cancer – day 120

Wow, what an awful way to wake up. And I have a terrible headache.

I had the worst dream this morning.

I was on my way home in the Jeep, I had just driven in on Christmas Tree Lane and gotten onto Tinsel Trail in some big snow (Tinsel Trail is the last bit of dirt road that goes to my house, and the road of my mailing address, someone must have really been in a holiday mood when they named our roads), and I had the snow chains on the Jeep but was pretty much sliding my way home on the iced-over road anyway. In the dream my Rubicon was red, not green, as I saw when I got out to check on how badly I damaged it backing up and turning around next to a rock wall to make room for my neighbor to drive past on the single set of snow tracks on the road. (Scratching the Jeep wasn’t the nightmare, only the back fender corner was scratched, it was just an early part of the sequence of dream that I remember.) In the dream, when I got out to check the corner of the Rubicon, my neighbor also got out of his white pickup (my real neighbor, the actual guy that lives there and drives a white truck), and he told me about a fatality accident that happened on Tinsel Trail between my place and his (mind you, this has NEVER happened on Tinsel Trail). And he suggested I go inside from the snow and chat with his wife while they cleared the trail through to the accident (someone lost control in the snow and slid off the road down the hill and rolled his car a few times into some trees. There were no EMTs or fire crews or even forest service out there, it’s just so remote. After the wreck, the driver of the car had walked to my neighbor’s place for help, and his wife had died in the passenger seat while he was gone for help. Or something awful like that. Even this bit of scariness isn’t what my night mare was about, it was just part of the dream set up that got me to be inside the neighbor’s house.

So I’m in the house, in the laundry room/bathroom just inside from their garage (I have no idea how their house is actually configured inside, this is what my dream mind made up) and I’m talking with the wife about the accident and then about my cancer and all my wigs and the skin care regime I have now. The wife in my dream was not the real wife who actually lives on the next property over, it was a different woman.

The woman started telling me how she used to be a beautician and make beauty product things too like wigs and accessories. And she wanted to try to help with my hair (which had, in the dream, thinned to what it is thinned to now but was still very very long like before I started cutting it because of chemo, so, we’re talking a hair every eighth inch or so).

[I’m getting awfully tired (for real, while I’m writing this, not in my dream) now, so I need to skim some details and get to where the nightmare woke me up, so I can try to go lie down again to hopefully snooze before it’s really time to get up.]

So the woman talks with me a while and gets me to try this hair conditioner and convinces me to look at haircut photos and talk with her about what I’m thinking about doing with my hair (I want to just shave it off and go with wigs) and she leaves the room for a long time while I have this stupid conditioner in my hair and can’t leave, and she finally comes back and she’s all dolled up and we talk about hair some more and she makes my hair look nice and complete (basically exactly what it was four months ago) if it’s brushed straight back but when she parts it on the side I’m completely bald on the exposed side (hard to describe that and how disturbing it was to see it in my dream, I don’t mind being bald, but the idea of being partially bald with long hair is somewhat strange and frightening).

Anyway!

Then she suggests we go out for dinner and that I should pay and I say why not sure I can pay and I’m checking my wallet to make sure I have my credit card to buy her dinner and I have these folded bills in the middle of my wallet (such that she can see there’s cash but not what denomination the bills are) when I unfold the wallet, and she snatches the money and flips through it and says “this will be enough” and I said “I’m not paying $300 for a dinner with you!” And she tells me that what she’s done for me (with the hair) is worth more than that and I tell her no way and snatch back my money and run out of the laundry room to my Jeep in their garage and get the hell out of there and headed down the road on to my house. Then, when I’m finally safe and alone away from their house, I wake up.

Ugh, nasty dream.