Regimen Change

I'm feeling a little low today, a little tired, a little pensive. I've been in high gear recently—the new budgeting (yay for free mint.com!), the excitement of New Plans, the days, newly longer than the nights (although very, very wet— I heard this morning that we need only 1 ½ inches more rain to beat the wettest March on record, and that there is a big storm coming in to grant our wishes—if our wishes are to drown simply standing outside, not even face down in a mud puddle)—and my level of frenetic activity has been unsustainably high.

Part of the problem has been that a lot of the frenetic activity has taken place inside my head, and much of that after 11:00pm when I've gone to bed and should be enjoying, as Bertie Wooster would say, my "eight hours of the dreamless." Coupling high-speed, buzzing thought with the three snoring males I share my room with is too much for me, though, and lately I've been finding myself pottering about the kitchen making midnight snacks of graham crackers and milk and doing crossword puzzles in the guest bed. I don't always stay all night in the guest bed, but one night when I did, Ian got out of our bed the next morning and didn't notice that I wasn't there. He was very careful and quiet when he got up (he told me later), as he usually is, shushing the dogs and trying to keep them (Hoover in particular) from ripping through the walls in their avidity for morning mealtime, and it struck him as odd as he carefully shut the bedroom door, that the dogs paraded into and out of the guest room several times on their way to and from breakfast. Once he'd had his coffee, he figured it out (probably before that. I don't know. I was asleep in the guest bed). In Ian's defense for not immediately noticing the absence of a loving and heat-producing wife, I had left my pillow; our bed cover is a lofty and warm down comforter; I am, of course, as lithe and slender as a young willow; and Ian is a first-class sleeper.

Anyway, many days it doesn't matter if I don't get to sleep until 1:00am or 2:00am, but on Sunday I had my 8-hour Adult/Child/Infant CPR and First Aid certificate class at the Red Cross (I passed. You may have a heart attack in my presence and I will correctly perform CPR. Please do not embed broken glass in your wrist as I will pass out into the remainder of the shards.) and I had to get up at 7, and today I had my regular brain MRI and I had to be at the hospital at 8:30. These early hours, I don't like them. Even if the sun is up (or, the clouds are gray rather than black), my body has clearly put itself on a different schedule.

My MRI was relatively stable—there is still only one apparently active spot in my brain, deep in the cerebellum, and if you look at it every two months, it's hard to tell if it's growing at all. It is possible, of course, to compare today's picture with the one taken last June when the spot was first noticed, and then the growth is visible, but Dr Jason is happy to continue the MRI-at-2-to-2 ½ -months schedule that I've been on this past year and not do anything more drastic (i.e. another Gamma Knife procedure) for the time being.

I also learned that my tumor markers are on the rise again. For the main marker that I'm used to, the 0-37 one, I went from 33 to 39. Yep, out of range. For the other one, I'm still within normal range, but higher than I have been in months and months. But (and here is the regimen change), when I met with Dr Specht 10 days ago, I told her I wanted to start taking the Paw Paw Cell Reg supplement that Witch Doctor Dan recommended. Paw Paw is a fruiting tree that grows in the southeastern US, and it is, evidently, known for its cancer suppressing abilities (much like the yew, which is used to make Taxol, a popular chemo drug that I've been on). I have complicated feelings about deciding to begin yet another supplement.

One: I somehow knew that it was time to try something more, and I was right. Yay!

Two: I somehow knew that it was time to try something more, and I was right. SUCK.

And so, I'm feeling a little low today, a little tired, a little pensive. Not enough sleep followed by mixed news that I've learned to expect, learned to live with, learned to live well with. I met my rock climbing buddy after my appointment today, and my palms and fingers are, as I've been typing this, stiff and abraded and hot and a little clumsy.

But somehow, though I'm not even aware I'm doing it, I haven't yet learned how not to hope for a clean slate. How not to value total, unimpeachable (impossible) health above all else. And so today, in my peerless, beautiful, rich, somewhat implausible life, I'm feeling a little let down.

