485 lines
25 KiB
Plaintext
485 lines
25 KiB
Plaintext
|
File: gutting.txt
|
||
|
Cont: evisceree-to-be gets clues, experiences The Fear, watches the dance.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Is there any diagnostic value in observing what people do in the face of
|
||
|
impending doom? Sunday night, I ate some pizza, dropped a book back to
|
||
|
someone off whom I had borrowed it, then whizzed around to a friend's
|
||
|
place in Newtown, and to a backdrop of Disposable Heroes of HipHoprisy, we
|
||
|
shagged each other to an absolute standstill (surprisingly good music to
|
||
|
shag to, I think). I guess impending massive trauma is as good an excuse
|
||
|
as any for a spot of debauch. Once we could stand up again, I threw on
|
||
|
some clothes and fanged it home on the understanding that the reason we
|
||
|
have license demerit points is, you're supposed to lose 'em. I know for
|
||
|
sure now the speed camera on the Princes Hwy at Kogarah won't get ya if
|
||
|
you drive a 'cycle right in the gutter out of the field of the induction
|
||
|
coils they embedded in the middle of the lanes. Tho, doin' a hundred k's
|
||
|
with your footpeg one inch from the kerb is somewhat dogdy.
|
||
|
|
||
|
No user servicable parts within. Refer to qualified service personnel.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Monday morning, I went to meet the guys who are going to gut me, Mr Aslam,
|
||
|
and Mr Cozzi. Aslam does kidneys. Cozzi does lymphatics. I'd address 'em
|
||
|
as doctor but I've been deconditioned of that habit, since it's not how I
|
||
|
address dad, who has been a DokTa for longer than I have been alive. He
|
||
|
came along for a listen, and also because he's my immediate next of kin.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Aslan and I had a look at the CT scans on a fluorescent backlit screen. On
|
||
|
the right side of my body is a normal kidney. On the other side is a
|
||
|
smattered veneer of (surprisingly, still functional) recognisable kidney
|
||
|
trying desperately to hang onto a fuckin' big chunk o' mutant cellular
|
||
|
bureaucracy gone mad. It is dimensionally about the same size as my head,
|
||
|
if you were to cleave my head down the centre first. I'm not quite sure
|
||
|
how I fit it all in. Into my head popped a quote from Parker (Yaphet
|
||
|
Kotto) in the movie Alien, who delivers the line with exactly the right
|
||
|
emphasis for this circumstance:
|
||
|
|
||
|
"That son of a bitch is HUGE."
|
||
|
|
||
|
The consequences of just how huge were finally revealed. It's not gonna
|
||
|
come out through the usual renal incision. When people as conservative as
|
||
|
surgeons invoke the word _radical_ and follow it with nephrectomy, there's
|
||
|
a gonna be some serious slashin'. They're gonna insert a blade just above
|
||
|
my pubic symphysis, run it all the way up the middle of my six pack (can
|
||
|
they do something about that protruding navel while they're there?) to the
|
||
|
base of my sternum, then do a left turn through my abdominus rectus
|
||
|
(that's gonna fuckin' hurt while I'm healing) and run along under the
|
||
|
margin of my ribs, then go through the pleura of the left lung (which will
|
||
|
collapse for a while, which sucks but I guess I'll find a bicycle pump and
|
||
|
reinflate it later) and through the intercostal muscle between the eighth
|
||
|
and ninth rib. Same thing again with the peritoneal wall. Then they ligate
|
||
|
a lot of heavy-gauge vasculature. I am so glad of the existance of
|
||
|
anasfuckinthesia and really sharp knives carefully wielded.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Let me quantify this. I just measured these distances with a tape measure.
