crossword puzzle winner gets the goods

Yes, Virginia, there really is a Forres Gazette. Aside from Ken Smith, the kindly editor who was pleased to hand me my (sic) £15 Macbeth's Butchers voucher, are two mystery women, both adorable. One was somehow connected to the gent coerced or shall I say asked to take pictures. The other may or may not have had something significant to do with the actual completion of the weekly crossword. You've now been shown - somewhere in this photo opp is a real rocket scientist with eloquence! 

I love living in a wink-wink nudge-nudge kind of community. Nobody's foolin' noone!

In preparation for this coming Thursday's re-visit to the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, which feels so time warpish to even write, I fell asleep on the couch tonight while the telly blared a rather endless drama. So what? you might sigh. I'm not a nap taker and I'm not necessarily sleep-deprived. Short of awfulizing its significance, it is highly possible that I remain psychically worn out from this past week's bone marrow biopsy. It's that or worry about my blood counts, which is just such a no-win. Incubating in this nap confessional is my awareness of desiring a massive paradigm shift (screw the gauntlet consciousness - somewhere the new name will come!) from fear-based to a profound soul deliverance. Somewhere inside of me is a place beyond holding my breath between medical challenges and feeling like I'm running from the Gestapo. This is not easy (to put it mildly) and I can taste its possibility. Its emergence could be my most valid experience of a leap of faith. I yearn for a spiritual transplant not ravaged by worry and constriction. I get it in blips, in little half-hiccups. 

I want to drink deeply of this richness I've only sensed. I don't want mindless denial, wishing away the implications of this shitty disease. Neither do I want to continue holding my breath in remission, hesitantly reading peoples' eyes and wondering if they wish me well or fear my death. I want wholeness, I want peace, I want to be completely CURED. If I tiptoe between medical incidents until and if I hit the 5-year mark, I'll blow myself to smithereens vibrationally. 

Somewhere in this incubation is sensing that until I fully acknowledge my passionate desire to LIVE with as well a complete acceptance of death's not far away potential, I will jitterbug between the two worlds and blur myself into a land of drivel and false hopes. I'm tired of being tired and afraid. I'm tired of pathologizing a nap. I'm sick and tired of staring at my legs, fearing bruises (from low platelets) or those little pin-prick red bits called petechia. I don't know if I'm being ballsy or foolish, but I'm not going to bow my head to every single thing the medical world barks at me nor bow my head in a big fat givin' up. I will listen, I will pray and I will ask to have this inner load lightened while I affirm that I want to LIVE!

Now!

..... In happiness, in sterling health, in faith, in service, in giddy abundance and holy grace.... for a very very very long time.