are you a good cloud or a bad cloud?

Nearly 12 hours in bed - well, my new "bed" of the living room sofa. My $300 Home Consignment gooshy fun oversized why did I buy this thing? is now my comfy 2nd bed. I readily slip from one side to the other and even the effing drainage tube tweaks only for a few seconds. Yesterday I awoke feeling druggy jet-lagged since I had pseudo-slept in one-hour blips for perhaps 6 hours. Horrid. Utterly horrid. It was Monday morning, but by gum I was on my way to SOLUTIONS, dammit!

By 3:15 pm, another round of mayhem and no solutions. Drove to Novato Community Hospital with an E-Ticket from Metzger's office for interventional radiology. Waiting for x-rays. Waiting for Alex bleeping Metzger's office to return from their fat 'n sassy one-hour lunch. (If this is an emergency, hang up and dial 9-1-1 now. I don't want to dial 9-1-1 now, you bastards, I want to talk to YOU). Curled up in my car in the Hospital parking lot because it was better to be there than the waiting room and I didn't have the oomph to drive the 4.3 miles home or to even swerve over to Starbucks in the adjacent shopping center. Lost connections re-establishing a flow of "next!" with radiology, then soon back in there for the thoracentesis I was now desperate for…. suck some of this out of my lung area, I can't breathe, please help me! And then PLEASE replace the tube with a larger one, too!

They could do neither. "You have loculations…. little separated pockets where the fluid is held. If the tube or even our needle goes into one, it doesn't take the fluid out of the others. We can't help you." I was weeping, which has now become really hard since I can't take a decent breath.

A Church friend on hold to visit since the morning was blown off for this? He'll come today, but really…. but really…..

My nose is slammed up against a wall of what next? I spent four days of hell in Marin General Hospital, to which I. Will. Not. Return. What part of NO don't you people understand? Yet I inherited my current now questionable duo of Metzger the oncologist and O'Dorisio the thoracic surgeon from there. Wanna see 'em again? Go back to MGH. I'm not going back. Vee have a problem. I say "no" and I get that veiled look of "You're not very cooperative, are you? Bad girl. We are the doctors. We tell YOU what to do, remember?"

Like hell you do.

Metzger is on vacation 'til the 21st. His office staff - you know, the people who answer the phones - were plucked out of some stoner haze middle school. And only yesterday I discovered that even if I went to Santa Rosa to be seen by O'Dorisio, he couldn't help my breathing any more than has been done.

The nose is up against the wall and it hurts.

The CT-guided biopsy for the mediastinal mass is still on for this Friday the 15th.

I have an appointment with Seattle Cancer Wellness Center for Thursday, July 21st. {Thank you, Anonymous}. One afternoon. Am I able to even fly? Book it? Ask for someone to come with me? I feel like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, who just wants to go home again… I just want to BREATHE again. Screw the maybe cancer and their long-syllable'd diagnoses…. I want to effing BREATHE! And nobody in conventional care seems able to help me today.

I will sleep and pray and suck supplemental O2 and have my friends come over one at a time and do one load of laundry one at a time and see where this goes. One day, one hour, one teary breath at a time.