The Body, Unelectric

There is a certain thoughtlessness any of us have when using certain parts of our body--need the salt? stretch, reach. Open a cupboard? bend or stretch upwards. The steady heel/toe motion en promenade, up or down the street.

Like anyone, I took m body for granted in a million ways each day and didn't keep a diary of my myriad oversights. Good thing, too: Had I done so, I'd probably be depressed if I reviewed it.

Yesterday, I started with a complete and utter triumph. I had a swallowing test, which is a process by which one stands in front of an x-ray machine while taking small amounts of liquid in various states of thickness, sometimes yogurt-y, leading up to applesauce, and the technician runs film of your ability to swallow barium-filled things. Trust me, you don't swallow any of this stuff for the taste.

My swallow test was a 5 star pass! I made it through the applesauce sauce phase without allowing anything down the wrong pipe--and better, I made Joey the therapist smile without telling jokes--which was helpful to me, as I forgot to cap my trach tube before I left the apartment and talking was more difficult than normal. I now have official directions to expand my repertoire of experiments in swallowing to all sorts of soft foods--yogurts, smoothies, mashed potatoes with gravy--albeit in very tiny increments. Let's not complain of size, though, when faced with what amounts to a smorgasbord in my Nutren-fed life.

What was particularly amazing, yesterday, was how wonderfully zesty cheap applesauce with barium actually tasted to me. By the time we worked up to that texture, barium was pretty much beside the point--so my taste focus was on the applesauce itself. Had you told me 6 months ago that such a quotidian product would taste like a gourmet meal I'd have truly laughed. And then there is--thank you universe!--the fact that my taste functions are still so acute--even without all that tongue surface, i detect small notes and react to flavor as if it's atomically powered. It must be the poet in me that allows the small metaphors for good to string together into the great theme of wow.

This does work against me, though--recently, my daily Nutren, dependably vanilla fake egg noggishly flavored, as been grossing me out with decidedly unplesaant metallic edge. The diagnosis? Like most tube-fed, it's time for me to take a daily acid blocker. And I've been advised to slow down the 2 minute way I let it slide in.

When I leave appointments with UCSF, I usually stand waiting for the 24 Divisadero bus at Sutter and Divisadero, in front of a restaurant called My Father's Kitchen, which bills itself as Vietnamese comfort food. It smells awesome, in case you're wondering--so much so that until yesterday, I never allowed myself to read the menu, afraid I'd never have the chance to find out how awesome it might be (and it's always busy which I do take as a good sign). Yesterday, though, riding Cloud Nine like my personal nag, I did read it. And I can't wait.

I arrived home with Scott's dinner in tow, and cleaned the toilet and turned on Ina Garten on the Food Network in time to find out how to make chocolate sorbet and Butternut Squash risotto, warm duck breast salad, and the tail end of how to make a lemonish-blueberry cake with a streusel topping. I like Ina. She's not skinny and good lord that woman loves butter. Better, everything she makes is elegant and slightly over the top and yet I know I'd want to eat it.

I felt a wetness on the right side of my neck while Ina was reducing yet another stick of butter to prepare her risotto. Pulling my hand away from my neck, it wasn't water, but a slightly sticky, and not exactly clear liquid but where was it coming from?

As I checked the bathroom mirror I saw, to my consternation, that my neck bisection scar seemed to be tearing up with some odd beige seepage. I don't know how, I don't know why, it simply happened. By now, I have a million theories as to why, but to recount all of those would bore both of us exceedingly. Offically, until I see the doctors today, this is a mystery.

I have seeped from a couple of spots on my body, at times, and in circumstances that have defied easy explanation. Considering I was bisected at the neck, perhaps this is no surprise; my neck, in its process of healing, has recently felt very tight, and occasionally hard to move left-right in normal process. Up-down being not much easier, and my range of motion limited by the fact that one month ago, the whole thing was sliced.

Coming back from surgery and a bit of forced lethargy, little that I do can be taken for granted. When I first visited Scott here on top of the big hill, I didn't have much trouble walking up and down 18th Street, or facing the sidewalk incline as one departs the bus at the top, or taking the stroll over the crest and down to La Boulange, in Cole Valley, to breakfast on oatmeal with the stroller set. The easiness of all that is completely gone.

I have to parse out when I go down the hill and I've temporarily given up on climbing it--my limits are clear at the moment, and 30 muscle pounds down, they do not include the incline. Indeed, stepping out more than once a day from the apartment is effort, and takes some thought and reason--and I do it, but not without some occasionally vigorous enticement. At home, I do housework in pieces, sometimes broken up by the odd wetness of a seepage where it's never happened before, on the body unelectric, merely cut apart and rewired oddly.

I have to add to the list of what I take with me on excursions, I think. Now I take ipad and keyboard both for amusement and emergency communication. My phone, though that's more for typing notes than for making calls, or texting my voice otherwise known as Scott.

I'll have to have some gauze with me, a few pads, some tape--perhaps a bit of neosporin. Locks for doors that circumstance opens on me, to pack alongside the tissue for the endless stream of stuff I have to spit out discretely, blow out as best I can or wipe when I can't quite feel it. Creaky and ill fit as any steam pipe, clanking down the street, recovery in motion.