New Age

Note: This one's long. You might want to piddle before you start.

 

In the past week I've experienced a significant shift in . . . focus, I guess, until I can think of a better way to describe it.

You might remember that a few weeks ago I wrote about a major physical house cleaning, finishing with this thought:

"The trick will be—always is—to use this cleanse, this created breathing space, this new awareness—to change the habits that brought on the overflow in the first place."

Well, somehow writing that out, really owning that idea, opened me up to new inspirations. Before I could again quite fill my closets with 17 colors of this season's Old Navy t-shirt (they're really cheap! Because they're made by Chinese children in sweat shops!), I suddenly found myself inspired to create an ACTUAL budget, so that I REALLY knew, and that Ian REALLY knew, what we were spending each month and what we needed to spend, instead of just guessing (me with better accuracy than Ian, but then, I do manage the finances. Or rather, I "manage to spend" the finances.)

I haven't had an actual budget—where you put aside money out of your monthly paycheck for things you hope to do in the future, and have an emergency fund for items such as replacing the hot water heater or your transmission—since I was in high school, and it's arguable that that budget, supplemented with a roof over my head and loving parents, was not quite as realistic as those that most adults my age are dealing with now. When I was going into 8^th grade and my brother was going into 5^th, our parents decided it was time to teach us how to save money and budget. On a long drive (to, as it happens, Jerome Creek), we tallied up all the things Deane and I needed money for in a year—including week-day lunches (cheaper, but harder from the grocery store), clothes, gifts, and entertainment; divided the numbers by 12, and my parents gave us that amount of money each month. Dad came home from work soon after with ledger books (mine was blue and Deane's was brown, faux leather with gold piping around the edges), and each month I would carry over any balance from the previous month and add in my new $90 (it was the '80s and $90 went a lot farther than it does now . . . although I could probably get a dozen Old Navy t-shirts on a good day today), and keep track of everything I spent, down to the penny.

Deane and I were actually both frugal kids—in part, I'm sure, because before we could drive, there was absolutely nowhere we could go to spend money. There was no corner store (it was a mile away and for a treat it was easier to just suck surreptitious slurps of Hershey's syrup out of the can in the fridge), and there was certainly no amazon.com, Ian's and my current nemesis. Deane and I ended up with regular surpluses. One summer, we cashed in our savings on plane tickets to southern California and visited cousins for a week. Another time, when I was 16 and presumably could've found a place to spend my money on myself, I convinced Deane to withdraw his savings and add it to mine and we snuck off to Renton in the used, cigarette-smelly Ford Escort, and paid off and collected the dive equipment Dad had been slowing buying, with money he'd been budgeting himself, from some neighborhood car repairs he'd been doing.

We drove out to the barn that spring afternoon in 1989 and found Dad, greasy, grimy and hard at work on someone's farm pick-up. We jumped out of the car and slammed the doors, our faces aglow with the surprise.

"What's up, kids?" asked Dad, coming around from the engine of the truck and wiping his hands.

"We took out our savings and we went and got you your wet suit and your oxygen tanks!" I cried.

"You what?" he asked, incredulous.

"We got you your dive stuff!" said Deane, "From Renton! That you had on layaway for months!"

Tears filled his eyes as he shook his head in disbelief. "Wow," he said, marveling. "You kids aren't bad. You kids aren't bad!"

He spent the rest of the afternoon in full gear, breathing slowly at the bottom of our swimming pool.

When Dad died in 1992, Deane and I inherited his share of some family property that ended up in a lucrative sale a few years later, and on my 25^th birthday I suddenly gained control of a sizeable chunk of change. I didn't become a Gates or a Hilton by any stretch of the imagination, but when I was diagnosed with breast cancer a year and a half later and my graduate student insurance covered a mere $2,000 of Round 1 (three surgeries, two 3-month stints of chemotherapy and six weeks of radiation), I was able to pay for it all without adding financial stress to the baffled horror of being a 20-something cancer patient.

