Cancer Journal #16 Jan 23

 

I’ve finished up the first week of a scheduled four weeks of radiation treatment of my pelvis (what that means is the prostate).  I go Monday through Friday so have 15 more sessions.  I feel nothing, either while I am be zapped or afterward.  I’m warned that there could be fatigue the last couple of weeks.  We’ll see.  

I go in gowned up, my pants off.  Tie strings are at the neck which take skills I don’t have to get tied.  Awkward foolish effort to cover up my underweared bottom.  It would be cute in a four year old.  Heck, maybe it’s cute in me too but not in any way that I’m interested in being cute. 

  I catch glimpses of other radiation patients in their gowns and the thing I’m immediately reminded of is angels in a Christmas pageant.  Full length, commodious, bleached to nearly white, floating toward their dressing room, it’s occurred to me each time I’ve seen one.  There’s a fellow on the same radiation track as me with whom I have a nodding relationship.  He’s scruffy.  Scruffy hair, scruffy beard, scruffy face, what I can see of with the mask on.  The cancer probably doesn’t help.  He wears a camo baseball cap.  He too looks like a Christmas pageant angel, albeit a very poorly cast one.

But maybe not.  Flannery O’Connor, the Southern writer, wrote a short story called, “Revelation” about a woman for whom respectability is very important.  She somehow has a vision of entrance into Heaven.  All the riffraff, the Black folks (although she doesn’t call them that), the down and outers are ahead of her and her kind in the line.  They all leap joyously and dance with all they have in the procession to Heaven.  The lady is totally shocked that these folks should be ahead of her.  Anyway, I think of that last shall be first principle when I see the camo capped guy in his angel gown.  He can be in my Christmas pageant any time.