Sunday, January 5, 2014

s/he/one/jonathan and the kraken clutches of doom

***12/ 4/ 13

Pre-MRI: 

I am drawing too near predictable indignities to be able to afford avoidable undignified behavior. It's best to get an early start of not stockpiling ones legacy with instances of uncouthness, best to curb ones penchant for scatological language as soon as possible. One can't erase all traces (no matter how successfully s/he thinks s/he has employed impersonal pronouns) of persistent juvenility, but one can begin now. So now . . .

I, specifically (now that I'm all grown up), get the feeling that the oatmeal is about to hit the fan.     By that, I mean, recent symptoms make me suspect we'll find some tumor activity in either size or number this afternoon. "Why so optimistic?" one might ask. If s/he is being sarcastic.

"Well," Jonathan might reply, pausing . . . will he answer sarcasm with sarcasm or with his newfound maturity? 

Here are the recent symptoms as regressions to old ones: deteriorating facial muscle control, numbness in left-side extremities, diminished vision, garbled speech trending toward indecipherable.  Balance iffier, gait iffierest (to say nothing of trot or canter); and most horrifying to me, eating becoming too much like work again.

As emerging from the old: left hand growing stiff and a little achy when clinched.

Why so optimistic? I'm not really. In fact, I'm little pessimistic right now.  Why so? Because, in boiling, blurping, bubbles, the oatmeal is rising.
  
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Circa-MRI: On the way to the clinic, I received a message from my mother telling me that my sister-in-law in Arkansas had gone into labor. Johnny was on the way. A namesake. A nephew. A glimpse of a legacy unspooling like an open-bail line let loose down the river, to eddy, to dive, to snag crags, to bob, nodding to prismatic trout, as dignified as the river itself--silvering into the next generation of shoal and slate. Into a gulf, a sea, an ocean, a silvering moon.

Intra-MRI: Supine, I'm slid into into my cold sepulcher where and when I typically remember just as the technician shuts herself out and me irretrievably in, that I misremembered to take off my cowboy-belt buckled by only a slightly miniaturized state of Texas and my steel-studded dog collar; where and when I typically think of Jonah and wonder what the weather is like in Nineveh.  But here and now, I am hoping that Johnny beats me out of our relative constrictions, it seems only fair, first come, first served, and all; and I am hoping to make it up for Christmas to kiss his delicious head during this optimum time for such delight.  I try to count the Price Is Right  Big Wheel clacks, thrum my belly in time with the Lone Ranger clomping up dust on Silver across miles of arid terrain, imagine being teased by schoolyard finders-ergo-keepers--neener, neener, neener--the typical din of this glorified, mortuary table. 

But here and now, I lose track of all pastime techniques.  I wonder if Johnny's here.  Come Christmas will I be able to kiss his whole delicious face clear off the face of this whole delicious planet?

Probably. Johnny's uncle is optimistic. 

Inter-neuro-onco-docto-office: the Verdict.  Images show growth in one the newer tumors--it's shaped like a nickel-sized paisley with an ultra-thin doily border, for reference. We suspect (me with my M. A. in Jingle Writing, he with his Doctoral Alphabet in Wrenching the Agonized from the Kraken Clutches of Doom) that the regressing and emerging symptoms are results of this growth.  We decide to add chemo to my Avastin, starting soon. Which, as I know from my 2012 experience, will be grody and not the teensiest delicious.

Nevertheless, I'm positive that I'll be home for Christmas, if only in one pair of jeans.


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