Falling asleep in the parking lot

The parking lot of the sun.

I'm so tired I could sleep here in my car at the parking lot at Seton Northwest Hospital. Or in a bench behind the smoothie bar at Whole Foods. Or on the floor in your living room.

I just came from a room where I lay on a narrow bed on top of crunchy thick paper pillow. A very nice technician named Christina inserted a tube into the pillow and blew it up with warm air so that it formed around my body. It formed specifically around my body and then froze there and somehow this frozen indentation was memorized by a computer. This is now my radiation pillow and it will be driven over to a different office today so it will be where I will be when I get radiated next week. I have my own personally indented crunchy blue paper pillow.

She then told me to make myself into a heavy bag of sugar so she could move me around. She said for me not to help at all but just a slump there as heavily as I could. I was naked from the waist up with my arms over my head like a ballet dancer. I slumped there like a sack of sugar while she gently moved me around under some red lights until my chest was perfectly aligned. (To what? A star?) She then pushed a button and my body jerked backwards into a CAT scan machine where I could look up and see a three inch white plastic alien stuck to the ceiling, which was Christina's little friend. 

I laughed. He was cute to look at for a few minutes. Personally, I think they should put a poem on the ceiling of the tube room/machine for us scannees to read. Or maybe some puns. Something for us to think about while we lay there contemplating our absurd use of time. 

Here are some suggestions, the first a poem:

         Keep me fully glad with nothing. Only take my hand in your hand. 
         In the gloom of the deepening night take up my heart and play with it as you list. Bind me close to you with nothing. 
         I will spread myself out at your feet and lie still. Under this clouded sky I will meet silence with silence. I will become one with the night clasping the earth in my breast. 
         Make my life glad with nothing. 
         The rains sweep the sky from end to end. Jasmines in the wet untamable wind revel in their own perfume. The cloud-hidden stars thrill in secret. Let me fill to the full my heart with nothing but my own depth of joy. 

By Rabindranath Tagore

Or, some not poems:

I stayed up all night to see where the sun went. Then it dawned on me.

PMS jokes aren’t funny. Period.

Haunted French pancakes give me the crepes. 

Velcro, what a rip off! 

A cartoonist was found dead in his home. Details are sketchy.

I used to work in a blanket factory, but it folded. 

The other day I sent my girlfriend a huge pile of snow. I rang her up and asked, “Did you get my drift?” 

When I was in the supermarket I saw a man and a woman wrapped in a barcode. I asked “Are you two an item?” 

A dog with his leg wrapped in bandages hobbles into a saloon. He sidles up to the bar and announces “I’m lookin’ fer the man who shot my paw.”

When the scanning was complete she pulled me out like a drawer. The machine spat me out. 

She then tattooed me with three tattoos, by hand with nothing more than a needle and a bottle of ink, like they do in prison. First she gave opened a big bottle of very black ink and with a wooden toothpick type thing dabbed a few dots on me - one to the right side of my right breast, one to the left side of my left breast and one kind of in the middle of my chest. (I think, I couldn't really see, because my head was still nestled in its blue crunchy pillow). 

She then took out a long thin needle in a plastic package that was sterile and she told me she was going to push the ink into my skin in three places. Tattoo me.

She showed me a faded gray tiny dot on her wrist where she had tattooed herself. It looks like a pale gray freckle. She put the needle over the skin right over the ink dab on the right side of my breast where she had dripped the black ink and said "ready?" I said sure, and she counted 123 as she pressed the needle into my skin. It hurt, but it was kind of interesting to to feel the needle slowly go in about a half an inch. Actually it felt more like she stuck it in 3 or 4 inches but I know this is not true. I felt like she was a sewing machine and I was a bolt of fabric and the needle was being pressed in slowly for three seconds. Then she pulled it out. She did this in the two other places, and the one on my left breast, the one that will be radiated, did not hurt at all because my nerve endings over there have been pretty much shot.

I am now permanently inked. I have blood and black ink smeared around my chest in a few places under my clothing.

I asked her why I had to get radiation if I've already had four surgeries and chemotherapy. This person as a technician, but she was very kind, and I find that I get dribs and drabs of information here and there from all kinds of people. You must infer and infer and infer and absorb and absorb and absorb and overhear and ask and read, and steal information, and gather it up into your basket of cancer information, if you want to be informed. 

Here was her explanation: when you have surgery and they are lifting the tumor out of your body, parts of the evil dripping poison tumor glob can drip back into your body, and leave tiny little microscopic cells of cancer that can then reconnect and grow. Also when the surgeon cuts into you little tiny bits of cancerous cells get sliced and kind of drip off the edges of the sliced area and float around in there. In other words cancer is made up of things that are so tiny that there is simply no way to tell if you get them all out through chemical medicine, or surgery, so the radiation is just one more blast of deathness to go in there and kill kill kill whatever's in the specific location that they have mapped out as the originating tumor site. 

The only problem is that these rays kill anything. So I will have killed skin and killed tissue and possibly the radiation can also cause mutations in other tissue that could then turn into cancer. However she assured me that the doctors know exactly what they're doing, and that research shows the patients that undergo radiation on top of chemo and surgery have a much better land chance of long-term survival. So I'm going to do it.

Probably start next Monday, although I am now awaiting a phone call from a person named Kevin who supposed to be 6 foot three.

I feel sleepy.