Miranda, Carol, and the Cunning Fennec Fox conclusion

4 May 2014

1748 hrs

Good Day or, evening rather, Dear and Patient Reader.

       Here we are again.  I certainly hope that you have been enjoying these posts the last few days. I understand that you have been coming to CFF since the early days, most of you anyway, since The Great Beginning, for my world-class rants.  I apologize somewhat for deviating from the norm, even though it seems the norm is coming to be these memoirs of my life, and these recent works of photography, both of which I hope you richly enjoy.

       There are many beautiful things surrounding me, and I am sure that if you look carefully at the ratio of Things to People, you'll see that humanity, in my own mind, has its limitations.

       The few friends in my life are primarily composed of women. Thank the IS. Haha. Three male friends of mine live in two different cities; two male friends live here in my own, one of whom is gay and looking and another who is straight and has found. 

       The rest of the men about me are mere acquaintances, though they have earned my respect as I hope that I have earned theirs.

       If I have not, then fuck 'em.

       The women closest to me are artists, too. They pose for me and sing for my recordings and they like me for who I am and do not despise me for not feeling what I do not.

       Ah, but perhaps it is because I am not involved with them beyond our friendship.  And they know and understand, even if they know it not themselves, not yet at least, that I already know Love's secret: Love is but a Spectre.

       Like the Devil, as many people believe in Love.

        These women understand that I know it, and I hope it is not long in coming that they do as well. Soon is my hope, before they age anymore under the Fist of Pain.

       So allow me now to continue on with my story of Miranda, her cancerous parasite, her sorrowful mother, and of course, the Cunning Fennec Fox.

       Shall I get the hell on with it, then?

       Splendid!

Miranda, Carol, and the Cunning Fennec Fox 

conclusion

            Carol was sending a message or, more accurately, her neurotransmissions were sending a message, to fate.  An open letter I was able to read; to which I had Access Unlimited.  She was telling Pain to Fuck the Fuck off.  She was going to feel a sensation so different, so the opposite of Pain; so much better than any sensation she felt in Who-Knows-How-Long?

            She required satisfaction . . . spiritually, emotionally . . . physically . . . and she was not By-god going to leave without tearing off a piece to save whatever her soul was. 

            Carol was not my patient.  For all intents and purposes, neither was her daughter.  I was the diagnostician in her case, and she should have been transferred off my service a long time ago.  I recommended treatments along with the diagnostic tests my department did not perform; the ones I could not order. 

            Not being an M.D., I was not able to prescribe meds, but I saw how anti-epilepsy drugs work, and which ones work best with what seizures.  So I gave my recommendations.

 

            It was the neurodiagnostic aspect of my knowledge in which I was Lord and Master of All I Surveyed . . .

            Miranda’s lack of proper treatment was not within the parameters of my administrative powers. 

            Did I tell myself these things in order to justify my own actions in my own mind?

            I do not believe in Sin.  I do not believe in Good and Evil . . .  to me, there is only behavior. 

Carol stopped first.  She asked me to come home with her; to come back with her to that small town forty miles away.  To come back with her and help her banish Spectres.

“I have to feel something,” she said.  “Something other than fear and hurt.”  And I thought to myself, ‘Don’t we all . . .’

Immediately after my mother’s stroke all our family knew was terror.  We felt it in the pits of our stomachs . . . felt it circulate in our bloodstreams like the poison it is; caustic and diffusing with every heartbeat . . .  transforming into a new molecule; something that felt like grief, only more pointed.  Terror was metabolizing into something that would kill my family, only because we could not heal more quickly than it tore us apart.

My father would beat me just to be able to assert control over something in his life, and he drank because he had to live with his behavior.  So he beat me more for making him feel so low.

I myself drank and used drugs, needing to feel something other than hate, or to feel nothing at all.  Life is tolerable when you are numb.  It is the lucent realization that you are alone, that you have alienated everyone around you by behavior alone.

I thought about what Miss Vera said.  I knew what Carol needed.  I knew she needed to be held, to be the one protected and soothed and touched.  She needed to succumb freely to the overpowering sensations of pleasure . . . to force out the writhing serpents in her gut.  She needed to feel filled and not empty.  She needed therapeutic primal screaming and needed someone to hear it . . . needed me to hear it.  I was powerless in all other ways.  Powerless against her Pain. 

