Thursday, and Scott is on his way from San Francisco for his adventure in babysitting an apprehensive 52 year old. There's a specialist license in there for sure, and some community college should jump on it.
The aging population guarantees that there are more of me to come. A new silent majority of people who've had no surgery since childhood (Tonsils, 1966, for me), little experience with the steaming heart of the health care system, and no history of other medical problems by which we may have learned how to deal with the entirety of the situation. We need babysitters--people who can yell for nurses and quiz doctors and check off the questions organized by category on a clipboard.
File keepers--knowing that everything is documented and all documentation is evidence, the Adult Cancer Babysitter will track deliverables and appointments on both sides of the coin. As a lone entity in the health care system, you'll be bent to their convenience without just such a special advocate, driver and blender jockey.
So, I kid, a bit--but I'll be leaning on Scott to unleash the ill concealed bulldog that rests and glares just under his pleasant surface. As a triathlete, as a guy who has had his own share of run-ins with doctors who are phoning it in, institutions that treat your time as a given to their needs, he has a pretty solid idea of how to get things done. And he wants to, which makes this less a job but certainly not a vacation in the spa state of Indiana.
There is a need for advocates in the system who are not of the system. Those who can without equivocation or reference to an impending raise, tell the hospital staff to up their game or the doctor to focus his. Nicely, of course, but an ombudsman's ultimate job is not nice, but efficient; an advocate is not impolite but focused.
I fell for my advocate a few months back because we share a broad range of core ideas and beliefs, laugh at similar things and want to be in love. The last thing is what most people miss in forming relationships. It's easy enough to do because it's a simple phrase that masks a very diligent set of behaviors.
Wanting to be in love implies a willingness to shut up and listen, to bend when the wind blows, to admit error, to process criticism without complaint, and to make oneself known too in just those ways, in equal measure, daily. Love is, of its own virtues, nice. It can be a great lift to the day, the sex can be wonderful, the feeling of connectedness addicting--but if you don't want to be in love, all you're doing is skimming the very shallow creamy surface of a bottle of emotion, and even at skimming, it won't last long.
Wanting to be in love is like wanting to survive, too. To know that around the corner is loss of an unspecified magnitude--and yet being able to say you want to survive the situation and be the best person available to what's left to be-- Monday, I will lose something--and certainly I've lost the old me already. But I'll lose tangible parts--my tongue, my old jaw perhaps, maybe my voicebox. I may breathe through my neck for the rest of my life. I may never taste again. But I want to survive and I will lose those things and work through it.
We'll know more facts by Tuesday. But facts don't push this agenda quite like emotions. I can cry a thousand times over physical mars--and I will. I don't intend to Rushmore my mourning period for the body and the life that was. But if I cry once over my babysitter, that would eclipse any pain I feel for my own small defeats.
Besides, he promises me I can stay up late, watch all the shitty TV I want, and have as much Nutren as I can shove down this tube!
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