Unprofessional

This morning I was at the clinic when the doors opened, 7:00am, to have my fasting blood draws (glucose and lipids) done. It was already broad daylight, but still early enough that the express lanes were quite expressy as I raced across the Ship Canal Bridge, after a brief stop at Essential Baking to pick up my post-blooding breakfast. Yesterday a scheduler for the SCCA called me to set up the 7:00am Port Access, and was able to move my Herceptin infusion back from 8:30 to 7:30, so that I could open that department as well. This all struck me as quite a fine plan, as it would allow me to be back at home just a little after 10:30, or more or less the time I'm ready to start thinking about the day, anyway. It would be like an infusion in my sleep!

Having finally realized that one of the only things I truly hate about my position in life as a cancer patient—hate with a passion—is sitting in those awful, uncomfortable, noisy vinyl chairs, I was excited for my first bed-anxiety-free infusion appointment. After my last visit I had asked when to come in for a guaranteed bed and was told that things were pretty open before 9:00. Well,
7:30 is way before 9:00.

Nevertheless, when I checked in at 7:25 I said, "They'll just put me in a bed, right, getting in here this early?"

"Why?" asked the check-in lady, someone I didn't know from my afternoons. "Are you having a long infusion?"

"I'm getting Herceptin, which is scheduled to be over 30 minutes, but I get it over 90," I said. "It just feels wrong to do it in less time, so yeah, I'm here for at least a couple hours."

"Oh," the check-in woman said vaguely. "Well, I'll mark down that you'd like a bed."

"Thank you," I said, and took my pager over to a seat by the window, where I could look out at the unfamiliar sights of both early morning and sun glinting off of southern Lake Union.

The lady called me back by name a few minutes later (they instituted the pagers to maintain more privacy but I guess I didn't get that this morning), and sent me to bay 45.

There are 43 sequentially numbered beds.

I went into the back, past empty room after empty room, to the chairs, just to be sure. I took one look, and turned back to the area infusion desk, where nurses congregate between patients and where bay assignments are made.

"Hi," I said, smiling, to the nurse currently sitting behind the desk. I like the nurses. They're very nice, they like their jobs, they're friends with each other. It's a warm and supportive place, the infusion room, an oasis in the blinding, skin-scouring, howling sandstorm of terror and sadness and pain that is often the cancer experience. I think it would be a difficult job. These people do it very well. "I want a bed," I said. "I came here early so that I would not have to sit in those chairs anymore. I hate the chairs," I said.

She smiled. "Oh, I understand. That's the lady in charge," she said, and pointed to another woman, up on a stool at the dry-erase chart, figuring out which patient to give to which nurse in which location. It was a woman I recognized from sometimes working in the check-in desk; she always complimented my engagement ring, so I had thought she was quite a fine person.

"No, there's nothing," she said shortly, glancing over her shoulder at me. "I have several people coming in later this morning who will be in for 3 and 4 hours."

"Whoa," said a different nurse, who turned out to be in charge of me for the day, "how about 43 right here? I'm just going to put her in there."

"I have someone in contact isolation coming in. Where am I supposed to put her?"

I started hemming and hawing, my guilt kicking in, but my nurse (I'm sorry, I really can't remember any of their names right now) said "No, Calin, go into 43. It's fine. Go and get settled."

So I went into 43 and my nurse shut the curtain, then lowered her voice and admonished the scheduler lady. I couldn't hear what she said, but I could hear the response: "I'm just doing my job! I am JUST doing my JOB."

I feel badly enough already for the cancer patients who are not as lucky as me. I know that people in that infusion room are dying. I know that people there are divorcing. I know that some are deeply in debt. I know that some have other diseases (bay 43, however, with only a curtain closure, was functionally no better than an end chair bay for someone in contact isolation who, I overheard, was happy to have a chair. I was not that problem.). I am probably the healthiest patient to pass through that infusion room. Hell—I might be the healthiest person to pass through that clinic full stop. But I have been passing through that clinic and getting jabbed and poked and irradiated, having my stomach upset and my dignity abraded, FOR THE PAST TEN YEARS SINCE IT OPENED, AND IT IS SHOWING NO SIGNS OF STOPPING.