At the end of a truncated workday, I ran into Carol in the lobby, where she was waiting for me; ready to pounce as the puma pounces . . . patient and still.

Miranda had been admitted, as she needed more powerful drugs to lessen the frequency of her seizures.  Ativan and her cousins were indicated.

Carol asked me once more to join her.

I followed her home.

After, warm in her bed on a cooling spring twilight, the bedroom window open to the soft breeze.  A month from now the daily thunderstorms would start; rolling in from Mississippi like a chariot.  These began around 1600 hrs, lasted an hour or so, then the humidity would double due to the magic of evapotranspiration. 

Tonight, that night 25 or so years ago, the light breeze that moved the thin curtains dried us.

I lay my body there, worrying.  What IS this?  Was I wrong?

You, Patient Reader, may have your views, your opinions, maybe even your sober judgment of me.  I can tell you right now that I was the only one of the two of us that had these worries.  Seeing Carol relaxed for the first time in however long; feeling the looseness of the muscles in her shoulders where, two hours earlier, there was only the tautness of the drum, I felt the worry slip off of me like a silken cloak.

       Her eyes were the color of coffee grounds; warm as a summer sidewalk; clear as peace.  In them I saw no fear . . . no regret . . . no shame.

   Catharsis took watch in that room that night.  This was new to me.  I knew Lust and I knew what Love used to be to me.  But this new wine . . . well, I knew not its provenance, nor could I dissect the intricate bouquet.  It simply was, I tasted of it, and did not shrink from its intoxicating effects.

For this was not Lust, nor was it Love, obviously, what it was was unique and . . . well, special.  There was no taking from one another . . .  there was only the giving and the receiving, equal in all parts.  Reciprocal and profound.

There was no Mine; no Yours.  There was not even really an Ours.  It was a sort of here and have . . . and a touch as light as butterflies.

I told her that she was one that would be watched over that night.  The one that would be protected and soothed and cherished, however fleetingly.  I meant it.  And she was and she knew that she was.  Evolution won.  Again.

Carol and I never repeated that night.  We saw one another frequently in what I was about to call “Neutral Territory,” but the hospital was not that at all was it?  The hospital was MY domain; the land over which I had some control.  The realm in which I knew no doubt.  Where my judgment was sound and my knowledge only limited by me.

We saw one another over the all-too-brief couple of months after our close night in her home.  There was no awkwardness; no underlying current of discomfort.  We converged at an intersection, we interacted, and the moments passed like that cooling breeze.

I had fixed that which was broken on that night, and that was all and everything I wanted to do.

Miranda died of cancer in July.  The tumor grew and occupied her tiny skull, laying siege and gobbling like the starving wolf.  Her ravaged brain finally gave up.

It was a good fight; Miranda fought hard.  Miranda fought to the Death.

Poor people, indigent, we call them, cannot (or could not) afford expensive tests like MRI back then.  At around $2500, they were among the most expensive non-invasive tests that were done.  The machines themselves were over a million dollars, and jesus, they had to be paid for, right?

Today, they are commonplace, and relatively cheap.

CT scans had been ordered on Miranda, but tiny tumors that are in their infancy and in the crania of youngsters need a higher resolution than CT’s provide.

By the time the glioblastoma was imaged, it was Stage IV; inoperable.  Terminal.

However, in the end, she was transferred to the Neurosurgery Service.

 

The six or so CTs the hospital ate could have almost paid for an MRI.  Ten of us pitching in a couple hundred bucks could have paid for one, too.  I suggested it, and was looked at as if a second head was sprouting from my shoulders. 

Gliomae are aggressive, and hers grew faster than most.  It was only pain Miranda knew in the end.

The tumor, as it turns out, was in the L parieto-temporal area.  Being right is not always rewarding. 

I was asked to a private meeting.  Present were two men in dark, expensive suits.  My medical director was there, staring down at the huge, oval conference table.  They all asked me to “alter” some of my notes.  To sacrifice one or two or all of my principles for the sake of the hospital; to take one for the team . . .

