More on Me and My Hip Pain

I had this idea last fall when I thought of this ongoing inquiry about death denial, that I would be writing a lot more directly about Pluto. Somehow it hasn’t come up as much, or I haven’t felt clear on how to. It’s almost like I’m writing through Pluto or something…. but! If you have questions on Pluto - will you write to me and ask?! Perhaps that could spark more direct writing on Pluto, if we even need or want that here - let’s see!

Here’s an update on me and my hip pain (icymi) hahahaha. Somehow that phrase makes me laugh, how small and personal that phrase is — me and my hip pain. But I share it this way because I feel this is where a lot of our minds dwell a lot of the time—don’t wanna presume about yours—but as far as I can tell! So this experience I just had showed me yet another facet of the opposite of death denial. Which is honestly not really new - I’m not sure I write anything new???

Summary: again it was the dawning that fear is not to be transcended, does not have to be or need to be transcended, nothing is to be transcended or gotten rid of.

My story where I saw about the fear is I went to a doctor's office recently and after waiting a long time, much longer than the early amount of time I had before the supposed start of my appointment, I went into another room to put on the soft pants and the gown. However before that while waiting, I watched a mom braid a grown child's hair, as they waited for someone's appointment. It was so gorgeous. I watched two women in their 70s mildly stretch (ironically unusual in an orthopedic waiting room) while discussing how they would watch the olympics later, also gorgeous. Then I waited in a smaller room for a person to come tell me what was going to happen. I read the "cover your cough" sign in spanish and thought how beautiful the word cough is in spanish: tos. Then I waited more. 

We walked to another room where the person gave me a shot of lidocaine in my hip. It burned. Then he injected fluid dyed a color (I didn't ask what color, but I wish now that I did) into my right hip joint. He was moving the needle around inside my body to get it into the joint. I couldn't feel it but I could feel it, you know? A ghost feeling, much more haunting. It lasted a long time, and while it did, I was breathing very deeply and loudly on purpose, and sweating at the back of my neck, and holding my hands on my chest to touch something living. I had the sense my body was so afraid, and I could notice how amazing it was that my body was afraid.

I thought, everything is working here.

I felt the depth of the vital life force of human beings that is expressed as fear. Meaning, this body has wild desire to live, and it is manifesting this way as fear. There is nothing to be done, to make different with what this body is doing, sweating, fearful, breathing so deeply and making sounds when the needle touched inside the joint and filled the joint with fluid. 

I got up when it was over and walked with this heavy joint full of liquid dye to the downstairs, another very small waiting room outside of the MRI room, then I had to change clothes more and take off my wedding ring and sit in another waiting room with the full, strange hip. I cried because I felt that every moment in my life had led me to this moment of sitting in this waiting room for the MRI. That previous sentence is a stand in for the feeling of the deluge-overflowing-fullness of time, how when I'm here/there in time/space, every moment contains the entire continuum of time. This ugly waiting room with small warnings and disclaimers and instructions on every surface, and beige empty patterns on the curtains. I didn't need to be anywhere else. I never need to be anywhere else than where I am. And that is such a funny sounding sentence, I know, but what I was experiencing was the relief of not thinking I needed to be anywhere else. My thinking not being in resistance to what is happening. Another plot twist. (Not) thinking. It's right here. An eyelash away. Not even that far, but the thinness of an eyelash gives a cue.

The absence of resistance to reality, how an absence of resistance makes everything so stunning. I don't need the waiting room or the health care or the people or the building or the time to be anything other than what it is. 

The sigh of relief that every single atom in that space breathed including every one in my own body, that I wasn't trying to make it different.

This is very confusing to my everyday mind, because it has an endless list of things it wants to make different in my own and everyone else’s lives and especially in the lives of hospitals and doctors’ offices! My everyday mind insists that I explain myself to myself, and to you. Still, this is what I felt in the waiting room.

The people called to me and invited me into the freezing MRI room. The man had a southern accent, and the woman said, we were just talking about that! over and over, but she never said what they were just talking about. We were happy together, the three of us, as they tucked me into my MRI spot. It's a tube barely bigger than my body that I lie in completely still for 26 minutes, while I wear two forms of headphones because the sounds of the MRI alternate between machine gun and fireworks the entire time. A whole life was lived by my body and my mind in those minutes in the MRI machine, and eventually I came out of that life and into the one where they moved me out of the machine and spoke brief words kindly again and said goodbye, and I walked out. 

Then I took a lyft home because they said I couldn't drive home with my heavy dye-filled joint and a man who appeared in his body so at ease with the fact of gravity told me a lot of his life in spanish as he drove me, and at red lights showed me photos of beautiful empanadas and other delights he cooked during his time running a restaurant in the tenderloin until the pandemic forced him to close. I said, vaya con dios, as we parted, even though that's something I never say in english. I said it because he already referenced god and that helped me know he would probably appreciate it, and it comes off the tongue naturally in spanish, which is one of the reasons I love spanish, it feels easier to talk about love and god in spanish, and I thought, I should be saying this to everyone.