I WANT A BED.

Part of the problem is that the amount of time allocated to "Herceptin" in the first scheduler's worksheet, the one who reserves the date and time, is 30 minutes for the infusion, which implies a visit of roughly an hour to the infusion room. Granted, that doesn't appear to be very long. I, however, take my Herceptin over a more leisurely hour and a half, and all things being considered, I am usually in my bay for around three hours anyway. This morning I was just shy of that, and there hadn't been any time for delays to build up. The infusion room nurses know my preferences and they know why—when I receive Herceptin faster, it makes my heart feel slightly, indefinably oogy. Herceptin, over time, is cardiotoxic. So far, my heart has been up to the challenge. I wish to keep it that way. And so the infusion room nurses are happy to give me a bed and let me hang out as long as I want. They don't care what the schedule says—to them I am a human being, not a time-frame.

But I have yet to figure out how to have everyone along the way see me as a human being.

You Blink, and Next Thing You Know There’s a Needle in Your Eye

I saw the ophthalmologist yesterday for my regular check-up which is, roughly, every four months. My right eye continues to be slightly troubling, with a cataract across the middle and fluid under the cornea. The fluid keeps building up from tiny, tiny (well, everything in the eye is tiny . . . I think I've written that before . . .) hemorrhages in the eyeball capillaries, and as I am absolutely worthless at keeping up with my fluid-reducing eyedrops (a total of 7 prescribed per day, from two different bottles, and I have to wait at least 2 minutes between drops . . . it's a math problem I've never even remotely worked out—I think I've had 7 drops maybe three days total), at best my eye has been stable and at worst, the fluid builds up more.

I like my ophthalmologist's office. The waiting room is full of the elderly (because you're supposed to be in your 80s when you develop eye-issues like mine, and it's 10:30am when I'm there, so you're supposed to be retired); there's free coffee (although I am usually still nursing my own from home); and there's a flat screen TV cycling through a series of vaguely disgusting informational videos about varyingly disgusting eye conditions and their remedies. The office is also the most efficient medical facility I have ever had the pleasure to be associated with. Which is to say, I actually experience pleasure when I'm there, simply because the efficiency is so satisfying to participate in.

Yesterday's visit had the added bonus of a small world encounter: Holly, one of the techs, and I were chatting about what I'd been doing lately, which was not going to someplace fabulous like Necker Island, but was assisting in deck replacement. "Oh, my grandfather needs his deck replaced—I was going to see about doing that this summer," she told me. "I fell through it last winter and really bruised my leg. He lives up in the San Juans, and it was really snowy for a little while this winter."

My ears perked at the mention of the San Juans.

"He's about 80," she went on, "and I've been warning him to be careful. We might need to get a barge to get the lumber out there, though," she mused.

"Oh!" I said. "He lives on one of the islands not on the ferry line! Which one?"

"Crane Island," Holly said dubiously. No one has ever heard of Crane Island.

"Your grandfather is not Tom Temple, is he?" I asked, pretty sure the answer was no, but having to ask all the same, as Tom is the brother of A in Idaho, of K&A, my third parents and owners of the Horse Paradise that I am lucky enough to take care of on occasion, and Tom lives on Crane Island (along with, it turns out, Holly's grandfather and two other families. Crane Island is a stone's throw off Orcas and very small).

"No," said Holly, "but I know Tom Temple! My grandpa's boat engine wasn't working once when we were up to visit and Tom ferried us across to Orcas in his boat!"

Yep, we nodded, it's a small world (and the more I learn about it, the more I think Tom Temple is at the center).

I went back out to the waiting room while my eyes dilated (which really messes up near seeing but doesn't get in the way of far seeing, so they let you drive recklessly away from your appointments) and learned about cataract surgery and astigmatism . . . over and over . . . the video seemed to be missing some of its sections yesterday . . . and then was called back into a treatment room. Dr Myers came in to look at my eyes—brisk, businesslike, but also, I've found, with a good sense of humor—and told me the fluid was a little worse than last time, and she'd like to try a steroid treatment again. Would I like to do it that day, or schedule it for another time? A brief vision of my calendar for the next two months flashed across my mind, wide swaths of time and days completely blacked out, as if the censors had gotten after a war-time letter full of army secrets with a jumbo Marks-A-Lot.

