here's my card, heal my back

Notes From the Edge:

Two weeks ago on a Friday I went in to Yerevan for my first MRI. I gotta say it wasn’t as much fun as I’d expected. The music was bad, for one thing, and looking at the MRI itself was even worse. The normal discs show up like little jellyfish, or cloud puffs, or anything else that’s soft and watery and whitish tucked in between each vertebrae. Three of my discs look like creatures from the Black Lagoon; they look like they’ve been running with a rough crowd, hanging around bars, and smoking way too much. Little lumps of coal at the base of my back and my spine twists up and away from them in lazy painful curves. It looks like a textbook illustration, the illustration you don’t want to be in, the one marked ‘abnormal’. It is not a pretty sight.

Immediately after, I started hearing terms and phrases such as ‘medical evacuation’, ‘operation’, and ‘ possible medical separation’ - none of which was terribly reassuring. I’m still hearing them. They brought me back to the office, sent me back to site, the films went off to Washington on the following Monday, and two weeks later I’m still waiting word. Do I stay or do I go? If I go, can I come back? Do I pack for 45 days, or for the duration? If I must go and can’t return, will Peace Corps ship boxes home for me? If I have to go, how much time do they give me to pack, to say my goodbyes?

I don’t have any answers, I don’t know what to do. I look at things in my apartment with a measuring eye now - this I want, this I can leave, this I’ll want if I come back but otherwise will abandon. I’ve started to sort my possessions, who will get what; I’ve stopped writing letters home; I’ve stopped my Armenian lessons. I’m trying to wrap up my ongoing projects, I can hardly start any new ones. I exist within the confines of a holding pattern. In an act of quiet desperation, I folded a hundred paper cranes, and I gave away all my New Yorkers. I am not ready to leave, I am not ready for final goodbyes. The pain is unrelenting. I limp almost constantly, sometimes I fall down and make funny noises. My left leg’s performance is unreliable, I no longer trust it. Two months ago I could bend over and place my palms flat on the floor, bring my head to my knees; now I can’t touch my toes.

On the other hand, I can still function. The pain may be relentless but it’s bearable; I can walk, I can lift a bucket of water, I can climb stairs, I can sleep most nights. I know I don’t want to leave if leaving means I can’t come back. Forty five days in America I could deal with, the idea of air travel doesn’t frighten me, I just want to know I can come back. I have work to do here, and I have to go to the Vernissage, and I want to help my family stack their wood against the winter. I have jars upon jars of mouraba to finish, sitting in jewelled rows in my refrigerator; Varton is making haash for me, I’ve promised to eat it. How could I leave now?

I don’t think I have a choice in this anymore. I am waiting on Washington, and the waiting is killing me. Ah, here’s my card - heal my back.