Being Still

The woman at the desk when I check in remembers me, halfway remembers my name, even though I haven't checked in with her for months, for probably six months, perhaps even more than that. (She has new glasses, or new since the last time I remember seeing her; her hair is longer. I've never known her name.) I wonder how many hundreds of people she sees each week, and how many of them she sees more than once, and how many of them she can recognize on sight; I expect the cartoon hair helps (though she used to comment on my old hair, too, nearly every time I happened to check in with her). In the MRI building, the lab tech who once massacred my arm when placing an IV is there (though now she is one of the most consistent at hitting my veins of anybody at the hospital -- I tell her this, when she is prepping the small moment of skin just inside the bend of my elbow, and we laugh together) but the other woman, the one who's always seemed to be somehow in charge of things, perhaps, is not -- and this is a shame, because I like her, really, quite a lot. She exudes a certain sense of everything-under-control -- her voice, her flat metallic-grey short hair, the way she holds her shoulders. She gets the tube into my arm without a problem, takes the small amount of blood they need to make sure my kidneys are functional and I won't end up...however one ends up if one cannot flush the contrast solution from one's body, later. But when she tries to flush the line with saline, it doesn't work; nothing happens. She wiggles things around a bit, and tries to force the issue, slightly -- manages to get a small amount of saline in, and her fingers pressing gently on my arm, just above the place where the tiny plastic tube disappears inside -- Does that hurt? And it doesn't, not at all, and I'm not just saying that to be agreeable. It feels a little odd, perhaps -- the barest trace of something-weird -- but it isn't painful or uncomfortable. She forces it a little more, and now we can both see the small lump forming beneath the skin, saline seeping out into the surrounding tissues, not inside the vein. But...it really doesn't hurt. That's so strange. Usually it hurts a lot, when that happens. And she nods, says it's supposed to. But we can both see that it isn't actually working, and my veins are trying to forcibly eject the plastic IV tube, so she takes it out (and it doesn't bleed at all) and spends long moments tracing her fingertips against my skin -- now here, now slightly lower; back of my hand, side of my wrist -- trying to find another, better place. But she can't find anything she really likes the feel of, and doesn't want to do this a third time, if it doesn't work, so I let her switch to my left (my dominant, and I hate having IVs placed there because it makes me feel mildly bound, restricted) arm, and she finds a spot immediately and this time it all works like a dream.

I am very good at lying still. I can count out my breathing, slow to ten, each time -- inhale, exhale. I cannot ever make my mind be calm and motionless like this, but it is nothing to do it to my body. I stay so motionless I might be carved from stone, or some other something -- more solid, or stronger, or less real. (When I tell him I feel helpless, he laughs and says I come across about as helpless as a wolverine. When things are quiet, in the dark, I think about what it must be like to feel oneself understood; I cannot begin to imagine it.) I can stay impossibly still, because everything else -- the things that matter more, the things that are more real, less solid -- is never still at all.

The rest of the day blurs in and out of focus -- stumble across the street, down the block, to get a cup of tea, and check the time, rush back to the other building, upstairs, wait to see my doctor. And she talks to me, and tells me things that are meant to gently reassure, but what it all comes down to, falling down around me like shards, is a capital-lettered We Don't Really Know. Because things can be as good as they can be today, and at any point become, suddenly, Not. (And We Don't Really Know, and there isn't much concrete solid anything that we can do, and it's all indefinite waiting and try not to think about it very much too hard -- the simplest thing being the most impossible.) Then rush back -- downstairs, across skybridge, through a brief maze of corridors, and down even further -- to the Infusion Center. I am in a large and windowed room this time, after months of always ending up in the tiny, windowless rooms in the hidden interior hallways. The chair is larger, too, and not the same weird seasick green that all the other chairs seem to be; it makes me feel like I'm in a cartoon, or a funhouse, shrunk down and sitting in a piece of giants' furniture -- and in the back of my mind I remember, distantly, one of the nurses talking about getting new chairs for all the rooms at some point, and I wonder if this is one of them, if it is new, if that is why, the difference. The clock on the wall -- high up, and facing the chair, staring straight at me -- is loud, absurdly so; the regular ceaseless tick-tick-ticking of it hurts my head, and overwhelms all other background anything. The IV tubing is still in my arm from the MRI, and so everything is quickly and easily done, set up in no time at all, as fast as the wait for the pharmacy to get my bag of liquid drugs prepared and sent down. I read until I can no longer focus, until the words all start to bleed together on the page, and then I curl myself into a knotted and objectively uncomfortable-looking knot -- pillow against my chest and shoulder, chin turned to rest against the pillow, knees tucked up -- and drift to sleep, my heartbeat aligning with the ticking of the clock up on the wall.