"Oh, let's do it today," I said.

"Okay," said Dr Myers. "I'll be back."

A different tech was in the room with me now, and suddenly I had a realization. "Wait a second," I said. "This is going to be another needle to the eyeball, isn't it."

"We like to call it a 'micro-injection'," she said.

"But that's really just a shot to the eyeball."

"Yep, it is," she said. We were both laughing about how utterly awful this sounds, and I reminisced about how you really can't close your eye when they're trying to put a needle in it, as I learned the last time. Men, she told me, pass out way more often than women, by the way, when their eyes get poked. "I'll go get a couple things ready and check with your insurance company and I'll be right back," she said, and zipped out of the room.

Within 3 minutes—not enough time to work up even a whiff of an anxiety attack—she and Dr Myers had both zipped back in, and within the blink of an eye—or rather, the much not-preferred non-blink of an eye—the steroid was injected and I was free to go, due back in a week (another swipe of the Marks-A-Lot) to make sure I haven't developed glaucoma.

I'm feeling just fine today, aside from the brief sting of the antibiotic drops that have been added to my regimen for 7 days (those I am being SURE to administer); and the dark floater that has been careening around my field of vision (I was told to expect this), occasionally causing me to bat at my head, trying to wave away non-existent gnats.

The cataract is actually smaller. I didn't know they could do that, and I'm happy to hear it.

Clarity of vision—that what this whole journey's about, right?

Metapost: Old Blogs

So, in some weird literary Iron Woman event I yesterday posted three times, and one of the times was to Orcas Estate, which should've showed up in the sidebar of this blog.  However, it appears that leaving a blog fallow for four years does not somehow render it richer and loamier, but rather more or less obsolete.  I can still post there, but it's too old and un-updated to even update anymore, and it's certainly too old to allow I Thought I Was Done With This to drag any information out of it.  What I'm saying is that, if you do click hopefully on the link today, you will see something newer than 4-year-old pears.  When I have more time I'll look into other ways of updating Orcas Estate (maybe it needs some petrochemicals or "toxic sludge").

Laundry List of Non-Breast Cancer Woes, or Tales of a Newly-Minted Hypochondriac

I saw my new internist this afternoon, and found out that, as she's a resident, she will be traveling to Boise in a couple weeks for a year's exchange program. You see, the Roosevelt Clinic where I went (so that I would not have to bring three truck loads of background information) is part of the University of Washington Medical Center, which means it is part of a medical school. Residents are pretty good by the time they let them see you on their own, though, so I was okay with this.

(grrrrrr. Word just f*$ked up again and lost at least half of my blisteringly hilarious prose. I'll try to muddle on, but I'm afraid you'll see it is a muddle. A middling muddle. At least for a liddle.)

It turns out that I was, however, very nervous about seeing this new doctor, and potentially opening a whole new can of Serious Worms. I took a whole extra half anti-anxiety pill, and much appreciated the bear hug from Cousin T (currently in the back yard finishing the spectacular new deck he's building for us—I got to help tear down the old one, WHICH ROCKED—I mean, the tearing down, although the deck itself was a little loosey-goosey too—but this birdwalk has gone on too long except to say SEE Word 2007? What have you done to me? COMPLETELY DESTROYED MY TRAIN OF THOUGHT!!!) on my way off. One nice thing about the Roosevelt Clinic is that it really is walking distance, and so I was able to enjoy the lovely, lovely day on my way there.

