Seventeen Minutes and Fifty-Seven Seconds

That's how long we talked, my Lila and me, this afternoon.

Today began her second week of radiation on the lymph nodes in her throat, almost all of which are compromised to some extent, and she sorta freaked out. When they went to put the immobility cast on her, she says she just lost it. The complete loss of 'agency' got to her. She was her illness and its treatment, and that was all. No Aristotle here: No 'excluded middle.' Everything is related: The cancer, and the treatment, and the way that the two things just take over everything. Everything you eat and drink, pretty much, is dictated, she says, by some 'health' or 'treatment' regimen or another. Sterilizing and cleaning and being careful, and studying and learning, and new information. More consuming than a full-time job, plus you get pain.

She said she just couldn't face it. She started to weep. Her son was holding her hand. It should be me. That's all I'm gonna say on that.

It appears there are divergent understandings of the clinical meaning of "nausea" which, printed on a battle of meds may refer to the clinical state of releasing tensions on the sphincters in the upper digestive tract, or the feeling that one i s in immediate danger of passing right the fuck out in the shower. The second meaning, apparently, is implicit, because the nerve that controls that part of the gag reflex also apparently stimulates unplanned unconsciousness. Science is wonderful, innit?

Lila discovered this only through the agency of her friend, a breast-cancer survivor who has been through the regime before and is providing kind of On-The-Job training to my gal in the subtleties of survival and resistance. I bless the woman daily, whom I have never met, for her generosity with time and information for my Lila.

I have improved my computer audio recently, with much bigger, heavier speakers, and am running our (skype) conversations through the speakers. It sound much better, like Lila's right here with me (tears seem spontaneously to accumulate in the corner of some eyes). But she says this cannot last much longer. She will eventually lose her voice from the constant bombardment of the radiation. It will eventually come back. In the interim, we can multi-medium...i can talk, she can text me; it's not like we're not gonna talk. She's my gal, I'm her man...I am an 'extra,' a "background artiste," on a funny, epistemological level, exactly the equivalent of the subject of therapy.