Summer #2: Flash Dance

Summer #2: There are things I haven't told you, but now that we've gotten closer, I'm ready to open up. Last fall I started having hot flashes. What a bizarre experience. Always colder than anyone around me, I was getting ready to start a professional development seminar for about a hundred people when the school's principal asked how I was. "Hot."

I stripped down to the essentials, a cotton tank and my britches, and looked around. No one else seemed affected. I felt like a hot coal must feel. Or a radiator. Not a person near a radiator. A radiator. Heat smoked from every pore, and I discovered pores in my scalp that had never made themselves known before. I thought maybe I was having a heat stroke, but no one came to my aid. They all seemed unaware of the heat tsunami I was experiencing.

I tell you this so that you'll know for sure how much I suffered: piggy flu, pneumonia, radiation for a brain tumor, and hot flashes. A friend staying with us called to say she had head lice while she was here, but we didn't get them. I was glad, though it would have made a good story.

I have not experienced dramatic emotional reactions, yet, though perhaps that's to come. When Ann, who is remarkably calm and centered, was going through this, she kicked a hole in the wall. I was in the kitchen, and I could hear her upstairs slamming doors and drawers more and more assertively. Finally she yelled down, "Honey," (she wasn't really thinking honey), "Do you know where my blue shirt is?" I hollared that I didn't, and she sighed dramatically. I heard her slamming things around again, this time in my closet. I knew she thought I'd hidden her blue shirt among my clothes. Then everything got quiet.

Ann came down in her pink shirt and stood quietly by me until I looked at her and asked, "Did you find it?" She responded, "I kicked a hole in the wall." It was like a child confessing having stolen candy from the grocery store. I laughed, and we went upstairs to survey the damage: yep,a size ten and a half hole in the wall.

The next day Ann fixed the hole and found the shirt. In her own closet. This is one of my favorite stories about her. When I asked if it would be okay to write about it for the blog,she said, "Why not. You've told just about everyone we know."

A few years ago, before my brain tumors, we went with our friend Ellen S. to see Menopause the Musical. There were seven men in the audience (I counted). I seemed to be ther only person under fifty years of age. The audience howled with laughter as the women on stage sang, fanned themselves,  went to the bathroom every few minutes, and had temper tantrums. I didn't laugh. I was terrified.

We're in for a cool, damp summer here in the Northwest, but I'm guessing I'll be plenty warm. Mary