A day for dreaming...
No medical tests, no consultations, no med-lists to update, no waiting rooms, no sitting half-dressed in a chilly exam room, no blood draws today. We call it a day off.
But we really still have a central line to flush, medications to prepare and coordinate all day, body searches for any new mark or blemish that might be a rash, several temperature tests, so it's a day off, sort of...
My current energy level precludes jogging around the room or running flights of stairs. Marian did three or four loads of laundry and walked a couple of miles to a local Walgreen Pharmacy to get an easier to swallow magnesium oxide supplement. She also vacuumed the room. My contribution: I bagged the garbage and trundled it out to the dumpster. Exciting, no?
Exciting -- yes!
We're alive and making meals and writing notes and reading the day's mail. So mundane and terrene, yet without a hint of the ordinary, because I know it is a rare gift -- a day for dreaming.
Quiet reverie
Harry Truman once defined Heaven as a comfortable reading chair, by a window with very good light, and a very large pile of interesting books to read. Day dreaming is slipping away to some part of my mind and may represent at least a corner of Heaven for me. I spent part of today in a comfortable chair by a window with very good light and an e-book filled with interesting books to read and even to re-read. It was a glorious respite.
More often than not lately, while caressed by the soporific touch of modern elixirs and powerful pills, my mind just drifts away from the dock and floats about on the lake of my memories and dreams. I visit with shadows of friends and relatives long past or simply row slowly along the marvelous coastline of my memories. It is amazing how much of my life is still there to revisit. Memories I thought long lost are often hidden in a small inlet, perhaps partially blocked by a massive tree built from a crisis or happy event. It seems I can hardly shut my eyes for a moment, and I am off on a journey.
The gift of the waiting room...
The drifting started with long hours in semi-comfortable chairs in hopelessly generic waiting areas and during the hours-long process of IV infusions. I still bring a book to read, and often garner precious hours of pleasurable reading. Occasionally there is a TV with a remote, and I lose a few hours, but unless there is something to be learned or enjoyed, it represents time lost.
I shut my eyes and...
Alone and adrift with my thoughts, floating among my memories, wishes, fears, and even an occasional doubt log jamb, I am free to sample and savor, query and shout for an echo, laugh and cry, once again burn a finger or feel heartbreak, and (one of my favorites) revisit the births of our children and touching them for the first time. It's all there, all the time, I need only cast away from the dock.
A moment ago, my hearing caught the sound of a train whistle -- something I rarely hear in the Keweenaw. With that sound came thousands of images and sounds surrounding my Grandpa Archie, an Engineer with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. My one regret from that connection: When I reached age 12, I would have been old enough to ride with him in the cab of his engine. The year I turned 12, C&O suspended the practice and I never rode in his cab. He drove the last of the huge steam engines until they converted totally to diesel locomotives. He would tell stories of his more exciting and scary nights in that cab, and I want to find some of those stories.
Each time I return from a day dream, especially the more vivid and detailed ones, I feel a bit better about my life. I have a revitalized memory to savor or I have a remembered injury or slight for which perhaps, even yet, I can make amends. I feel more alive for remembering more I have lived.
If there is a blessing to being forced into the regimented and regulated lifestyle of a patient, if there is a silver lining in the cloud of pain, nausea, tremors, if there is a golden glow at the center of this shadow of fear and uncertainty, it is this: I have time to search for meaning and value in my life, I have been given the gift of time to review it all.
Perhaps mine is a more extreme form of the same process experienced by our aging friends and relatives. Their "second childhoods" may revisiting their first ones and trying to get it right.
There is joy in the new and exciting, in children and grand children, and in the wonders of our new technologies. Imagine integrating the best of the past with the best of the future to generate the best possible life now. I love that I am alive and I thank God every day for the gift of that time. I thank all of you for your prayers and good thoughts. I thank you for the cards, letters, and e-mails.
Bless you and thank you for reading along on my journey,
Mick