At the risk of generating a lot of envy, I will tell you that first on my list on Wednesday was a trip to Upstate at Community hospital to have a bone scan. Now, how many can boast that? This is a test where you are first injected (when they can find the vein, if you get my drift) with a radioactive substance. Then, after a few hours during which time you will set off Geiger counters … the substance will have traveled to where it was supposed to go. You then return to have an impressively agile, gigantic machine scan your body for bones. I planned to have no fun at all.
But how wrong can you be?
First the techs at Community were great and our conversations during and after the test were elevating. Everyone took time to talk with me while I was prone and under an enormous camera that was picking up the gamma rays that were now leaving my body.
Afterwards, as I was leaving, smiling that the whole thing was not as awful as I had envisioned, I heard someone call my name. I turned around to see a gal in wheelchair waving at me. She removed her mask and identified herself. I will use a faux name. “Ann, it’s Linda!”
Oh my gosh, it’s been at least three years since I saw Linda. We’ve exchanged bits and pieces on Facebook, but we had no real person-to-person chat. “I’m here for a cat scan,”she said with the tone of someone not well. Linda is one of those people who seemed to have unending energy. She was an “Energizer bunny,” but treatments for her illness have stolen that.
I followed her into the waiting room and sat across the aisle (the appropriate six feet) and we began to chat. We caught each other up on family and our various ills and I told her that I had been teaching crocheting at the library.
“I used to crochet and knit, read, do puzzles, garden … now, I can’t find interest in anything,” she said with a defeated sadness.
I knew that feeling in spades a few years ago after the second hip surgery. Illness is a robber of self. It becomes you, steals the who you are. Beyond the illness is the side effect of its affect on your personality. It takes away more than it should. Instead of having a problem, you become identified with it. Pernicious and evil, medical practitioners need to address this as well as the disease.
“How about if I bring you a hook and some yarn? I suggested. “If you just get started on a project, say for your grandchild, that might be something to stimulate your interest.” She was about to reply when the mustachioed gentleman sitting in the chair to her right, said, “My mother used to make these things with circles of fabric, as he held out the fabric on his right shirt sleeve …didn’t matter what kind of fabric, she would cut these circles, holding his fingers to demonstrate. She’d sew around the edge and then pull the thread tight to make these little …what did she call them? Yo-Yos. Then she’d sew them together to make bedspreads. My sisters would embroider them with flowers or people’s names. She gave the bedspreads away as gifts.”
He continued, “It was actually an assembly line. My father brought home some Styrofoam from work. My sisters threaded lots of needles and stuck them in the Styrofoam so that Mom wouldn’t run out of thread to make the yo-yos. Mom recruited all of us to cut out the circles from fabric that she had gotten from just about everywhere. We’d all use templates made from the top of Crisco cans to cut out the fabric. I even helped, and I was working on the farm.”
I told the gentleman that my grandmother made these coverlets. I loved them. And then Linda began to ask questions about how to make them and the gentleman turned to better face her to explain in greater detail.
It was getting late and I had to go. I excused myself, asked Linda if we could get together soon. As I turned the corner of the room, I noticed that the yo-yo conversation was continuing. Unplanned therapy.
So, if you were envious of my bone scan, you should be extra-especially envious of finding such a warm and sweet conversation among people not being defined by their illnesses in a radiology waiting room.
