In college, I once took a class about the role of ghosts in tragic drama (or something equally as strange), and the professor said that ghosts tend to appear in doorways, and stairwells, and around beds, because they are all liminal spaces: the ghost is trapped between this life and the afterlife, so it appears in those in-betweens, between rooms, floors, between sleep and waking.
I feel trapped in the in-between right now, and the ghosts are coming back- old fears and insecurities, and all that fun jazz.
I’ve been to Boston twice since I last talked to you folks. My doctor there says that my left lung looks like a”crushed up accordion,” pieces of collapsed lung, scar tissue, and the mystery growth all smashed together.
He wants to get a piece of this mystery stuff to biopsy. This could be construed as good news. It’s a small possibility that what’s going on in there is an infection of the scar tissue, which could be treated with an anti-inflammatory drug.
However, my local doctor, whom I’m much more prone to trust, is convinced that it’s a recurrence. And I think that the Boston doctor is just trying to cover his ass on the off chance that it’s not cancer, because his plan for treatment is rather dangerous.
Because if they treat the lung tumor, they want to radiate it. And it’s sort of behind my heart. I shouldn’t have any more chemo, because the last time through, I had the strongest chemo that a person can possibly have. If it survived that, it will survive any chemo.
So now here I sit at the Haymarket with my coffee, waiting for the pulmonary specialist to call with a plan on how to get a piece of it: the two options being 1- bronchioscopy (sending a tube down my throat, opposite of colonoscopy- you get the picture), or 2- getting a piece from in between my ribs. But as I said, the tumor kind of lives behind my heart. So we’ll see.
So right now, I’m drifting, waiting for word from “the man,”on how they’re planning to add to the patchwork of scars on my chest.
Just hanging out with the ghosts.
