Figment Lives
I’ve started so freaking many posts over the last couple weeks. More than once I just couldn’t find the time to finish. More often, I couldn’t find the words. I can’t put two coherent thoughts together most days right now. I realized last night that I think I forgot to take a bath for a couple days. I’m spending a lot of time trying to remember to breathe, let alone eat or look human. Waiting takes the longest time.
Last night we walked the dog longer than she has been walked in several years. We didn’t go far, on the human scale of things, just the street route to Giant Eagle. Picked up some puppy poop bags, Macaroni for dinner tonight (I’m going to make some of the crockpot mac and cheese I’ve been seeing on Facebook lately) and something for dinner. It was a really nice walk. Not raining for a little while… and not turning back to seasonably colder again yet. I realized that was the longest walk (outside of my commute from the parking lot to work and back) that I’ve done in a couple weeks. It was good. I want to run. I want to strap on my shoes, grab loud music and run until I can’t run any more. But I can’t even put the thoughts together to do that right now. I hate the waiting.
I think, though, that more than hating waiting, I hate platitudes. Google is a wonderful thing. Google is the worst thing in the world. It’s, honestly, been a godsend because it would have taken an eternity to look up the definition of words that I’ve been trying to understand if I wouldn’t have had an electronic means to find them at 4 am. AND I’ve found information on both ends of the spectrum.
Given my personality, I tend on the hopeful end, but I also try to balance it out with the realistic parts. I don’t stop reading after the first paragraph. I read till I get to the parts that seem to be more relevant. I still tie my wagon to the stars that look like they are going to shine the brightest… I know that makes me seem a lot like a joke sometimes, but it keeps me sane. I don’t believe in fairy-tales, but I do believe in the words to the songs and the melody that gets stuck in my head so I don’t forget. Sometimes the hard work goes easier when there is a shared memory and a melody in your brain. I’m not stupid. I’m not a pollyanna. I’m scared to freaking death and whatever I can tie my wagon to in order to keep me sane, I tie it there.
Yes, I read the first two or three paragraphs. But I read to the end of the article, too and I tempered my giddy “it’s all going to be just fine and everything is wonderful” ideas with the reality that what’s real is really real and I started to work my way through what (realistic odds here, not the pollyanna ones) might happen, what we might be facing, what the next few months might bring.
There are a couple of people who will read this and, hopefully, know that THIS part is directed at them… Thank you for helping me through this. Thank you for being a sounding board and for reading the words that I’ve been reading and telling me that I am (or am not) seeing what I think I’m seeing. The words of encouragement mean an awful lot when they come through a place of understanding and reality. This is going to be another long week and the fact that you are there means more to me than you will ever know. You don’t have to have the right words, the answers, or the solutions… just knowing that you know and understand helps more than you can ever know.
I’m trying hard not to be maudlin. I’m trying to tie knots in the end of my rope (the rope that I keep trying to not only tie knots in… but to tie extensions onto to keep myself from falling off the end).
Wednesday we leave early in the morning for Cleveland Clinic Main Campus. The high on Wednesday is expected to be 15. We are SO taking my truck because all wheel drive is comforting to me. Bear has a Bronchoscopy to biopsy the nodule in his right lung… the bigger one… the one that the CT scan results suggests warrants further investigation. He’s sure they already know what they are going to find. He’s hoping he’s wrong but he’s scared and he’s sure. I wish they were able to do a needle biopsy. Given its location they should have been able to. Then we would have had the results by now… but with the extensive emphysema that wasn’t really an option… collapsed lung when they hit a bleb was an 80% chance. If they can’t get a good sample with the bronchoscopy, they will pick another alternative.
And now, the light is creeping into Sunday morning. The shine on the wet pavement of the street beneath the lights is beginning to creep, itself, back into a smaller and smaller circle. The deer have all already gone back into the ‘forest’. It’s time to start thinking about getting busy doing something constructive. Something that doesn’t require a whole lot of thought but can be done, kind of, on auto-pilot.
I’m trying to keep up the Mary Sunshine demeanor. It’s working about a third of the time. But a third is a start, right?
A Figment Of Fitness 