|
||
|
I'm up for ghastly half-meter gash in my torso, half midline, half
|
||
|
centre-to-edge. I am gonna fuckin' fuckin' fuckin hurt for fucking weeks
|
||
|
and it scares me a lot. I hope they have a sewing machine or a staple-gun
|
||
|
handy for when they finish removing the thing, and a spare 44 gallon drum
|
||
|
of refined opiates to dunk me in. Regardless to what level of accuracy it
|
||
|
is executed, it'll more or less be tactical butchery getting into and out
|
||
|
of my carcass.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
Aslam reckons they might damage the spleen in the process of doing this
|
||
|
procedure, and damaged spleens tend to bleed all over the place, so they
|
||
|
might have to chop that out too. I don't have a spare one of those,
|
||
|
unfortunately. I'll be more happy if I keep it. To cover the possibility
|
||
|
that I lose my spleen, this arvo, in each arse cheek, via inch-long
|
||
|
23-gauge needles, were administered recombinantly engineered vaccines
|
||
|
against pneumococcus and meningococcus, which are two kinds of bacteria to
|
||
|
which you have an increased (forty times!) probability of succumbing when
|
||
|
you're asplenic. My bum hurts bilaterally. I can sit down, but not move
|
||
|
about without a strong ache in the bottie. Vaccination's a pain in the
|
||
|
arse, but it beats being eaten alive by an opportunistic microbe.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Part of why they need an opening redolent of something I'd normally find
|
||
|
on a CityRail vinyl train seat is because Mr Cozzi is gonna resect all the
|
||
|
lymph nodes up and down my inferior vena cava, in the event that the
|
||
|
suspect lymphatic drainage from our friendly mutant has contaminated them
|
||
|
with metastatic cells.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Tumours all begin as one cell. The one I'm nursing is now several
|
||
|
_billion_ cells, all of whom took time to execute their capitalist genetic
|
||
|
imperative of "go forth and uncontrollably exponentiate". Today arrived
|
||
|
some other clues; first, a pointer to when it might have started; second,
|
||
|
how I could have known about this thing earlier; and third, an insight
|
||
|
into its general nature.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Once Was A Kidney looks about as ugly in NMR images as it does in CT
|
||
|
images, but there's better resolution of the arterial and venous supply.
|
||
|
Tumor cells aren't very clever, collectively; they're effectively clones,
|
||
|
all equally unimaginative and proliferative, rather like an insidious
|
||
|
subspecies of middle management. Whilst busily reinventing half my renal
|
||
|
system as the sort of disease for which abattoirs reject slaughtered
|
||
|
carcasses, the stupid fucker grew into, and blocked off, most of the renal
|
||
|
vein which the kidney uses to return piss-depleted blood to the inferior
|
||
|
vena cava (which is a BIG pipe, I could (very uncomfortably) fit my thumb
|
||
|
into it). NMR shows the occlusion fairly clearly. I thought for a moment
|
||
|
it'd have been funny if it occluded the renal artery and effectively
|
||
|
starved itself before it got a chance to get massive (well, duh), but
|
||
|
that'd just kill my kidney, which would become necrotic and would need to
|
||
|
be removed anyway. Less slasho, but slasho nonetheless.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Natch, the progressively-less-kidney is still being force-fed a load of
|
||
|
pressurised arterial blood from my descending aorta. So ...the thing...
|
||
|
had to find some other place to drain its venous output. Sure enough, it
|
||
|
decided to head downwards, and involved itself in my gonadal vein, on the
|
||
|
left side. When it did this, it raised the venous pressure therein and
|
||
|
de-elasticised the collagen in the veins which take circulatory drainage
|
||
|
from, you guessed it, my left testicle. I have no idea if this means I'm
|
||
|
gonna lose a 'nad, but hey, I have a spare one of those too. Bilateral
|
||
|
symmetry has its privelages.
|
||
|
|
||
|
I've been walking around for a couple of years with a 'nad sac which
|
||
|
occasionally feels like a bag of worms hanging off my pelve, but it
|
||
|
doesn't bug me. I had it checked out by a GP the same day I discovered it
|
||
|
while having a shower at my old squat in Annandale, and he told me what it
|
||
|
was and said, well, if it doesn't bother you, don't worry about it. It
|
||
|
didn't, so I didn't. I mentioned it to dad and he didn't think of
|
||
|
anything, but then he generally operates on people with no scrota. I
|
||
|
didn't think of anything, either. I rationalised it as age-related
|
||
|
idiopathic collagen failure, I'm getting it in my lower legs, too. It
|
||
|
seems, however, that bags are the embryonic form of these cans of worms to
|
||
|
which I hear people refer every so often, one of which I have recently
|
||
|
opened.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Chatting to Aslan today, mentioning my complete lack of symptoms other
|
||
|
than splenomegaly... no night sweats, no pissing blood, no pain ... I was
|
||
|
just in the process of mentioning that I had a left varicocele but he got
|
||
|
the words out two seconds before me. Encouraging - therein lay the
|
||
|
correlation. But when did this appear?