I went through a drawn-out check-in process, considering that I had been in that same building for a medical procedure less than a year ago, then sat in a weirdly high chair (seriously, I could swing my legs) in the waiting room and wrote my list of questions, from the head down, as follows:

1. Plugged left ear
   
2. Infected earring
   
3. Vertigo
   
4. Underarm fungus?
   
5. Thumb pain
   
6. Finger eczema
   
7. Vit D blood test
   
8. Fasting blood sugar
   
9. Cholesterol
   
10. Spots on calves.
    

When I was called back I first had to correct the pronunciation of my name (this has been standard procedure for me since I could talk—"It's like Calvin, minus the V"), then I got weighed (160 pounds of SOLID MUSCLE KICK-ASS) and had my blood pressure taken (116/69). No surprises on any of that, and then my doctor came in. She was very nice, Kim, and went through each item on my list.

1. She did a thorough examination of the inside of my left ear and saw nothing unusual (but it hurt a little to have someone poke around with that magnifying glass light thingy) and, indeed, I don't have any other signs of allergy or snot issues, but I thought maybe there was some connection to item 3.
   
2. The earring itself was not, of course, infected, but nor, she decided, was the hole into which it was stuck. "I see no sign of pus," she reported (Pus. Isn't that an ugly word?). After my last MRI I had had some difficulty putting my 4^th earring on the left side back in, and had mashed up the hole a little. Since then, for about two weeks, I have been unable to keep my hands off the stupid thing, and so it's simply not healed yet. STOP PICKING YOUR FACE, CALIN, OR I'LL PUT SOCKS ON YOUR HANDS (and she did, too, my mother, back when I was about five and had had a dog bite just under the eye).
   
3. The vertigo is really mostly gone, and is episodic anyway, and so yeah, whatever. Don't spend so many hours bent over on the floor, cutting out dress pieces.
   
4. It's most likely razor burn, she said, having seen no sign of anything else under my arms. "Get the hairs pulled," she suggested. "That will be much better." I don't know. Legs are one thing.
   
5. My thumb really didn't hurt at all today—it pulled a beater-Chevy-with-unidentifiable-knocking-sound-when-taken-to-the-shop-for-diagnosis game—and preserved a sullen silence. Yes, maybe someday it could turn into arthritis.
   
6. I forgot to ask about my fingers. Ian has the same thing (had it FIRST, and shared it with me), and we're dealing with it well enough I suppose, occasionally using Band-Aids and ointment for flare-ups.
   
7. Blood tests are ordered for Thursday morning when I have to be at the clinic at 8:30am and so can, conceivably, fast for items 8 and 9 (in part because I am often not out of bed before 8:30. My stomach is still asleep at 8:30).
   
8. See 7
   
9. See 7
   
10. The spots on my calves are small moles, one on each. I don't think I've always had these two—I think they appeared several years ago (like, more than seven)—and they haven't changed from what I can tell. I have moles all over my body, and always have. For a while in my yoot, maybe my tween years, I picked and picked* at a mole on my upper right arm until it bled—but it didn't go away. Today, it's probably the most dangerous-looking mole on my body, but it's been that way ever since I left it alone in about 1983. Kim saw absolutely nothing alarming on my leg moles, or on two darker but quite well-defined, small and round ones on my back. "Just watch them," she said, which was pretty much her advice for all of my, as it turned out, complete non-issues. And, really, no surprises on any of that, either.
    

I suppose there is some chance still for bad stuff to show up in my blood tests, and even though some of my lady parts are gone, most of them remain and so I need to schedule a woman's health screening for . . . sometime . . . probably this fall when I build up another large enough head of steam for any medical issue not breast cancer-related.

In the meantime, if I do ever have an actual illness utterly unrelated to breast cancer, I have established a relationship and a place to go. As this is likely to take another decade or so, Kim's year away will most likely have no impact on me whatsoever.

*My mother-in-law once went to a cocktail party where she met a man who was a psychiatrist (or psychologist, I'm not quite sure). She said "Oh! Can I ask you a question?" The man, looking exceedingly bored at the prospect, told her she could. "Why is it that we humans love picking at our scabs so much?" she blurted out, avid to know. I don't remember if the man had an answer, but he was VERY relieved to have had such a disgustingly non-standard question set to him.

Metapost: Posting

So . . . I don't know what I was complaining about, lack of energy or whatever, because clearly I've been very busy lately which is the only excuse I have for not having posted in weeks.

