Saturday
Now: Pretty Generous Nodularity
I’m puzzled by a recent review of my medical records from Lt. Dan and Cowhage Clinic. I had picked up the records from Cowhage and was transporting them to a new physician. Curiousity made me look at the notes from the fateful visit when puppet doc said my prostate felt the same as the year before, enlarged but smooth.
Scanning the report, my eyes went right to a typed line that jumped off the page. The color of the typed line was significantly lighter than the type elsewhere on the page, and each word was clumsily spaced apart with perhaps eight carriage returns so as to extend the line completely across the page. It looked as if White-Out liquid had been applied before typed-over new words were added. And those words? See for yourself. They say: "pretty generous prostate nodularity". The spaced out words do not appear anywhere else on the document. I thought perhaps the lighter lettering might have come from the copy machine, but compare the darkness of the lettering below this line and you'll see it's as dark as the lines about the prostate line.
On December 25, 2004, almost the exact third anniversary of my diagnosis, Lt. Dan, Puppet Doctor, reappeared. I spotted him with what I now realize is the sulking gait of someone living miles from his own center. He was wearing a University of Iowa sweatshirt, a reminder that doctors there at Iowa had failed to help my father in his battle with cancer last year.
While I've long thought that I had put Lt. Dan behind me, this brief encounter so flumoxed me that all I could do was retreat to my bed for a four-hour nap, and I'm someone who never takes naps.
How does this story relate to my journey of reconnectness today? Well, obviously, when you reach back there will be diappointments. You will get thumped. And those big shoulders will slump. It's working through the slumps that are important to the journey. I could have turned into a raving lunatic over the apparent altering of my medical records, but I'm not going to do that. Will I just drop the matter and move on? Probably not. Abandoning past pain -- I mean stupidity -- is simply not that easy. Poet John Ashbery ends a poem: "The tenacity of just seeming." Well, I'm now tenacious in the notion that it just seems like this whole event could have been prevented with a little more awareness on my part, and a lot more of doing the right things on Danny Dolt's part. My notion is that I'll find an innovative way someday to embarrass Dan, and my grins will carry the day. ¶ 11:09 AM
Scanning the report, my eyes went right to a typed line that jumped off the page. The color of the typed line was significantly lighter than the type elsewhere on the page, and each word was clumsily spaced apart with perhaps eight carriage returns so as to extend the line completely across the page. It looked as if White-Out liquid had been applied before typed-over new words were added. And those words? See for yourself. They say: "pretty generous prostate nodularity". The spaced out words do not appear anywhere else on the document. I thought perhaps the lighter lettering might have come from the copy machine, but compare the darkness of the lettering below this line and you'll see it's as dark as the lines about the prostate line.
On December 25, 2004, almost the exact third anniversary of my diagnosis, Lt. Dan, Puppet Doctor, reappeared. I spotted him with what I now realize is the sulking gait of someone living miles from his own center. He was wearing a University of Iowa sweatshirt, a reminder that doctors there at Iowa had failed to help my father in his battle with cancer last year.
While I've long thought that I had put Lt. Dan behind me, this brief encounter so flumoxed me that all I could do was retreat to my bed for a four-hour nap, and I'm someone who never takes naps.
How does this story relate to my journey of reconnectness today? Well, obviously, when you reach back there will be diappointments. You will get thumped. And those big shoulders will slump. It's working through the slumps that are important to the journey. I could have turned into a raving lunatic over the apparent altering of my medical records, but I'm not going to do that. Will I just drop the matter and move on? Probably not. Abandoning past pain -- I mean stupidity -- is simply not that easy. Poet John Ashbery ends a poem: "The tenacity of just seeming." Well, I'm now tenacious in the notion that it just seems like this whole event could have been prevented with a little more awareness on my part, and a lot more of doing the right things on Danny Dolt's part. My notion is that I'll find an innovative way someday to embarrass Dan, and my grins will carry the day. ¶ 11:09 AM
