I couldn't sleep last night which happens sometimes to all of us. For me, it was the effect of a long, lazy, multi-hour nap with Rally. Warm under my electric blanket, dead to the world, it didn't occur to my body that it might not be the best idea to sleep 6 hours during the day.
I blame the anesthetic from surgery, which did seem especially efficient. I woozed home and woozed into bed and stayed woozy through yesterday, I believe. Now that's the shit!
During my non-sleeping early morning, I found myself in my bathroom, the half-bath which now looks like a medical supply closet, where I hack and change bandages, fuss and bleed sometimes (it's much easier to clean up in there). I had to change the sopping tissue in my mouth and I caught sight of myself in the mirror--and then I noticed my mouth has sloped further down, and is somewhere now where my chin used to be, and listed heavily to the left.
I don't, honestly, look at myself very often. I find it's better to practice something that's not denial, but isn't full on unvarnished truth--I think of it as avoidance. I know my face is contorted, I know that cancer has changed me, I know I don't look like MAP anymore. I see myself enough to understand all of those things, to see how I've degraded past normal human looks into something quite different, yet not entirely alien. But my mouth, seeing it there, hanging, useless, I have to admit was a bit of a shock.
I've resolutely tried to think of myself as normal, and what I'm going through as a normal situation, and how it effects my body as completely normal. This tether has often enough kept me from spinning into depression, or giving up my fight in the face of what I'm facing. Avoidance has allowed me to see cancer as small and myself as typically large, Gulliver v. Lilliput, with a strategic foreknowledge of what can happen when big meets small.
I think, always, that I will win. And I will continue to think that, even in the face of the mouth that looks more like scar, the face that is puffy with fluids, the skin flaking off despite all the creams and water. I have to do that whether I like it or not--I'm just made that way. Trying to be a narcissistic baby about this is just not in the cards.
I suppose the shock, the truth, the vision at 2am, is deeply bound up in other situations where I am not the actor I used to be: at the end of this month, Charles will go to the Music Library Association meeting in Denver, and I won't. I used to love to go with him. I know several music librarians who are now scattered around the country and it's fun to see them. We have a tradition, which I started, of having an Ethiopian dinner together, a night given to fun and the fabulous food of Ethiopia and being together. I miss all of that, me and my mouth.
I am still not regular at attending the lectures that interest me, though fairly I missed one recently because I misread the schedule. I sit amongst the normal listening to erudite commentary knowing I am no longer normal. I wear a face mask, I sop myself with tissue, I move slowly.
I went back, last night, to the beginning of this blog and read about the first 20 entries, some of them were well done, some not, some just emblematic of the fear I felt and the grind I entered into it when cancer came knocking. I realized I'm not that guy now, that I could not write this blog the way I did then, the tone is completely different. Then, there was some misguided hopes of a return to normalcy, and now this writing is defensive and self-protecting when it does not self-flagellate.
That is normal--normal progression as one lives with a killer. You don't sleep or buy knives if your roommate has a homicidal streak; you don't tempt them by watching Law and Order.
What I'm left with from this event is a sense of the reality of the horizons I gaze at--a place to go to through zigs and zags for me, a place that is gotten to through doctor's offices and procedures and plans. I am no longer Mark A. Price who walks his own path--I'm what's left of Mark A. Price who does what he is told in order to survive. I am the version of MAP who schemes and tries to figure out how I can get someone to make a prosthetic for me that will replace this hole that used to love to mash peanut butter and now just is...there. I'm the guy in the mirror, shocked.
Some accidents are happy, though this wasn't one of them, it's lingering after-effects may yet prove good. I must always come face to face with myself, it's unavoidable, and the next time I do so the surprise will be lighter. I may even force myself to look more often, into my heart of darkness, to alleviate its power and light it's corners. I might, as my old boss in Brooklyn always said, light a candle instead of cursing the darkness.
What is certain is that I will be here. No matter how far south I find my mouth next time, or how contorted it seems, I'll be straight up about it. I will not hide, I will not freak, I will not run. In the list of problems I have, this one is fixable. I am shocked to realize that can still happen.
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