Doctor's waiting rooms pt 2.

As some of you know, for about a month my husband, Skip, has been suffering from what we thought was extreme sciatica. Terrible pain. And weird cramps, tingling, numbness. He was unable to sit or lay down, so no rest—and nothing seemed to help the pain. So, we made the round of docs- -and had lots of tests. An MRI and dexascan showed a mass located at the sacrum (right above the tailbone) and another hot spot at the base of Skip’s skull. So last week the back surgeon referred Skip to the Simon Cancer Center to see an oncologist.

Horrible week waiting for the oncology consultation. We went yesterday- and the news is good, compared to the worst we feared-- but also not so good. The doc thinks Skip has a “giant cell tumor” in the bone at his sacrum. This is a Nazi tumor—it has already eaten away a good section of bone and is beginning to encroach on the nerve canal (hence the pain, tingling etc).So it’s a good thing we caught it before there was any permanent nerve damage. As for the skull "hot spot," an anomaly, the doc says.

There will be a biopsy this week, just to confirm that it’s little “c” cancer (the kind that doesn’t spread to other parts of your body and metastasize). At the same time, they'll do another CT-scan to get a better pic of that skull "hot spot." Once we’re positive what we’re dealing with, there will be major surgery to remove the tumor and scrape out the inside of the bone— recovery won’t be fun, but no chemo, no radiation, and no sword of Damocles hanging over our heads. And new pain meds! Percoset, which seems to be helping with the worst of Skip's pain.

In the meantime, I went to the doc this morning. I have a rash which is either shingles or poison ivy. I haven't been out in the yard for ages, and the garden looks like a Rousseau painting-- all jungle lush and full of neighborhood cats. The cats and I are great friends, so I may indeed have gotten poison ivy from my favorite felines.

So two long doctor waiting room stretches and I finished Eileen Myles's Inferno. Two particularly gorgeous passages right at the end. "The place I found was carved out of sadness and sex and to write a poem there you merely needed to gather." And a little later, "In that place (and poetry is most of all a mastery of places, not the world but the weather of the states that form your life and what you read and how things were taken and what came back) each of these series of occurrences creates a season" (p. 261).

Harvey Pekar and wife Joyce did that marvelous book, Our Cancer Year. For Skip and I, it's the season of little c.

waiting for the consultation (Sunday)

We have an appointment Tuesday for a consultation at the Simon Cancer Center.

So, this is a long weekend. Skip's pain is worst at night, making it hard for him to sleep, so he's keeping vampire hours. Napping during the day. I've been working on a tenure report and still reading Eileen Myles. I've gotten to the Heaven part of the Inferno-- where the poet comes out. I love the idea of sexuality linked to paradise and enlightenment-- but it's a hard section to read right now.

Talked to Ellie for the first time since her own husband had a health crisis, about this time last year. I remember finding a book of poems in Seattle-- Angina-- written by a German poet with Michael's name, and sending it to her along with chocolate. Many phone calls; then just e-mail, postcards, funny notes, brief touch-ins until today. Michael is fine now and it was good to laugh with her. Gallows humor shared with an ardent Buddhist.

Books for waiting rooms

Life has taken one of those turns... Skip has been suffering from what we thought was chronic and extremely painful sciatica. So we've been making the rounds to deal with pain-- lots of docs, lots of tests. Unfortunately, one test-- the dexascan-- showed two "hot spots" on Skip's spine-- one in the lumbar area where the pain is and one near the base of the skull. Yesterday we went for a cat scan of Skip's skull and now we're waiting to hear about a biopsy appointment for the fluid filled mass nestled in one of the vertebrae at the base of Skip's spine.

Reading during all this has been difficult for me-- I have classes to prep and it's very hard to concentrate. So mainly books that can be easily read in short, interrupted bouts-- and for obvious reasons I suppose I've been drawn to smart, incisive, tough-girl prose. Ellen Willis's Out of the Vinyl Deeps last week. This week it's Eileen Myles' amazing Inferno. Billed as a poet's novel, the book maps onto Dante The first part deals with the "descent" into the fiery pit of poet-dom and the second coincides roughly with the Purgatorio--where the poet pays her dues. It deals with her career. All of which makes it sound like this book is lugubrious as hell, but it's not. Very funny, very witty-- with bursts of gorgeous language (It's no accident that it's blurbed by both John Ashberry and John Waters). Along with poetry, the novel treats coming out as a lesbian and the intimate connection between sexual experience and the self. In an age where adolescent and young adult sexuality is so often seen as a problem-- pathologized or censored-- it's refreshing to read something that hearkens back to something I remember so well. The way we find ourselves through sex-- relationships and romance, too-- but largely through sex, I think. I also love the way she writes about writing-- also something I remember as an aspiring writer: "We who write poetry and think about it all the time-- who walk the streets that other humans walk, past pizza stands and trees, are citizens meanwhile of a secret country with its own currency that gets exchanged anecdotally, even whispered in the loud thrumming silence of the day, in the galleries the Marxist auditoriums jammed bookstores...the stinking bars where poets meet and read in." And later: "the poet's life is just so much crenellated waste, nights and days whipping swiftly or laboriously past the cinematic window" (66). Talking about coffee, drugs, cigarettes, drinks-- the table she works on, her little portable typewriter-- a life many of us (whether we wrote poetry or wanted to or not) will recognize from our undergrad days. "There's no mystery," she writes, "why poetry is so elaborately practiced by the young. The material of poems is energy itself, not even language. Words come later."

Published by OR Books, an alternative print-on-demand press-- (http://www.orbooks.com) specializing in books with a political edge, Inferno is a great read.

Capable of drowning out the inevitable blaring tv set, now ubiquitous in doctor's waiting rooms. And most importantly for my purposes, capable of distracting the worried waiting spouse from her own anxiety for a few precious moments.

Myles Reading Inferno

Just back from Boxcar books where Eileen Myles read from her newest novel, Inferno. Coming of age story about living as a poet and a lesbian, all mapped onto the structure of Dante's Inferno. Witty, smart, sharp--and I loved the flow of it.

Eileen reads well and has a wonderful Boston accent that I'll hear in my head when I finally get the book. All those flattened "arhs" that seemed so full somehow while she was reading. Boxcar sold out, which was fabulous-- so I put my name on the special orders list. Sat with Alyce and Mary- and watched a man eat a complicated meal of pita and hummus, fastidiously breaking off little pieces of pocket bread and smearing it with the chickpea spread while Eileen read. Reminded me of André Breton's description of the Surrealists eating in the Parisian movie houses. The guy even looked liked an old Surrealist.

Afterward, talked to Eileen, whom I know through another friend. She's driving back to NY from the West Coast. Strange night-- exhilirating, but there's a strange feeling in the air. Warm and thick, like a storm coming.