Pictures from our Second Erection

Our Orcas Estate is becoming quite the enclave, and you can see pictures of our second building not quite completed here. I added a few more since hiding a link in the previous post--as Ian pointed out, I had forgotten the ones from his camera, which were the ones that actually included shots of me working. Very important that you all should see that I, too, can work.

We're hoping to add pictures of the building completed . . . sometime.

Perspective

I've been feeling sorry for myself for the last couple weeks. I've been stuck here at home, my passport gathering dust in the safe (or mold—seriously—we now keep a bowl of dehumidifying pellets in there with the important documents). The weather SUCKS, verifiably so, and things—just all sorts of THINGS—don't seem to be going my way. For example, as you know, I began a serious, for real, grown-up budget recently. It was pretty exciting to start the process, to figure out where our money goes, to self-satisfiedly pat myself on the back as I don't just buy a book because I happen to like the look of it, and I don't just hand over the VISA (or rattle off the numbers from memory, including security code) for dog treats/chocolate/shoes/a handbag or whatever else strikes my slightest fancy—in other words, I've been feeling that I am quite righteously hiking the moral high ground . . . and yet, it seems that every week or so, for the past couple months, I've received a bill in the mail for around a thousand dollars.
Yes, it's true, some of those bills have been from the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance (my 10% co-insurance payment for my Herceptin infusion every three weeks: about $900.00), and it's the beginning of the year and we have to pay and pay until we reach our out-of-pocket co-insurance maximum (which we are hoping we have—a maximum, that is. It's new insurance and very difficult to understand so we can't be quite sure) . . . but a lot of them have just been bills, and I've felt, petulantly, that I'm actually being punished for trying to rein in the motley and flamboyant Wild Horses of Flagrancy.
I came home after attending a somewhat sobering dinner party last night, though, and realized that the bills I've been receiving (minus, to some degree, the cancer ones, but even those . . .) are all signs of the unimaginably unfair advantage I have in life—taken in a global sense, but even in a national sense—being an upper middle-class American living in the Pacific Northwest. My bills are all, with the exception of the Bs for Boat, from the A-named services of the Affluent. I have had to pay the Accountant. The Attorney. And, because Ian and I are particularly fortunate, the Architect as well. Waaa, waaa, waaa. Tiny violins.
Nevertheless, this gushing outflow has stressed me out a little, not least (as Ian points out) because we are so very well aware of it now.
On top of the financial "woes"—or rather, over, under, around, and interposed between the very molecules of the financial "woes" and every other part of my life—are my health "woes". I don't mean to be flippant with the quotes. I know (I KNOW) that living with my state of health is a constant trial. Usually I don't think much about it; usually I'm perfectly functional if not quite perfectly fine; and/or I'm off in some exotic part of the world where it's easier to deal with the vagaries of day-to-day life (i.e. sub-Saharan Africa) than it is here where the vagaries are endless subtle variations on a theme: Is this new tickle/stumble/lost word/sense of fatigue/pinprick-sized spot/etc. ad infinitum, a sign of my imminent death? But for now I am here, and I have to learn to be here, in the present moment with the vagaries of home, and none of the distraction of curly-headed children asking me for one pen or ladies in kangas trying to sell me live chickens to take with me on the bus.
And, I had been doing quite well here. Happy, feeling more and more confident in my physical health and mental health. Getting above my "predicament" and actively making some plans for here, for home, instead of only reacting. And then, a week ago Thursday, at the end of a day that involved picking up new mastectomy bras, bringing lunch to my grandmother, several hours of infusing in an uncomfortable vinyl chair at the SCCA clinic, and dinner with Mom and Marsh and talk about a building project we were getting ready to do that weekend on Orcas (leaving the next day), I got a migraine. My first in several months. And following quickly on the heels of the opening strains of visual aura came a panic attack—out of the blue, and very scary. As my vision stopped fracturing and came back into focus, everything else around me pulled away, including my own voice. I lay in bed (it was about 9:30pm at this point) almost unable to nerve myself up enough to reach behind me—10 inches away—and take ½ of an anti-anxiety pill. Ian came in and I spoke with him, but my voice seemed to be coming from a thousand years from here. One of my friends said it sounded like a drug trip; the disconnection and surrealness is a little like being dangerously drunk (not that I would have any idea about that, Mom), but much, MUCH scarier. Panic attack; dread attack. Ian lay next to me and held my hand, the dear, reminding me that I had been through these before, and they pass.
And this one did pass, and I got back out of bed and packed my bag, and Friday we drove up to Orcas and over the weekend built the second stage of our little cottage project, and drove back Sunday night, and Monday night I got another migraine, followed closely by another panic attack. This one happened slightly closer to bedtime and so I just took my nightly pill and called it a day, and the experience was less bad than previously.
Witch Doctor Dan had a cancellation Wednesday morning and worked me in and gave me the not really comforting news that he thought these neurological episodes hadn't been psychological like previously, but were instead physiological—namely, my pituitary was displaying signs of damage. This is not particularly surprising news, as Dr Jason warned that the full-brain radiation would have side-effects and after-effects for years to come, but it was . . . draining. The whole several days have been draining. I mean, again and again and again, I thought I was done with this.

