We watched the shuttle land this morning and I heard them speak of ”entry interface” which is where the shuttle moves from space into the the earth’s atmosphere.
The goal of guidance, navigation and flight control software is to guide and control the orbiter from this state (in which aerodynamic forces are not yet felt) through the atmosphere to a precise landing on the designated runway.
I’m going through entry interface right now. The events of the past weeks are starting to fade. The swelling is subsiding in my shoulder. I’m not living on pins and needles waiting for the next shoe to drop, and so I’ve raised my eyes to the world once again. Jeebus.
What kind of inhumanity does it take to do this? Or this? Or this? Or this? And what is this all about?
And this is just insane.
This isn’t even what I wanted to write about in this first real honest-to-goodness post since my own personal drama took over. I wanted to write about Nancy, who sent me flowers with a note that read “Who knows why or how, but you’re one of my best friends….I’ve never met!” Nancy, who may be dying and can’t even afford to find out, much less do anything about it.
What she didn’t realize — and that’s why one goes to an endocrinologist when one has thyroid issues rather than a cheap federally-funded health clinic for the poor — is that when you’ve had thyroid cancer a doctor likes to keep your levels EXTRA LOW just to make sure no thyroid tissue grows back. Because if you’re not on Synthroid and don’t keep the dose high enough to suppress everything, your thyroid will start trying to grow tissue again and that tissue will likely be cancerous.
And then all it has to do is spread somewhere, say your lymph nodes, and you’re fucked.
So by taking me off of Synthroid for more than a month, that nice but uninformed doc at the clinic for poor folk has risked my life.
And forget me knowing if cancer is right now spreading throughout my body, because I sure as hell can’t afford to pay full freight for an MRI.
I wanted to write that because of my really good insurance my recent medical adventures won’t send us careening into debt. I wanted to write about how I want that assurance for every person in this country. When one is staring one’s mortality in the face, the last thing anyone should have to do is find themself thinking twice about whether to call the ambulance, make the appointment or get the test. The very last thing.
Right now, the atmosphere is hitting me hard.