In the outer physical world, I have been constructing and destructing, both at the current home and the future home (or, rather, DEstructing at this home and CONstructing at that one). I have been making an attempt to lie down in the afternoon every day more often than I used to, which cuts a bit into writing time . . . but mostly life has just been rushing me along at warp speed, particularly now that it's light much longer than it's dark up here in Seattle (and that's even more true on Orcas . . . which can be a bit of a drawback if you are camping in a more or less translucent tent, with the weekend plan of hard physical labor needing much rest.).

In the inner physical world, my last MRI was stable. One tumor marker blood test was also stable, but one had jumped . . . up, unfortunately, not down. We'll keep our eyes on the jumpy one, because it might just be a reaction to one of Witch Doctor Dan's suggestions (the tumor marker blood tests measure a protein in the blood that cancer cells give off—not the cancer cells themselves—and so there's always a possibility the protein is there for another reason). Dr Specht did offer to order me a PET/CT if I wanted it but . . . lovely berry-flavored, ointment-thick CT contrast drink notwithstanding, I decided to give it a miss for the time being.

In the mental world, I have been writing and rewriting post after post, but as mainstream technology has not, heretofore (THANK GOD), allowed our every thought to be spread about the interwebs without, at minimum, intervening thumbs, none of the posts have actually posted.

In the spiritual and emotional worlds, I am continuing assertively down my path, even when I don't want to go (sometimes you have to, you know).

And back here in the blogging world, I have made a subtle but, I think, useful change to my layout (many thanks to blogger for ease of use). At the top right side of home page, you will see a new section entitled "My Other Blogs", with a list of three other blogs below. As you can see, they cover different topics and tell you how recently I (or Ian, in the case of Spackle and Hoover and Orcas Estate) have posted, so you can see if anything's new on any of them without having to take the time and emotional energy to click hopefully through, only to have your wishes dashed when you see the same pears that have been sitting there at the top of the blog for the last four years (now that things are grinding slowly to a start on Orcas, I'm thinking that blog might see some more action).

I have also listed the blogs of a couple friends below that, and will list more/take those away as requested.

We were laughing in the barn last week that we were referring to the weather as "hot" when the temperature was about 65 degrees. But that WAS hot, and today is looking to be the same, if not hotter, and so I'm heading out to do some yard work.

 

Wherein Witch Doctor Dan Makes a Diagnosis* that is Subsequently Corroborated by the Western Medical Establishment

*my words only. Dan cannot and does not actually diagnose.

When I met Daniel Lane NIS Specialist several years ago, he was already known amongst friends as the Voodoo Man. Being a professional and responsible practitioner of his craft he did not, however, introduce himself to me as such, and I was left to draw my own conclusions. My mother used to sing "My friend the Witch Doctor (not quite this version)" to me as a kid, so naturally that's where I went after my first appointment with this seemingly incongruous method of healing.

In that first appointment, Dan fixed a low-grade acid reflux issue that had been subtly dogging me for years. It was subtle enough, and had been going on long enough, that I generally took no notice of it except to take the occasional Tums (I prefer the berry-flavored ones), and I don't remember even mentioning it, but Dan caught it in his initial scan. "You have four valves in your digestive system," he explained, "and they're supposed to fire in a particular order. Yours are firing out of order, and we're going to put them back."

I lay there fully clothed on my back on the clinic table and maybe clenched my teeth, or maybe held my temples or other pressure points (at Dan's direction, and I don't remember which points, it's been a long time), my right arm up at a 90 degree angle, and Dan held some pressure points, said "hold strong" and pressed against my upraised arm. Nope, couldn't hold it. I could feel the weakness as my arm jigged back and forth against his hand. Dan tapped my head, or swiped back and forth on my upper thigh, or whichever of his methods was appropriate for this particular fix (I have obviously not been surreptitiously studying up on NIS myself), and then said "okay, now hold." He pushed on my arm and I held—rock solid. Huh.

