Lymph Nodes
You don’t normally think about lymph nodes that much
Most people, I’d hazard a guess
couldn’t even tell you what a lymph node looks like
let alone what it does.
They’re the unsung heroes of the body
queuing up at the bus stop
hours before you even wake up in the morning,
punching in before dawn to scrub gunk from your blood,
dispatching SWAT teams to new wounds,
oiling the wheels of communication,
unfussily doing their job
And then, one day, something gets caught in their filter
needs to be stopped,
or all hell will break loose.
When you’re on the operating table,
the primary tumour gets all the attention.
The poor old lymph nodes were just sitting there
minding their own business.
Does anyone ever say thank you?
No chance, just one morning half of them are gone
and the rest are left to do the same amount of work
for no more money. They should have a union.
The lymph nodes know all about passive aggression.
Right, they say, you’ll notice when we’ve gone.
You’ll find that suddenly your life revolves around your arm pit.
No more top shelf tins fetched down for you.
You’ll shell out for a fancy bra,
only to find you can’t bear to wear it,
because there’s a tennis ball under your arm,
which might not sound so bad,
except that this one’s stuck beneath your skin
and something keeps blowing it up.
Two weeks down the line, the physio will tell you
that now you need to be nice to your lymph nodes,
appreciate what they’ve gone through,
no flowers, no cards, just the skeleton crew,
nipping out for a five-minute smoke and a grumble,
Well, you can see their point of view.
It’s time to get real. No more vacuuming for the foreseeable,
or ironing, or driving the kids to school
Go on, you just try an emergency stop.
And if you know what’s good for you,
you’ll need to mount a charm offensive
with twice-daily massages, moisturiser
and generally giving them one or two likes
on whatever media they use.
Let’s hear it for the lymph nodes, then
and the office cleaners, too.
