Gains and losses

About a million hours of sleep and glad to be waking without bed sores, I rise at 7 am. We go together out to breakfast where he eats very little and looks pale and uncomfortable. The doctor's office is made of plain wood and sparse. We look at our phones and wait. The doctor's questions are detailed and patiently asked. His responses are vague and teen-aged. I would speak up to fill in the gaps when he's finished talking but I don't really have any information. At some point, I'm asked to step out of the room. Something twinges sharply in the area of my right temple again. Should I say to the doctor something like, while we're here, doctor, can you tell me if this twinge is an aneurysm warming up or a stroke taking shape? She wants to work him up. Sends us down the street to a lab for blood work, gives me a number to call to schedule an MRI, gives him a bagged plastic hat and accessories to capture a stool sample the next time it becomes convenient to do so. We're about 15 minutes past the closing of the lab but the young woman at the desk gets us in since we've come so far without me asking. She has pretty dark eyes above her mask and I see kindness there. For a moment, I feel some sort of life beginning to return to my heart area until I realize she's at least 30 years my junior and then it's back to that dusty cobwebby sadness and the business at hand. The nurse in the lab is rather rude with me and short with my son. We've shortened her personal Saturday. The work takes less than five minutes. I marvel at the way nurses routinely get away with being unprofessional like others professionals can't. I wonder why that is? Maybe because the patient is in a one down. Whatever. Thanks for seeing us, I would have said, but she doesn't give me time to. And then he's picking out some DVDs in the presidential library and I am watching the snow fall on the roofs of the dark red brick campus across the street and on the branches of the thick oaks. It is nice to watch it fall. You give it that much while another twinge occurs in the same temple and you imagine that in a coma you will remember this vision through the window and other snapshots you've taken with your eyes throughout your life. And then you wonder, dreadfully, if your boy has enough of those stored up and worry that you have not given him what he needs to sustain himself in this often bleak world. You're thankful, though, that he's not having to flee a burning apartment block in the falling snow trying to sleep in a subway tunnel to avoid Russian rockets. What the fuck do you really know about bleak anyway? 

It's time to push the clocks forward again. It's that time of year when we lose an hour of sleep at the very least.