August 26, 2007

• I forgot how nice it was to get home from being around a lot of strangers, get on Xanga, and have friends waiting for me.  I mean their comments were waiting.  And from my favorites.  I just tried to liken it to something comforting but I couldn’t think what.  Part of that is being out of practice and part of it is that there is very little in my life that offers the consistent (I guess I haven’t been lately), positive, forgiving, open-ended kind of socializing this offers.  At the end of the day you can check in with people in a way that you can’t have with neighbors or friends or family (for they require things).  Xanga is the perfect way to say goodnight to the day.

  I’m still wearing my name-tag from the party I went to.  My friend, who I teach bellydance to on Tues nights, had a block party.  She and her husband and the neighbors across the street have a band.  They’re pretty good and over the years I have gone to enough parties that I know lots of their neighbors.  But tonight I met someone I really liked.  He was acting single and we really hit it off but I found out later he was married.  Figures.  By the time you’re my age you have a very distinct type of guy who might be a match.  And my radar’s good so when it goes off I know I’ve found — Maybe not one in a million but you get the idea.

  This afternoon I went to another party and this was very special to me.  My support group, back in 2001, was comprised of a very powerful group of women.  Every Tues at 10:00 we’d hang out for a couple hours, do a little meditation, some sharing and every once in a while have a speaker.  It was supervised by a cancer nurse and a cancer counselor (shrink).  The nurse and a few of us would get together socially but I lost track of them because my ISP suddenly got fussy and considered their email to be spam.  Two years went by before I ran into one of the women and we got it all cleared up.  The group thought I hadn’t wanted to socialize with them anymore and I thought they weren’t inviting me for some reason.  One of the women I hadn’t been fond of was there.  Her husband had been the head of the hospital, and my doctor for a brief time before he retired.  She came up to me today and said how much she enjoyed my column.  I thanked her but said I’d quit doing it.  On the way home, I realized her husband had probably read it, too.  Because how else could she have gotten it?  It was only for staff. 

  When his wife got breast cancer all of a sudden all this money became available and the hospital’s focus really changed in terms of how receptive they were to Eastern medicine. I don’t think it was any coincidence that this man’s son had just graduated from a naturopathic college.  I only know this because the son observed my procedure when his dad aspirated the cyst on my thyroid.  These people came into my life, one at a time, in sort of an odd way.  After the procedure, the doctor invited me back into his office — I wondered at the time why he had such huge, plush quarters on a floor that was administrative.  He asked me all sorts of questions about my experiences at the hospital.  He’d read my file and could see I’d spent a fair amount of time there over the years .  Later, I saw his son for an unrelated issue, and then  I met the senior doctor’s wife in my support group.  I’d remembered her from her picture.  It had been in the plush office and the reason it was so memorable was because she was standing next to her plane and she was a knockout.

  The reason I laid all that out was that when I found out, after my thyroid incident, how much power the doctor had at the hospital, I almost presented him with a proposal.  I thought it was pointless but I was seeing a medical intuitive and he encouraged me to write something up, addressing the way the hospital was dealing with breast cancer.  I thought it was crazy.  I told him the hospital would never go for it.  The funny thing is the hospital did go for it, five years later, and it was because of this woman’s husband.  And, after today, I’m thinking it was because of her.  I kind of liked her today.

  • 2:34 am
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