No Rehearsals

Monday, 09th January 2023

So it’s now a new year, a time for New Resolutions, emphasised with camel-case lettering; new attitudes, new stuff. Living a new, or different, life. All that sort of thing. Today I’m due in the bone scanner. Different day, same headache. Ironically, dealing with cancer’s a slow process. The time lag from diagnosis to treatment for my other diseases was fast.

Today, next step in the process.

Different day, same old problems. MS, cancer, I live on my own, whatever, life’s ‘normal’ problems don’t suddenly go away because life somehow ought feel sorry for you. It doesn’t.

My cab is due in five minutes. I’m taking a cab because my trike’s close to VOR, but mainly I’m not sure of the internal geometry of where the bone cancer scanner is, so I need to take my powered scooter. Trike for distance, scooter for building internals. 

No card. 

Bank card, not a scooter thing. My bank card, this card, lives in the same place All of the Time. Right now, at departure minus five minutes, it’s not there. Despite looking in the same place at least five times. It’s too late to take the trike, too late to call anybody. I’lI just check my bag again, where the card usually lives, for the sixth time. The card might have magically turned up since I last looked. Obviously.

Tomorrow, confusing writer time travel, but today as I write (AIW), tomorrow / today (AIW), it will turn up in the garden having fallen out of the back-pack pocket whose zip I can’t do up with fingers that don’t work properly.

Confusing, what? Oh, ‘VOR’. ‘Vehicle-off-the-Road’. It’s an Army term, maybe tri-service. Some of the old vernacular lives with me still. In answer to a question, ‘Wait One!’ as I pause to think, ‘Dobbie’ for washing — probably a derogatory imperialist / racist term from the old India days, but I hope not. ‘Scoff’ for something to eat. ‘Stickies’ for a sweet, fizzy drink. (From Belize, in the topics. Spill some on a table and wait one. The spillage becomes stickier than glue.) ‘Stills’ for Falkland Islanders. The MOD banned the term ‘Bennies’ from an ’80s TV Soap character, so the military switched to ‘Stills’: they’re ‘still’ Bennies. Army humour, huh? ‘Numpty’ for being an idiot. I made that one up. The term for being an idiot in the Army vernacular is not repeatable here.

‘Checking out’. A euphemism, not that the Army tend to do that sort of thing, euphamise, for dying. Not like being ‘slotted’, that’s when someone else holds the agency for your death. Checking out is the natural, if a little premature, processes.

In life, an old Ireland hand used to say, there are no rehearsals.

There are no rehearsals for cancer. No script. No pre-knowledge of how to deal with what goes through your head. Or how to get rid of that ear-worm loop of I don’t want to die, yet. Dying’s easy — when it’s quick.