Crickets making artificial cricket noise. Crickets all around me. Crickets in the walls. Crickets in the ceiling. Crickets beneath my feet. Crickets inside my head. Crickets that seem deaf to stern warnings. Crickets unwilling to refrain from making the sounds crickets make. Crickets making a devious plan. Crickets immune to thought-cast poison. Crickets behaving as if they think belong…no matter where they are. Miserable little crickets grabbing pieces of my patience in their tiny little vice-like cricket jaws. Crickets doing all they can, in their wicked cricket power, to destroy any semblance of tranquility. Crickets doing all they can to shatter the tattered fabric of what’s left of my peace of mind.
Evil little bastard crickets attempting to drive me out of my mind. Crickets, the spawn of Satan, making significant progress toward their objectives. Perhaps I should allow birds and reptiles, spiders and mice, other predatory beasts with a hunger for cricket flesh, into my house. Or maybe I should start bathing in insecticide. I may need to begin drinking Round-Up. I may become a living, breathing, laser-focused cricket hunter, bent on murdering crickets and silencing the other deviant criminal noisemakers that refuse to let me hear only the beautiful sounds of silence.
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My misgivings about keeping yesterday’s PET-scan appointment notwithstanding, I went through the procedure yesterday. A hard metal table, even covered with fabric, is uncomfortable; when one’s back takes umbrage at what feels like an instrument of torment, a half-hour period seems more like torture intended to break one’s spirit and elicit screams of agony. I did not scream, though. That would have been inappropriate in a context of medical “treatments and tests.” The results, which were available on my patient portal less than an hour after the procedure, did not strike me as extremely bad, but they were not what I would consider good, either. I may go to my oncologist’s office today for an IV fluid infusion (they called yesterday afternoon to ask if I would like to come in today to for an infusion and to have the oncologist explain the results; or wait until my scheduled appointment, next Wednesday). I told them I would wait. But I might change my mind (they said I could…just drop by). As much as I’d rather sleep, I might go and learn that the results, delivered by my oncologist personally, are a bit more uplifting. Or I could be devastated to hear that the increases in “lesion” size and their SUV (standard uptake values) are nothing to celebrate. We’ll see.
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Thinking can be a disagreeing activity; one that creates more stress than it relieves. For that reason, the introduction of a device or a medication that would enable a person to shut off all brain functions (except for those necessary for life…e.g., breathing, blood flowing, etc.) would be a truly wonderful thing. You think?
I hate those damn crickets, too; the ones that live in my head.