I was in the fortunate position to buy a house in Seattle at the very leading puff into the housing balloon, and I've been able, for the last 13 years, to pretty much have whatever I wanted whenever I wanted it (oh, curse you Amazon Prime for aiding and abetting me so, so seductively with your fulfilled promises of music, books, wine glasses, wool clogs, cameras, glitter fabric, and more!). In part, I have not completely lost the practicality I had as a child and so I bought a top-end 4-Runner instead of a top-end Range Rover, and this has kept my practices relatively sustainable over the years. Also Ian, always looking out for my happiness above all else in our lives, has greeted each new purchase, be it clothes, housewares, or dog toys, with words of praise. "Good job, Sweetie-pie!" he says earnestly. "Isn't that a beautiful sweater/mixing bowl/squeaky shark!"

And it has been lovely, and I do like these things, and I have enjoyed giving in to my shallowest whims and barest inklings of desire. But there's always been an undercurrent of guilt that, try as I might, I haven't been able to completely stomp into submission. No matter how many sweaters from Anthropologie I layer onto the face of this guilt, I have never quite been able to suffocate it. And, frankly, I myself am practically suffocating in sweaters now.

I have tried to use my cancer as a justification to spend what I want—I'm a poor, poor thing who has a difficult challenge and so I should be repaid, or at least rewarded, for my suffering—but to be honest, deep down, I don't buy that (as it were). No, deep down, I know we all have struggles and we all have gifts, and in this world, you don't get monetary rewards for having cancer.

I have claimed to myself that shopping is an artistic outlet—and there is a tiny kernel of truth in that for me—I do find satisfaction in putting together outfits and decorating my house and entertaining my dogs—but that claim also smacks of me doth protesting too much.

Ian and I also don't have kids who need their own clothing or their own food or their own squeaky sharks or future schooling, and so why, I ask myself, shouldn't I have a fourth pair of perfect jeans to go with the three pairs I already love?

Here is why:

Because I have music in my life, and it doesn't give a shit if I'm wearing that J Crew sweater that's the perfect shade of dark orange, a pair of purple cords and one of the Old Navy t-shirts (a nice mushroom-colored one), or simply the red fleece robe my mom made me that, let's face it, I'm in a large proportion of my waking hours.

Because I have nature and animals in my life, both under my daily care and under my periodic care, endlessly entertaining and challenging and thought-provoking, and they don't give a shit if I'm drinking wine out of glasses with daisies embossed on them or the mug someone gave me in college.

Because I have writing in my life, writing which allows me to have a profound relationship with my inner being, and with the inner beings of my friends and relatives, and writing doesn't give a shit if . . . okay, well, writing does actually find the squeaky shark annoying.

The point is, this last week, I watched a performance that tipped me into a new chapter in my life. A friend of mine, competing in a jazz singing contest, got up on stage at Jazz Alley here in Seattle as herself, her true self, doing the thing she loved most, and that she's held onto through her own pretty unbelievably difficult life, and sang her heart out. It was one of the best live performances I have ever experienced, on a completely different plane from the rest of the contestants. I sat blinking back tears, shivers running through me as her music, her soul, filled the room. She didn't win the competition, but I don't see how she could have. She wasn't doing the same thing as the other people at all.

Anyway, I'm tired of filling my house and my life with facsimiles of truth and meaning. I'm tired of giving in to the first impulses of my over-indulged ego. It was fun while it lasted, but I've grown out of it now.

I'm ready to sing out my soul.

