A Bit of Light Reading

At the end of my consultation with the radiation oncology team on Thursday I was handed a blue fabric bag, in it were several booklets to educate me about what's to come. Courtesy of your tax dollars and donations to the Juravinski Cancer Centre my fine people, I thank you.

The bag has been at the end of my bed for four days now. It handily could be used for groceries, in a pinch work as a purse, store wayward trinkets, collect dust.  I continue to think of all kinds of uses for the bag, but I struggle with actually stretching my hand in to start reading what I'm supposed to be reading in preparation for the first step - the tattoos.

I already know how tattoos work, don't I? You decide to permanently imprint your body with a design and it hurts like the dickens. That I know I can deal with, I already wrestle with the dickens on a regular basis. And if I would choose to get a tattoo, I'd probably stop at dots and little lines anyway - once I realized that it does hurt a lot I'd beg them to knock it off. I'm not a glutton for punishment. Some of my blog posts may suggest otherwise, but truly I'm not into that sort of thing and trying to run (hobble my way?) in the opposite direction as fast as I can.

I'll be reading about the radiation treatments, the risks, the side effects... stuff I think I've pretty much already learned on Wikipedia and the Mayo Clinic website. I have a lot of time on my hands, education has become my full-time occupation. Besides staring longingly at my big New York City photograph sitting just beyond my lovely blue bag. They really ought not to be in the same sight line, but it's a small room that my daughter and I share, and I need to keep my stuff on my own side. It reminds me of car rides when I was little, my brother and I were not to let any part of our physical self cross the imaginary line dividing the back seat. Let me tell you, it's only he who broke that rule, I was a perfect angel :-)


So the bag still stares back at me. The details of the end of the appointment are a bit of a haze, one of the specialists took out the booklets - crossed out a bunch of pages that aren't relevant to my situation (pleased to hear that I'll be escaping the risk of erectile dysfunction!) The booklets were placed carefully back in the bag with a kind smile and assurance that I could call the team anytime if I had any questions. The reason I was in a haze? She had drawn on her knee with a pen to indicate how the tattoos would look, it was all I could do to not glance down and wonder how many people will think that I've taken to doodling on my legs out of sheer boredom. And that led me to wonder if the tooting grannies (a few posts back will explain) were still in the waiting room.

Heavy stuff in that bag I'm sure. Nothing so far has given me the incentive to reach in, so instead of trying to think of further uses for my bag I'd like to anticipate the titles I'll find therein.

Tattoo!! God Bless You...
(which especially amuses me because as soon as I finished typing that line I sneezed, and the jiggle of the laptop - on my lap - sent it into reboot. Which gave me time to think of more titles because this old clunker needs a good fifteen minutes to get going again. Which leads me to think of that side effect I won't be experiencing).

A Tree (Limb) Glows in Brooklyn
The Secret Life of Beams
I Irradiate You (Truly, I Don't Like You at All  You Nasty ECD Tumours)
Sitting on the Dock of the (CT scan) Bay

Trust me, it gets much worse, I'll save you from more groans.

Which reminds me of a dream I had the other night. It was a stupendously welcome change from the months of retched nightmares I've been having (do I have my sleeping pill to thank for that?)
I was part of a comedy troupe, ad-libbing to the riotous cheers of the crowd. Kind of like the dreams where I speak French and German fluently (why not add Swahili?) and have handsome and adoring men falling at my feet (don't you know that they're lined up ten deep in real life for a woman in my condition? Terminal is the new sexy!)

A girl can dream. But she also must get down to doing her homework.