Fourth Eve

It's the eve of my fourth surgery on my dented left beast. This experience of surgery - once anticipated with awe and fear and specialness - has now become merely routine, banal. I'll just catch a ride to the hospital Tuesday morning at 5 am, and get dropped off at the swishing auto doors in the special surgery parking lot. I'll wave to the sleepy dude parking attendant we have gotten to know. He runs a very special lot - it's small, there is no charge or ticket for those of us lucky enough to come here. He sits on a wooden chair, reading a book, his long hair flopping stylishly over one eye. He shows you to a nice spot in the small living room of a parking lot. 

Mike'll drop me - then go back home to tend to the morning rush of eggs and shoes and backpacks and peanut butter and jelly and teeth and yelling - peanut butter and yelly sandwiches - that ends up in a loud car on a loud highway and a final denouement of flying out of the car with a slam. Then: a wall of traffic cuz your commute back is terribly unfortunately the wrong way. 

Anyway before he commences this grind I'll go up the quiet elevator that penthouse-ishly deposits me right into the beehive of surgical bustle. I'll walk ten feet to the left and sign in with the elegant slim man with the ebony skin and dazzly smile, then go sit behind the huge water wall art thing and watch my name appear on the digital screen: Adams/Nelson. My surgeon. 

Across the room will be some slumping sleeping raggedy family or clump of grey people. Always someone. I don't stare - anyone there waiting already at 5 am is probably not having fun. What happened I'll wonder - gunshot at midnight? Crash? Pop had a heart attack? Probably not elective rhinoplasty. 

I'll read Dark Places as I wait. Things are coming back. One is my appetite for reading - once again I can't get enough. And I'm reading book after book and books and articles and essays all at once. I'm reading all of Gillian Flynn as fast as I can - ate up Sharp Objects the other day and now I'm into this dark place joint. I love the psychopathic murdery messed up fucked up nature of her books - they are like Law and Order meets David Lynch plus sharp super sharp pop culture commentary and eating Fritos - simply delicious. Yesterday I held the book open in my left hand while unloading the dishwasher with my right. If you think reading is so great you may not understand that it's an escape drug. I'm on it.

Then I'll hear my name called. But not for surgery - no, the first stop is always with Ye Olde Financial Department. Lucky (??) for us, we've already blown the deductible this year so it won't be too horrible. I think I should have a St. David's/Jane Nelson credit card by now - an account. I'm a frequent flyer here. Yes bartender I'll start a tab.

Soon I'll be called behind the curtain into a freezing world of green fabric, needles inserted skillfully by a tall friendly man, an anesthesia nurse with alopecia and expertly tattooed eyebrows, and endless minute ticking away until I'll WANT the surgery to get started. Why arrive at 5:00 for a 7:30 event? I'm easy to set up - big juicy veins that invite the IV warmly, no questions in particular (I've so been here), no fear, no special requirements. I'm a peach - an easy patient. Why can't I just slide in at 7:20? 

Soon they'll wheel me back into an even impossibly colder room and ask me to scooch over onto a tiny table. I may or may not remember this - they finally inject me with some magic forget juice literally as they wheel me down the hall. Sometimes I remember lots - getting to the OR, joking with the nurses and doctors, hearing the radio, thinking that the table is so skinny how do fat people fit - my arms can't even lie next to me WHAT DO THEY DO WHILE I'M UNDER, tie me onto this surfboard of a table?!!! - and other times my memory ends around corner two of the hall. 

When I wake up someone will pick me up I think. Just another Tuesday. 

I wanted to drive on a field trip this Thursday with the eighth-grade to go to a farm, but I'm not sure if I should do that 48 hours after surgery while I'm still wearing an ace bandage. But I might. I'm very used to this.

I seem ok. Now in this time valley between one event in the next. But underneath I know that all is not quite right. 

She lay in the bed on her right side. Her right arm was tucked under the pillow she held between it and her left leg, which was quick forward like a flattened sideways runner pinned to the ground. The bed. Above her was the ceiling of the clicking fan. Below the ceiling seemed to be another invisible ceiling made out of atoms and silver. Like the ceiling in an old car, a 1962 Dodge, that is sagging where it has become separated from the glue that held it to the inside of the metal capsule. This invisible ceiling in her bedroom was sagging toward her with some kind of weight like I have a bowl of water was resting on top of the gauze and was pulling it down down down. The heavy part of the invisible ceiling had sunk lower and lower toward her and was now pressing on her left arm and pressing her to the bed. It seemed to press on her throat to make her feel a little sick. She was pressed and could not move.

6 Things 6 Weeks Out From Chemo

1. My hair is chia-petting in but my eyelashes just fell out. Is there a complaint department? I still apply mascara to the air in front of my lids.

2. There is still a chemical wall between me and the world. Food and alcohol and drugs are through the looking glass - a bit backwards and seemingly real but not quite right.

3. Every 97 minutes a warm hot breeze breezes me.

4. My children are sick of this. Fiona wants me to put on a hat in the pick up line at school. Violet rolls her eyes and complains "God MOM why do you always have to tell everyone everything about your stupid cancer?!!" she says if I even make any casual reference to my hair or a hat or say that I might not be able to go on a field trip or something. I can see her point, maybe it seems like for too long everything is been about me. And maybe I don't need to mention anything, but sometimes when I see someone I haven't seen for a long time and I have no hair they ask me about it. Also I feel this weird obligation to put other people at ease, to bring up the subject or break the ice before they feel like they have to. Like, yes I know I have no hair, ha ha ha, isn't it just delightfully hilarious? This is something my mom would say. But don't worry about me, I just have a touch of cancer, everything is great. Ha ha, it's cool! Am I polite? Or am I seeking attention? She thinks I'm trying to get attention, I don't know what I'm doing. 

5. That's another thing - people ask me what's happening, why is this happening, why is that happening, when will your hair grow out, what color will it be, will it be frizzy, will radiation make you tired, why are your eyelashes falling out now? Why are you having to have four lumpectomies for god's sake?!?!?? How common is this? Exactly what is going on inside your body, exactly exactly exactly?? EXACTLY? The thing is, this is all new to me. I have never had cancer before. I do not know the answers. I'm not an expert.

6. I'm stiff and crinkly. When I get up to walk I kind of hobble for a minute or two. Am I getting old? Did chemicals crunch up my bones and joints a little bit? Is my brain crushing me so that I'm in a different gravitational force? I feel differently than I used to feel physically and mentally.

Outside the tornado we are blasting along here merrily and I like it. Seeing lots of friends and playing and playing and playing.