And again and again and again, I'm reminded that I am not done with this. That there is only one end to this, because this is my life.
We had dinner last night at the home of a colleague of Ian's. The wife of his workmate, a beautiful girl, excellent chef, funny, bright, well-spoken in her second language, arrived in the United States for high school in 1998, from Transylvania, Romania. She went on to become a concert pianist and then, maybe a couple years after that, was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The only way to treat it was surgery. They did the best they could, but she lost just enough motor skill that she can no longer perform. Then, a couple years ago and completely unrelated, she discovered that she has early stage MS. I didn't ask her age, but starting high school—high
school—in 1998—she can't be much older than 26.
Twenty-six.
It's true—maybe she wouldn't have survived the brain tumor—already—if she hadn't left Romania. Nevertheless, she did leave, and did survive, and now what she has to look forward to is a lifetime of degeneration. I don't. Maybe I'm not such a poor thing after all.

Mama Liz's side

Here I am with some cousins from my mom's side, on a recent weekend whiz trip that Mom and I took to SF. From left, Cousin Katie (daughter of Mom's oldest brother), Cousin Laura (also known as Same Socks Laura--daughter of Mom's first younger brother), Mom, and me (other, youngest brother not represented by any daughters in this picture, unfortunately).

Dad's Relatives and Me

On the left is my Aunt Linda, Dad's older sister. She lives in Bangkok and is quite the world traveler (runs in the family, it would seem). In the middle is my one-week-from-being-96-years-old grandmother, who just had her knee replaced and is back living at home, on her own, in the house where my dad grew up. And there on the right, photoshopped in from a 1/3-times larger picture, is me.

Bad Dog

This morning has been a slightly disheartening reminder of why people save money (note—I said "slightly". There's nothing major to worry about here. You can read on.), namely, to pay for problems that arise, unexpectedly, just when you're looking outside at the brilliant sun and thanking the powers that be for the (finally!) advent of spring. I have just realized, just now, that Ian and I in general do not lead too frivolous of lives. Sure, I've been suffocating in sweaters and we could build a second home entirely out of books (almost entirely out of books that don't fit on our shelves, even—that's the next level of discharge that we must engineer); but we don't really bandy about large wads of cash.

Except in the case of our boat.

You will remember that I grew up in a power boating family. We started with a ski boat, moved on to a 26-foot cabin cruiser, and ended with a 36-foot luxury yacht (by our standards, of course, not Paul Allen's). For several years, I didn't do much boating, but then I bought Ian's and my current home in Wallingford, a mere six blocks from a lovely lake. I yearned to have a boat—a power boat—to feel the speed, to sneak peeks into the backyards of the rich and famous, the weeping willows dipping into Lake Washington, and all the faded, curving fiberglass slides that no one ever used standing as sentinels on the ends of docks. More than that, though, I wanted to be able to take said boat and visit—quickly—other islands amongst the San Juans than just those four serviced by the ferries.

I yearned for years, but could never quite make the decision to buy a boat because I knew, from deepest childhood, the troubles that went along with the joys and I also knew that my father, the Mechanic, saved us countless hours of aimless, dangerous drifting and thousands of dollars of repair and maintenance costs. It is, in fact, very true that a pleasure boat can be defined as a hole in the water into which you pour money.

Anyway, when Ian and I subsequently did NOT move to New Zealand in late 2007 (subsequent to renting our house and selling our cars and spending four months flitting hither and thither about Europe and then living for three months in the lovely but small guest room of some dear friends—all mere months before beginning this blog), I declared that we would be buying a boat. If we were here, we were going to have access to all sorts of water.

So we did, and we have. We bought a Sea Ray because they have a good reputation and it is, in fact, a really fun, fast, stable boat; and we had a radiator put in so that the normal engine cooling system—sucking up water—would be circumvented so that we could go in sea water (which, with its salt and electrolytes would corrode important parts of the mechanical workings that make the boat go) . . . and herein lies our unforeseen expensive problem, poised to chomp away the first tender shoots of a savings account that I've been so carefully tending the last several weeks.