Miranda could, under the right circumstances, help their bottom line.

I just might get a bonus.  All I have to do is play along.  The alternative was the poisoned pen that dripped into my Curriculum Vitae over the course of my so-called career.  My choice.

It was now Medical-Legal that was taking away my free will.  

I refused their kind and generous and illegal and immoral and just plain wrong proposal, and I promptly resigned my position as Assistant Associate Professor of Neurophysiology.

 

They circled the wagons. 

Miranda’s complete chart was almost impossible to get.  Almost.  Medical Records had yet to be warned about me.  Heart in my throat I went down there in the Abyss of Records and checked it out, taking it then to my soon-to-be-vacant office.  No one was the wiser.

As fate would have it, my personal file on the case was not in my file cabinet.  It sat in the accordion file, along with a few other cases, safely tucked in the trunk of my car.  I always charted the final notes in the quiet solitude of my home office. 

To this day, I disavow any knowledge as to how Carol had ended up with the unabridged version of her dead daughter’s chart.  I know not how that chart happened to have the business card of one of the best Malpractice Lawyers in the region stapled to it.

Some anonymous donor, perhaps?

I do not know how the end played out for Carol.  How much is a child’s life worth?  Need we factor in inflation as we calculate the value from then to now?  I do however, suspect that Carol could now afford an MRI.  She could quit her server job and stay home full time.  Sad that the house would be empty and silent.

How many MRIs could have been bought with my bonus, those thirty silver pieces? 

Am I not the Bodhisattva of Compassion?  Can I, in my misanthropy, in my sociopathology, set the fractured heart?  Am I kind enough?  Good enough?  Probably not.

Am I the EEG, the suspicious diagnostic tool that renders on accordion paper hope and despair?

Am I the sum of evolutionary biology, and nothing more?  Does Broca or Wernicke even matter if it is only deaf ears that are turned toward me?

Am I more than the sum of my neurotransmissions?  Are any of us?

Am I more than my hypothalamus, regulating the Four Fs; Fight, flight, feed and reproduction?  And if so, is it worth it?

Am I the glioblastoma multiforme; malignant and menacing; infiltrating, insulting and insidious?  Am I a Space-Occupying Lesion?

Does my indifferent yet malicious existence kill the will to live of those in whom I take up residence?  Do I make them, in their agony, pray for death?

Am I the Bodhisattva of Wisdom?  With wisdom lies Great Sorrow, to paraphrase the ecclesiastic, and I have surely reaped sorrow, and see it perpetually in humanity.  Gandhi was asked once what he thought of Western Civilization.  He said it was a great idea.

Do I witness sorrow any more than any other?  Less than most?

Can I not be this being?  Can I not reach this Higher Light?  Sometimes I think it is the only way I could contribute.  Can I not be both He of Compassion and He of Wisdom?  Must I be neither? 

Was my desire to heal other helping or harming my case?  Was the desire to be these persons damning me, perpetuating Samsara?

Is the universe not broken by the deaths, those agonizing endings of far-too truncated lives?

Is all we ever know simply the varying degrees of pain?

Am I the forgotten man and his ruined career, living with his principles both good and flawed?  I am both of these things; good and flawed.

Should I have played along?

Am I but the pit of loneliness in the stomach, the gut?  The pit we all have felt, this void, empty, abyssal and bottomless; more an oubliette than a symptom?  The pit in which Carol existed before that cool spring night?

How could I be the Bodhisattva of Anything with these all-too-many questions? 

But One only become Wise by asking them, these, and eternally more, questions.  One becomes Compassionate only when they are answered.

Finis

Well, Patient Reader, I certainly tested your patience on this last leg of the journey.  Thanks for hanging about.  2500+ words to this post alone.

But y’all are completely aware of my rambling nature; my digressions.  I know my buddy Dr. -------- knows- you remember her; my last writing professor.

The pics sprinkled throughout the blog are ones from the film I am putting together.  Some of the others are already on CFF; previous posts, I mean.  Hope you find them all enjoyable.

Anyhoo.  (Did I really say anyhoo?)  Tune in for more rantings and ravings to be posted as they come to and move me.  I bid you good day.

Always,

The Cunning Fennec Fox