Another cafe, another darkening sky in another suburb. I am going to a friend’s for dinner once I’m done with the doctors and MRIs and ultrasounds and a double round of nuclear scans, with great gapes of time to kill in between. A maw wide and empty enough to make me think: all western medicine depends on war. Cancer patients need Molybdenum 99 sourced from outmoded nuclear reactors–it goes to the patient or the weapon, weapons are winning out at the moment (except there is no honesty in that profession–weapons directly, “energy”, indirectly). I’m told have a different isotope fueling the camera’s efforts to light up my organs on film, but it’s all from the same element. A true perversion of a singular truth about medicine in general, buttressed by the technician’s lie: “Don’t worry, the tracer has no side effects”. In any case, I have time to kill until it’s safe to get under that machine again.

This is the coldest damned cafe in all of the greater Toronto north. The snow fell hard here, the door opens wide to gusts and the only thing that keeps me from shivering outright is the stainless thermal coffee cup I brought with me, filled with boiling water so that it acts as a heat source as well as tea. Too scalding hot to drink, but chill-slaughtering when I hold it in my hands. The technician told me to eat something, drink wine before making my way back to the machine. Wine is a disaster with gamma rays.

I made such a fuss about getting ready to come here today. I picked out a cashmere sweater I wish I hadn’t ruined with haplessly applied deodorant, as it would have been warmer. I put on a pin- striped skirt and noticed I’m smaller than I was, it fit me without constriction this time and I thought about all the time that’s passed since I’d worn it last, who I was then. I decided I’d need tights and some lizard shoes with a heel–but that was the height of the absurd, where was I going? I took all of it off and put on khakis and boots.

I don’t know what to wear to this kind of thing. I just want to get in, get it over with, get it done. I can’t stand the amount of time I’m left to spend under an opaque plastic lens or some frigid probe waved by a distracted technician. Its like being buried head first, with your thoughts in crescendo the deeper down you go. And a soundtrack of nothing but swelling minor chords playing in every enclosed space.

I tried hard to keep from crying all day.

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