Step Three

If I've been quiet here, it is because I'm just beginning to raise my head up out of the foxhole. Okay, not a great metaphor, because there has been no hiding from enemy fire. A better metaphor would be getting off a merry-go-round, those metal ones ubiquitous in playgrounds before people worried so much about children's ability to play safely. Kids would load on, someone would spin it by holding the bar and running fast right next to it, and then jump on. The world would blur by if you looked out, familiar but lacking essential detail. Gradually, it would slow down, and you would climb off, reeling and tipsy, centrifugally altered, but still in the same place.

Going through two surgeries and six rounds of chemo in seven months required my hanging on through a swirl, looking out at a sometimes blurred world going by, dizzy, often nauseated and disoriented, precisely at a time when thinking clearly would probably be a good idea.  Then the chemo ends, things stop swirling so fast, and smelling weird, and the hair starts growing back, altered, but still on my head.

So now that I'm done swirling, landed in the same place, I have possibly too much time to reflect on what the hell just happened. Getting from one appointment to the next was in many ways easier. I used to love Jed Bartlet in West Wing when he'd say to staff, "What's next?" but I console myself now that I don't have to answer anything except "radiation," the Step Three after surgery and chemo.

Radiation offers those bizarre moments unique to breast cancer treatment.  I am having a new form of super high-tech radiation, with a Star Trek-like machine, and in case you think I'm exaggerating, it is called the VARIAN TrueBeam High Energy Linear Accelerator (THELA). I have a team of three highly trained technicians who make this thing work with admirable precision, including playing jazz on Pandora while I'm on the table. Mandy is an artist of alignment, and her two handsome assistants tug and shove me to her requests like "left hip 3cm right" with fervent devotion.

But the first day was slightly intimidating, and I walked into the vast room with the plutonium-powered DeLorean THELA machine with no idea what happens next. I looked up at a monitor next to the machine and saw large photos, including a side angle shot of my left breast, trussed up in the plastic and velcro thing they fitted me with for these treatments. My face must have done something because Mandy said consolingly, "That is just so we know we have the right treatment location. Probably not what you expected to see this early in the morning."  I answered, "Well, as long as you don't leak it on the internet with Jennifer Lawrence's naked photos..."  There was a second of silence, and then three loud guffaws. From that moment, I figured it would be fine.

Cancer cures wrinkles...

One of the great things about cancer treatment is that it refocuses priorities, at least for the patient. Rather than worrying about the long-term effects of a bad haircut, I worry about the long term.

Having lost most of my hair, including eyelashes, eyebrows, and other bits, I am freed up to worry about having lost some cognitive function, like finishing sentences.

When I look in the mirror at my fuzzy head and puzzle over what look is coming next, I realize no one ever knows what is coming next. I should already know this, given my life history, but clearly I need big, heavy hammer reminders. Nothing subtle.

Last week, while arranging a consult with a dermatologist because of the former melanoma on my leg, my oncologist joked that it could take awhile to get an appointment for cancer follow up, but if I wanted Botox, they'd see me fast. So this got me thinking about the wrinkles and creases meandering around my face as I slide down the slope to sixty...maybe that is the look that is coming next?

Absolutely not. All earned, all me. After enduring a multitude of things shot into my body for the past six months, nothing unnecessary will be, well, necessary. Cancer has eliminated wrinkles from my worries. Both my wrinkles, and yours. Cured.

Not lol. Loll.

I don't lol. I don't mean laugh out loud - if you know me, you know I do that raucously. I mean I don't write "lol" to signify I am laughing out loud. I am nearly 57 and it isn't becoming. I would have cringed had my mother said "far out" as an exclamation in my youth, and no doubt Love Child would cringe at my writing "lol" in social media or anywhere else. (I do write WTF in text messages, but he doesn't usually read my texts, so he is spared embarrassment.)

In any case, I do not lol, but I do loll, as in around. As in lollygag. Summer increases my need to loll, particularly in the sun, and Vermont has only intensified the need this summer, because the air smells so darn good, like green, like cool water. 

Right now, I'm staying in a lovely house with a screened porch, complete with a sun-loving kitten who shows absolutely no guilt about lollygagging. He works hard and fast in the morning, knocking things off the shelves, chewing on my computer, spinning a pen across the floor, licking my breakfast, then curls up in the sun by me and yawns. He is an excellent teacher; now I work hard and fast in the mornings, too, and when the sun starts leaning in through the screens, I curl up and yawn. 

Chemo has given me a very particular justification for lolling. When I feel horrid, I need to focus on something to both remember and look forward to, and on the scale of great things to remember and look forward to, lolling in the sun in Vermont ranks in the nosebleed level of the range, way up there. I'm grateful for my teacher. 

If I were you, I wouldn't read much further...

Really, this is just going to be more chemo grumbling; useless venting.