Healing

Ian, clever boy that he is, decided he'd better start healing before I got tired of being the coddler rather than the coddled, and so he's back on his feet (shoulders?), and able to drive the fun new manual transmission Hot Chocolate Mini Clubman again. Which, SIGH, means that he does drive it, and that I'm back to my big ol'—albeit comfortable—and, I've found, mildly threatening—red 4-Runner. You see, a Mini is small. Smallness is inherent in the name, after all—MINI. And people see a Mini coming up the street that they want to pull out into, and they look the driver in the eyes as she nears, they give a faint sneer, and they pull out, forcing the Mini driver to make evasive maneuvers. In my case, these maneuvers are consistently coupled with honking (the Mini has a fine, musical horn) and creative profanity. No, that's not fair—the profanity isn't creative at all. "WHAT THE F**K?!?" I yell as I hit my brakes/swerve/flip the bird/tootle at the a**hole who is getting in my way—obviously because he or she is insanely jealous of how cool I am in my Mini and must get back at me by being a jerk.

In my big ol' comfortable red 4-Runner, though, people tend, I have noticed, to stay out of the way. I still occasionally honk and swear at them.

The other thing about driving the 4-Runner is that it really is a very slightly more comfortable ride for the dogs, who are my almost constant daily accessories. When Ian and I looked at the Clubman model of Mini, whilst car shopping, we saw that there was plenty of surface space for two largish dogs to lounge comfortably if the back seats were down. After bringing the car home, Ian sewed a two-part, two-tone blue bed for the space, and it really is quite luxurious. Spackle, who can leap with great self-satisfaction into the back of the Mini (someone, at this time invariably me because of Ian's handicap, must always lift 74-pound Spackle into the much taller 4-Runner), feels like a pasha on his palanquin when he's riding with us, because he is a lounging car-rider anyway, and now the windows are low enough that he can see out as we bowl along. All that's missing from his perfect experience is a slave fanning him and languidly feeding him jerky treats, one by one (because too many grapes can be poisonous to dogs).

Hoover, on the other hand, is a very erect car-rider, which in the 4-Runner allows him to survey and comment vociferously on the world around him with ease, but in the Mini gives him a crick in the neck—while he is completely blocking the rear window. Hoover really does make a better door than a window, if a door is pugilistic and barks histrionically at any dog it sees in the world, as well as at people deemed to be off their rockers. In his defense, though, Hoover does seem to have a sense of crazy. I generally agree with him about the dogless pedestrians he barks at—they look bats.

But I digress. Ian is doing very well, with twice-weekly physical therapy and icing (on his shoulder, not the cupcake kind), and is already able to take two dogs for a walk at one time, if he makes sure to have Hoover on the left. He sat on his bike in our sunny, spring-morning back yard today and thought about it, but decided to take another week before attempting cycling on the road. He's needing much less coddling these days, but nevertheless hasn't quite gotten around to recoddling me . . . I can only assume that's just around the corner.

I thought I'd eke the last bit of mileage out of my new haircut--it won't look this good once I go to bed tonight. And no, I haven't had any colorist other than Helios. Blonde streaks are a direct result of spending so much time these last several months in warmer, sunier climes (two of the four of which have experienced major flooding since I've visited them . . . maybe I should start traveling to drought-stricken areas.) If you haven't seen me much since January of 2010, here's what I looked like then.

Payback

This is one of the posts where travel really meets day to day life. So you'll see it both places. Sorry, those of you with a direct feed.

One of the difficult things about being the invalid spouse in a relationship is not actually the part about being an invalid, because I'm not really an invalid. I could be, of course—I could probably come up with enough reasons to sit around and moan and complain and have people wait on me hand and foot and . . . honestly . . . not have very much fun . . . but I'd rather live life to the fullest that I am able, which is pretty full. And so, only slightly more often than I would like to, do I have to take advantage of Ian's kindness and solicitude. Still, it seems a little one sided . . .

In the interests of living life to the fullest, we took Friday off from work (Ian) and horseback riding (me) and went up to Crystal Mountain to ski for the weekend. When I made the reservations a few months ago, it was because this was the first free weekend we had when Ian could possibly get a day off work (his first year is a very busy one). I'm not sure if you all have been reading the snow reports, but it ended up being a fantastic weekend for skiing. Crystal Mountain has the most, and most interesting, terrain close to Seattle, and from 22 February to now they have been hit with 7 or 8 feet of new snow. Basically, after a warming trend beginning in December and ending in mid-February, most area ski slopes were pretty much mud. And now there's a whole new season! This, of course, meant that Saturday and Sunday were very, very full of other people, but the longest lift line we were ever in was about 10 minutes. They're very good at moving people, the Crystal Mountain Resort folks.

