repair

Truth, the earring episode gave rise to a couple of disconnected days for Laura and me. "I'm not supposed to be mad at you because my job is to take care of you!" confessed the exasperated spouse. "I'm not supposed to be mad at you because I know the earring is not important!" was my enlightened retort. This is how two counselors fight.

We finally agreed that the earring loss was more about my feeling like things were happening beyond my control. That's obvious when you stand in the lookout tower of the frontal lobe; the part of me that was upset about the earring, though, was pacing in the dungeon of the amygdala. Other exiles there: the part of me that resents Laura's relative freedom not to complete things on my timetable, and the part of me that just generally likes to be right. The various parts of me finally just picking at straw on the dungeon floor did a lot of grumbling among each other, while the frontal lobe guard was fumbling, slowly, for the keys.

Anyway, two nights ago, during one of my many wakeful spells, it occurred to me that if I could get off my righteous position I could end up with a lovelier pair of earrings than the original ones, which were beautiful but unwieldy. This surrender is harder than it sounds. I had that sort of feeling where you could stop being mad, but you don't want to. I'd take a small step away from the anger and then go back for one more bite of righteousness. Yummm. That tastes good.

But today I brought the remaining beautiful, unwieldy earring to the bead artisan in West Hartford Center. She is going to stimulate earring mitosis and come up with two smaller ones. And I will wear them during my months of chemotherapy as tokens of repair, relational and otherwise.

In other repair news, we saw the surgeon again yesterday for another draining. She is still majorly bumming, as they say, about my left side, which looks like Rocky Balboa on the losing end of a bad fight. She tells me it's okay that it's badly bruised from all the needles involved in the draining rounds (we've done 4 so far), but she is just miserable about the burn, which I guess is going to leave a scar, fo' sho'. She suggested the possibility of plastic surgery. This, for under my arm. I would be taking skin from my tush to fix a spot under my armpit. This is like patching a hole in the elbow of a sweater by cutting up the back of the sweater. I'm not doing it.

Gail, Paul Bunyan's younger sister, mentioned in the blog post of December 2, shaved another shivering alpaca to make me a hot compress holder which arrived in yesterday's mail. The fur envelope is covered with soft yellow fur stars, and had a little note saying "no more burns!" Too bad I've lost my license to use hot compresses. Instead, we warmed up the insert Gail had included, then passed the soft, warm envelope from chilly foot to chilly foot, under the sheets in the cold winter night. The silent ritual was sweet recognition of our repair.