Five days later

The results of the tests I've been getting every three months are done in a day but when five days passed without getting them and hearing the guy I called to ask about this say that if the results were "sensitive" it may take longer I was ... what's the right word? "Anxious" doesn't seem to do it. When I was a kid I'd have said "shitting bricks," but I'm too old now (sixty) to say such things. "Perturbed" might be all right, but sounds too low-level and is stuffy, too. 
Anyway, I just got them and I'm happy to say that they indicated that I'll be around for at least another several months. It's odd to read something with the word "no" in it so many times and take it as good news. It's also a little sad that when I see the word "stable"—I do have bad stuff going on inside me—I'm happy. 
Meanwhile, family drama. A dispute with a brother over my behavior. Wait, that sounds wrong; it sounds like I've been getting drunk at parties and breaking things. It's about my anger at how while I was hospitalized my sisters-in-law threw out things that meant much to me. (Note to all: Never do that.)
My brother got quite agitated, waving his arms around and, for some reason, mimicking me. Honestly, I don't sound weird or anything. He was more doing it as a tactic, I think. I've never done that. Yes, I've done impressions of people behind their backs, but often as a compliment to them, though if that were true I'd do it in front of them so I'm being weasely saying that. You got me. Still, I'd never do it to him or anyone else, no matter how angry I was.
Family trouble. Shit. I'm not going to think about it. I got good news today.
Meanwhile, tomorrow I go in for an MRI of my prostate gland. This will involve something not suitable to discuss in mixed company.

Highs where I live, southeastern Pennsylvania, won't get out of the forties for the foreseeable future, and it will freeze almost nightly. This time of year, at this location, this is the kind of weather that gives idiots license to sneer at climate change.
There's still some snow on the ground where I live. Bad, because it means I can't go crutching in the park because I only like doing it if I can get off the paved surfaces. I took this picture last week. Look at that sky. There is such beauty in the world, sometimes, no?
 

Sad notes and annoyances

May is a lovely month in my region, southeastern Pennsylvania. Perfect temperatures for days at a stretch. Blossoms everywhere. Birthdays of loved ones and my own.
This May, however, I have tests coming up that may indicate that having my leg amputated in February didn't nix the cancer and I'll be dead within a year or two.
Other things, most of them minor:

• A life on crutches in barely tolerable. The little things add up after awhile. An example: When you're on crutches both hands are so occupied that if you want to do something like scratch your ear or blow your nose you have to stop walking to do it. If you happen to be with someone else you have to tell them that and make a minor apology. Not that any real friend would care about this, but having to explain such small actions to people is a new burden.

  

  Author Rebecca Chace.

• I finished a novel I liked yesterday, Leaving Rock Harbor, by Rebecca Chace. I'd known the author when I was a teenager; a summer friend in New England. Usually, knowing an author puts a sort of veil over what I'm reading and I'm so busy judging the prose that I can't enjoy the book. In this case, though, it's been forty-five years, so that wasn't an issue. When reading the acknowledgements page I saw two names of mutual friends, both women, both of whom I carried a minor torch for. Not that I'd been on the cusp of romantic involvement with either of them, but after years passed I realized that both were my type and who knows what may have happened if we'd kept in touch? One had acted for awhile and then found that her real calling was teaching and she's now and Alexander Technique instructor. I watched one of her demonstration videos. She was still recognizable four-and-a-half decades later, and her laugh hadn't changed a bit, which was almost eerie but nice. The other had become a lawyer and worked on social justice causes. Then she became a pastor in her early fifties. Then, just two years ago, she died. Her obituary didn't list the cause. She'd married a guy I also knew back then, the early 1970s, and that surprised me. He was a little rough when I knew him. I guess he cleaned up. He died, too, but the obituary didn't say when.
• Mirror therapy is supposed to do wonders for phantom limb pain. I've seen videos in which users have gotten real relief within a week. I'm set up for it, but it hasn't done much for me yet. I have to put in more hours, I guess. A problem in my case is that mirror therapy tricks the brain into believing that your missing limb is still there by showing it to you as a reflected image. In my case, however, the missing limb, my right leg, was seven inches shorter than the left. When my non-existent foot hurts, the location is where the foot was, not where it should have been. 
• Yesterday I was replacing about two hundred gallons of the water in my six-hundred-gallon koi pond. As the new water was going in, the three koi I have got restless, thrashing around a little. This happens every year when I do it but usually that proportion of water replacement is one they tolerate well. Once the replacement is in, I immediately pour in a water treatment that makes the new water compatible. This time, toward the end of the replacement, one of koi jumped out completely! I was sitting outside during it, finishing the above-mentioned novel, and something rustling in the foliage next to the pond caught my eye. I had no idea what it was, having missed the actual jump. I crutched over in a hurry and, knowing that it would be very hard to pick up a vigorously writhing, foot-long, slippery fish, managed to guide him back to the pond. He'd never have gotten there otherwise and would have died an unpleasant death under an

