The Grouchy Man and The Cell Phone Lady

A grouchy man walked into Planet Care today.  I don't know why he was grouchy.  He just was.  He walked past me in an aisle where I was running back stock.  I looked him in the eye, smiled, and said "hi" as he approached me.  He just looked at me with no response and walked on by.  I thought nothing of it.

Immediately after that, a lady who was talking on her cell phone walked into the same aisle where I was running back stock and the grouchy man stood staring at cans of soup.  She walked past me as she was talking on her cell phone.  And then I heard the grouchy man say in a very loud and grouchy voice, "If you have to talk, please keep your voice down.  It is very annoying."

At first I thought he was talking to me.  And then I saw the lady with the cell phone looking at him, stunned. 

"Excuse me?" she said. 

"I said, if you have to talk, please keep your voice down.  It is very annoying." 

She was momentarily speechless.  "I, I'm talking to my husband," she stammered. She began to whisper into the phone about the grouchy man who asked her to keep her voice down. "It's very annoying, he said."

I marveled at this scenario.  First of all, the grouchy man stated, "If you have to talk," with emphasis on the word "have." What constitutes having to talk?  Some people, it would seem, have an innate need to constantly verbalize their thoughts, feelings, observations, pontifications in a relatively stream of conscious manner.  This seems to be driven by a biological predisposition to moving the mouth.  Others may need to communicate critical information involving national security in a timely manner.  Others may need to negotiate a top secret rendezvous.  It seemed to me that this question was too subjective, hence open-ended. 

Next, the grouchy man made the request, which was spoken more as a demand than a request, that the talker keep her voice down.  Why?  Because it was very annoying.  What was annoying?  Her voice?  The fact that she was talking?  The fact that she was talking on a cell phone?  Did he ask every person he passed to stop talking?  If so, how did he ever get anything done?  What would he do on a subway in New York?  Tell everyone to stop talking?  What does he do in large department stores during the holiday season?  Wear a sandwich board saying, "Don't talk?" What entitles him to demand people stop talking?  The world is full of talking.  We just have to put up with it. 

The woman told the grouchy man that she was talking to her husband.  She emphasized that point.  Was she indirectly threatening grouchy man by suggesting her husband would kick his ass? Did it validate her talking any more to be addressing her partner, who, I feel it is important to note, is a man?  Would it validate her talking if she were talking with any man?  Or does it only count when the man is your husband? 

Grouchy man scowled as he walked out of the aisle where I was running back stock and rounded the corner into the next aisle.  The woman walked in the opposite direction.  Did she think this would lessen her chances of running into the grouchy man again?  It would seem to me that it would increase the likelihood since he would be walking towards her from the next aisle over. 

Poor sad people.  The grouchy man continued to seethe on into the evening, opening a can of organic soup and eating it unheated directly from its packaging.  A scraggly cat begged piteously for scraps.  After the man finished his meager meal, he put the empty can on the floor for the cat to clean and slouched down grouchily in his sagging armchair.  The large house contained no other life save him and the cat, who loudly slurped up the residual bits of cream of tomato soup.

The cell phone lady drove her Miata to the country club where she complained to her masseuse about the rude man she encountered at the grocery store.  She sat in a hot tub afterwards.  The facial mask that had been carefully applied by an esthetician cracked around her mouth and furrowed brow as she related the story to her tennis partner, who later joined her for gin and tonics at the bar.  She drank one too many and missed the chair she'd intended to sit in.  She fractured her tailbone.  

The grouchy man sits alone, wondering why he's so grouchy.  Was he always this way?  He thinks not.  But he can't remember when things changed.  He pulls himself up out of the chair and kicks the empty cans aside on his way to bed. 

The cell phone lady lies in bed with an inflatable inner tube under her ass thinking of nothing at all as she flips through the channels on her wide screen flat screen deluxe screen t.v.  

Blood

The Cancer Center makes me feel like crying.  Often, I am numb to the experience of being there.  But days like today, I have to stuff my feelings way down in my gut to prevent myself from making a larger-than-life spectacle of myself.

I enter the lobby and check in with a desk person.  I wait in the lobby for a phlebotomist person to call my name.  I go into the lab.  The phlebotomist person swabs my arm with alcohol and stretches a thick rubber band around my upper arm.  Depending on who my phlebotomist person is, we may chit chat about metaphysics, gardening, motorcycles or simply jab each other with good-natured jokes.  Then my arm gets jabbed and blood gets extracted and collected in a tube labeled with my name and other identifying factors like my birth date and probably a case number.