|
||
|
|
||
|
I had to trawl my email archive for "scrotum" to get a clue when this
|
||
|
started, 'cos I remember emailing someone about it. Must have looked odd
|
||
|
in the process table entry on conway -
|
||
|
|
||
|
predator@conway:~$ grep -r scrotum * | more
|
||
|
|
||
|
which for those of you not conversant with the gnu/linux command line
|
||
|
shell means:
|
||
|
|
||
|
search everything under my home directory for the occurence of scrotum
|
||
|
and display anything you find, chopped into individual screenfulls.
|
||
|
Visualise that process as you will.
|
||
|
|
||
|
According to the datestamps on vasquez.zip.com.au and conway.cat.org.au, a
|
||
|
message mentioning my varicocele appeared a few days before Thurs Feb 28
|
||
|
2002. So I've been an oncogene farmer for at least 21 months, and probably
|
||
|
for a few months longer than that, since when the initiating cell started
|
||
|
down its proliferative career path, it needed a few months to get enough
|
||
|
buddies to block a a vein. This is, in its own way, sort of encouraging.
|
||
|
Big, slow growing tumors are generally less prone to metastatis than their
|
||
|
malignant, aggressive, fast-spreading, fast-growing, kill'em all and let
|
||
|
god sort 'em out relatives. If it was likely to be malignant, it's
|
||
|
probably had at least two years to figure it out. It has involved ONE
|
||
|
lymph node. So if we're lucky it still hasn't figured out how to take over
|
||
|
the rest of me, and it can be scooped out more or less entire. Good
|
||
|
riddance, fucker. You can propagate all you like... in a cell culture
|
||
|
bottle where I can feed, nurse and autoclave you at will, bwahahaha...
|
||
|
say... fancy spending the rest of your life in vapour phase liquid
|
||
|
nitrogen, with a handy preservative of 10% DMSO and 5% dextrose?
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
I'm starting to lose confidence in GPs and not simply 'cos of the "forget
|
||
|
about the varicocele" incident in Feb '02. I popped along to another GP
|
||
|
while I was doing some kitchen renovation a couple of weeks ago (probably
|
||
|
late October), moaning faintly about this splenomegaly and that for some
|
||
|
reason the waist strap on my backpack didn't fit comfortably any more. He
|
||
|
checked for enlarged lymph nodes, palpated my guts asked me if there were
|
||
|
any other symptoms, and when I said no, said not to worry about it. I'm
|
||
|
glad I worried about it a bit more and asked dad to feel my guts one night
|
||
|
in front of the (you guessed it) footy. If I'd taken the same "don't worry
|
||
|
about it" approach to this thing as I did to the varicocele, you'd be
|
||
|
reading this rant in late 2004 or maybe 2005, about my impending death
|
||
|
from inoperable cancer, and how it came to be that I'm up on a charge of
|
||
|
the manslaughter of my general malpractitioner. Maybe I'm getting
|
||
|
infinitesimally smarter about these things as I age. Am I enough of a
|
||
|
prick to send him a copy of the CT report? Yeah. Lift your game, pal.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
Ar, shit. It just occurred to me I'm gonna miss Jello Biafra on Thursday
|
||
|
at the Enmore.
|
||
|
|
||
|
I bagged TISM member Jock Cheese's album Platter today and it's pants
|
||
|
shittingly funny and also sad in some places. I wonder if this guy's brain
|
||
|
isn't somehow entangled with mine.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
Vote me for President.
|
||
|
I'll ban patriotic sentiment.
