Radioactive Tube Gloom

When I write words on a page it becomes apparent to me that I'm losing my shit. "Ummmm, nobody needs to hear that, Danielle," I say to myself 68 individual times as I hammer on the delete key with my Malibu Barbie manicure.

"Slightly alarming.  
Inappropriate.  
TMI.  
That is hilarious to you and exactly no one else."

I have ten million thoughts blasting through my brain on any given day and approximately zero of them feel sane to me.

It used to be that my only downtime was half an hour of meditative space I made every morning before I chased children around all day.  That, in retrospect, was a healthy amount of downtime for an Enneagram Type 4.  Now this free space lurks around my person at all times, threatening to swallow me up and chomp on my brains.  I can't seem to make proper use of it--there's so much of it that it disorients me.

It's not that I don't have things to do.  My days are kept pretty full with logistical cancer shit and more mentally-constructive pursuits such as reading, frolicking in nature, snuggling things, conspiring with friends, etc.  But every intermission between these activities feels like one thousand pounds of weight on my being.  Like I've come home from a tropical vacation to my agonizingly boring roommate, who has eaten all my TJ's snacks and wants to show me memes of Melania Trump. And the roommate is me, or rather, my mind that won't shut up.

Okay, so imagine that you don't have a job or eyelashes and are going mentally insane as a result and now you must get a PET scan which entails first of all, avoiding carbs for 24 hours 😩, and second, getting injected with dye that is so radioactive it comes in a giant metal syringe.

During the hour it takes for this junk to do its thang in your body, you have to sit perfectly still and silent in a room by yourself.  You mustn't fidget or perform any mentally stimulating tasks such as reading, for fear that the dye will accumulate in places it shouldn't.  You're simply left alone to enjoy an hour's worth of your own paranoid thoughts.  Fortunately, you just finished binge-watching The Handmaid's Tale. Once the poison has dispersed, you have the pleasure of laying in a tube for another thirty minutes with your hands strung above your head, so that your limbs go completely numb and begin to mirror your frame of mind.

It's a lot for a depressed wacko like myself.  I came outta that thing all super hangry and radioactive and wanted to nuke someone right in the face.  (I was instructed to keep away from small children and pregnant women for the rest of the day til my atoms stopped disintegrating or something.) My dad, who had driven me to the hospital, had conveniently wandered off, so I paced the halls looking for him in desperation.  I attempted to exit through the front doors, but got tangled in a mob of family members whose relative had died upstairs just an hour before. I begrudgingly listened to them rattle on with lament and I feigned puppy dog eyes, best as I could. Wickedly, I thought, "Yea my mom's dead too, please stop blocking the damn door."

I found Pops after another ten minutes of scouring the piddle-scented halls, but then I had to wait 9 whole days for the results of my test.

Day 9 is today:
Negative PET.  Complete metabolic response. No active lymphoma found.

I feel my sanity slowly return and I cry til my falsies fall off.  Fuck. Yes.