Spindles

Another drug I injest through my chest is called Taxotere, which I have discovered is an "anticancer substance of vegetable origin" and is also a "spindle poison." Are you a vegan or vegetarian or or person who presumes to like vegetables perhaps? (I say presume, because in some of my experience vegans and vegetarians are people who do the worst things to vegetables, which I find highly ironic. I think vegetables can be quite delicious.) Vegetable is now a highly charged adjective. Vegetable poisons. Vegetable politics. Vegetable furniture. Vegetable counseling and mail order grooms. 

According to the Merriam Wenster Dictionary the term "spindle" means:

1 a : a round stick with tapered ends used to form and twist the yarn in hand spinning b : the long slender pin by which the thread is twisted in a spinning wheel c : any of various rods or pins holding a bobbin in a textile machine (as a spinningframe.

I tend to get spindle and spinning looms and spinnerets or something mixed up in my head in some vague fairy-tale-evil-stepmother versus beautiful innocent young girl miasma, or a spidery Ariadne Greek themed dream. With pricked fingers and blood and death and sleep and dark attics or Hades. Metaphor, part of the layered Jungian same story never ending narrative of human life: blood birth, blood spilled, blood death, no escape. We, as in humanity, have pondered and written our story, seeking its meaning, for millennia, always through a red lens. A feminine red lens - overcompensated for with fits of knights and rules and gods. Yeats said the "blood dimmed tide." Always a prick and innocence lost, and always death/birth. To me this spindle idea is part.

So then, what is a spindle poison? Is this a redundant phrase?

Well apparently when chromosomes break apart they then migrate along a "mitosis spindle" which is a thread of protein. Spindle poisons get in there and "disorganize" this action. Let's just say they fuck it all up. The chromosomes, a colorful bunch, are all like "hey let's split, cheerio!" and they ride their little tiny bicycles along the thread highway and then this poison rain comes along and rains sludge upon them so their little windshield wipers on their goggles don't work and they all crash up. Or something. 

A quote in and amongst the jargony text I'm inferring does say:

"Unfortunately, spindle poisons, as numerous and varied as they are, still are yet to be 100% effective at ending the formation of tumors."

That is rather unfortunate. Right now that little set of evil vegetables is killing and chilling in a Poe-like manner parts of me. Namely the most far out parts, the very ends of the very ends of my star points if I were a starfish: my finger tips and toe ends. They are deadly tingling or tinglingly dying. Their nerves are shriveling up and calling in sick. I only hope that if a rogue cancer cell is hiding in my body, that it's chosen Big Toe, Right Side, as its address because everyone in that room is dead. 

Where've I been?

Mailing stuff, lots of stuff. I've been very postal.

Making tea.

De-pressing

Reading cramming gorging on poetry

Losing eye hair beauty

Even doing online poetry trivia contests like some kind of freak cat poetry lady weirdo.

Having guests. 

Getting comfortable with being awake all night and just being there. I feel about the same if I sleep or don't, eat or don't, drink or don't. Do or don't. Mostly I don't. Wanna.

Dreaming. In one dream I was angrily gushing at my mother for not understanding how awful it was for me to feel so wasted on life/death feeling that I wondered if I wanted to go on, that it was like I'd lost my own me and saying accusingly to her something like god you don't even know what it's like, it's like losing a child, you don't even know! And simutaneously knowing how impossibly hugely grandly evil a thing that was for me to say or even conceive of because yes she did know did lose a child my brother and no one knew it better than her, and me, and my sister, and my father....and at that moment the dream dissolved disintegrated and I rose to the surface of my consciousness (under which I'd only been an inch) with a dreadful feeling of guilt and shame and awfulness and dread sorrow. For her. For her? For what? And the question of am I really a horrible person? Everything was terrible.

Floating. Forgetting. Everything.

Do

Write to me

Borrow a book

Ask me a favor

Take me out to lunch

Take three items out of my house

Tickle my child

Put away my dishes and shoes and scissors/debris

Tell me about you

Share a fantastic poem

Tell me what you think about the music I recommend you listen to

Puzzle me

Give me a long survey or questionnaire or exam or quiz or test

Watch television with me while eating snacks

Take my children out to lunch

Charm my husband

Leave me a secret note written on the wall somewhere in my house or inside of the door or cupboard 

Say anything

Laugh inappropriately 

Tell outrageous lies and stories  

Don't

Bring or send me any physical items larger than 2 inches tall by 3 inches wide, unless from Nordstrom or Iceland or your drawer

Worry

Fear me

Wonder what to say - anything'll do

Censor 

People asked - that's why the list above. 

Last chemo February 6

Then I'll be radiant 

Sources:

1. Made up 

2.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3086919/

3.http://www.oncoprof.net/Generale2000/g09_Chimiotherapie/gb09_ct12.html