Skip to main content

How I Found a Cure for Bone Cancer

Last night I cured bone cancer.
Today, so far, I have done the dishes.
Let me tell you about the bone cancer.

A couple of days ago, I began to notice an ache in my legs; particularly my right leg.  That is the one sent through a medical meat grinder so that the doctor could implant a replacement hip.  His assistant told me what a chore it is to saw everything up and put in replacement pieces from Ace Hardware.  I have come to believe her:  ever since I have had the sense that small pieces of what I used to call muscle have been trying to find each other and glue themselves together somehow, in a kind of trial and error process.

It had come to this:  everywhere I touched my leg, in front, it hurt.  Lying in bed was not a comfort.  Wriggling my toes induced a process something like Northern Lights on my legs, without the light.  Just for fun, I would poke myself tentatively, just to ascertain that the end was near.  I finally settled on bone cancer, rationally aware that it would be the first case of titanium and polypropylene cancer.

How would I tell Mari?  I knew it would be difficult because I had stayed up late watching an episode of Henning Mankel's "Kurt Wallander" series.  Wallander had come to have to admit that he had Alzheimer's Disease, and was afraid to tell his daughter because he feared she would abandon him to solitary madness.  So I knew it would be difficult to tell Mari that I had bone cancer, and that I might have to move to Sweden where people understood gray weather and depression.

The people who know me best--the people I try to avoid--know that I am easily the unlikeliest candidate to happen upon a cure for cancer of the artificial hip, but it came to me in the night:  cowboy boots!  A few days ago I had worn cowboy boots all day!  I like cowboy boots.  I especially like a pair I bought in Wichita, Kansas at Shepler's.  I do not wear them often; only when I recognize that Alzheimer's is causing me to forget that I live in Tucson.  Then I put on my Luccheses, and I know that life is Let's Pretend, anyway, and it all comes back to me:  born of Scandinavian stock expelled from Norway, once a parish priest, then a heretic, a personality like a wire brush, and now suffering from terminal bone cancer of the titanium hip!

And that cured my bone cancer!  Just pure, rational thought and a pair of cowboy boots!  Every muscle in my lower body was howling in complaint at having had to wear high heeled shoes all day, several days ago.  A million small muscle tears caused by standing tall when the time came, when I had almost completely forgotten that I lived in Tucson, and what had happened every time I wore cowboy boots, and I no longer had bone cancer!  

You can laugh, and I hope that you do, so that you can get it out of your system, but those of us who trace our lineage back to Kurt Wallander and Kristin Lavransdatter and Harald Bluetooth know something about living in fog.  We know that the sun does not rise every day:  sometimes it has to decide whether it will come back, so when it does, we do not laugh at it.   Sometimes we cannot remember what it is, but we do not laugh.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy.  Those were skills to be learned and practiced.   I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop.  He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes.  He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade.  Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore.  The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up.   I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth.  I knew how to do that.  Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down.  On the second try, aimi
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them.  Even when all they wanted to do w
Post a Comment
Read more