8pm in the hospital. I wait for my visitors to leave, pat my arm, check my stash of gum and jello, sing see you tomorrow cheerily over their shoulder. I waggle my fingers at them and smile. The stale metalic taste of chemo and Zofran heavy in my mouth and my sinuses. I have been waiting for 8pm. for the peace and the euphoria that will soon come. I have timed it. My med schedule is every four hours. My last morphine dose was at 4pm. At 4pm, I had to interact, try to eat, try to pull off some sort of conversation. Now, I can just rest. Let myself slip into the narcotic haze that hits around 8:20pm...
And I open my drawer and pull out a magazine. (My favorite is IN STYLE, but any fashion or scene mag will do. IN STYLE and ELLE are the biggest and have the best articles [yes, articles].) And I get lost. I slip into the slippery pages of banality and beauty and cleverness and swim in my morphined state through pages of beaded necklaces and what to buy your best friend for under $50.00. I get lost for hours in a perfect, hazy peace where for once, I seem to forget the nausea and the pain and exist in a world of strappy sandals and desert rose lip gloss. I lie there, so weak that somedays I have to prop my magazine up with the bed table, and I dream of the days when I will shave my legs and rub them with glamour girl shimmer cream and slip on a pair of strappy sandals that perfectly matched my handbag, and then set out to lunch on a patio where my hair needs to be pulled back because of the breeze.