We were sobered, though, at Crystal this weekend, because the excellence of the snow for us was just making it all the harder to find the 40-year-old man who went missing there last Tuesday. He hasn't been found. And I just now read that two college boys went missing on Thursday—the helicopter flying around when we arrived Friday morning was searching for them. I don't know if they've been found. Life can't be full without the bitter in the sweet.

Anyway, even though Ian and I didn't ski at all last year, and skied a mere ½ day in both 2009 and 2008, we were pretty fit, and found ourselves able to navigate any terrains we wanted (some more easily than others, as it continued to snow both Friday and Saturday and we were often socked into thick fog) with more or less the skill we remembered having. Ian in particular is a beautiful skier—graceful and fluid, flowing straight down hills, adjusting to bumps as if they're not there. I found myself plowing through more bumps than I'd like to, thighs burning—I felt like I was working REALLY HARD, harder than three years off might signify.

"I need to have a lesson," I suggested to Ian at one pause for breath late Saturday afternoon. "I haven't had one since high school."

"It's true," he said, "a lesson might help, although you don't look like you're working hard. Still, the equipment has changed a lot and someone could probably suggest ways to ski that might be different than they used to be." He looked thoughtfully at me, then said "You don't fall very much. Maybe you just need to fall so that you remember it's not the end of the world."

I was willing to allow that he might have a point. I had recently taken a fall in a riding lesson, on a day when I was having trouble focusing (except for being afraid that I would fall); I went over a jump, landed, and slid accidentally off the side of my horse, rolling onto my back before standing up and brushing off the arena dirt. No pain at all, just a reminder to stay in the moment. It might be true—snow can be soft.

Sunday morning dawned bright and sunny (and full of boys clomping about the inn in ski boots at an ungodly 7:00am), and though sore, we packed up our car and headed off up the mountain in good spirits. From the very top we could see, 14 miles away, Mt Rainier at its majestic winter finest, glowing brilliant white. Dormant, we reminded each other. Not extinct. Could erupt at any time. Lovely. We decided to start with a short run down to the nearest upper-mountain lift, and I took off into a huge bowl, Ian close behind me.

Swooshing along, feeling good, I suddenly heard my name yelled, then again. I skidded to a stop and looked back up the hill to see Ian far above me, lying in the snow. I watched for a minute to see if he was going to get up and join me as usual. He was moving around, but he didn't get up.

A father and young daughter skied up to him and stopped to see how he was; I began the long, desperately difficult and sweaty job of sidestepping up a steep run on newly waxed skis. Someone called me from a few yards across the hill; would I mind getting out of the way? They were photographing people and I was right in the . . . oh . . . I was climbing up to that guy? Would I like to just leave my skis with them where they would be visible and out of the way, and just hike?

I popped off my skis and started the climb, infinitely easier in just the stiff boots. The father and daughter slid by and the daughter, maybe 9, told me "he was just going to see about getting his skis back on, but he seems okay." I continued to hike, not too worried.

And there was no need to be too worried; Ian's issue wasn't a new one, and, in fact, taking place in the first run, on what looked to be a gorgeous day for skiing, also wasn't new. He had dislocated his right shoulder, which he had done during Fresh Tracks at Whistler ten years before, the first time we'd ever skied together.

I'm not saying a dislocated shoulder isn't an awful thing to have happen to you, and this is the third time for Ian and this shoulder in the last 15 or so years, and so there's got to be some kind of care and rehab, from what I understand, to make sure it doesn't keep popping out for a coffee when it's not convenient. And Ian was obviously uncomfortable with the weird feeling of his arm dangling from threads, and as the adrenaline wore off and the ski patrol arrived to ship him into a luge, it really started to hurt. "I'm sorry to ruin your day," he said. "You can ski some more if you want to."

