Singing School

Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence; 
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium. 

WB Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium"

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20310#sthash.KCeXLQHh.dpuf


Have you ever wondered what your monument of magnificence is, will or would be? I have. For me it would be an incredible array of poems that people relate to as having captured ephemeral moments that are nonetheless universally true and applicable--like how you can leaf through "Ariel" by Sylvia Plath and lines leap out at you that are perfect, that encapusulate an emotion or a situation beautifully. 

I have had the opposite situation this week with my body, which doesn't seem to want to conform to my ideas of magnificence. On the eve of radiation and chemo, I find that every time I have one of these Nutren snacks, I hate the flavor, it all tastes like metal, and I'm finding it difficult to force more of it down my gullet. 

This is a most inconvenient time for this, too--this is the zero hour. We don't have time to change or wait, it is time to go. And to go means that all support systems, mental, nutritional, medical, psychological--they're all ready to march forward in time, in step, with no hesitation. I just don't know if they are. 

I need to think, and reflect, on what brings me here to Byzantium--talk to the emperor, talk to the wizard, get better. To allow life to return to my body where it fled, before, and reinvigorate my belief that no matter what happens, I deserve to live, and live well. I may have lost sight of that, temporarily--this may have become buried in the typical rounds of life. 

I have felt like a merry go round horse a few days here, some days I've felt like a guinea pig, and others, like a punching bag for the disdain or anxiety of doctors. While I have an overwhelming good sense of those who are caring for me, there are a couple of team members I've encountered who are not, I think, on quite the same page. Certainly, I'm spoiled by the 90% good I've encountered versus the 10% whatever--especially as I've encountered no bad. But incredible doctors make mediocre ones look terrible by comparison....medicine is too personal, even behind all those cold machines, to make up for what a person might lack in personality or empathy. 

And I recognize that this journey is changing me too in many ways, that I'm not impermeable whatsoever. I have spent what seems like a year and is barely over a month straining to get to this point where there are about to try to kill whatever is left of this cancer. Perhaps that causes me apprehension--worry that they won't kill it, that this is it, that the improvements I've made are all I can expect. 

I find that healing is bringing not surprises but realities that I'd ill considered. Of course when they bisect your neck, you should expect to lose some mobility up and down as you heal--but I hadn't thought of it--the tightness of the muscles, the neck aches I've had in the back of my neck....my head lately pounding. 

Yet I'm well...my temperature, my blood pressure, my attitude--all where they should be....

This is no country for old men, indeed. This is just pre-prize fight, and there is doubt in me, and I have to square that away with what I know to be true. That I've come to a great place to be treated, and I've arrived in good time, to a warm welcome, that a treatment plan has my name on it. Radiation is ready, chemical infusion is ready, drugs for nausea have been purchased. I have to show up and help it all work by my belief.

I have to study the magnificence of my monuments. I have to believe.