Shot Thru With Light

I was walking into the setting sun this afternoon, the ocean on one side of me, car after car after car on the other side. I couldn't see the people walking towards me, so I had no social obligations to acknowledge them, leaving me free to ponder as much as dodging dog shit would allow.
It's getting harder and harder to ponder on West Cliff Drive, what with safety concerns...bikes, poop, dead fish, spacey people pondering...
The sun was ferocious in the chilly afternoon sky and I was unshakeably certain that I was permeable, light shooting through all the various and increasing number of holes in my bones. I stopped, pissing off a cyclist for good reason, and savored the vision.
If I was a painter, I would paint that one with lots of bloody red and deep yellows and oranges coming through the holes in my legs, my pelvis, all up and down my spine, my arms and shoulders and ribs and skull. Maybe with encaustics, y'know where they mix the paint with hot wax and sort of sculpt the paint on the canvas, giving the image fleshiness and heft.
And when the light shines through that.
Wow.
For someone who likes to walk and jump up and down and dance and jerk around for no reason, it is distressing to know that my bones grow more fragile from one CT scan to the next. I think about that movie "Shadowlands" about C.S. Lewis (Anthony Hopkins) and the American woman (Debra Winger) he fell in love with and how one day she's just walking around the kitchen and her leg breaks.
Snap.
Crash.
It's a great movie, partly because she dies such a tragic death (they'd just fallen in love) by bone cancer. And it makes Tony Hopkins realize just how much he loved her.
It didn't start in my bones, but in my breast, and it's taken to my bones like a tick to moist dark skin. I have lytic lesions, which are the ones where the cancer thins the bone, leaving them at risk of breaking out of the blue. Especially with bouncing. Or picking up heavy things. Or sometimes for no apparent reason.
It seems that along with the erosion of the bone, there can be nerves and muscles involved, all those things being so close together like. This intimate sharing of space and blood and sensations and naughty cancer cells can bring on the pain like a surprise birthday party that only people you don't really like come to. For instance, I often have the feeling that my ribs have been shattered by a two-by-four.
Halleluiah for the humble poppy. I know I complain about the irritating and embarrassing side effects of opium derivatives (constipation, nausea, anxiety, anorexia, itching, depression, nodding off as the arc of narrative makes it's most graceful turns in books and movies. Oh and farting.
But I don't even want to imagine what my life would be like without opiates. I remember when my grandmother was dying of cancer. It started in her breast and within five years it was all over and finally in her brain.
In those days...the early '70s...they were real worried about dying middle-aged women becoming dope fiends and so the only time she got pain medication was when she screamed for help. And my dear introspective, shy grandmother who I remember as being someone I had to get really close to in order to hear her, became a screamer. I was ten and we visited her in the nursing home every night for months.
There should be a parade for all the people who dedicated their lives to getting as much pain medication necessary to the people who sorely need it for as long as they need it without making them feel guilty or weak or fiendish about it.
I'm grateful I can save my screaming for other opportunities.