Nuclear Medicine

When I’m in the machine, a PET scanner, Brian, the technician, tells me if I need anything just call, there’s a microphone, but I can’t imagine calling out to him. He’s in a little glass office guiding the machine up and down my body from my nose to my knees. I’ve already swapped stories with the wonderful nurse who gives me barium to drink and injects me with a radioactive tracer. We’ve been talking about snow in Philadelphia but stay away from the tragedies happening minute by minute wherever you turn. It doesn’t seem like a good time to actually talk about anything. I’m meditating as the machine moves like a shell along my body. It takes about 30 minutes to do its job. The room is cold, so Brian covers me with three folded cotton blankets heated up in the warmer closet. I know these blankets and love the heat they give off.

I thought something wonderful was going happen for about a second, not in the machine but in the hours before I entered it. But it turned out I was almost scammed. “It’s a long con,” Scott said. I was enticed really by the title of the email “Publishing Opportunity” or something like that on my university account, supposedly from a commissioning editor at Hachette Book Group. They wanted to bring out an edition of my mystery, If the Owl Calls, in Great Britain. Or so the editor said, but there were lots of ifs, and Scott said the end would have been when they asked for my bank account number to pay me. I had visions of a European book tour (I haven’t done one in the United States!) and other editions, translations, and enough money to travel to New Zealand again. My friend Karen said she was almost scammed too, but it was a poetry book they were after. “Who scams poets!” She said.

Last week I was skiing in Vermont and felt like I could fly. A great gift after a long story of the dismantling of my body. But there I was on the snow, over the hills, under the trees doing something I love to do again.