|
||
|
Introduce a virus pest control
|
||
|
that reacts to the mention of green and gold.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Up there Calici, in there and fight,
|
||
|
wipe out jingoism overnight
|
||
|
there's no marketing that can stop it
|
||
|
I don't care if there's ten Tony Locketts.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
I caught the bus home and remembered how much I like the feeling of my
|
||
|
head vibrating against the glass to the throb of the diesel engine under
|
||
|
the floor of the bus, and that cloud of hot, almondy burnt diesel which
|
||
|
you often walk through when you walk towards the folding entry doors.
|
||
|
I went to a service station and stuffed my wankerfone full'o credit in
|
||
|
anticipation of a ton of SMSs I will have to send in coming days.
|
||
|
|
||
|
I walked up the hill in the rain and enjoyed the light splashing and the
|
||
|
cold, wet, astringent smell that the trees emit when their kino is washed
|
||
|
down their trunks. I've walked up it thousands of times, it was one of my
|
||
|
first big excursions, on the way to and from primary school. I get home
|
||
|
and the dog whinges to me, wanting a walk, but my arse is complaining
|
||
|
about its brush with bacterial proteins, tetanus toxin and aluminium
|
||
|
hydroxide adjuvants and I'm not going to walk much tonight.
|
||
|
|
||
|
I'm getting short with mum. I tell her stuff and she asks questions which
|
||
|
indicate she didn't listen, which is the worst kind of question to ask me
|
||
|
since it makes me uninterested in answering again, making her ask more
|
||
|
questions which indicate she didn't listen the first time. I don't know if
|
||
|
she's going deaf, or senile, or something. Or maybe she's always like that
|
||
|
and I'm getting stroppy.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
Tuesday, 10am.
|
||
|
|
||
|
This time tomorrow I'll be on the table, halogen floodlit, peeled open and
|
||
|
hovered over by people who dress in funny green smocks with blue masks,
|
||
|
and wield sharp, disposable blades, various 316 stainless alloy tools,
|
||
|
pass each other the right instruments without asking for them 'cos they're
|
||
|
_in the loop_ and to whom clings the hope of those who would be glad to
|
||
|
see me come out alive. A machine will be doing my breathing for me. I'll
|
||
|
be very thoroughly paralysed, deprived of sensibility, and bits of what
|
||
|
used to be my guts will accumulate, detached, on the table beside me. I
|
||
|
go into the hospital, starved from midnignt tonight, at 6:30 am tomorrow
|
||
|
morning. They carve me up at 9am.
|
||
|
|
||
|
They reckon it'll take 'em about 90 minutes to take the freakshow out, and
|
||
|
about two and a half hours to get all the lymph nodes and other shit, then
|
||
|
insert a drain and sew me up. Procedures of this length are known as major
|
||
|
ops in the trade. I'll spend about four hours splayed on the table, total.
|
||
|
By a perverse twist of fate, dad will be in the theatre next door,
|
||
|
operating. It won't surprise me at all if he comes over and gives me a
|
||
|
haircut while I'm out. I'm gonna be drugged out of it, in intensive care
|
||
|
for a day after this trauma. I hope someone has the good decency to tell
|
||
|
me what day it is if I wake up.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
I popped into dad's office this arvo. I figured I might as well make him
|
||
|
the executor of my will, which should be logistically easy, since I can't
|
||
|
think of any instructions and have no worthwhile stash of desirable
|
||
|
goodies for distribution. His parents wrote him completely out of their
|
||
|
wills, which has pissed him off for about thirty years. I don't know if
|
||
|
it'd be appropriate or ironic to leave all my stuff to him. I figure he
|
||
|
can do what he wants with my stuff, but knowing dad, he'll chuck it out.
|
||
|
What would he do with a climbing rack, a 60MHz CRO, weird computer shit, a
|
||
|
stack of CDs, twice his bodyweight in books, a motorcycle? Nah. I don't
|
||
|
care just yet.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
There in every classroom, in every secondary school
|
||
|
and in every workplace and every typing pool,
|
||
|
there beside you on the bus with the lifeless stare
|
||
|
nervously outside surgery waiting for doctors there.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Together, loser. Loser.
|
||
|
Loser, loser, losing, lost.
|
||
|
Loser, loser, losing, lost.
