Tag Archives: RDP

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Soft cloak

The sparkling water distracts, while she is shy above it, cloaked. She waits for the moisture that remains after Mount Olympus has taken her share from the clouds as they roll over. Over the year Mount Olympus and her sisters take hundreds of inches before the clouds pass on to Tahoma, but she catches the moisture left and builds a soft cloak. She is nearly hidden in the blues and pale blues. Look for her.

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It doesn’t fit, but I wrote it for the Ragtag Daily Prompt: risque.

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Uncomplicated

My feelings are not that complicated now
I feel sorry for your need to be quite cruel
Sorry and occasionally wonder how
You justify acting like a stubborn mule
a distillation of your treatment is quite clear
you choose to keep the people you control
promises mean nothing when you feel fear
Telling yourself we’re evil takes a toll
You feel free and safe when you axe another friend
You feel that all your problems are at bay
A new need immediately builds again
Who will be the next victim of the day?
Your world shrinks every day you live
A stone cold heart forgetting how to give.

Sonnet 14

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Isn’t it an amazing tree? Complicated and yet forming an overall beautiful shape.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: complicated.

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Threw me out of the band

On Sunday I was in Portland with a friend and went to a memorial at the Laurelthirst. It was for a musician named Turtle. Local musicians showed up like crazy. There were at least six very fine guitar players, three on stage at a time and sometimes more. They switched in and out and switched styles. It was a beautiful tribute.

My two favorites were “They threw me out of the band” and one that bemoaned everyone playing music and drinking and that he had to sing another song about another dead band member. Funny and sad.

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For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: delete.

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The forum gathers

The forum gathers.

Red Paw puts her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands. “Told you so. Been telling you for 11 years.”

The small child/angel is sitting in a chair that morphs from regular boardroom chair to youth chair as she morphs back and forth.

“Nice job with the chair.” says Red Paw.

The two split and now there is a Small Child and an angel, sitting in two chairs.

Red Paw morphs too, into a bright red angel with a black halo and black bat wings.

The White angel nods and a feather drops. The feathers are bright white. Her halo is made of gold glittery pipe cleaners and attached at the shoulders.

Red Paw’s halo floats and seems to pull at the room.

The Quiet Woman sits in the fourth chair, with a cup of tea. “Anyone else?” she asks.

The others shake their heads.

“We are discussing the diaspora. Is it time to let them go?”

“Has been for 11 years.” says Red Paw nastily.

The small child nods.

The White angel says, “They want to believe what they want to believe. Let them go.”

“T, B, S, C, S, D, A, F, N, C, T, L, K, R and then next generation as well?”

All three nod.

The small child says, “They can contact us at any time.”

“They won’t.” says Red Paw.

“People can change,” says the White angel.

“And do they always?” says Red Paw.

“No.” says the White angel.

“I agree,” says the Quiet Woman. “We are done.” She brings a gavel down on the table, which rings like a singing bowl. The other three blur and melt in to her.

“We are done.”

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The photograph was taken 2016 or earlier when Halloween was on a Sunday. I dressed up and so did the minister.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: forum.

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Unfiltered

An old friend died this morning. She was a college friend of my parents and has known me since birth. I will miss her quite terribly.

She and I took a road trip in September. She had lost thirty pounds, not on purpose. I thought I had better do the road trip while we could. We went from Michigan to visit five households of old friends in Wisconsin. I lived with her and her family for a year during college in Madison, Wisconsin in the early 1980s. She is a beloved mentor.

She also introduced me to all sorts of groups. She has an amazing record collection.

I went with her to see Warren Zevon in Madison.

The painting is my photograph of one of her oil paintings. It is about 3 by 5 feet and gorgeous.

Dona nobis pacem and much love.

For the Ragtag Daily Post: filter.

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Diagnostic quest

Some diagnoses take months or even years. How can that be?

A patient comes to me with right shoulder pain. His pain is “out of proportion to the exam”. His shoulder exam does not fit with a rotator cuff tear, he has good range of motion, it is weird. I hospitalize him and ask orthopedics to see him.

The orthopedic surgeon agrees with me. It is not a musculoskeletal shoulder problem. We do xrays and labs. We do a chest xray as well as a shoulder xray because on the right side of the body, the recurrent laryngeal nerve goes down to the diaphragm and then returns to the shoulder and neck. So sometimes shoulder pain on the right is referred pain from a problem or tumor or pneumonia at the base of the lung.

