5.25.06, Another Toothpick

“Another Toothpick.” --Janice Soprano

* The medical trivia: At times I forget that a primary reason for the blog is to pass on medical information, share the news, let people know what’s up. Today’s Franky Scale is around a 7, which is good for a Thursday during the chemo cycle -- by Thursday the steroids and other feel-good balancing drugs they give me during the Tuesday oil-change usually wear off and the fatigue, the blah of food, nausea, and overall physical malaise sets in. I’m better at managing all with each week, but that’s the cyclical nature of this beast. Two days ago, I finished an antibiotic regimen, I believe what they call a Z-Pack (azythromicine), related to a few spots seen in my lungs during the restaging process. Dr. Whiting, my oncologist & the primary doctor I see these days, says they don’t look cancerous but possibly inflammatory (cause, don’t know), or an early-stage infection. Since my immune system is getting its ass kicked every day for two weeks in a row, or getting attacked at least and then trying not to get its ass kicked, there is of course increased likelihood of infections. Thus the Z-Pack--another medical unit that sounds vaguely superheroish, like Protonix Man! (Btw, you should see my cape, it kicks ass.)


*The formal narrative: There is some excellent dream analysis from the first disk of Season Three of The Sopranos -- though Dr. Melfi’s self analysis in the episode might in fact be too perfect, it’s too fast, she’s too practiced, especially in the spontaneous setting of a session with her own “Dr. Melfi,” Eliot -- this is all about the rape episode, btw. Not an easy one to watch. She dreams: her office after hours, alone, the ACME vending machine, the Rottweiler, then the rapist, then the catharsis. In waking life she gets right up after a few days, goes back to work, takes the same route she walked from her parking lot, up the same stair case, up through the architectural “blind-spot” with no cameras, nothing. She knows her fear, finds it, and walks straight into it. The solution of direct address. So many approaches to anxiety and fear. This just struck me particularly, I might be cathecting too much onto certain characters, the impression was serious though.

[written last night] And in the realm of serious impressions, I had some more after reading the post the Princess submitted a few days ago to have me put on the blog; she’d sent it in for the possible editorial work. You read it, the previous post, but there she mentioned how it’s now two months later and that there are only a certain number of months left and as I started to read my head started spinning with questions -- real and rhetorical. Months. Till what? Till somebody addresses the 800-pound elephant. It’s until I die. Soon I die, I think. And the last few days, after reading the princess missive, I’ve felt some anxiety about this, more than usual. Looking out over the city of Seattle tonight, the skyline lit and spread outside my windows, and having thoughts about how the view expires. It expires soon. What do I do about this? How much is possible? Realizing and knowing, knowing is the word, that I will die and leave this big round soft cookie that never tastes quite as good as you want it to. Still, it’s a cookie, and who doesn’t like a good fucking cookie and now and then? Worse still, who doesn’t want cookie when they’ve had it and it gets taken away? Where’s my goddam cookie?

Looking at it otherwise, no one wants the vision that comes with the blinding of their eyes, nobody wants the gift called prophecy when they realize what the cost of knowing the future is. Nobody really wants to hear it and nobody really wants to know. Anyway, here is where I find myself. Never the option to say “no,” to not come here, to not have these experiences. There is no life before your “made” (on HBO), and, there is no war in heaven that follows the first exercise of free agency in the world of Christological mythology (a drama followed by many of my people). The state where no one, not any more, wakes up and goes to work, again, another day, no more anxiety of being and no more anxiety of freedom. How is that for a solution to the old existential double-bind?

You rethink it daily. Everyday, though you step up and go to work. Nobody wants to walk out of their office, a bit early let’s say, say about 2 p.m., then walk over to the steps of Kane Hall to sit and enjoy a cigarette. And you do enjoy it, for a moment. Then the phone rings. Here you learn that no one wants to hear from the doctor that -- once you strip away the tempered and euphemistic language of medicine, once you learn more about the words being used -- that you might have a few more years but either way you’re gone. Irony of the plot at this point. That was the good news. Definitely nobody wants to learn two weeks later that it’s worse than that -- the euphemism of the day: “metastasize.” New jargon. Meaning? Metastasize: the possibility of several years traded in for several months in the course of one doctor visit. Or you can spin the Big Casino metaphor differently, you can locate the fear and walk straight into it, and/or you can gamble, gamble and fight, and see what it gets you. Nobody wants to hear this. Me neither.

And likely nobody wants to comment on it, back to one more Sopranos figure, Uncle Jun -- one with stomach cancer like the Princess points out! --, nobody wants to comment on “all this goddam morbidity.”