They performed the echocardiogram right in his room, with the blinds pulled down and the lights dimmed to keep glare off the screen. The room was hushed as a chapel, the only sound from beeping machinery and the tap-tap of the sonographer's fingers on the keyboard. Pulsing blobs appeared on the screen, some as graceful as floating balloons while others performed a frantic tarantella. I wondered how anyone could possibly see sense in those vague shapes.
Fortunately, the cardiologist saw something more rational than squirrels or jellyfish. He saw fluid surrounding our son's heart and he immediately ordered a pericardiocentesis, a procedure to drain the fluid, to allow the heart to beat more freely before my son starts chemotherapy.
Many of the new words we're learning sound lovely as long as we don't think about what they mean. Pericardiocentesis. Sonographer. Lymphoblastic lymphoma. Sounds like poetry, but I'm not ready to write any right now.
Okay, maybe just a haiku:
Dancing balloon or
jellyfish, squirrel on a wheel:
mystery and marvel.
That's the best I can do right now. Anyone else want to give it a try? Describe one of life's great mysteries in seventeen(ish) syllables.
3 comments:
With time limitations and a caffeine deprived brain - I used CoPilot —
A heart on a screen
Shifts, nothing like the symbol—
Still, it beats with hope.
Sonogram’s blurred shape
Strays from the drawn heart symbol
We pray it grows strong.
💙🙏
Lovely! My favorite chemotherapy word is Vincristine, a drug derived from the Madagascar periwinkle. There's poetry in that.
Wow- I didn’t know periwinkles had medicinal properties. 🩵
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