later, he pulled his own stitches out from his surgery and decided to take showers in the dirty water. I worried about his wound, had a breakdown and couldn’t sleep for three weeks, bad time cured by drinking a beer in the afternoon and reading a book from the expat library (a group of misfits) on the rooftop of our place.
The roof was where we spent most of our time, and we had a lime tree up there. During the long rush hour around the city, there was a two hour cacophony of car horns that we loved from the roof. At the end they sounded like witches screeching by. Each building’s façade was a different color which to me had different meanings I’d assign to them.
We could see the mountains around, and a roof dog who lived lower down across the street. We lived right by the wheel of road around the city, a 10th of a mile down the spoke leading to the old town square. At twilight the air turned blue and the banana man came down the road with a cart of roasting bananas and he’d blow a mournful whistle. Everything announced itself with its own signature noise, including the garbage truck all of us chased after in our nightgowns and slippers to toss in our weekly trash. Every dawn, a man came by and swept the whole road.
There was a weekly parade down our street, either people celebrating and usually with their own little marching orchestra, or a march for labor rights. One day we saw some circus trucks from our second story window, and could see a tiger in one. We walked to the circus, which had a big tent and a small amount of animals who were more on display than anything. We did not catch performances.
My husband’s doctor also took care of me during my husband’s recovery, but he gave me medicine that took away my thoughts (Geodone, which somehow made me think of a fake simulacrum of the planet) and hence gave me depression and made me collapse onto concrete doorway stoops or even the sidewalk as we walked, so I weaned myself off it, grew weary of the long dustiness of the dry season of Oaxaca. The grit from the adjacent freeway was so bad that we had a hole in the wall of our kitchen for sluicing the mop water off of the floor and onto the driveway. And during the rainy season, water ran down from our roof onto our tile steps into the kitchen and we pushed it out the same hole.
My husband is a man of epoxy and duct tape. He’s been known to epoxy his broken tooth to itself and give his dentist nightmares. He has many interesting stories. In his autobiography he has a chapter called “bone.” When he was little, he tried to jump a fence or some such thing, and he opened a slit in his leg that went down to the bone. He said that it was pure gleaming white, and he touched it with curiosity. Imagine! He said that when he was on his way to the hospital with his parents he kept trying to keep them calm.
Now we burn frankincense here and our deck encroaches Zoo property. In the morning we hear elephants from our bathroom window. We hear coyotes howl at the sirens on Pearl Road going to Metro Health hospital. Sometimes the owls hoot at the coyotes. Sometimes the coyotes howl at the dogs.
- Lady 8.11.2023
