It was Blood Draw Day and I SO did not want to go.
My almost weekly Small Stabbings served to find out whether an infection was raging through me, and my immune system was seriously in danger thus requiring even more Medicallyness, or if – yippee, zippity doo dah – I was cleared for yet another super-duper fun chemo treatment protocol.
I absolutely did not want to make that drive to the hospital. I wanted more than anything to simply wake up, get up, and live my life; to do the work of that day and not be in the predicament I was in. Of course, I didn’t want to have cancer, but quite possibly even more that, I hated being subjected to The Poisoning.
I felt like absolute shit, completely chemo-trashed – mind, body and soul.
But I heaved what felt like a three-hundred-pound leaden vessel into the car and I drove myself the endlessly long, fifteen whole minutes from our rural lake community into my small Midwestern hometown, the hometown I had left at age eighteen and only recently moved back to, at fifty-something.
I drove myself the nine mile stretch between corn fields to the left of me, soy fields to the right (here I am, caught in This Cancery World.)
The crops gleamed bright, bursting with growth. My, now ninety-one-year-old, mom says that when she was little they could hear the corn grow – a snap, crackle and popping. I drove along that straight road, a runway into town between those rows of sharp blades of midsummer corn and the softer soybean leaves. My mind was dulled, spent, thick from the poisonous chemo. On the drive in I don’t remember noticing any roadkill, whether any raccoons or opossums lost their life making a final crossing that day.
(I tried not to notice the seed signs next to the fields that revealed Monsanto chemicals.)
As I neared the southern edge of town, I saw a freight train stopped on the tracks just ahead. Not slowly inching its way along the outskirts of our town, as is the case many times. Oh no, it was at a dead stop, blocking the road into town. AS far as the eye could see in both directions. Rusty metal coal cars, many graced with graffiti. Wild colors and shapes bursting off the flat surfaces. I pulled up behind a gigantic silver pick-up truck. (Random confession: I have serious pick-up envy.) There might have been one car in front of the truck, but I couldn’t see around it.
It was a whole lot of coal in all those cars. And there were some tank cars, too, some containing liquid fuel oils.
And there we sat, engines running.
Growing up I got used to sitting in the car and waiting on trains. My hometown boasts of having one of the largest switching yards in the country. Both the Burlington Northern and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe lines once wove through our town, each with its own depot. The fast-paced ding-ding-dong of the railroad crossing lights and the long mournful wail of train whistles filled our town even more often than the hourly church bells and hymns played from the towers of some of our fifty plus churches. That’s a lot of churches. Between eighty and one hundred and fifty trains are said to pass through town a day, depending on the source. And well, that’s a lot of trains.
This was a T intersection, turned sideways. I had several choices. Instead of waiting at the stopped train, I could turn left and try to get into town another way, on another road. If I drove far enough, way past the west edge of town, I could get to a rare underpass and then backtrack back.
I could sit there and stew in annoyance, bang on the steering wheel, let loose my choice swear words.
I could sit calmly, call a friend, or my mom, or I could grab my ever-present notepad and write, as I often do.
If I reached inside deeply enough, I could do some humming meditation or chant “ohm.”
Or, I could crank up my CD player, get out of the car and dance in the road. Let loose with some unabashed joy.
I first danced in the road up north of Chicago at a remote commuter train crossing, at the edge of Zion, where I was administered the chemo infusions – my Big Stabbings – at the Cancer Treatment Center, where my Little Stabbing blood draws proved me just healthy enough to get poisoned again. Unless I was too ill, I would make a pilgrimage to the Lake Michigan shoreline before, and sometimes after, the Medicallyness. That first time I got stopped by a Metra commuter train; since no one was in sight, I got out and danced. It was my little celebration: cancer and chemo hadn’t killed me yet!
And so, following my new tradition, feeling a bit sheepish, glad that it was a nearly empty road, and despite my ecological passion about fossil fuels, I left the engine running, turned up the volume on my car CD player, slowly lifted out my buffeted body, and started shuffling my feet. I left the car door open as a partial privacy shield, but also to grab onto if I lost my balance (which I do, with a constant companion of vertigo.) I danced my gentle salsa-merengue fusion steps to Juan Luis Guerra’s Visa para un sueño – the one disc always loaded in the player, the upbeat tempo and percussive drumbeat good medicine for my soul.
Those breast-high corn stalks on one side and calf-high soybean bushes on the other grew almost to the edges of the narrow blacktop road. A prefab metal building that looks like a storage facility but that houses a Baptist church stood next to the utility power substation bordering the tracks. Town and the blood draw was ahead. The train still sat there, not moving.
And so I danced. With the gentle abandon of one whose body isn’t reliable. The rhythm of the music moved my feet and hips. Only ginger arm movements, my whole chest a minefield of wounds.
On my right – surgical – side, my breast remained relentlessly tender from the chunk of cauterized tissue that would be in there forever. The first thing I remember in the recovery room was the long, rugged face of my kindly, seventy-year-old, world class surgeon leaning over me, extra-large and wonky, distorted like in a bad drug scene from a movie. He said so gently, “I’m so sorry, there was a complication.” (I might have reached for my breast to see if they took the whole thing, not just a chunk as planned.) “There was a bleeder.”
My left side stung from the still raw wound of the port catheter they embedded in my chest. My heart nestled directly underneath this wound that kept on not healing properly.
Even so, I danced.
At one point, a car eased past me. The person in the car waved. And smiled. A kind, heart-filling smile. It was Lori Ackman. Well, that’s her maiden name and she lives in my memory as that girl. She was the beautiful, blonde, older sister of my early childhood best friend, Shelley. We now live just around the bend from each other, neighbors again, some fifty years later.
She chose to take the left turn at the T. Unlike me, she had a job to get to.
My blissful dancing trance broke when I saw her and waved back because it was then that I realized that a bunch of cars had pulled up behind me waiting for the train to pass. I felt conspicuous. Awkwardly self-aware. But I didn’t care. Not really. Okay, I did, of course I did. But not enough to stop dancing.
To some degree I am my mother’s daughter. She is a Midwest farmer’s daughter, a middle child, she rarely raised a fuss, and she tried her darnedest to tame the wild out of me. Vestiges of her childrearing and that Midwest reserve still reverberate in me.
Lori knew me back when. When I was five, seven, nine years old. When I was that wild child, a bit of a whirlwind. And now she knows me again, as an adult – tired, worn down, ill.
She might have been surprised to see me dancing, alone, outside of my car while waiting for a train to pass but I’m guessing she already knew that I am at the edge of “normal.” I’m glad that she was the one who passed me. She is one of the most kind-hearted, live-and-let-live people I have had the pleasure to get to know again here, half a century later, being a boomerang landing in my long, lost hometown.
I had a one-person dance party. What could be the harm of a nearly bald, older woman shuffle-dancing in Crocs, in the road, at a stopped train, at the city limits of a small town? I was lost in joy. Relief. Gratitude. I could still stand. I could still dance. Well, sort of. I was free from Medicallyness, for the moment.
I could say that I have a newfound permissiveness in my choices, that a shift has taken place since before. B.C. Before Cancer. There is some truth in this. But the truer truth is: I have always marched to the beat of a different drum, or moved to the rhythms of my own heartstrings.
I knew Carpe Diem deep in my bones before I knew the expression.
And so: I dance!
USA Railroad Switching Yards
Juan Luis Guerra Visa para un sueño *****