Time Borrowed
You awaken, after fourteen hours of restless sleep, lids heavy as stones.
Stomach queasy. Muscles frail. Brain fogged.
What sorrow there is in never seeing the shadowed face of your disease.
Your joy is always fleeting,
for time spent today is borrowed from tomorrow,
in an endless circle of debt.
Yet your beauty remains, unscathed.
The Little Things
When your life is in the balance,
it’s strange which pills are often the hardest to swallow.
Not the daily reminders of mortality.
Not the toxic medication dumped into your veins.
Not the surgeries that empty cavities and rearrange vessels.
It’s the hangnail.
The split lip.
The itching of nerveless skin.
The little things matter.
The Little Things
When your life is in the balance,
it’s strange which pills are often the hardest to swallow.
Not the daily reminders of mortality.
Not the toxic medication dumped into your veins.
Not the surgeries that empty cavities and rearrange vessels.
It’s the hangnail.
The split lip.
The itching of nerveless skin.
The little things matter.
The Hairy Truth
“Cancer treatment makes me
want to pull my hair out!”
I said as I yanked out giant clumps.
I laughed. My visitor gasped.
What I didn’t tell him:
That morning, as I showered, my five-year-old
carefully laid a paper towel at the edge of the tub
so I could place my fallen hair upon it.
Life Expectancy
The lump.
It turned me from physician to patient.
Though at the end of the day, there’s no real separating.
19 months: port access, cold tables, bloody sores, disappearing eyelashes, sepsis.
A new life expectancy.
And also,
A new life expectancy.
Appreciation, unbridled kindness, deeper love, a different view of sunsets.
Patient, physician. Back again.