"Ian," I said in reply, looking him straight in the eyes, "you are the most important thing on this hill to me. We are done, and we're going home. There is absolutely no question."

I saw him off, hiked back down to my skis and went my own way, and I really did have a fabulous, long, exhilarating run. Ian was brought in to the first aid station at the bottom and his shoulder was manipulated into place and his arm tied with a makeshift sling. And then I got to be the one to return his demo skis and our rented poles (oops—forgot ours in Seattle). I got to be the one to go collect the 4-Runner and pull it into the 5-minute load/unload parking zone close to the ski patrol clinic. I got to be the one to help Ian off with his ski boots, and on with his Sorels. I got to be the one who drove us carefully to Maple Valley to have a bite to eat, say hello to the dogs, and convince Mom and Marsh to keep them for another couple days (Ian won't be walking both of them together any time soon). And, perhaps most excitingly, I got to be the one to drive him to the ER so that he could get an X-ray. Even today there have been some things I've been able to help him with. I love it.

As we were walking yesterday afternoon from the ski patrol clinic to the car, though, over slush and ice, my right arm through his left arm, holding him steady, I did have something to say.

"Ian?"

"Yes, Sweetie-pie?"

"I think I'm going to go with my original plan and have a lesson. I don't really think that falling more is the answer."

Lighter

Ian is home—he got in last night around 2:00am and, because I had generously changed my schedule to coordinate with his Hawaii time zone, I was up and waiting for him. Spackle and Hoover had already been put to bed, but Hoover heard someone—felt someone?—enter the property—he was aware of Ian long before I could hear anything, although I was hanging over the back of the couch, watching out the living room window, and so saw him arrive—and came woofing out of the bedroom in time to leap on Ian at the door. Spackle was close behind, and I ultimately came in a distant third for hugs. We're glad to have him back.

I was really glad to have the week to myself in our home, though. There were a couple times when I found myself needing to take an extra bit of anti-anxiety medication . . . but that's why I have it. And there were certainly times when I really missed Ian, because we've made a life together that is ideal for two people. For example, it's nice to have someone else take care of at least one of the dog walks each day. Hoover's unknown-dog apeshitting is boring to deal with all on one's own, walk after walk, day after day. And I'm really slow at picking up the poop—removing my mitten, pulling the roll from the handy leash-tote, pulling the bag from the roll, finding I need to remove my other mitten, then finding the end of the bag that will open, opening the end and shaking the bag open, making sure it is, in fact, whole—and all the while the dogs are milling squeakily about, maypoling my legs and threatening to take me down.

Also, of course, when I was bubbling with anxiety, it would've been nice to have Ian accessible by more than phone, but I had him there in the back of my mind, and for 8 days, I could live with that.

AND, the house is cleaner! I won't add tedious detail to the list of accomplishments, but rest assured I kept very busy. It was liberating to wander around entirely of my own volition. I listened to two books while I worked; Treasure Island, and a new book by Cornelia Funke (who wrote Inkheart), Reckless. I spent only one evening watching any sort of movie, and it was one I owned, one of my favorite candy-coated teen fantasies, The Princess Diaries. The dogs adjusted to my schedule (aside from dinner time, which they began chittering about at 3:45pm almost every day regardless of how recently they'd enjoyed breakfast and, because they are spoiled, a light lunch) and happily took long strolls around the neighborhood at 10:30pm or later. Ian commented last night that, left to his own devices long enough, he would go to bed an hour later and wake up an hour later each day until he'd done a complete circuit of the clock. And we both remember reading somewhere that, if living in a cave with absolutely no indication of passing time, humans will ultimately work out a schedule of 25 hours, not 24.