For about 24 hours, my guts felt WONDERFUL, which is to say that they did their job without any fuss and so I couldn't feel them at all, but then the reflux refluxed. I saw Dan a couple weeks later and told him, and he said that yes, since the valves had been off for so long, they would need about 3 visits before they would hold (the same is true of pianos that have been untuned for years—they incline toward the familiar kinks and string lengths and so should be retuned every couple weeks for up to several months, until they learn the new preferences). Sure enough, 3 visits later and my guts have been excellent ever since, with only very occasional misfires associated with stress, viruses, and chemotherapies—easily fixed at one of my regular visits (I see Dan about once per month, barring pressing issues).

Over the years, Dan has helped me with all sorts of unmeasurable health and wellness issues. Not just internal organs, but also structural aches and pains and psychological trauma—including, as he did recently, migraines and acute anxiety. It's his recent suggestion of possible pituitary damage and mild hypothyroidism that I want to focus on here.

The pituitary gland secretes hormones that help with, amongst other things, thyroid function and blood pressure. If the thyroid is not functioning up to speed, any number of symptoms might appear, including increased anxiety, low basal body temperature (consistently below 98.4, which mine is), difficulty with cold temperatures, dry skin or hair, thin, brittle fingernails, and any number of other things. Dan did some tapping to wake up my brain to awareness of the pituitary damage, and then suggested that I start taking two drops of an iodine supplement (Iosol) daily, as well as adding a thyroid PMG to my collection of daily supplements. I have not had another migraine/panic episode since my visit to Dan.

Yesterday afternoon during my appointment with Nurse Sarah, I told the story of the migraine/panic episodes, said that I'd seen Dan and they'd stopped, and said that he hadn't seen any evidence of external interference—no viruses, bacteria or fungi—but that he had noticed damage to the pituitary gland.

"Yes, we start to see that around the two-to-three year mark after full-brain radiation," said Sarah matter-of-factly. "And you're at . . . just about three years. Yes, that's when pituitary and thyroid damage start to show up."

"Dan just gave me PMGs for my thyroid, and suggested 2 drops every day of an iodine tincture! I've been feeling a bit fatigued, and I couldn't figure out if it was normal aging, or somehow related to this cancer thing!" I said, excited.

Nurse Sarah and Ian and I then talked a bit about what I do, what I want to do, how I've been feeling lately, what my mother does, what Sarah's mother does (not enough, she thinks, if I am looking for a role model on the opposite end of the spectrum of ant-to-sloth), and how to deal with all this. For starters, I'm going to have a thyroid-level blood test drawn tomorrow when I go in for my check-up with Dr Specht, to get a baseline, but REALLY for starters I'm going to continue on with the supplements that Witch Doctor Dan suggested.

I have always trusted Dan, because for several years he has consistently, if not absolutely invariably, helped my body make changes for the better. He is deeply invested in what he does and in his patients; he's bright, he reads a lot about all sorts of things that can add value to NIS, and he's become remarkably intuitive as well as skilled. But I've never before had such clear proof, verifiable and witnessed by one of my allopaths, that he really knows his shit.

So, yes, I'm aging, as all people do, and the elongating healing time-frame and the increasing need to take it easy are completely natural effects of life. I am also, however, being impacted by physical issues that were foretold (if shunted aside by me during the hyperintensity of the lifesaving going on in late May 2008), and recently rediscovered by a favorite alternative caregiver, progressing right on schedule. This doesn't mean I won't have more migraines and panic attacks, or that I'm suddenly ready to jump into rock climbing, horseback riding, and weeding the front yard—separated by dog walks—all in the same day. I don't know what other side-effects might appear now that I'm three years out from that life-saving brain barrage. But I feel good—I feel like I've been placing my health and well-being into good hands.

After the appointment yesterday Ian and I were standing in front of the elevators, waiting and waiting for a ride back up from the bottom to the third floor. I was grinning—I am right now. "Dan called it, didn't he," said Ian, looking in my eyes.

"That is EXACTLY what I was thinking!" I exclaimed back at him.

"You and me," he said, motioning back and forth between our heads, showing the paths of telepathy.

The elevator hadn't arrived and I was bouncy, full of life. "Let's take the stairs!" I said, and we raced up them and out into the sun.

