A Spacious Place

At 7:00 am this morning, under a pitch black sky studded with brilliant stars, I walked into ARH to receive my second and final gallium scan. The technologist was right the other day: I haven’t experienced any difficulties from the injection of the radioactive isotope, gallium – the little needle-prick has healed nicely and Verna hasn’t observed me glowing (and I certainly would have stood out early this am…) But the scan to “read” the isotope as it courses through my bloodstream, now that’s another matter.

We’ve all seen the large circular Cat-scan machines, either in real life or TV/movies (the best take on the travails associated with this procedure, for my money, is from Woody Allen’s “Hannah and her Sisters” but I digress) The patient lies on a narrow platform which is slowly passed through the large circular opening while the machine whirrs away, taking important pictures and then, after a brief time, is extracted. But with my kind of scan, the gallium kind, the opening isn’t circular, it’s rectangular, and it isn’t large, the “ceiling” perhaps 1 1/2 inches from the end of my nose, and the “extraction” wasn’t brief – I spent 35 minutes on four occasions over the two days in this contraption. And, throughout this experience, I had my feet taped together with masking tape (to keep them from flopping over – you’d be surprised how hard it is to keep them upright for that length(s) of time) and my arms velroed tight to my sides with a long plastic “scarf” looped through my arms and around my torso,

Now you have to understand something about me. I am the High Priest and Grand Potentate of Claustrophobia. I get panicky in the back seat of two door automobiles…when I am back there by myself. So here I was, in this high-tech coffin, in my own worst personal nightmare.

So what do you do? What do you think about?

First of all, you keep you eyes shut, tight, no peeking, the whole time. That helps a lot. And then you/I think about Tuesday morning.

On Tuesday morning I convinced my friend Keith to accompany/drag/cajole me up Elk Mountain. If you don’t know this area, Elk Mt. is the last peak on the ridge which extends west from Mt. Cheam, the 6900 ft. peak which presides over the far eastern face of our valley. Elk is about 5000 ft. and it is rated “difficult” in any hiking guide. It is our “Grouse Grind” (approximately the same vertical and horizontal challenge as that more celebrated hump.) I’ve done Elk dozens of times, but not in the past 11 months.

And I made it on Tuesday morning, half an hour longer than it used to take me, but I still made it, staying “within” myself, catching myself as I got to that breathless point when I could tell my diaphram wasn’t going to kick in as it used to. I made it.

There is no view going up the trail – you are in trees the whole way. Then, when you come to the first rock outcropping just below the peak, the whole valley floor opens up, from Vancouver to the west (on a clear day) north to Harrison Lake and beyond, east along the ridge to Cheam and south to Cultus Lake and Columbia Valley.

This morning and yesterday afternoon at ARH I thought about the spaciousness I experienced on Tuesday.

There are times when I am overwhelmed by my limitations. I can’t do the things I used to do in the ways I used to do them. And that might never change. But what I’m learning is that there is spaciousness in each day. Yes, the future is uncertain. When isn’t it for any of us?

That mountain top experience did give me hope, but it gave me hope to continue to cherish the little things, the opportunities in each day to enjoy the people I’m with, to savour good food, music, I don’t know, the whole shebang…There is so much freedom, even in straightened circumstances, if we have eyes to see it (and sometimes they need to be shut tight.)

“He brought me out into a spacious place
He rescued me because he delighted in me” Psalm 18:19

Thank you, Lord.