Starting a little freak-out phase

These last few days before Bill has surgery and finds out all the details are getting harder and harder. Our thinking just keeps slipping back into this gloomy and anxious pond of vague imagery. It's hard even to keep mastery of the day-to-day details of life--dishes, trash out, even reading--because our life energy is being burned up with these thoughts, and we don't feel like doing even the basics.

So our new game is called "Find Ways to Think About Something Else."

This morning we watched a movie about alien pods attacking Iowa. It was satisfyingly gross. Then in one romantic scene, the guy brings the girl to his house for a little romance, and just after the first kiss, he whispers, "Why don't I go make a fire?" only we thought he said, "Why don't I go make a pie?" and we were like, "WHAT? DID HE SAY 'MAKE A PIE?'" and then there followed an hour of pie commentary through the rest of the movie--which commentary we found strikingly hilarious for some reason. Of course, it's not that hard to find things that seem funny when you're talking Iowa aliens and pie-making.

Then the other day, as we sat in the doctor's little examination room alone, waiting for 90 minutes and feeling extremely grim and depressed (ugliest office ever--terrible paint color, no art on the walls, stupid paper bed cover, ugh)--Bill comes up with something that struck me as so dang funny, I can still laugh whenever I think of it.

What happened was, I had brought this big piece of whole wheat bread in my purse (a Panera baguette) to eat when desperate, knowing we wouldn't have access to food for long stretches of time. So we're sitting there without talking, both feeling horrible and serious and morose, and after a long long silence, I said to Bill, "Would you like some brown bread? I have some in my purse."

He says nothing for a few seconds, then with a completely straight face, and still not looking at me, he says, "You sound like a Bulgarian woman--'Vood you like some brown brett?'"

"A BULGARIAN woman?"

Long silent pause. Then he looks at me, still with a straight face, and says, "Have you a beet?"

I don't know. Do Bulgarian women carry brown bread and beets around? OMG. We started laughing so hard that I think the nurses in the hall outside could hear us.

Other times, we try to think things up to make even tiny bits of fun.I got the idea of maybe renting some crazy kind of car to use while we're in Durham, just for the distraction of having something fun and different to drive.

And the dogs are funny. Always. Like right now, all of them are trying to get in my lap at the same time, while I'm typing this.

But I just thought I'd record the nature of this little mode that we are in, to keep the story real and not completely romanticized. Sometimes romanticization of illness bears terrific fruit--by which you can enjoy the taste of bittersweet songs, arrival of spiritual insights, and so forth.

And sometimes, you just can't see it any pretty way at all.