NUCLEAR MEDICINE

4 4 Y N U C L E A R M E D I C I N E A U S T I N S E G R E S T Weekdays I wheeled the vial across the hospital, its fifty-pound lead drum blowing through the atrium where sky crashed in on potted trees, and workmen were walling up the old ER entrance where I’d rolled in my mother, deteriorating, slumped. No more waiting room delirium and panic now. Watching the clock, I had three minutes to get the radioactive agent to its subject, one of a set of identical twins, so his heart could betray its damage. No time to see that wall close up like the artery that killed my mother, or the one that would darken a section of the vet’s heart muscle. I took the tunnel under Clifton Road, the decay drum catching momentum down the ramp as I cried out to strangers, organ transplant, coming through – some white lie to clear the way, 4 5 R not thinking of the beating bag I’d dreamed of carrying her heart in, or how being alone with her dying left me exposed, as to a naked dose. Lying on the scanner bed in his room of lead, some Don or Ron, Harry or Larry was prepped for my delivery. Not thinking how personal, how molecular, upheaval gets inside us. Riddling the body, the body releasing that which hurts yet preserves us – what stress damages the heart, what we can measure of it. ...