You Gave Cancer Everything, and It’s Still Not Enough

I’m still alive.

And so grateful to be able to write those words.

I had scans in July and all the tumors are stable. No growth. Holding steady. Starboard as she goes.  Life has settled into a routine of chemo every three weeks, with one week of recovery and two weeks of near-normalcy. One week on, two off. This rhythm stabilizes my life and makes it easier to plan rest, meals, and activities.  It gives me hope.  And while I know I’ll be on chemotherapy forever, this chemical pace gives room for living and for life.

I am slowly learning how to accept the likely-permanent paralysis of my right arm.  It is a slow process. Dictation software helps, and my daughter and husband have rallied, too. But the magnitude of it – the utter uselessness of this limb now, the sudden, startling flopdowns when it’s unsupported, its fishlike swing and sway, its blankly numb detachment from the whole of my body’s honed, coordinated machinations, its sheer weight and cumbersome ostracism, a rogue gong, a flaying odd pendulum—is a continuous, displaced, awkward reminder of cancer treatment’s costs. What is the cost of living? What are you willing to pay?

 I think of Jane Hirshfield’s poem, “The Weighing.”

“The world asks of us

only the strength we have and we give it.

Then it asks more, and we give it.”

It is all we have, this sad giving. Reluctantly we open our fists, offer our veins, bare our heads, and display and platter our full selves for the reckonings of scan results. We hope for months, beg for years. We search online, query the doctors, roll over with the real and dream upheavals of this nightmarish, dazed half-life we plea to withstand. Oh we are a desperate chorus of endurers hoping to be whole.

And each day is one and one, the word  “more” a felt bead on a rosary we hope to hold.