Wednesday, December 18, 2024

Three Beautiful Things 12-17-2024: Lower on the Triage Ladder, Vivid Dreams!, Leftover Meatloaf Dinner

1. A lot happened on Monday: labs at Sacred Heart, checking results as they flew into my portal, a Great Harvest coffee and muffin stop, shopping at Trader Joe's and Pilgrim's Market, lunch at The Breakfast Nook, car serviced at the Toyota shop, and hoping the snow falling didn't stick to the roads. (It didn't.) We had family dinner on Monday. 

Monday was a cyclone. 

Today I balanced out the whirlwind of Monday with very little activity on Tuesday. 

Tuesday was a zephyr.

I have not heard from the nurse coordinator about my labs and I take that as a very good sign -- I'm assuming there are no problems to address and that my medicine dosages will remain the same.

For about six weeks now, I've been pretty sure that I've moved down the triage ladder, that I don't need and will not receive the kind of immediate attention and response I got when I had labs done in the early post-transplant months. 

To me, this is good news.

It's a ladder I'm happy to descend. 

2. When I went to sleep Tuesday evening, for the entire night I experienced one vivid dream sequence after another. When each sequence ended, I was too stoked to go back to sleep and I played the dreams in my mind over and over, hoping I would soon fall back to sleep.

I loved my first very intense dream in which a group of actors, including my first wife, and I were working hard in rehearsal (I was the director), preparing to perform a period piece involving royalty, broken marriages, forbidden attractions between characters, as written in the script, and deep character analysis as we talked together to figure out the roles and the action. I woke up and was talking out loud (what did Copper think?), telling the actors to work with the tension between strong transgressive sexual attraction and restraint. 

I've never been a play director -- don't ever plan to be -- but, in the world of dreams, it was fun working these things out with talented and experienced actors and negotiating the uncertainty of working on a project with my first wife with whom I've had no contact for right around forty years. 

My second dream involved a welcome and unexpected reunion with a Eugene friend I haven't seen for over ten years. The third enmeshed me in a madcap trip from our former residence at 940 Madison in Eugene to the Eugene airport to drop off Patrick and Meagan who were going on an international flight, but we and a herd of other family members who were piling into the Sube, a thousand clowns style, just couldn't seem to get going and once we did, I kept missing turns, making U-turns, and being unable to take the correct route to the airport. 

This stressed me out and I woke myself up and talked myself down, doing all in my power not to return to that disoriented dream once I fell back to sleep. 

I succeeded. 

3. I had to wonder as I climbed out of bed this (Wednesday) morning: were these intense and fascinating and, regarding the last one, stressful dreams a result of my delicious Tuesday night dinner?

Ha! I don't know why some warmed up leftover delicious meatloaf and sautéed mushrooms, red pepper, red  onion, and yellow squash and a sliced cosmic crisp apple would lead me to the stage, a Eugene reunion, and a labyrinth of a drive to the Eugene airport from 940 Madison in Eugene.

I don't need to know.

It's just fun writing about what was a fun, wild, and a bit stressful night of dreams and talking out loud to my pillows (and Copper!). 


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