Window

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The room where I have my treatments is one of several that line an outside wall at the Gray Cancer Center. Each room has four to six recliners where patients sit while poisons of various types are infused into their veins.

(Well, that's a little dramatic. My treatment isn't a poison; the nurses don't even have to worry about it splashing on them. May it continue to work!)

The outside wall is mostly a big window to a very small courtyard. This wall is continuous with the walls of the private clinic where I used to get treated before I went onto Medicaid. The private patients' courtyard contains a beautiful iron sculpture of birds and vines, and a feeder that's patronized by many different species and varieties of birds, including finches, sparrows, cardinals, nuthatches, and, on the ground, mourning doves and pigeons. Where I sit now, there's no bird feeder--hence, no birds.

There are pretty plantings, though, of tulips just now shedding their petals, bright azaleas in red and mauve, and other flowers I can't yet identify. Behind them is a Japanese maple with lacy leaves, bowing to the ground.

The purpose of these plantings is to keep us attached to life, even those of us who are trying to separate. My nurse has the same goal in mind when she talks gaily to the gaunt, jaundiced man in the chair next to me, or the little old lady who has just been diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. I think she's scared. I still can't help being irritated, though. I want to tell her to shut up.

I may be going back to work. That's an act of living, even more so than building my Artemis garden or doing my art. I'll be doing some part-time hours in the same job I retired from, since Cathleen, who replaced me, has requested that her hours be reduced. I think I'm looking forward to it; I'm definitely glad that my Medicaid spenddown (sort of a copay that the recipient must spend before coverage kicks in) will be going away. I just have to be careful not to make so much money that I lose my Social Security Disability.

Much of the time, even when I'm actively taking part in the sweet, mundane things of ordinary life, I feel detached. It's as if I'm standing to the side, watching myself live. I can't stop doing this. I just try to forgive (and forget) myself and move on. And forgive others, who aren't living so self-consciously--the people with a future.

I am grateful, though, and grateful I'm grateful.
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