A Spork in the Road

I abhor the colloquial use of “literally” as an intensifier.

“She literally took forever to answer my question.”
“He was literally foaming at the mouth.”
“I was literally burning up.”

I’m all in favor of colloquial speech. I think casual grammatical structures are a natural consequence of how the brain operates in conversation, and I don’t expect myself or anyone else to preserve elegant syntax when chatting at the water cooler.

But must we really abuse the word “literally,” a gentle word that has done no violence to us or our loved ones? Can we not restore it to its natural meaning, rather than yoking it to wild metaphors that are in no way meant literally?

Please, be conscious of your use of this lovely word. Use it advisedly. Or I will hunt you down and make you suffer.

Literally.

My counts inched up a little this week, out of the “Critical” range and back into plain ol’ “Low.” My nurse said, “They’ll come back up eventually, I promise!” But she wasn’t worried and didn’t even mention shots, which made me happy.

I still don’t feel peppy, but I don’t feel so strung out as I did last week.

And of course, the main hope is for a clean PET scan at the end of the month. The rest of this is just standard recovery.

We produced The Wisdom of Eve last week/weekend, and as usual I wore many hats: sound tech the first three nights, stand-in for one of the smaller roles on Saturday night, and combination dresser/battery replacer/sound tech on Sunday.

Saturday night I donned a blonde wig in order to play Vera Franklin. My dark eyebrows are starting to come back in enough that it looked a little odd, but not terrible. Even with my handful of lines I had a couple of costume changes, one of them onstage, so I was happy to find dresses that could all be unzipped and stepped into/out of. The Sinead O’Connor look doesn’t really work for a 1950’s period piece.

The play, which is the stage adaptation of the 1950 classic All About Eve, has some great lines and undeniably vivid characters. However, unlike the film, the stage play is very flabby on a line level. A lot of arduous explanation and recapping and fluffy dialogue that does nothing for the plot. Every night, following the script for sound cues, I itched to take a red pen to the page.

I thought of Jim Kelly’s rule that for the final draft of a piece you should cut it down by 30%. Would that playwright Mary Orr knew that principle!

Don’t know what my counts are today (lacking a personal laboratory here at the office), but I’m certainly feeling better than I was earlier in the week.

I’ve been told one cannot feel when one’s white blood cell count is low. Poppycock. You know that feeling you get when you realize you’re fighting some kind of bug: a little tired, a little draggy, a little stupid? That’s what it feels like. When my counts are high, I feel like I could rule the world. I rise early and feel magnanimous towards the world.

This morning I won’t say I popped out of bed, but I got up within ten minutes of the alarm and managed to make it through the first half of the morning without dropping, breaking, or accidentally kicking anything. This constitutes progress.

I’m optimistic that my brain cells will follow suit and will perform somewhere close to competence. This would make me and all my clients very happy.

My blood counts are down today from last week. Neutrophils are hovering at the bottom of “normal” range, but my overall counts were down to 2.4 (marked simply with a “C” in the margin of my blood work sheet: “C” for “Critical”).

Neulasta works. It also retails around $7,000 per shot. An Everest of a number when you’re battling insurance woes and staring at a box full of past due medical bills.

We’re going to see if my counts climb back up a little next week. Otherwise we need to talk about Neulasta. In the meantime I wash my hands, avoid crowds, sleep more.

Loss grew as you did, without your consent; your losses mounted beside you like earthworm castings. No willpower could prevent someone’s dying. And no willpower could restore someone dead, breathe life into that frame and set it going again in the room with you to meet your eyes. That was the fact of it. The strongest men and women who had ever lived had presumably tried to resist their own deaths, and now they were dead. It was on this fact that all the stirring biographies coincided, concurred, and culminated.

Time itself bent you and cracked you on its wheel.

- Annie Dillard, An American Childhood