His chest xray is normal.

We are having trouble controlling his pain even with morphine.

I call the general surgeon. My patient has some small lymph nodes in his supraclavicular spaces. We actually have lymph nodes all over, but many are hidden deep in muscles or under bone. We can feel them in the neck, the supraclavicular space, under each arm and in the groin.

The surgeon says there isn’t anything large enough to biopsy.

I call the oncologist in the next county. We are too small a rural hospital and do not have an oncologist at that time. I say, “I think he has cancer, but I can’t find it.” The oncologist listens to the story. He agrees. We do a chest and abdominal CT scan and some blood tests. The patient has had his colonoscopy. Nothing.

I send the patient to the oncologist’s bigger hospital. They can do some tests that I can’t. A bone scan and a PET scan.

The oncologist calls me. “I think you are right, but we can’t find it yet. Send him back when there is something to test.”

My patient goes home with pain medicine.

He then calls me every week or two. “It still hurts,” he says. “Please come in and let me do another exam,” I say. “No,” he says and hangs up. I am a Family Practice physician so his partner is also my patient. She comes in and rolls her eyes. “He complains, but he won’t come in!”

At last he shows up in the emergency room and now he has enlarged supraclavicular lymph nodes. The general surgeon biopsies them. It is an undifferentiated carcinoma. That means we don’t know where it is from. We don’t know the primary.

The oncologist says, “Send him down, so we can do the tests again.”

The patient is at home and refuses.

I call the oncologist back. “He’s refusing.”

“Oh.” says the oncologist. “Well, we can treat it with chemo blindly. We can try to figure out the primary and treat it more exactly. Or he can choose hospice.”

Ok, yes, three choices. I call and leave a message to go over the choices with him.

He comes up with a fourth choice: he refuses to talk to me at all.

I call his partner. “Yes,” she says, “He’s grumpy.”

“We are happy to help with whatever choice he makes.” I say.

“I’ll tell him.”

He continues to refuse to talk to me or the oncologist. Eventually he goes back to the emergency room and goes to hospice at the local nursing home.

I tell the oncologist. He comforts me. “Yes, sometimes we are pretty sure there is a cancer, but it has to get big enough to find.”

I am not comfortable with that but medicine is way more complex and messier than people realize. Sometimes it is really nice to have a patient with something where I know what it is AND it can be treated. Appendicitis. Gallstones. Strep throat.

But sometimes it is complicated and can take months or even years. Stay present and keep checking in.

Diagnostic quest.

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The boat is returning to the water after work in our boatyard. Healed and seaworthy.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: quest.

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The Extroverted Feeler’s haircut

My son was an Extroverted Feeler when he was little. Let’s call him EF.

We move in the middle of his first grade. From Colorado to the Olympic Peninsula, arriving on December 31, 1999. Y2K. The computers do not stop the next day and the world does not implode. My mother has recurrent cancer.

He starts school. He is in a three year class in public school with two teachers. It is a first, second, third grade mixed class. There are fifty kids and he is starting in January.

His mother is bananas because she is trying to learn a whole new set of patients, phone numbers, specialists and local medical slang. His father hates moving and lies on the couch. His grandmother is not doing well. He doesn’t have any friends yet. He misses his Colorado friends and his teacher. He is gloomy.

His father takes him to get his hair cut.

They return and I nearly swallow my tongue. The EF has a triple mohawk. A central spike of hair, shaved on both sides, and then another spike on each side. He and his dad thought it up. I tell myself: it’s just hair, it’s just hair, it will grow back! Horrors.

Two weeks later the EF is cheering up a bit and has a friend. Why? Apparently the haircut garnered attention. Within a week, not only does every kid in his class know his name, but most of the parents do too. “Who is that kid with the triple mohawk?” The EF is very pleased.

He gets a triple mohawk once more. By now I am ok with it.

After that he gets normal haircuts. His grandmother dies, but he has some friends now. His mother is less bananas over time and his father knows the name of every checker at the grocery store and all the coffee shops and the golf pros.

There was a cartoon where a mother is telling her son not to stare at a person with a mohawk. “But mom, don’t they get mohawks so that people will stare?” Uh, good point!

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For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: mohawk.