Cancer World!!!! The Theme Park No One Wants to Go To

Yesterday, I spent the morning being siphoned and then the afternoon driving two hours to a "CANCER CENTER" two hours away to be siphoned AGAIN, then herded through endless examination rooms, hallways within hallways, into another windowless room, to be dealt with by caaaaaring nurses.  And finally an Oncologist who gives me more news--luckily good, that I am responding to treatment like a love letter to this new drug.  I was VERY relieved, but this is still only five weeks in, so I reserve the right to allow joy to come to the dance

Needless to say, I am happy and grateful.
I know others are going through so much more, but there is such a feeling of US and THEM in a doctor's office when dealing with disease. As if I'm being examined behind bars.  I can't help but make the gap lessen by saying something completely irreverent to make the Nurse/Phlebotomist gasp, or at least laugh.  Throwing someone off guard while they are holding needles is probably less than wise, but certainly a way to be thought of as a sentient entity, rather than a test tube.

I just have this trigger about being a number.  I insist on being a person in the damned room.  I realize that this is probably how they are seeing me, but the inner rebel-without-a-clue can't help it and out comes the rubber chicken.  Wacka wacka... (Michele Ragusa, this is all your fault :)  )

On the way home, I stopped in a one horse town at a Golden Corral and gorged--as I hadn't eaten in hours and despite the constant weight loss connected to this disease, I can't help a trough when the moment arrives.
TRULY a lesson in what I don't want to be, yet a strange feeling that I am with my people.
Southerners fresh from church in their polyester skirts complimented by their equally rayon doctrines... Acutely obese children begging their mothers for more yellow "vegetables".  I look at them with a strange aversion and recognition.  These are my people... that I DO NOT want to be like.  I will inwardly judge them, but become enraged if anyone outside my ken casts a disparaging eye their way.
Difficult to explain and I'm not exactly proud of it, but maybe Margaret Mead would understand!

Home to begin direction of a show at Connemara with our new Apprentices--that fill me with such pride and desire to do right by them.  Art mirrored by life complicated by mortality.

Time for some more wine, I think.