|
||
|
|
||
|
There's cancer in the south of France
|
||
|
Cancer lurks in Rome.
|
||
|
Cancer circles the whole globe
|
||
|
'Till it finds you home.
|
||
|
|
||
|
In heart and liver it is waiting
|
||
|
for all of us or most
|
||
|
our very cells join hands and sing
|
||
|
loser, loser lost.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Loser, loser, losing, lost.
|
||
|
Loser, loser, losing, lost.
|
||
|
|
||
|
"Lose your Delusion I" (from TISM - the Beasts of Suburban)
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
I'm starting to think I should choose more carefully what I slap on the CD
|
||
|
player. Pink Floyd's "Breathe (Reprise)" sprung out of my speakers and
|
||
|
stopped me in mid-breath. I'm not frightened of dying, either. I'm just
|
||
|
frightened of the pain and stupidity of the likely routes to that end when
|
||
|
the process isn't under my control. I am In Harms Way already, but the
|
||
|
escape route is risky, and includes possible iatrogenic damage (a spleen
|
||
|
is a terrible thing to waste) and nosocomial infection. I hate hospitals
|
||
|
for a number of reasons mainly associated with getting a knife in ya, but
|
||
|
also 'cos they're full of microbes which eat antibacterial drugs for
|
||
|
breakfast... cyclosporins, beta-lactams, chloramphenicols, tertacyclines,
|
||
|
you name it. Rip off a couple of atoms and, Borg-like, assimilate them
|
||
|
into the molecular collective. Humanity trained these microbes to learn
|
||
|
these resistance tricks over the last fifty years by overprescription of
|
||
|
antibiotics, and failure to complete courses thereof. I've seen the
|
||
|
plasmid maps of the antibacterial resistance genes these bugs pass between
|
||
|
each other, molecular cassettes of free software, shared by the bacterial
|
||
|
community to defend itself against the semisynthetic chemical onslaught we
|
||
|
throw at it. If anything gets into me while I'm laid open, I'm up for an
|
||
|
ugly septic cytological shitfight, 'specially if I lose my spleen
|
||
|
somewhere in the theatre. Even if everything goes brilliantly, it's still
|
||
|
gonna fucking HURT.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Yesterday, the patho lab upstairs did a blood group and hold on yet more
|
||
|
of my brachially extracted claret, but I noticed they didn't ask for a
|
||
|
crossmatch on the stuff they took out of my arm. This is a good sign.
|
||
|
They're not expecting to need to transfuse me.
|
||
|
|
||
|
I found out that the noise cancelling headphones are three hundred bucks
|
||
|
from Sony, and I think I'll just bring my normal squishy earplugs instead.
|
||
|
Amazingly, for three hundred bucks, they do no digital signal processing
|
||
|
at all - it's all fast analog circuitry. Three hundred bucks is a fuck of
|
||
|
a lot for a small mic, an SMD operational amp and a couple of passive
|
||
|
components on each side of your head. I think I'll have to go track down a
|
||
|
circ diag off the net and go from there. If I get out alive.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
Welcome to my last shower before The Slashing. I've chemically mowed off
|
||
|
most of my pubic hair with some thioglycolate goop, so some stranger
|
||
|
doesn't have to do it with a razor leaving pointy ends on the hairs, which
|
||
|
would make it more likely to itch when it grows back. It doesn't help the
|
||
|
scar heal if I scratch it all the time. Anyway, I'm not happy to have some
|
||
|
random person doing alien crop circles in my short'n'curlies with soap and
|
||
|
a razor blade. I might get cut. Or hard. Or something.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
I wake up early tomorrow morning with a load of clothes (black), a
|
||
|
toothbrush, a hairbrush, mobile phone (and charger), Kuhn's "The Structure
|
||
|
of Scientific Revolutions", an artline texta. This will all be waiting in
|
||
|
a black backpack which dad insisted upon my using on the grounds of
|
||
|
hygiene (I can't argue - my main backpack amounts to a nylon-substrate
|
||
|
ecosystem which uses me to get around Sydney, and turns wash water black
|
||
|
when I wash it) - but the black backpack is another of dad's `image'
|
||
|
requirements wrapped up in med-speak justification, and it isn't like I'm
|
||
|
gonna go deliberately smearing my backpack on my wound or anything) but
|
||
|
it's unfamiliar to me, and I've had, and sometimes lived out of, my other
|
||
|
pack for ten years.