  

  A koi jumping out of water.

  unseasonably hot sun. (Of course I talked to him during the seconds he was out of the water, telling him how foolish he'd been. I doubt he listened.) The water's not clear enough to see the bottom of the pond and therefor the fish, so the rest of the day I crutched out every half hour or so to look at the area around the edge to see if everything was all right. So far, so good, and that includes this morning. I'll have to build up the section where he jumped somehow so it won't happen again. 
• The older I get, the more mistakes I find in my writing. I go over what I write and I'm surprised by them. Dropped or incorrect word endings are the main category. Just moments ago, for example, I found I'd written "I finished a novel I like yesterday." Like instead of liked. I'm sure I'll find several others a few minutes from now when I go over this. If it weren't for the built-in spellcheck I use, you would have very little respect for me.
• I bought a new shoe Monday. The brand is New Balance, which certainly applies to me. My left foot has always been unusually wide. I describe its footprint as almost a square, though that's an exaggeration. The sales clerk was knowledgeable and considerate, but I'm not sure the shoe's a perfect fit or if I have to just wait for it to get fully broken in. I'm going to check at my rehab session this afternoon and if they say it's not, I'm returning it. Life, especially mine, probably, is too short to wear an uncomfortable shoe.    

Crowded tables

My favorite thing to do these days of waiting to hear when and how my illness will kill me and to what degree it ruin my body before it does is taking a shower.
I take two quick showers, one when I wake up, another before going to bed. As brief as they are, they're delightful. The change from dry to wet, then dry again. And showering is a minor, pleasant form of work that feels good. Getting clean takes just enough concentration to take my mind off being ill, but not so much that it's hard to do.
Another comforting thing is eating. Not so much the eating, but preparing the food and getting things ready. If you've ever fasted completely for just one day, you were probably surprised by how much free time you had that day. Modern humans need far less time than ever before to attain sustenance, but when factoring the decisions and shopping in with the preparing and cleaning up afterward, we spend more time around food than we think we do.
Today I had a test, a pet scan, so breakfast was out. I'm not overweight but I can easily miss a meal, yet I found myself internally whining like a child over having to skip breakfast. It seems that I have something medical going on every two weeks that makes me have to limit or skip meals.

A breakfast cafe at a farmers market.

After the test, which took about two hours, I made up for my trifling deprivation by having breakfast at a local farmers market. I seldom go to it but it's a very good place. It used to be the only grocery store in town and the first time I went was probably when I was an infant, carried by my mother, nearly sixty years ago. 
The tables were crowded. I asked an older man who was seated alone if I could share his table. He was fine with that. His son came by later, a man in his early forties, I'd guess, who grew up here and now lives in Colorado. The father, Larry, was a friendly, chatty eighty-five year old. He's originally from New York but moved to this area—Southeastern Pennsylvania—in the 1970s. He asked how long I'd lived in the area and I gave him the simple answer of all my life; nearly sixty years. There was no need to go into the years abroad and other cities.
"When you're eighty-five," Larry said, "sixty sounds like a teenager."
My impulse was to tell him that while I'm sure that's true, my odds of living to be eighty-five, or even sixty-two, are slim.
I said nothing, of course. My pancakes had arrived and tasted too good for me to want to ruin the moment.

A camera up there

Yesterday, the Complete and Total Loser spent over half an hour with a camera up a part of his body he regards as an exit-only portal that required cleansing steps prior to the camera's insertion. It wasn't a camera as most would understand it, with a lens. It was more like a probe and the procedure in some ways resembled ones you'd hear alien abduction victims (i.e., crazy people) talk about having used on them in the 1990s, when that was a thing. 
The idea was to get an MRI of the Loser's cancerous prostate to check the progress of said cancer to determine how urgent its removal may be. That's not a step most bother with, but the Loser has other health issues going on and will refrain getting his gland yanked if those other issues arise as they will kill him within a year, making removal of the prostate unnecessary. 

Technicians stand by an MRI machine, waiting to abuse the Loser.

Needles, injections of contrast fluids, a noisy machine, a narrow bed that would jerk back and forth an inch or so to get good images. No fun and in a few days he'll be undergoing something as bad at the same place for his lungs and decrepit leg that will take several times longer. 
Meanwhile, as he writes this, Southern California is burning and snow is falling in the Loser's southeastern Pennsylvania town even though it's twelve days before the start of winter. It is very pretty and calming to see, and the Loser may spike his eggnog later, sit by a window and enjoy the view.