I seem to have reached the point of fed-up a bit short of the point of finished. My patience is worn not only thin, but off, like the soles of my favorite Merrells. I've worn through two pairs so far, replacing them when the soles had turned to holes, but for this, I have no idea where to go for replacement.

I'd like to stop complaining and catastrophizing, and I'd like my real life back, the one with normal chaos and annoyances, like dog hair and the service light on in the car. I'm weary beyond reckoning of being bone tired, feverish, weak, nauseated, brain-addled, and in pain.

I'd like to once again be a nice person to live with: one who is cheerful, helpful, generous, positive, and cooks good things, instead of someone who runs from the smell of coffee or lettuce (chemo and lettuce: very VERY bad) Who wants to live with a retching wretch? Certainly not me.

So, yes, I understand that I have to do this one more, one last time. July 31. But I don't have to like it.

Restoration Software...

Waves lap softly over the shale beach. My shoulders soften back down to where they should be, lower than my ears, which can hear the voices of the fishermen in the small boat, softened by the distance. Birdsong is a soft murmur from the huge trees on shore.

Nothing restores me like staring at water, and I gaze across it, confirming my refusal to let the chemo schedule cancel our journey to this house perched on Lake Champlain, booked before therapy began. Basking here in the reflected shimmer of the water is a powerful form of therapy.

My respect for the chemicals pumped into me is endless, as well as for the brilliance of the scientists who created this regime which allows so many women to survive, when years ago, they wouldn't. When I feel outright dreadful, and even when that subsides and I simply feel off, strangely riddled, I still cheer the toxins doing their work that is saving me.

But I deeply respect other cures, too, and this vista, the glory of this sleek lake, framed in the distance by hazy mountains, helps me breathe and let go, remember that I'm more than a damaged body. Everything in nature has its own cycle of damage and renewal, including me.

Spoiler Alert: The Bletchley Circle, Season 2 - Reborn or resumed?

As an unashamed lover of British telly, I am hooked on several BBC series; luckily, I managed to convert dear husband to fandom, too. Love Child notes, eyes rolling, how predictably dull we are, hunkered in of an evening, with our "Midsomer Murder" marathons, and "Foyle's War" post-show analysis. We don't do sports; this is our sport.

Last night was practically our Super Bowl: two episodes, back to back, of new season two of The Bletchley Circle, a visually powerful, factually based drama about four women who were part of the famous code-breaking and deciphering team that is credited with shortening World War II, saving countless lives. Much of the show is about how these women fared after, in post-war London, unable to tell anyone what they'd done because of the Official Secrets Act, now in ordinary jobs or married, with children and husbands who don't know Mum was a war hero.

In last night's episode, Alice is arrested for murdering her former lover, also a Bletchley veteran, and we find out she is deliberately covering for her long lost daughter, whom she believes committed the murder. Alice refuses to fight the charge and is sentenced to hang. As her former Bletchley colleagues attempt to solve the murder, the prison prepares to carry out the sentence. In a bleak scene, she is weighed, her height is taken, and then, in a tight close up, a tape measure goes loosely around her neck; a voice intones: "fourteen inches." We see just her face; we can't - or won't - imagine what this feels like, having your neck measured for a noose.

In the end (I promised spoilers!) she is acquitted and walks out of the prison (though not into sunshine, this being London) completely free.

I could not stop thinking about that scene, wondering how it would feel. Would she now make her life completely different, dramatically throw off all that had been, and revamp the very basis of how she lives? Or would she immediately seek a swift return to the most ordinary routine, the comforting safety of exactly what she had before this traumatic event intruded?

This resonated because I have the same questions. Cancer is a traumatic event, and getting rid of it is a long and sometimes frightening ordeal, too. Mortality looms. When treatment is done, will I want to be reborn, revamping all that led up to this, or will I want to resume the safety of all I have built, the life that came before, because it is comforting?  I can see both, clearly, in opposition and in congruence. I'll keep you posted.

Making it...

Walking around bald in public is like walking around with a cuddly cute puppy; everyone likes to come over and schmooze. They don't actually pet my head, but some of them would like to. I've never, until now, been told on a regular basis that I have a really nice, round head.

Instead of tips on housebreaking and chewing disasters, I get advice like, "Baking soda can cure cancer." and "Watch this TEDTalk about wave therapy..." They also have stories about others they know who did this, sometimes admitting it didn't work; the chemo friend didn't make it. I don't much mind that - I know people who didn't make it, too, plus I read stuff.

But I know lots of folks who are making it, in every sense of the word, with cancer and without. We are all making it if we get up and open our eyes. We've all got struggles and challenges, and truly, the only difference is mine is visible. And being bald is way low on the list; it is just the one I'm reminded of when I catch my reflection and remember. But I've got a really nice, round head.