Tag: venous system

“every force evolves a form”

theresakishkan8 Comments

laid out

The great thing about swimming is its capacity for meditative thinking. Not always. But sometimes, when I have something to figure out, and if I’m breathing steadily as I swim up and down the local pool, I can find my way down into the idea I’m puzzling through.  I’m going to write about it here because I know how often I read about writers and their work patterns and my own never seems to be anything like that. I’ve asked myself many times if I might in fact be a fraud, that maybe I’m not really a writer at all. But this time I actually had an insight about something and I worked out a solution that I think is pretty interesting.

Over the weekend I completed a first draft of an essay on rivers and venous systems. I was trying to understand how our veins work and how things can go wrong with them. Obviously my medical background is zero. But I also realized at recent medical appointments that there are gaps in the way doctors and other medical practitioners view (and tend to pathologize) anomalies in the human body. My essay remembers particular rivers and their origins, situating me (and my family, if required) on or in different rivers. The rivers move over and around obstacles, their water levels change, they form oxbows and meanders. I try to imagine the notion of braided rivers, channels that split off from one another for various reasons (bank erosion being one) and then rejoin each other again. And there are many correspondences with our venous system. I loved writing the first draft and now the challenge is to take the sections, written as they occurred, and make a coherence of the whole thing. The beginning is still the beginning and the end is still the end but the 12 sections in between needed some organizing.

I had in mind moving the material around on the page a little, as one would do with the sections of a poem, using the space of the page as a compositional field. Can you do this with an essay that is essentially written as straight prose? Well, maybe you can. In the pool, I remembered a little passage in one section of the essay that uses an encounter with a physiotherapist last week who was helping me to strengthen one leg.

My physiotherapist tells me that the ligaments, bones, and cartilage exist in a relationship. He braids his fingers together to show me. Then he turns them askew, like my own braided hair after I’ve slept on for a night or two, and he says our work will be to re-align the workings of my right leg. He doesn’t think it’s simply arthritis though he’s breezily convinced that everyone over 50 has some degree of it in his or her joints. He speaks of trauma, of injury. A bump or a fall or a turn too far.

So what would happen, I wondered, if I tried justifying the margins of certain sections to the right-hand side of the page rather than the left. Would you still be able to read the prose easily but might you also be able to understand how the sections are like the rivers splitting and rejoining one another, the bones and ligaments trying to do the same? Would you? Hmmm. I kept swimming up and down the pool, doing my slow kilometer, and trying to “see” the prose sections as visual correlatives of my body and the rivers I love. I know this could work with huge sheets of paper and letterpress printing, I know that space would not be an issue. But on an 8 1/2 x 11 inch page, what then?

I’ve been trying various things in my word-processing program (which isn’t Word but LibreOffice, close to Word but not exactly the same) and I’ve been cutting and taping pages to try to see which sections might look best meshing or braiding together (only at the bottom or top of a page, I guess, because otherwise there won’t be room for the actual text). And trying to remind myself that this is writing first and graphic representation second. That meaning ought to come first. But maybe there’s also room for what Guy Davenport, via Mother Ann Lee, so beautifully recognized: that “every force evolves a form.” That meaning is, in a way, a realization of aesthetic form.

one section

Ok, back to it. I can’t wait to fiddle some more.

“creeks in the darkness”

theresakishkan4 Comments
bridge over Rosebud River
bridge over the Rosebud River, April, 2016

I am currently at work on an essay about rivers and blood clots. An odd combination, I know, but I seem to have a clotting disorder (I’m waiting to see a hematologist for further tests) and it’s made me think a little more seriously about how our venous system works. How everything flows normally and then doesn’t. And of course that led me to think about rivers, the ones I love and return to, and how they change too for reasons that have some similarities to what happens with our veins. So it’s very absorbing, this essay, and I woke this morning with that kind of excitement I’ve always felt as I enter the deep waters of writing. It’s leading me to the north, to the MacKenzie River, where we were lucky enough to spend a few days in Fort Simpson at break-up, and to Englishman River, where I camped as a child and then as a young woman in desperate straits, and this morning to the Rosebud River as we drove it two springs ago very early and stopped at the aqua bridge between Wayne and Rosedale to listen to magpies. And in my mind is how to keep the various strands winding around each other, as the channels of braided rivers split and rejoin, as banks erode and are changed over years or centuries.

A deep cramping pain. Some swelling. In the Emergency room, my history is taken. Pulmonary embolism a year ago. Suspected deep vein thrombosis. 6 months of blood thinners. Many scans and tests.

A lab technician is called from his bed to take my blood for a d-dimer test to determine if there is active clot activity. An ultrasound is set for the next morning, though it is well into that morning when the technician draws blood from the pool of my right arm. I do not wait for the results because I want some sleep and the person in the other bed is on a powerful narcotic that makes her itchy, causes her to moan on her side of the screen that separates us. The medical staff is not happy I’m leaving.

We drive home on a dark highway. It’s a 45 minute journey and after 30 minutes the Emergency room physician phones me on my husband’s cell phone. In the car, the loud opening chords of “Sultans of Swing”, a moment when I regret he didn’t set his ring tone to something sweet—the Brahms lullaby or “That Sheep May Safely Graze”—as I struggle to stab in the right place to answer it. The physician tells me that my d-dimer test is positive for blood clotting, that I may have a DVT, and that I must return immediately to begin a course of anticoagulants.

“As I’ll be coming in later in the morning for an ultrasound, I can’t just wait until then?”

“No, I must insist you come back now.”

So we turn around and head back, my husband silent with weariness. He won’t let me drive. About halfway to the hospital, we see a large animal on the side of the highway. Not large like elk, which we see quite often. And not a coyote. Bigger than that. It takes a moment or two, and the glare of the animal’s golden eyes, for us to realize we’re seeing a cougar. I’ve lived on this peninsula for 35 years and I’ve seen just two cougars in that time. I’ve heard two more, I think, but sightings are rare.

All down the coast, we passed creeks in the darkness, Homesite, Meyer, Anderson, Maple, Haskins, scribbling down the mountains. And I would do it all again, sit at the desk with a nurse taking my pulse, my blood pressure, arranging for bloodwork, ultrasound, medication to prevent a blood clot moving up into my lungs, for the glow of the cougar’s eyes in our headlights, and the knowledge of water finding its way to the sea.