My little vial of blood travels to a room where people with microscopes and other machines count my platelets - as well as other things like my hemoglobin, white blood cells and absolute neutrophils.  My neutrophil count is 3.4, which appears to be low, indicating I am at greater risk from "infectious
agents both inside and outside the body."  Great.

But I digress.

The stats are entered into a computer.  A nurse person in the treatment area/chemo room, takes this information and delivers it to the pharmacy.  The pharmacist person analyzes the data and determines the weekly dosage of NPlate for me to receive.

Around this time, I am called back to the "flush room" to wait.  The flush room is a cubical tucked away in a corner of the chemotherapy treatment area.  Directly across from it is another cubicle where patients receive chemotherapy.  On either side of that are other cubicles. And this is how it is: each patient is in her own cubical.  Each patient has a television to watch in their own cubicle.  The cacophony of televisions is disconcerting at times.  Why doesn't the cancer center supply headphones?  I am glad I do not have to lie around and receive chemotherapy in that environment.  What a complete drag.  I used to have chemo treatments at a cancer center in Kernersville.  It was much smaller and not as busy.  There were no t.v.'s.  I was pretty comfortable there.

Again, I digress.

I wait for the pharmacist to mix up my dose of NPlate.  Meanwhile, a nurse takes my temperature and my blood pressure and makes chit chat before excusing him or herself.  I usually wait ten to twenty minutes for the pharmacist to deliver the NPlate.  Once it arrives, the nurse swabs my arm, the same one I had blood drawn from, and injects the NPlate.  Wham bam and it is done.

This is the ritual in which I participate weekly.  It rarely varies.  There was one week in which my platelet count was so low, I was admitted to the hospital on the spot.  That only happened because I missed my treatment the previous week.  I had the brilliant idea that I would give myself a break from it and go to the beach.  It was a nice break.  But it had ramifications that lasted a couple of weeks.

The emotions vary weekly, however.

One week, I sat in the flush room waiting for my shot and the woman in the cubby immediately in front of me starting throwing up.  I couldn't help but watch.  She sat in her chemo chair with a big plastic bag held in front of her and tossed her cookies.  In all the years of being in a treatment room, this was the first time I have ever witnessed a person lose their lunch.  And as I watched this, a strange feeling crept into my psyche that manifested in the following thought: 'I am not sick!  I do not belong here!  How can I ever get better when I am constantly subjected to the vibe of sickness?!  It was a form of indignation propelled by rage which soon manifested as depression.  I am not sick.  I am not sick!'

Today, I watched an elderly woman across from me as she received a bag of blood.  Her husband sat with her.  They were both thin, though the man looked solid whereas the woman looked frail.  The man had a kind face.  He smiled sweetly at the nurses as they darted in and out.  But he never spoke.  His creased forehead betrayed a worried mind. His eyes betrayed a weariness.  But he patiently sat by his wife.  She was tired, barely able to hold her eyes open.  Every once in a while a sound would cause her to open her eyes and she took in the world around her.  But she soon closed them again.

There was a rural aspect to the couple.   I tried to imagine what they did for a living, if they still work.  They appeared to be in their early 70's.  The man wore a flannel shirt and jeans.  His shoes were nice leather shoes.  Probably his Sunday best.  I imagined he put those on specifically to wear to the Cancer Center. His work shoes, he thought, were not suitable. The woman wore a bandanna around her bald head and an over-sized t-shirt.  A blanket covered her lap.  She wore oval-shaped wire framed glasses.

I watched her and wondered about her life, about their life together.  I was overcome with the urge to get up from my seat in the flush room and go talk to them.  About nothing in particular.  All for the sake of giving them some love.  Just that.  Just hope for their future together.  Just hope for a bit of ease in life.  But I sat there.  Watching the bag of blood slowly empty into her arm via the long line of tubing. Mesmerized by the process.

My platelet count was low today.  It had been holding steady in the normal range for a few weeks.  And I'd actually begun, once again, to hope that I'm going to get well.  That a day will come when I won't need these weekly treatments.  My platelet count today shot that hope down.  Dashed it against the rocks.

I will never be well.  I am not sick.  But I will never be well.

