This is the 52nd Wobbly Bicycle. One year of Wobblies. On the week a year ago that I decided to write about my cancer diagnosis, I gave the post that name, and kept using it. I’d thought to stop it after a year, and then I thought, well, when are we ever NOT wobbly bicycles? And certainly after a serious diagnosis, one is evermore aware of the beauty of flying along in perfect balance. Balance contains tentativeness, a little to this side, a little to the other. Nothing stable.
Jerry and I are in Ann Arbor, at the University of Michigan Hospital, where he just had back surgery. If you like drama, I could mention that he was in the O.R. for ten hours, with four surgeons in attendance. It must have been interesting, to figure out how to “fix” the spine from the deformity that develops after many years of the body’s leaning, trying to correct itself. Scoliosis and stenosis. The motif is balance, our wobbly-bicycle bodies.
I brought a trekking stick with me because I knew the hospital is huge, I’d have to walk a lot, and I’m having maybe some sort of back issue myself, that causes me to limp if I walk very far. (There was no time to see a physiatrist before we left. I did have a hip x-ray, nothing wrong with my hips.) So, anyway, I’m using the trekking stick like a cane, and it keeps me from limping, which I think is a good idea, to keep from throwing my body out of kilter.
It’s interesting, being a “disabled” person, getting those quick glances, that special consideration, holding elevator doors, etc. I feel like I’m faking it, but then, what disabled person doesn’t feel whole inside?
This large hospital feels like a magical enclosure. I’m thinking of the people I see, in extremis, the nakedness of the situation. I was taking a walk down the long hallways today, aware of a deep pleasure that comes, no matter what the anguish, in being just what we are, vulnerable humans, putting aside the posing and ambition that seemed so crucial, just being glad for a breath, for care, for a moment without pain, for simple thoughtfulness. 
Something in this reminds me of being at the seashore. The waves come in and go out, and you can’t do anything about any of it, so there’s a great peace. Even in Hurricane Sandy, you can’t do anything about it, so you just act like a plain person for a change, taking care of what you can take care of, what’s right in front of you to do.
I sat for a while yesterday in the interminable time before the buzzer went off telling me Jerry was out of surgery, thinking how I might write about any of that—the immediacy of it—the moment seemed so just there, just what it was, that anything I said would be a distortion. You have to just leave moments like that alone, if you’re going to write about them, let them bubble up at another time, in another way.