My views were reinforced by the relative ease of the entire experience. Make appointment, show up, be checked, possibly receive a fairly standard diagnosis, get drugs, fix it, talk about it for 3 days with everyone I know, move on. Azithromycin--like me, there's probably a few spare of those in your medicine cabinet as we read.
My ongoing problems are problems of a body that apparently never was subject to intelligent design. Sinuses that are just never quite drained, never quite happy. A twitchy knee. A couple of toenails that--having been broken by falling appliances, vases or other objets lourdes, never quite grew back with the beauty they lost, smashingly. I've learned to live with these things: tissue always present, Afrin addiction, a sports band, and virtually never being seen in public in flip flops. Diagnosis prescriptive, rehabilitation achieved.
The first billboard I saw driving into Cancerville said: Stage 2, treatable with chemo/radiation. The next said--see the oncologist, see the radiation oncologist. The third said: treatment starts in the head! That first drive was, although not a Sunday afternooner, something I could deal with. Start point. Endpoint.
It was upon entering the freeway loop around the great Cancer Metropolis that escalation became part of my life. Sign: Radiation won't work for you! big frown. Next: Chemo leaves you a 20 per cent chance of recovery, dumbass! The third: That Stage 2 is way more Stage 4. Margins may be involved. Surgery, radiation, chemo, and 50 per cent chance.
Escalation brought overpasses. Complicated by ways where grinning practitioners would eagerly flag you down and ask for a ride--only to tell you for your own good why the last plan might not be best. I know the extended metaphor is straining here but I actually did have a dream a whole lot like this, and from that time have seen the struts upon which it was built in the world I'm now encountering. It was a cream that hid that black in the coffee, true, but the coffee was obviously just that strong.
The test of you in the system is how well you handle escalation. How you look, cry, what you ask, what joke you tell. Those who mix stoicism with fatalism with practicality do, I wager, far better within the rigid concepts of who is ready and who is strong than those who simply yell, those who simply cry or those who simply shut up in shock. You are judged in the system as it ramps up on you because at no point will the system be able to give you the full picture of what lies ahead. This is not a broken bone. This is a broken structure.
How I react is not a reaction. It's a part of who I am and how I was raised. That I do not yell at people for that which is not to be helped. That I do not blame for that which was unpredictable. That I will not sue because this wasn't foreseen or diagnosed sooner. That I place empathy as the highest good in my relationships with others, whether empathy leads me to disdain one's problems or embrace them as something I desperately wish to fix. It is the same guide, and to me, the same mountain: different paths, disparate crowns.
Today, I was thinking of escalation as a camera was being forced down my throat. In order to place a g-tube, they work from both sides--a view of the inside, a hole from the outside. It makes perfect sense, and it was explained as part of the POSSIBLE treatment plan, allowing me to think I didn't have to go to the second floor and would not need the escalier automatique. Clever, yes, to think I wouldn't; impractical, definitely.
The blanking drugs thank god took over just as at mid throat I felt a panic fill me from this impossible big camera! Like a safari rider's, an image jockey from the National Geographic, it was about to choke me and...naught. I could go back to nothingness, I could have--for all I know, a broken bone.
I am polite to everyone I meet in the system. I ask informed questions, I make small jokes, I do not tax the people who I know damn good and well are heavily taxed. I refuse to escalate who I am in the story because that is not my job. My job is listen, react, accept, understand. Perhaps I make that sound passive but I have the hardest job. I have to reach out to a doctor who is telling me I will undergo something that horrifies me and offer them all the love I can muster and all the gratitude for their expertise I can express.
I am hard on the system, and I view it askance, and I express that here--but without it, I'd die like a latter day Henry VIII, only without the gold, opium and power to make it even mildly tolerable.
So, on the elevator to better, when my fellow passengers smile and push higher floors than I wish to go to, I ride too. Those passengers may know far better than me--I hope they know far better than me. I will see new views, perhaps even the one I long for--the 360 of magnificence, and finally, the way out, the causeway exit, the tunnel where the guerneys don't come creaking back to exam rooms.
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