spur is about 1/3 from top of foto,
the black protrusion on the right
pushing into the white surrounding
the lighter gray spinal cord
I’ve been wondering about my dreams. I’m a vivid dreamer, totally detailed with things like pebbles on the ground and dust in the basement and spiderwebs, all in color, frequently surreal.
Like to remember my dreams because they give me an idea of how I’m doing mentally and spiritually.
But when I smoke grass every day, my nightly dreams are dumped from short-term memory as I wake, leaving me clueless, and I’ve had a great run of smoking daily for past five months. But ran out a week ago and decided to wait due to finances, and voila, woke with memory this morn.
In my pre-dawn dream, the Akron Art Museum had an open show, so I snuck in and left a live beehive. One woman got stung and caused a scandal. When Lady and I went down to pick up the hive, the authorities asked me to apologize. Lady said she was sorry, which she would have been in real life because someone got hurt, and in real life I would never have done the hive thing for that very reason, but in the dream I said no, I’m not sorry, it was an excellent art interaction. Then the director asked, “Did Chiplis drive you down?” and I said yes. Dream over.
Jeff Chiplis is a 35-year-long friend who creates sculptures from found and recycled neon and is quite well-known – see his work here > http://agentofchaos.com/chiplis/index.html.
Mary E. Weems, Lady K. Smith, and myself are writing a poem-a-day for May. Here’s today’s poem incorporating the doctor’s description of my MRI showing a bone/cartilage spur in my neck pressing against and bruising my spinal cord causing a 7-month slight numbness and tingling in the fingertips of both hands. Looks like the doctor’s going to go in, scrape the burr spur off and put two metal rods in to stabilize my degenerating neck bones – a laminectomy and fusion sometime this summer.
I’m going to ask him if he can insert the rods horizontally so they stick out of my neck with bolts on the end Ala Frankenstein’s monster.
Status Report 211
Doc sez
There is severe degenerative disc disease
at C4-5.
Exaggerated kyphosis at C4-C5
is demonstrated.
At C4-5 there is moderate compression
secondary to the kyphosis
and degenerative disc bulge
and ligamentum flavum hypertrophy.
One subtle area of abnormal signal
or mass demonstrated.
There is hypertrophic facet arthropathy
bilaterally left greater than right
contributing to moderate
foraminal narrowing on the left
and mild foraminal narrowing on the right.
At C5-6 hypertrophic facet arthropathy.
This causes minimal degenerative
spondylolisthesis of C5 on C6.
There is no spinal canal encroachment.
There is minimal foraminal
narrowing bilaterally.
At C6-7, mild degenerative disc bulge
and spurring without neural compression.
Moderate compression of the cord at C4-C5
secondary to focal kyphosis
and degenerative disc disease.
Going to have to do a laminectomy
to scrap the burr spur off
then fuse the neck bones
to two metal rods.
So I say
Doc, can you insert the rods sideways
so they stick out, and add bolt heads
a’la Frankenstein’s monster?
As I say in a previous poem
I am a man of bad bone.
– Smith, 5.16.2016