Anyway, as I do the work to lighten my soul, I have enjoyed having a week to do some work to lighten my home. Deep, dark corners have been aired and lost things found and brought to light. In some cases, the lost things were recycled to become something new; in others, donated so that someone new could use them. And some things, having completed their lifespans, were merely tossed. The result is that my house feels lighter, even though much of the change has been internal, and wouldn't be noticed by the casual observer.

The trick will be—always is—to use this cleanse, this created breathing space, this new awareness—to change the habits that brought on the overflow in the first place.

Cobweb

Today is the fourth full day that Ian has been gone. The dogs and I are limping along moderately well in his absence; no one is starving (although Hoover thinks he is, at least beginning at 3:45pm every afternoon, disregarding the fact that I 1: fed him breakfast at 9:30am (two hours later than when Ian's here and therefore much closer to dinner time); 2: fed him lunch at 1:30pm (more or less the usual); and 3: dinner time is NEVER before 5:00pm. The dogs' favorite time of year is Spring Forward, when all of a sudden the clock says 5:00pm and they're only just beginning their vociferous yearning to be fed).
Actually, I should be honest here—for the most part, I've been having an excellent time while Ian's gone, barring the OF COURSE freezing cold bed to climb into after a long day's labors clearing the hidden reaches of our house so that I may stuff them full of new hidden things. In fact, to give you a quick summary, I have:

1. Taken 42lbs of papers to the UPS Store to enjoy the fruits of their shredding service
2. Donated 9 knitted caps (already knitted before) to the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance
3. Donated 2 gently used breast forms to same
4. Recycled all the Amazon boxes left over from Christmas and the last year (which means that the coats in our coat closet can actually hang straight now!)
5. Cleared out all the baskets in the bathroom of nail polish colors that I decided were in questionable taste and what was I thinking??? and sterile bandages that had been cut in half . . . rendering them . . . NOT STERILE; I consolidated cough drops and threw out expired over-the-counter meds; and I recycled or tossed the jellyfish swarm of plastic bags infesting it all
6. Collected and removed from the fridge 18 vials of Neupogen that hadn't expired and so was worth something like $6,000, and the 300 or so syringes that had come along with it
7. And, finally, I went through all the expired prescription drugs and got rid of those—yes, including all the oxycontin and codeine and whatever else the kids are selling in high schools these days.

This has been good, satisfying work, and I've enjoyed my labors, although my back has been bent in a C-shape basically since I've been back from the Caribbean, and today it (or my mind, or my spirit, or all of it together) tendered a complaint by causing a brief zing to the lower half of my skull, which then settled down to roost, painfully, between my upper shoulder blades. What the fuh?!? I thought to myself, trying to straighten up and make the cramping go away, then trying to bend this way and that. Eventually the cramping ebbed, but I was left with a tightness in my back, particularly when I turn my head, and a sudden case of the panics.
You see, last night I felt a hard spot in one of my neck lymph nodes, one of the ones that I've been so desperately afraid to touch since 2008 when they were so, so engorged with cancer and I was in such denial. This hard spot was new.
And suddenly, the gossamer veil between contentment and fear, confidence and insecurity, joy and deathly dread, was ripped down and I found myself, again, staring stark-eyed at my mortality.
Here are some of the things that I thought in the next 30 minutes:

1. Maybe that was something actually inside my brain shifting, of course not in a good way.
2. I feel a bit dizzy. Can I walk straight? Yes, I'm walking perfectly straight.
3. Ian is in Hawaii.
4. Maybe that was something actually on my spine.
5. I need a shower. Well, I'll take a shower and see how I do . . . Yes, I'm able to stand up perfectly well in the shower with my eyes closed.
6. I went rock climbing last week. That pulls on these muscles.
7. I attempted pushups two nights ago and did four before I got bored.
8. But, even though all these things are fine, I'm feeling a bit panicky. I'm going to take ½ an extra clonazepam.
9. Ian is in Hawaii.
10. Okay, next, blow-dry my hair.
11. The dogs need a walk. Can I hold Hoover back if he apeshits, or will it make my shoulders/neck worse?
12. Look at me, holding on to Hoover and it doesn't hurt at all.
13. Wow, it's really beautiful out here, bright and cold and with the air flowing with winking crystals.
14. And I don't have a headache.
15. (Conversation with Ian in Hawaii, including the suggestion that I could take a taxi to the clinic. I chose to drive the Big Red 4-Runner).
16. I never had a headache.
17. I think this is non-serious.
18. I should make myself some lunch.

