Biscuits as Comfort Food

This morning, Medicare sent me on a round-trip through an MRI machine to see what's going on inside my leg. It was a bizarre experience--what with all the loud fog horn and mechanical duck quacking sounds.

Then, across the hall to mammography, then the sonogram to check out a spot that  always shows up each year, then the radiologist's report that it's no big deal, nothing to worry about.

I felt detached from myself for three hours, being buzzed and prodded and squeezed by strangers.
Three of the four technicians seemed bored, almost as impersonal as the machines. The rooms were freezing.  Eye contact was virtually nonexistent.

Every time I go into these rooms of machines and cold light, I look around and see a roomful of other women waiting, as I am, for a friendly word, a nod, good news, relief. One woman, about my age, looked ravaged by disease or chemotherapy, swollen and jaundiced, with a devastating mask of sadness.

Too often, I take the gift of good health for granted, rarely thinking about people who are gravely ill. Going into those rooms always puts me in touch with my mortality. This could be the day, I think. that my string of good fortune takes a different turn.

Leaving the imaging center, I felt like I've felt after visiting people who are ill in a hospital: I walk out into a sunny day and am shocked that all the time I've been inside, the people outside are going on with their lives, eating out, and buying stuff. Today I felt the lingering chill of the imaging rooms, humbled, deflated, relieved, lonely, and hungry.

For the first time in years, I drove down the road to Los Patios--the place we always used to go for celebratory lunches.  Back in the day, it was a vibrant place with eateries and busy shops, a plant nursery, and a swinging bridge where we'd stand and watch the ducks below. Twenty and thirty years ago, it was one of the best places in town--and my mouth watered at the prospects of those buttery biscuits we used to eat there.

Both the patio and the dining rooms used to be busy every day. Today, the patio and the inside dining rooms at the Gazebo were empty--and I decided to take a table at the patio and eat lunch alone.  Never mind gluten, never mind calories, all I wanted were the Southern Girl's comfort food--flaky little biscuits glazed with butter.

It wasn't quite like going home after a trip to the imaging center--but it was a reminder that (as Betty said to me in an email last week) "Life is not a dress rehearsal."

I'll get back on the wagon tomorrow--but when biscuits help bring me back into my body after passing it, part by part,  through machines, I'm having biscuits!