The Woes and Complications of the Elderly (i.e. those approaching 40)

(oh dear. this has gotten very long.)
Aging gracefully—slowing down, taking time for aches and pains, easing gently through middle age and into a sedate and orderly dotage—has not been well modeled to me. My mother, 30 years my senior, has taken her retirement as an opportunity not to enjoy a new interest, but rather to cavort gleefully about in a vastly inventive amusement park of new interests (none of which, she reminded me today, includes dusting or seasonal cabinet-cleaning). She lives on the 15-acre land where I grew up and, while she's given up raising livestock and has taken down the intra-proprietal fencing (except for the white rails that define her expansive yard), she does dig around in several acres' worth of flower beds, as well as raising various berries and fruit trees and a giant vegetable garden. She has a now-dwindling collection of elderly pets, and tramps daily through her woods and down her hill to the almost completely silted-up pond with Loper-dog, who is on his teetering last legs but doesn't seem to know it. She takes an exercise class at the nearest Y, and sometimes swims laps in the pool, although as soon as it's barely warm enough to be humanly possible to be in her own pool, she is there swimming with the algae and the waterbugs, getting her daily exercise minus the chlorine. She has season tickets to the opera and to a couple of theaters; she attends choir concerts and the occasional show featuring a grand-niece (to date, the grand-nephews have not taken so strongly to singing and dancing)—as far away as central California.
Mom is also a member of a group of equally garden-obsessed ladies calling themselves the Garden Girls; a book group of long standing; a writer's group of longer standing; a community band; and a brass quintet which she developed, organizes, hosts and cooks for (plus any family members they may bring to rehearsals) once a week. They put on quarterly concerts at a local community center, and Mom organizes those as well.
She also finds time for dinners out and movie nights with friends; she frequently hosts meals at her house; she travels both for visiting within the US but also to tour the world, and she is generally up for an outing when I have something to suggest.
She is not alone in this lifestyle, sharing many of the above interests with her friend Marsh—and aren't I glad she and he have each other (although Marsh could've maybe slowed her down a bit, instead of just having his own endless drive)—but still, for someone (me) who is post-menopausal (well, medically so), taking chemotherapy, and supposed to be cautious of overdoing it so that she can live as long and healthy a life as possible, my mother at almost 70 is setting a very bad example.
My father also set a bad example. He owned his own business until I was about 11 (he was 42), when he "retired" from 7-day work weeks down at the car repair shop and instead spent 7-day work weeks constantly busy doing every other thing under the sun. He built major projects around—and into—our house, took trips to Alaska to work for months at a time in fish camps, had a lively labor trade going in the community, and was instrumental (ha ha) in developing the talented and still thriving Washington Wind Symphony. It occurred to me the other morning that perhaps he somehow called that little hornet to him that awful day 19 years ago on Stuart Island because he couldn't figure out any other way to have a rest. "Hell is if you live a bad life, and as punishment you get reincarnated and have to come back here," my dad would say to me. "Heaven is if you live a good life and when you die, you're dead. That's it. It's all over." I tend to believe in reincarnation rather than any sort of Hell, but I like to think Dad is having a good, long, well-deserved and unjudged nap before working out who he's going to be the next time around.
Even Dr Jason's parents, my almost-parents in Idaho, are awful. They, too, are hovering around 70 and they have 80 acres and still horseback ride and raise cattle and Christmas trees—which his petite mother, A, shears by hand with a big machete. They primarily heat with wood in the lengthy and frigid winters, and K puts up the wood. It's possible they've recently invested in a wood splitter, but I wouldn't be surprised if K still does most of the splitting with an ax.
Perhaps you are getting a sense of some of the difficulties I am facing here.