|
||
|
|
||
|
I think the BOEING emblem looks better since I coloured the E and I out of
|
||
|
it.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Amazing amounts of bullshit went into keeping control of what I finally
|
||
|
put into the pack. My impending hospitalisation appears to have awakened
|
||
|
some long dormant parental pack-yer-kid's-stuff-for-them genes which are
|
||
|
usually only activated when preschoolers are notified of their first trip
|
||
|
to the zoo and need their globites stuffed for the epic land and sea
|
||
|
journey to the far flung gates of Taronga Park.
|
||
|
|
||
|
As part of her melodramatic propensity, mum went on a pathological ironing
|
||
|
frenzy and presented me with a load of razor-pressed tee shirts and shorts
|
||
|
to wear in hospital - all of 'em are dad's, various pharmo company shit
|
||
|
decked in advertising for such things as implantable contraceptives. I'm
|
||
|
think I'm supposed to be grateful for the work she's done on these things,
|
||
|
given as a gift from the concerned. No offense, but fuck off. I'm wearing
|
||
|
what I usually wear, I pack my own shit, and if I had a religion it would
|
||
|
prohibit ironing. It's all my stuff, 'cept for a dressing gown an
|
||
|
acquaintance wore while they were having their guts chopped out last year,
|
||
|
and gave me for the occasion on the grounds that it will bring me luck.
|
||
|
Which is crap, of course, but it will bring me a better R (thermal
|
||
|
transfer co-efficent) if I wear it. It is an unseasonally cold November.
|
||
|
So I took it.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Some strange concepts come out when the shit hits the fan. People ring up
|
||
|
and wish me good luck, knowing nothing whatsoever about the treacherous
|
||
|
mathematical randomness underlying such a wish. There is something sort of
|
||
|
equivocal about a cancer patient saying luck isn't something they've had a
|
||
|
lot of lately, since I did spot the thing, too, hopefully in time to chop
|
||
|
it all out. Nobody seems to notice the contingent Markov chain: in order
|
||
|
to `get lucky' and spot cancer in time to head it off, you have to `be
|
||
|
unlucky' and contract the disease first.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Yea, verily, stochastic processes giveth, and stochastic processes taketh away.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Three people rang me up this evening and said they'd pray for me, which
|
||
|
I'm sure will make them feel better but otherwise be a waste of their
|
||
|
perfectly good CNS activity.
|
||
|
|
||
|
One gave me a couple of quotations from, if memory serves me correctly, a
|
||
|
little tome called Life's Little Instruction Book, a million-selling
|
||
|
publication which I recieved as a present over a decade ago and
|
||
|
disgustedly flung in the garbage as a collection of meaningless, and in
|
||
|
some cases self-contradictory aphorisms.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Someone else, a rello, rang up, concerned because their mum called them
|
||
|
after my mum blabbed to their mum about my illness. We ended up having a
|
||
|
long rant about oncogenic cervical viruses and tumor processes in general.
|
||
|
She said she would worry about me, and I said that would have no impact on
|
||
|
me, and she should just rock on down to BOC Gases, lug home a cylinder of
|
||
|
nitrous oxide, crack open the reg' and just try and fuckin' relax. She
|
||
|
thought that was kind of funny. I hope she doesn't light up a spliff at
|
||
|
the same time, since NOX is known for its propensity to, uh, vigorously
|
||
|
accelerate combustion.
|
||
|
|
||
|
An old workmate of dad's rang up, and asked how I was, but I couldn't
|
||
|
identify him by his voice on the phone, and I answered, `That depends on
|
||
|
who you are. So who are you?' Eventually he coughed the beans. I knew he
|
||
|
knew what I was in for. "I am up for a ghastly slashing - rad nephrectomy
|
||
|
minus optional extras." This dude's a surgeon too, and he knows the
|
||
|
outcomes are not down to luck either.