I drove myself safely to the clinic after all this, early so that I could get rid of drugs and donations, and it was disappointing all around. No one was in the Patient Resource Room to take my hats and boobs donations and so I filled out a form and left them (but had to miss out on hearing the lavish praise of my fiberical output); the pharmacy actually DOES NOT process expired medications (of all places, one that treats cancer SHOULD, I think); and when I was finally called into the infusion room about 20 minutes after my appointment time, I was put in a chair.
I HATE the chairs. They are ugly brownish-gray vinyl, and sitting on them is like being in a bed with no mattress pad and old polyester sheets. Minus the part about being on Virgin Gorda. And they are not private at all; or only nominally so. They are separated by curtains only, and light and sound spills seamlessly from one to another. I was on the edge anyway, and the sight of this awful place pushed me over and I began to cry, trying all the while to NOT be crying. I explained to my nurse (one whom I've known a long time, maybe 9 years) that it was just one of those days, and that I had all these drugs I wanted to get rid of, and all this really expensive Neupogen that was still perfectly good, and all these ridiculous syringes that were completely sterile still as they'd never even been taken out of the baggy from the pharmacy in the first place. She took the handfuls of my garbage away and someone else came in with some warm blankets. We put one on the chair and I sat down and was cocooned with the other over the top; a couple minutes later my nurse returned with a hot gel pack that I put between my shoulder blades, and yet a third warm blanket behind my neck. She told me they had an organization that might be able to use the Neupogen; I pulled myself together and began working on the morning's Sudoku.
As I sat in my chair and nurses came and went and jabbed my port with a needle and squoze my arm with the blood pressure cuff and offered water and whatnot, I started to listen to what was going on around me. Not just the incredibly annoying television two bays down, or the endless, ENDLESS beeping of empty infusion machines, but the people. And this is what I heard:
The woman through the veil on the right side of me was Filipina and, I would guess, in her 50s. She was there for Herceptin, as I was, but it wasn't going so well for her, although she sounded lively. She would feel short of breath for several days after an infusion, but it would stop a couple days before her next infusion. This process repeated, every three weeks. She couldn't think of the words in English to explain exactly how she felt. She also talked about a woman she knew who had cancer in one breast and had it cut off. The next year it came back in the other breast and she had that one cut off. The next year it came back in her lungs and she had two of her ribs removed and surgery on her lungs. Her nurse gently told her that everyone has her own experience, and that we are all very different.
The woman through the veil on the left side of me was dying, maybe not this week or next, but soon. I had seen her in the waiting room with her daughter, who looked to be about 30. The woman was frail, confused, sitting in a wheel chair. She was in for an infusion of platelets, but was given oxygen as well. "Isn't there a bed?" she asked, three or four times, while the nurse gently told her she was on a waiting list and would be transferred as soon as one became available (the next time my nurse came in I said, abashed, "If I'm on the waiting list, take me off. She needs it way more," and I pointed to my left.). This woman, as all of us, was treated beautifully by the nurses, and by her daughter. At one point they wheeled her away to a private area to talk about her care; when she came back, hospice had been set up, and by the time her platelets had gone in they had set up in-home oxygen to begin this evening. The woman needed to be told each detail multiple times, and each time everyone around her was kind.
But fear of that incapacity, that frailty, that sort of death, is what I walk with in my life, just beyond that gossamer veil woven of fine, fragile cobweb. In certain lights—in many lights—the veil is opaque, solid. Ignorable. Forgettable.
But not all.