Avoiding the Answer

Post surgery, people ask a predictable question: Is it better? I've tried avoiding the answer until the answer is clear. Surgery leaves one with puffiness, the drugs mask a trail that pain cuts through the body, recovery soothes one part of the system but complicates the rest. There is, I reason, no answer to make, so I've avoided making one.

Yet, I will say--this surgery was successful. The pain of the old bone and apparatus that was pushing against my skin is gone. The post surgical pain of cut bone is gone. The puffiness of healing is subsiding. My chin hangs now on nothing and slouches inward. I wear surgical masks in public to avoid stares. I am Michael Jackson! now simply lacking those elegant bandages he wore on his fingertips.

I'll soon have a follow up appointment with the surgeon who will concur with my general thoughts and proclaim success. Hopefully, we'll next figure out when surgery 2 will happen, and when we'll pull a flap of skin from somewhere on my body over the hole in my neck. I apparently do very well with anasthesia, and can bear being put out for days. I apparently wake from surgery feeling terrific which I did the first time, and this last time, too. My worries are slaked on some of the procedural issues: heart, good; will, strong; healing, adequate.

My head is being pulled away from worry by trivialities I'm jamming into it as quickly as possible. This is the time, in Indiana, for planning Spring gardening. I'm looking into reseeding a patch by the driveway with wildflowers, turning a large portion of the front where there's been flower decimation into a vegetable patch this year, forming a better herb experiment, being a more diligent weeder. I'm trying to figure how I, with this tracheotomy tube and an inability to exert can build a raised bed in the back where I've been dumping yard waste--how I might, stone by stone, build a free form wall and seed a bed of shade plants--hostas, ferns, bleeding hearts, astilbes, and how they will accomodate the inevitable blackberries shit into the bed by birds, the violets, beautiful as they are for a week and aggressive as they are for the rest of summer.

I'm learning how to count in Danish--technically, that's "one and twenty" in translation, not twenty-one. I'm hearing myself say please and thank you in Danish and imagining I'm doing so on the streets of Copenhagen, having been handed some weinerbrod and kaffee by a handsome little Danish kid wearing those inevitable Euro clothes (of course he's handsome, this is my imagination). When the thought of my voicebox being removed intrudes upon me, I open an email from Comme une Francaise that purports to teach me tricks of French that lessen my non-native vibe...realizing in one part of my mind that no one will ever judge my accent again (always hated), and can only judge my proficiency in spelling. When thoughts of the next recovery and the inevitable pain that comes with it crowds me, I think of the technicalities of loading all those grammatical symbols for Danish and French into my Ipad so that when it speaks for me, it can at least sound accurate.

When I wonder about the high rates of mortality from head and neck cancer in general, I think of a dog I'd like to get if I can, if I recover well from surgery 2, if I feel able to be ambulatory on a daily basis and fair to its need to go sniff the neighbor's mail box post and pee on their Christmas roses. A rescue dog, a non-shedder, housetrained, a bit mature, small, likes a lap--someone who like me needs another chance at proving worth and value, and hates shitting where he or she eats.

You see, I do make a lousy correspondent from the edges of reality. Faced with not knowing what will come next, I return each time to the easy fantasy that I'll overcome everything with ease and power. What happens, actually, is that I stumble over recovery with luck and chance, and the power is simply supplied by my stubborness, not some great will, insight or perception. Like soda, I open up the future with an expection of sweet froth; if it emerges flat, I pour it out for spoiled.

So while I recover, the weather is typically Indiana. It is jacksawing between a dying gasp of Winter and a lick here and there of Spring--I do like this. From the standpoint of poetry, one can only be amazed to see a crocus with a dust of snow upon it; from myth, how can you avoid thinking of Persephone struggling to break free of six months in hell? In reality, there's no way to avoid daydreaming a rocker on the back deck, the door open, the breeze and sunlight, a non-shedding companion chasing squirrels into the maple tree, an emerging bed of astilbe fronds, peach, white and violent magenta waving under it, a wall of stone placed to look old and accidental, a bird bathing in a bath made to look terra cotta, a well placed vision seeing it all as if by seeing it, it could be true.