;)
I passed these chickens as I walked, and thought of the day two years shy of four decades ago when I shot a pig between the eyes and then cut the heads off 76 chickens. It was a great feast, held in honor of a man 13 months dead, and it happened on the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, not far from the new bank of the dammed Missouri River.
As I walked further, I saw a blond lady walking in the opposite direction, coming towards me. I had not seen her for a couple of months, since just before I left for the Arctic Slope in June. Over the past two-and-a-half decades, our paths have often crossed either on foot, on bicycle or, in the days prior to Serendipity, on cross-country skis.
Before Serendipity, these path-crossings happened mostly on trails, deep in the woods, but this cannot be anymore. Always, when we meet, we stop and visit for awhile.
"You're back!" she smiled. I noticed that she seemed more thin, more gaunt, then I had ever seen her. I attributed this to increasing age, and yet it seemed like too much aging to have happened in just two months.
She asked me how things were so I told her about Margie, and her fall. She listened and offered words of sympathy and consolation. Then, after a couple of minutes of this, she asked, "do you want to hear my story now?"
She had been suffering some abdominal discomfort for awhile and then had finally been able to go in for a cat scan. Immediately afterward, apparently before examining the cat scan, the doctor took off on a two-week vacation.
Immediately after he returned, she received a call. Right after that, she checked into the hospital and got her gall-bladder removed.
;)
During her surgery, the doctor discovered that she has cancer on her liver. Now she plans to see a specialist in the Lower 48. If that surgery goes well, then the odds are fairly good that she will have another year of life ahead of her. Without the surgery, or if it does not go well, she has only months.
"This is not right," she said.
"Can I give you a hug?" I asked.
"Yes," she said.
I wrapped my arms around her and she her's around me. She squeezed hard. It was a long hug. "It's hard," she said. "It's so hard."
She is a strong, tough, lady who has always kept herself physically fit. "If this had been done right," she said of her medical care. "I could have had months more." Months doesn't sound like long, but when you get down to counting in months, then how precious is even one month?
"I'm going to beat it," she said. "I'm going to."
Before we parted, she told me to pass her condolences along to Margie. "Tell her I hope she heals soon."
;)
Margie just received some good news from the doctor. The original diagnosis - that there was no break but almost certainly ligament damage which might or might not require surgery, was completely wrong.
The break, as I have already noted, was not in her knee but on the outside of her femur, where it joins the knee. Now she learned that her ligaments were not damaged. She will not need surgery. Just time for the femur to heal.
So all that pain that we thought was due to ligament damage that really wasn't there was actually due to the break that we thought she did not have.
I told her about the blond lady. She cried.
She is a good woman, my Margie.
And my daughter-in-law, Lavina, napping there on the couch beside her?
She is a good woman, too.