jumpingfish

This year the dogs didn’t get cards for the mommy. They had a different suggestion, leaving the execution to the man, of course.

Last time I was here, I had a little trouble with the final swallow. The first one was ok — watery barium liquid. The second one was ok — something more like milk. The third one was, too — barium pudding with a spoon — although it did take a little work. But I couldn’t get down the last mouthful of pudding mixed with crushed saltines. The x-ray video of me-the-skeleton showed the problem. There I was, my skeleton jaw moving up and down and my skeleton tongue (?) and skeleton throat trying and trying to swallow. But there it was, that lump of pudding-and-cracker stuck at the base of my tongue in the back of my throat going nowhere.

That’s what happens when the shoot radiation at your throat day after day, week after week, after cutting out a chunk of your tongue.

But this time, three months after their gun fired its last shot at me, things were different. The first liquidy swallow went fine. So did the second milky swallow. And the spoonful of pudding. And finally the pudding-y crackers. As I chewed and swallowed, I could see the x-ray video in a reflection in the window, and I could see the dark lumps slip cleanly down my throat each time.

The technician was almost giddy.

“You did great!” she said. And she called me over to her monitor to show me the video close up.

“A lot of people still can’t do that,” she said. “Look at you. Right there. It goes right down. Let’s watch it again. You’re doing great!”

As an additional bonus: I actually tasted the saltines!

1.

Oh, was this a messed up set of appointments. 

We’ll have a follow-up appointment in three months, they had told me. And sure enough there were appointments that popped into my calendar on precisely that date almost the day after I walked out of the radiation center. But those were minor appointments. The actual doctor appointments didn’t show up and didn’t show up, which wasn’t a surprise because in my experience the doctor’s schedules never got finalized until near the appointment dates, anyway.

But as time went on, the actual doctor appointments still didn’t show up.

Finally as the three month date was less than three weeks away, I sent a message and then some more messages on the next day and then left voicemail. It was at this point that appointments started furiously popping up in my calendar with messages of apology and phone calls to disregard some of the other messages they’d left me. It was clear that I had allies there who were working very hard to straighten things out. Adelaide in particular came to my rescue and somehow figured out how to squeeze me into the already over-booked CT schedule. And Mary called. And Gary.

But the thing of it is, by that time too much time had passed, and it was simply too close to the appointment date to get everything lined up nicely. 

2.

So the first appointment of the first of two days was at 6:45 in the morning. That was for blood work, and we waited there until time ran out and I was due for my CT scan. So we told them we’d be back, and we walked off to the far reaches of the building to check me in for my scan.

And that check-in process took a long time.

As Trudy went off to get breakfast in the cafeteria downstairs, I sat squinting as a nurse tried several times to get an IV line stuck into my arm — evidence of which I will carry with me as a dark bruise for several days. But I’m kind of used to needles by now, so (squinting aside) it was all good.

Then I went to wait in a big chair with a wonderfully warm blanket over me (because those CT rooms are so dang cold) and the Benadryl coursing thru my veins making me sleepier and sleepier.

Beep. “Hot oatmeal ready,” Trudy texted me. “And cold milk.”

I texted her back and said I was still waiting. And a while later, I texted the same. And a while later, too. And then I fell asleep.

“Mr. Hasan?” a nurse asked, which made me jump.

She took me to the CT room. They scanned me quickly — in far less time it seemed than the time it took to start that IV. And then I was done.

3.

Back in the waiting room, the fair and industrious Trudy was holding my oatmeal and milk. It seemed to me that it had been a very long time since she had texted its arrival.

“And look,” she said, “It’s still hot!”

I was starving. I opened the container and took the spoon and started chowing down. It was indeed still hot. And it tasted great. It had cinnamon. And there were raisins in it.

It was the best breakfast I have ever had.

“I’m pretty good with a shovel,” I told Gilbert. “I’ll dig the hole.”

We are replacing our main circuit breaker panel, and we have to put in a new grounding system in order to be code compliant. Gilbert’s attempts to drive two 8-foot grounding rods had (unsurprisingly) failed, since there’s solid limestone four or five feet down. I was offering to do the digging for the city’s alternative grounding scheme: a 3 foot x 3 foot steel plate buried three feet down.

On Friday, Gilbert said we could do two smaller plates rather than one big one.

“I’ll dig the holes,” I told him.

I started today at 2:00. The sun had just passed behind the eves of the roof, so I was in the shade. 

There was gravel below the loamy garden topsoil, which was not a surprise. And then I hit black clay that made me set my shovel aside. I started using a post-hole digger (a hard way to dig two 1 foot x 2 foot holes). 

3:00 came and went. Then 4:00 came. And 5:00.

After 18 inches of black clay, there was another 18 inches of reddish clay. It was grueling work. The clay didn’t fall off of the post-hole digger, but the fair and industrious Trudy came to the rescue, scraping the gunk off the blades so that I wouldn’t have to bend over after each load.

6:00 came and went.

I hit solid rock and bent the blade of my grandfather’s post-hole digger. This is bulky-trash weekend in our neighborhood, and the salvaging/scavanging/recycling trucks have been driving up and down the streets for two days. I was mighty tempted to set the bent post-hole digger out by the curb, but Trudy would have nothing to do with it.

“You can’t get rid of your grandfather’s post-hole digger,” she said.

Ok, but I couldn’t use it, either. So I went begging: first to Ron who has a long rock-bar which sadly is in a shed 30 miles away, and then to Bill who loaned me a rock bar and his heavy-duty post-hole digger.

By the time 8:30 rolled around, the deed was finally done. I could barely speak.

Let’s just say that I might be good with a shovel, but with a post-hole digger in gunk — not so much.