If you alter the basics of a boat, there will be issues. In our case, the radiator that was installed to cool the engine just wasn't efficient enough and so, for the last 111 hours of engine use, even though the boat hasn't been overheating, it has been running hot, which is hard on the engine in the long run. Mercury, which makes the engine, has suggested adding some sort of pump to the system which makes it better somehow (I have a better picture in my mind than I am able to explicate here), and we need to have that installed . . . for $1,008. Or not use the boat. Or use it for many fewer years than we would like.

One thousand dollars, of non-frivolous money, for frivolous, non-environmental fun. Sure, we share this fun with as many friends as possible in the summers (and, it sounds like with the upgraded system we'll actually be able to keep the boat running all winter, thus sharing with intrepid friends all year long), and we are SO looking forward to more outer-islands in the San Juans again this year, but wow. Huh.

I stood up to shake it off after hanging up the phone with Dave, one of my friends at Sea Ray, and took a quick trip to the bathroom. I returned to the living room, my chair, my laptop, my coffee. I sat down, replaced the computer on my lap, picked up my mug, took a sip, replaced the mug on top of the cedar bentwood box Ian made me for our first Christmas together, next to my cell phone, turned back to my computer . . . turned back to look more closely at the top of the box. LITTLE SPLASHES OF LATTE EVERYWHERE. On the box, on my phone, on the pens lying there. What the . . . ?

"HOOVER." I said, and he, sleeping innocently 3 feet away, leapt up and came wagging over, tail down, ears back, a picture of guilty contrition. "YOU WERE DRINKING MY COFFEE." Apparently, EVIDENTLY, GUILTY AS CHARGED.

And a little more insight into how I view the world—I did not think "EWWW" and race to the bathroom to throw up—I thought "Damn. Now I don't have as much coffee anymore," as I finished it off.

In All Fairness to Seattle Boat

When I last wrote of the Seattle Boat/Lake Union Sea Ray "struggle" (shall we say), Seattle Boat was going to get my boat down from dry stack using a large metal plate to cover the hole in the ground and then take the boat across the ship canal to Sea Ray, where Sea Ray could perform the dewinterization. Also due at this time was the 100 hour service (boat "mileage" is measured in engine hours because distances are pretty hard to judge), which involves the boat being pulled out of the water at Sea Ray's service facility. Dewinterization can be done in the water. Anyway, Ian and I thought "Great. We'll just have them do the service at the same time."

But then, the morning after I last wrote, I got a text from Seattle Boat saying the boat was in the water and Sea Ray could come whenever (NOT THE PLAN AS I KNEW IT), and so I tried to talk to Sea Ray to find out what was up but they didn't seem to know . . . but then a couple hours later someone else from Sea Ray called to say that they had finished the dewinterization and the boat could be stacked again. Whaaa??? Well, that being the case, I texted Seattle Boat letting them know they could put Dogfish away and suggesting that they choose a more accessible spot this time—at least for the time being. (You are maybe beginning to see the kinds of things I fill my day with when not actively involved in cancer, horses, rocks, or Gyrotonic: hyperbolic, maddeningly inefficient minutiae.)

The need remained, however, for the 100 hour service (and repair for a coolant leak discovered during the dewint), and so I scheduled me to drop off the boat this morning. Initially, I thought I would have to drop off the boat at the end of Ian's work day so that I could get a ride back to my car (also the ends of the work days for both boat places), but then I really looked at the distances. By water from Seattle Boat's dock to Sea Ray is, according to the path feature on Google Maps, 335 yards. Under favorable conditions, I could give Dogfish a big shove and she would glide perfectly into the slip across the ship canal, because my innate physics brilliance and physical prowess would have allowed me to give a push of just the right amount of force to counteract the friction from the lake water. The return trip by land to my car, under unfavorable conditions, was less than a mile, which I could easily walk—much more easily than trying to coordinate with Ian on top of Sea Ray and Seattle Boat. Today the conditions were, alas, unfavorable, and I had quite a wet mile-long loop. But the boat will be really, REALLY ready if we ever stop getting rain.

An aside about the rain in the Northwest this year: We have so much snow pack right now that the state is considering asking the wind farm in southeast Washington to close down periodically—because we will be making too much electricity with our hydro turbines??? Also, the reservoir up on Snoqualmie Pass on I-90, which delivers drinking water to the City of Seattle, is FULL-FULL, which it has almost never been—usually, there's a small, murky puddle of water surrounded by tree stumps. I have it on good authority that all the stumps are currently submerged. And, although I can usually have a dog walk during a dry part of the day, that hasn't been true nearly as much for the last several months. We really are fulfilling our reputation.

