saw this item about a lawsuit online today. brought me back 2 yrs in the amount of time it took the photons to reach my eye. A photograph w/ time-travel facility. for this you see is the MIT dorm in Cambridge right across the street from the park we took Maxwell every night 2 years ago. When we weren't here, that is, for my radiation treatment.
seeing that structure has several levels of strange but the simplest one to convey would be this:
we've been living in the past the last couple months. It's mainly because of our book, the co-written his/her, husband/wife, patient/caregiver memoir, the writing of which has forced us into a sort of semi-constant state of reliving unpleasant moments in all their stark unpleasant detail. What i had tied up and shelved in my mind as a sterile antiseptic box named Surgery One has now been pulled down and unwrapped, freeing a swirl of specific moments and general memory, some better left forgotten: the jerky ride of medical turmoil, the emotional highs and lows based on numbers on charts and interpretations of graphs, the malevolent stink of a friend's misguided email, the acrid bite of black fear, the hazy fog of post-surgery, of late-night MRIs, of a black and uncertain future. Real good fun.
Obviously, it's been really f**king difficult to write about. Both of us have wondered about the sensibility of doing it now, about the value of doing it at all, trying to think if the whole project has any value at all except to us and if so, why the hell are spending free time, weeknights and weekends, reliving these horrible things in horrible detail? Merely to exorcise? What is it we hope to gain from this experience?
One choice tidbit has been pulling the word 'chordoma' up from the ocean floor, as for 2 months we thought i had chordoma instead of chondrosarcoma. There was some hope heading in to Surgery One that i had a pituitary tumor, which would have led to a different world. not to be. the distinction between chordoma and chondrosarcoma was not known to us then. i suppose it didn't really matter. any way, found this today which addresses some of the difference.
so, we are trying to balance all this unpleasant-ness w/ fun, whatever that might mean and whereever we can get it. last night went to the laurelhurst to meet D & L
and see brazil, which is still real great. if you've seen it you'll recognize this:
1 comment:
we're writing it because it's fun to eat dinner at 9:30 every night. we're bringing a little bit of parisian life into our lives. we're writing it because what else are we going to do? forget?
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