and going straight when you should have
taken the fork in the road and ending up in a Star Trek episode...
Well, that is where I have been hanging out for the last few days.
"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?""That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat."I don’t much care where--" said Alice."Then it doesn’t matter which way you go," said the Cat."--so long as I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation."Oh, you’re sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."(Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 6)
Maybe I really am traveling through a different dimension when I start to look to Alice in Wonderland for meaning. This notion of needing to know where you are going is something that I have heard Lalitha speak about many times over the years that we have worked together. She has said things like "If you don't have any idea of where you were going, there are plenty of other entities that do." The premise is that I will most certainly end up somewhere but unless I am very conscious and precise in my direction it is easy to get swept along and end up living someone else's agenda and not living the life that I had intended or had been intended for me.
I am feeling quite disembodied, a sensation that I have been feeling for days. When I saw my TCM on Monday morning, I asked him, after he had put in the first set of needles, if I was dying or if I was just practicing dying. I asked that because I have been having a very distinct feeling of being outside my body, watching myself. It is kind of cool and kind of creepy. Sunny laughed and said that I need to be eating more food to bring the Qi into the body. When I asked my physio yesterday, she said that I need to pay attention to how I'm holding my head and where she indicated was sore and was made sore by doing my Carrie Bradshaw imitation of writing whilst sitting on my bed.
The key Star Wars symptom is peripheral neuropathy (pn) which involves odd nerve sensations: numbness and tingling in the hands and feets, popping (remember those things that were around when we were in high school and they exploded in our mouths? I just googled it: Pop Rocks. As an aside to my aside, I keep telling the kids how amazing it is to be able get the answer to any question that you want to know just be having Internet access.
Okay so that Pop Rock sensation is what I feel in different spots throughout my body: in the inner joint of my elbows, in my neck, down my spine, esp. the lower back, down the thighs etc. The popping and pinging when it gets going is doing a non-melodic symphony of pings, pricks, tinglings with a numbing bass beat. Hard to sleep with and it would be very hard to live with.
All that on top of exhaustion and break-through nausea, hot flashes (or were they blood sugar crashes?) makes for a very disorienting time. I spend as much time as I can in my uppper office. I now have a bird feeder (squirrel and rat and swallow proof supposedly) that hangs right in front of one of my windows on my bedroom front porch overlooking the North Shore mountains, ocean, Stanley Park, Downtown etc. The first brave black-capped chickadee came for a sunflower seed just before dusk yesterday. I plan to spend as much time resting in the next few days until all these symptoms subside. The kids are doing great. Tom and Laura are as usual being fantastically supportive as are many other people and we are all doing well. I am getting to rest and conserve my energy to tell my body that I want to live despite allowing chemotoxic chemical to be inserted through my veins that give my body a very different message.
I really am fine and there really are a lot of weird things going on with my body as it responds to the chemotherapy drugs. The fact that I really try to pay attention to what's going on with my body and my mind (ie a self-observation practice) means that I really notice even very subtle changes and sensations--which basically makes me sound like a nutter hypocondriac who can milk a well-intentioned "How are you?" or "What's new?" into a full-on entire lunch-hour monologue.
I'm going to track down a copy of Alice in Wonderland, if it's no longer sitting on our shelf downstairs and study it for clues. "Tut, tut, child!" said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it."(Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 9)
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