I am 38 ½. I am strong; healthy. As far as I know, I don't have high cholesterol, low iron, low vitamin D, borderline blood sugar levels or anything else that people my age are starting to worry about, because of all the things to be youthfully prodigious at (piano, writing, cooking, languages), I chose breast cancer, and I haven't actually had any of those other tests done in recent memory. Nor do I seem to catch most of the bugs touring the general population—"working" the way I do, I don't spend a lot a time in the company of the unwashed, germy riff-raff. Earlier this year I mentioned to Dr Specht that I was thinking of getting an internist so that I could keep up on the normal registry of aging in America. She seemed to think that was an okay idea, nothing too important, but yeah, since I was apparently going to be living, against all odds, maybe I should see if my diet of sausage and whole milk lattes was on the road toward killing me instead (not quite her words, of course). I have an appointment in early June for a standard physical, so maybe I'll find out something new and I will get to add one of the common struggles of the middle-ager into my collection of health concerns to manage.
In the meantime, though, I have absolutely no fundamental understanding of what a normal aging process is supposed to feel like. In my world, aphorisms like use it or lose it carry a lot of weight—if I can, I do. And if I can't, instead of simply not, I immediately worry that I didn't use it enough and now it's lost. Even though I am consciously aware that I almost died in the hospital three summers ago and now I am in the best physical shape of my life—I know this—I am afraid that taking an afternoon or a day—or heaven forbid even 15 minutes—to lie down and rest means that I'm dying. I'm not just losing muscle tone or balance or bone density or the sun-streaks in my hair—my life is ending; the cancer is getting me after all. The thought that I might simply be tired, and that rest might, in fact, be good for me, might be a gain, in fact, instead of a loss—is something that I rarely ever consider. And yet I know from personal experience in many disparate parts of my life that a healthy mix of work and rest keeps everything functioning smoothly. The obvious irony here is that these thought processes themselves are exhausting.
I used to do a better job of mixing work and rest, and maybe having cancer has messed with my ability to take time off. Simple enough, I suppose—it is daily pounded into my soul that I have no idea how much time I have left, so I want to DO SOMETHING, and taking a nap has never counted as valuable in my book (since infanthood, I'm given to understand). Anyway, several years ago when I was in my mid 20s and studying in Portugal, Mom had just retired and was struggling with coming down off the frenetic days of her 30-year-long teaching schedule (I'm not sure that she's succeeded). "Calin, I need help," she said to me in one of our rare overseas phone conversations. "I am too busy, and you are so good at doing nothing!" I obviously took offense at this (enough, perhaps, that I've already used it in this blog), but she wasn't trying to insult me. She was trying to figure out a way to spend her days the way I was—walking, reading, learning a new city—whatever I felt like, whenever I wanted, in an easy-going way.
The problem with asking me for advice on doing nothing—back when I was 25 and living in a residencial in Porto—was that there was nothing I had to do. My room was cleaned daily, breakfast was included, I sent my laundry out. I didn't know how to knit yet, I didn't have a sewing machine or a piano or even a laptop. It was 1998, and I paid for one hour of computer use each evening at a little cybercafé across the Avenida dos Aliados from my inn, then came back to my room and enjoyed Portuguese television: classic American shows subtitled, not dubbed, so it was no work at all to keep up with the antics of Maxwell Smart or, more modernly, Remington Steele. (note: the Portuguese did rename these television shows while they were subtitling them, and the names had varying degrees of success. "Get Smart" was changed to "Olho Vivo", "Keen Eye"—the pun didn't really work in Portuguese; but Remington Steele, which could've just stayed the same, was greatly improved by being called "Quase Modelo, Quase Detectivo": "Almost Model, Almost Detective". Much more descriptive.)
I now own a house, and have responsibility for dogs and Ian and the home, plus I've learned to knit and I have a sewing machine and a piano and a kitchen and a yard, and I live in a city with a rock climbing gym and horses nearby—and so there is always something to do that needs doing, or something that I want to do. At the moment, I suck at doing nothing. The trick, Mom, to being good at doing nothing, is to take away everything there is to do.
The standard 2-month MRI that I had today (stable) and the subsequent appointment with Nurse Sarah ("You are still leading a charmed life!") have left me with all sorts of new things/additional insights to write about, and this particular entry has gone on quite long enough, so stay tuned over the next few days for me to continue musing about the aging/cancer/life choices/using vs. losing/medical practitioners/happiness/anxiety questions.
In other words, stay tuned for another post.