A New Week / A Few More Blood Vials
As the title so brilliantly says, it wouldn’t truly be a fulfilling week without a series of blood tests, right?!? So here I am, at 8:30 am, a syringe in my veins and 5… yes, FIVE, new vials ready to be filled up with liquid parcels of my lifestream. If I wasn’t particularly happy to find myself seated on that little plastic chair surrounded with all sorts of very weird illnesses awareness posters and countless brochures about (put a disturbing and gruesome word here, as long as it’s related to something that sounds like the end of your world type of dramatic, terrible and fatal sickness), I was nonetheless very thankful not to have to go to the hospital and spend 3 hours in a car back and forth to do blood tests. You have to appreciate the simplest of all silver lining details when you’ve come back from the dead. The good news of today is that it’s only a 5-minute drive to turn my body into the blood bag I have become for more than a year now. There’s that, and I do like my local clinic nurse, she is not only quite funny and super sweet, but she has a heart of gold. She volunteers in palliative houses and accompanies loved ones about to lose a precious person from cancer. Every time I hear that word, I can’t help but think that some megalomaniacs have invested fortunes to colonize Mars, but we haven’t found a cure to that implacable plague. Anyway, that’s another debate for another day. So let’s focus on my nurse’s unique compassion and benevolence towards those holding on to a fragile thread of life and about to depart, as well as those suffering too deeply from grief no one is ever ready to foresee, left alone to understand how it will hurt even more the second following their loss. Oh my God does this hurt, it’s unbearable.
We always chit-chat about family when we see each other. She shares about how her daughter is doing in school – she wasn’t supposed to give birth, so that’s quite a miracle that she did, especially at a time when she was so desperately sad and ashamed about her situation. Her husband is a long-distance truck driver, a salt-of-the-earth type of man. “He’s a hard-working one with a heart as big as the world”, she said. I like those amazing testimonies of what is too often overlooked. She asked me how I was holding up since MacKaye’s departure. MacKaye was the pure incarnation of what a lovely living being is all about, a rock star in its own right, so everybody knew him. I answered a vague and distant “It’s ok, you know…” She put her caring hand on my arm and said: “You don’t have to be “ok”, just be. There’s no cure to that kind of pain Alex… ”
The “conversation” rapidly converged from grief to my health as she wasn’t able to access my main vein even with the syringe in my arm. “It’s unbelievable how many times you have been punctured in the last year only. Your veins are tired”, she said, trying to find a way in, from inside, to which I replied: “Yes, I’m also tired of being a lab rat as well”. “Of course, but your case will help a lot of people in the future.”, she insisted on saying with a big smile while removing the needle to puncture me somewhere else. I know that some of you might be “syringe sensitive” so I will spare you the other 3 unfruitful attempts before finally having to switch arms over. YES, IT’S WORKING…here comes the flow!!! 15 minutes later, I was back at the studio to get ready for my weekly management meeting. That empowering hour of love and passion would be the perfect boost I might need to keep going with my day!!!