|
||
|
|
||
|
As confused and crazy as they all seem, being aware that people give a
|
||
|
shit does feel good in an egocentric sort of way. But why do they do it?
|
||
|
Do people feel bad if they don't tell me they're worried? I'd much prefer
|
||
|
people just got on with their lives, heedless of my problem, not worried.
|
||
|
I'll tell 'em the news when it's all over.
|
||
|
|
||
|
In a few hours I'll wake up, get over to the hossie, sign in and dump my
|
||
|
junk. I'll be running a circulatory system increasingly full of
|
||
|
catecholamines, and the cerebrospinal fluid sloshing around my ventricles
|
||
|
will be sodden in home-grown neuropeptidyl trepidation. But fear is OK
|
||
|
provided it can be kept under some sort of control, and I can do that.
|
||
|
Dad blocks all inquiries as to his state of mind, and appears unreadable,
|
||
|
which is worrisome. Makes me feel like he's masking something.
|
||
|
|
||
|
I don't know what to do about mum breathing her cigarette-flavoured,
|
||
|
desperation-tinted, canned wisdom in my direction, borne aloft on a
|
||
|
wheezily delivered aerosol of pathogens freshly exhaled from her
|
||
|
disintegrating, tobacco-plundered alveoli. She's had some hellish bodily
|
||
|
slashes too, in her life, but I know already what I'm in for and it isn't
|
||
|
gonna help to have her dissolve in front of me. I feel for the poor thing,
|
||
|
but I'll be glad to see the back of her weepy preoperative histrionics
|
||
|
when the orderlies mercifully shoo her out of the ward. I'm not equipped
|
||
|
to look at them, they're terribly contagious, and more than anything else,
|
||
|
I don't want to catch the vibe they harbour within.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
At half-eight, they'll stick in a main line, get me into the drapery, get
|
||
|
me onto a gurney and wheel me down to the OR. I'll be strongly inclined to
|
||
|
sing this as I glide along the corridors:
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
The angel of death hovers overhead.
|
||
|
My family come gather round my bed.
|
||
|
Come my colleagues, come literate friends
|
||
|
here is my life wish as my life ends -
|
||
|
|
||
|
I wish I'd slept with more girls.
|
||
|
I wish I'd done more drugs.
|
||
|
I wish you'd all go and get fucked.
|
||
|
|
||
|
(Professor Derrida Deconstructs - TISM "Faulty Pressing Do Not Manufacture")
|
||
|
|
||
|
provided, of course, I can stop laughing long enough to get the words out.
|
||
|
Stuck in the circumstance, it will hit me as astoundingly silly that the
|
||
|
last thing a considerable proportion of the community sees before they die
|
||
|
is hospital ceiling tiles. It's also the first thing they see again if
|
||
|
they survive their surgery. You are on a planet of pressed, painted,
|
||
|
rectangles of suspended bagasse. What a reason to bother to regain
|
||
|
consciousness. I'll be glad to see them again. Who'da thunk it.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
I won't need to pack the texta: from my {umops apisdn} perspective with
|
||
|
respect to the intended audience, I got it right on the first go. Since
|
||
|
dad's on a medical tribunal which hears cases in which doctors are
|
||
|
dismissed for rank incompetance, I've been exposed to too many shocking
|
||
|
stories of instruments left in, wrong organs removed, wrong ops performed,
|
||
|
to not try and help out all I can. So on my right abdomen is inscribed a
|
||
|
morbid joke so bad it could almost serve as an epitaph, but if it works,
|
||
|
it won't need to. Hopefully they'll see it after I lose consciousness.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
. .
|
||
|
.
|
||
|
\_/
|
||
|
|
||
|
PLEASE
|
||
|
OPEN
|
||
|
OTHER
|
||
|
SIDE
|
||
|
-->
|
||
|
|
||
|
(I had to do it like this 'cos it wouldn't all fit across my abdomen).
|
||
|
|
||
|
Gimme the succinyl choline, Captain Snooze, let's get it fuckin' over with
|
||
|
while I can still maintain the delusion that I'm really not scared shitless.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
<predator>
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
(next in the series is conway.cat.org.au/~predator/gutted.txt)
|