Is it any wonder why I have trouble planning things in advance - why, for example, I cannot entertain the notion of going back to school in pursuit of training for a viable career? Something that I'll be able to do when I'm 60? I have no guarantees that I'll be here that long.  The drug that is injected into my blood weekly has numerous side effects, one of which is increased malignancies.  Since I've already had cancer, this sounds like a raucous cancer party waiting to happen.    

After my injection today, I walked out of the flush room, past all the cubbies filled with people receiving some treatment or another.  I walked down the long corridor from the treatment room to the lobby.  The front door is inhospitable.  I do not care to pass through it.  In a way, it's easier to remain in the cancer center where it is automatically assumed that something is wrong with me than to go out into the world at large where I am perceived to be normal.

I am far from normal.

I have a body that wants me dead.

I have no ambitions in the monetary realm.

I have a vivid imagination that takes over my logic center more times than is useful.

I immerse myself so completely into my creative realm that at times I sacrifice going to bed at a reasonable hour or leaving for work in a timely manner.  My creative realm is much more important to me than time or money.  And that's fine.  It's just every once in a while, I'd like to feel "normal" by other people's standards.

Additionally, when I pass through the doors of the Cancer Center, I must again walk among the senseless violence that plagues the world.  War mongers.  Spree shooters.  Blood runs freely in streets and movie theaters.  The precious source of life that we all take for granted gets emptied out of people against their will.  I willfully allow blood to be drawn from my arm once a week.  But victims of guns did not consent to have their blood emptied out of their bodies. 

Once I pass through the doors of the Cancer Center, the careful environment arranged around the sick falls apart.  And the world at large is perceived.  And it is hard to bear at times.  

I'd like to feel a bit of ease in my life.  I guess I was just projecting my own desire for ease onto the woman directly across from me in the treatment area of the Cancer Center.  Or maybe not.  Maybe there is a universal desire for ease that we all experience.  Maybe I am merely finding this universal desire a bit too compelling to ignore.

I hammer on my keyboard as if the words that come out of my brain matter a damn.  I know that in the larger schematic, they don't.  But for the moment, they are keeping me alive.  They are the long line of tubing connected to the bag of blood running into my veins. They are my medicine.  I allow them to flow forth, hopefully bestowing a bit of lifeblood upon the reader.

Once in Love

I saw the ex-husband guy last night. No matter how much time passes, seeing him is awkward. Maybe the awkwardness arises from the realization that love doesn't die. No matter how much you wish it would. Or possibly it arises from the embarrassment of the memory of a certain time in which I lost control.

This morning, I am filled with a vague sadness. I long for a sense of peace or resolution that I believe will never come.

A wise woman once told me that we are born with a very particular need for a very particular kind of love. No one knows how to give us that love. Not our parents. Not our partners. Not our friends. The only person who knows how to give us the exact kind of love we need is ourselves.

In keeping with that notion, maybe certain relationships arise out of the need to manifest a very particular expression of love. Steve and I definitely created our own world. And for a time, it was a lovely world. Two truly beautiful and amazing beings came onto the planet as a result of that world: our daughter and our son. And this is an accomplishment. No matter what became of the relationship.

Still, it surprises me that there is a lingering grief. When will the grief die? All that I know to say is that Steve and I made a life together. And we created a forum in which to express a very particular kind of love. That expression was unique. It will never have another forum. Because Steve and I together were unique. And even though we cannot be together - because we just can't logically figure out how - the heartstrings are still entwined. And unfortunately, always will be.

I say unfortunately because in this moment, I feel a huge regret for losing the ability to manifest love with Steve. It seems there should be a lesson here. Probably it is so blatantly simple I just can't see it.

Another wise woman told me recently that no matter what your spiritual beliefs, the reality is this: we must move towards Love, towards acting from a place of Love. The opposite of Love is fear. So whenever we experience fear, remember that we want to operate from a place of Love. Choose Love over fear. Love is all you need.

One might say I chose fear over love in my relationship with Steve. But maybe a greater Love was calling me in its direction. By abandoning that relationship, I was forced to walk alone for a while. Over the years, a love and compassion for my self have unfolded. I think it was necessary to be alone to do this. And I think that through striving to know and love my self better, I found an important teacher: Danny Bayer, whose absolute love for, acceptance of and patience with me have helped me grow in ways unimaginable.

I believe it is still possible to summon Love from the ashes in which I attempt to smother it. I'll uncover it a little, dust it off, and see what I can see.