From whiskey river.

Inside this pencil
crouch words that have never been written
never been spoken
never been taught

they're hiding

they're awake in there
dark in the dark
hearing us
but they won't come out
not for love not for time not for fire

even when the dark has worn away
they'll still be there
hiding in the air
multitudes in days to come may walk through them
breathe them
be none the wiser

what script can it be
that they won't unroll
in what language
would I recognize it
would I be able to follow it

to make out the real names
of everything

maybe there aren't
many
it could be that there's only one word
and it's all we need
it's here in this pencil

every pencil in the world
is like this
- W. S. Merwin

LDLMP

Utterly frustrating person in charge today. Kept undoing V and my prep work, to be tidy, never acknowledging she was a hindrance. Both of us wanted to shake her.

Must calm the fuck down.

Planning baths

Bleeding like a stuck pig. Soaked through repeatedly, at work. Head buzzing and recoiling - like the repulsion after walking face first into a spider web.

Moby a great comfort, warm nose kisses and healing purr.

Reset, again.

And it's here with a vengeance. Started so oddly, spots. But declared itself last night.

Damn, damn, reset the timer.

At least I never got pregnant

Seven weeks. Hard not to feel this might just be the end. Forty years.

My ten year old self would be horrified.

Still counting

Six weeks, and still waiting. Certainly some sort of change. Alterations in skin.

Quite irritable yesterday, kept in check.

Tattoo DNR on my chest, and let me go

I have no doubt there was some stupidity here. But CPR really doesn't do much for an 87 year old, save prolong the inevitable and kill someone by torture instead of allowing a natural death. Yes, there should have been DNR orders on file. But in facilities caring for people with little chance of surviving a lot of medical intervention, staff informally do a "slow code." Do what is required by law for the general population (for whom CPR has some chance of working) but mostly let nature take it's course.

Likely, the dispatcher got wound up in "saving!!!" the woman, and the "nurse" (if that is what she was) didn't really react at all, and the two versions clashed. Dumb v. Dumb, I suspect.

What happens when you do CPR on an 87 year old woman who needs assisted living? (Which is to say, not one of the extremely healthy, strong, active nearly 90 year olds.) Well, the ribs shatter, and the patient goes into an ICU, where they are pierced and tubed from every orifice and vein, drugged and kept awake, develop pneumonia or the feeding tube gets displaced, and they die shortly after, away from friends and family or anything comforting.

I'm all for ICUs for a victim of trauma, relatively healthy, fairly young, who may well survive to be strong another day. Marvelous in that case. For anyone else, the odds are minuscule to non-existant, at an astronomical price - both to the individual and raw money. It's more a science experiment than health care.