But back to exonerating Seattle Boat. When I arrived today Sean, the manager of the Lake Union marinas, was there and was genial. Pleasant, even, to the point of mild joking about the weather and our recent debacle (!). He showed me where my boat is usually stored, and sure enough, right behind it, affecting ONLY my boat, was a circle of cones about 8 feet in diameter, marking the place where the repair was seasoning. Sean explained that he hadn't known that the work was going to be done; my boat was the only one affected; AND I was the ONLY CUSTOMER who wanted a boat down that day. Or probably for weeks.

I'm not quite sure what the lesson is here: You never know when incompetence is going to filter down and affect you? Sure, that may be part of it. But it's probably more true to say that curve balls come at us from all directions, all the time. Some miss us completely. We deflect some without really knowing it—maybe a momentary twinge. Some graze our elbows or knees and inconvenience or annoy us. Some end up connecting directly with us and really beating the shit out of us. But for all of these, the best way we can react is with grace and empathy. Breathe in. Breathe out. There is always enough time.

Permission

I saw Taya today, whose self-created bodywork system is suddenly becoming THE THING for massage therapists to learn and who is, therefore, more often these days traveling around the country teaching courses than waiting at her Everett-area office for my call, and she scolded me when I told her I was rock climbing regularly again.

"Bu . . . I . . . No, reall . . ." I kept trying to say, and she just kept scolding.

"Your body is still in healing mode! You are still on drugs! Rock climbing is hard on you! Horses, yes, ride those, horses are good for you. But this climbing! You need to be careful! You need to not overdo things!"

"I already have ONE mother," I finally managed to wedge in poutily, when she paused for breath.

"I'm the one keeping your body healthy, though," said Taya, "not your mother!"

When she finally petered out, I had had time to ready my response. "I'm not climbing high walls," I said, "I'm just bouldering. I mostly climb with a friend, for about one hour, once a week. We take turns on the walls. We stop when we're tired."

"How safe is it?" she asked.

"Very safe—there are big thick mats on the floors, and I'm conservative about what I attempt. One thing I've discovered is that, from doing Gyrotonic, I have a really good sense of my body and what I need to do—which muscles I need to use—to accomplish a climb. And if I can't do it, I can't. But climbing's REALLY FUN!"

She looked at me sideways, still unconvinced.

"Look," I said. "In my horseback riding lessons, I'm jumping, but I'm jumping two-foot fences." I held my hand off the floor—short. Two feet. "I am not jumping Olympic-level jumps." I raised my arm over my head—tall. Scary. "Likewise, in climbing, I am doing beginning-level climbs—they are barely harder than ladders."

She didn't exactly humph, but her "okay, well, I just want you to pay attention to your body," sounded humphy.

What I remember from several years ago, when I first started rock climbing, was that going twice a week was ideal. That would allow my hands to heal and my muscles to stop aching—ready to be broken down again. I also used to horseback ride twice per week, and it's possible I even Gyrotonicized two times per. Certainly, when I was doing Pilates, that was two per. But I just can't do it now, this two-timing—I don't have the energy. I'd love to be able to ride twice per week and double the speed at which my jumps get higher (because 2 feet is higher than they used to be); or climb a couple times so that, likewise, I would be improving more rapidly, and able to handle the routes that weren't just like ascending ladders. But those days aren't these days.

These days, I sleep 8-9 hours per night, usually waking between 8 and 9 in the morning (I used to rise at 7:30 on the dot—for years, really). I don't usually schedule more than one thing per day, and I get a bit worn out—emotionally, physically—if I don't have a day completely off every week (I'm continually learning this). I still revel in difficult physicality, in the day-after burn, in the intense sweats and the gulping of water—but I have to revel at half-mast now.

I've been feeling faintly frustrated by this half-mastedness; the flagrant sloth of sleeping until 9 or—heaven forbid—later some days; my begrudgingly recognized inability to anymore go all out, all the time. In part, this may be a side-effect of fully incorporating cancer into my life: I don't really think about it unless I'm directly involved in it (i.e. someone is sticking a needle into my chest to access my port, or I'm putting in my ear plugs so the noise from the MRI doesn't deafen me or drive me bats), and so whatever my body is doing to integrate the pharmaceuticals and the supplements and keep the cancer at bay, whatever incredible amount of work that that takes, I'm pretty much completely unaware of it, at least in any conscious way.

And so, thank you Taya-mom for reminding me that I am, in fact, still (always?) in healing mode. I won't take your advice and stop climbing altogether, but I will allow myself to start finding 50% to be sufficient. Glorious, in fact.