Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Piercing in a Couple of Ways
I waited an hour at a chain clinic to get a blood test for TB so I can do ‘service learning’ at a hospice for my Death & Dying class and I think my son might have been right when he said that I was really getting too far into the thick of things with this dying business.
It’s a series of coincidences, actually. Hard to sort out without drawing a diagram.
After waiting an hour, the blood lady started in on me, right away appreciating the prominent vein in my right arm but then complaining that the vein was quote giving out on us unquote. She explained that a vein could be as big as the biggest earthworm and still not put out.
Who knew?
So then she went after the other arm where, happily, the blood flowed like a river. There were no stickers or donuts, but I swiped a little pack of fruit snacks on the way out the door, stepping around a guy draped over a chair, napping or sick, not sure. When I looked back at him, he had a little plumber thing going on.
At home, I decided to tackle my homework – three short training modules about how to have difficult conversations with seriously ill people and then an hour-long documentary telling the stories of three very sick people with no further treatment options. Central to the stories was how the drive for cure, longshot to improbable, crowded out conversations about how people wanted to spend their last bit of time on earth.
The moderator, a doctor himself, told about a time when he conjectured with a patient that an extremely experimental drug could have him ‘back on the tennis court by the end of summer.’ He said he knew he was lying but couldn’t help but offer some tiny dust mote of hope to his patient. It made my head spin. I’ve been in the room where fantasy games were being played by people who ought to have known better. Yes.
In sum, I don’t know what I’m doing except there seems to be pieces of tile strewn all about that if I fit them together will make for great coherence and insight. Just a theory. I am only guessing that will happen.
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
I’m also throwing darts at a similar board, aiming for coherence and insight. I have a feeling all I’ll get are a bunch of holes in a board. Maybe these holes will create some kind of new image that will make sense to me one day, down the road, and that is a more realistic hope. Coherence and insight, that looks entirely different., maybe.