Transitions – Pink Stinks

Brief Fanfare for the Ordinary

I never thought I’d live to say it, but here it is: It’s my daughter’s first day of senior year.

Cancer has now been my companion for over five years. It’s been an unwelcome visitor, a deadly ghost, an iron wheel turning under the street. And yet my daughter lives, I live, my husband lives—and this first day back at school is a sword in hope’s stone. We claim it, it is ours.

There will be no trumpets. A few screens will go black. We’ll look at the grass, finches will twitch, and the train calls will continue until dawn.

But eventually the fog will clear and in friendship with the scrub jays and bright red zinnias I get to say: I’m in remission, my daughter’s back at school, nothing in this can sway.

Who? asks the owl.

You, says the ground.

For today.

I Miss So Much About My Job

Education Week has published an essay I wrote about ending my career due to cancer.

Here is the link.

Updates. Also, Sick of Sickness.

It’s the post-Thanksgiving hubbub and cozy couch life. We’ve eaten as a family and hung out with dear friends, and gratitude for each small bite abounds. We bought and decorated our tree yesterday, which was strategic planning on our part, as my next chemo cycle started Friday afternoon and we knew it would wipe me out. So Friday morning, we scrambled. The tree is lopsided, imperfect, and beautiful. There’s a metaphor there for living, I think.

Xmas Tree

I’ve started a new chemo cycle. The immunotherapy I was on, Tecentriq, nearly eliminated the larger tumor under my armpit. Unfortunately, as cancer will do, some cells developed resistance to the immunotherapy and moved into my lungs. I now have 5+ tumors in both lungs. It’s impacting my breathing and causing some coughing. This was terrible news for our family and has caused yet more grief. We’ve told our daughter about this recurrence, that it’s treatable, and that we’re taking things one step at a time.

Those conversations with our child – they are the worst, most wrenching part of this dread tunnel.

And so I’m now on Carboplatin, Gemcitabine, and Tecentriq, all at once. After my first dose last month I slept for nearly 36 hours, with one – or two- hour wakings for water and food. I kept very little down. This treatment plan, if successful, might add another year to my life, but I will be on it forever or until it stops working, and sick for 1/3 of the time.

It’s the worst treatment to date. For about 7 days after, I am very sick, despite anti-nausea medications and steroids. Carboplatin and Gemcitabine can really knock down blood counts. Some people need transfusions, and I hope I do not.

How do I feel about this? How does one go forth, knowing that 1/3 of his/her foreseeable life will be flu-like nausea and pain?

I still choose to remain in gratitude for each day. Each day these eyes manage to open is one to be thankful for. I planted daffodils and crocuses to invest in next spring, and I make wishful, hopeful travel plans. My daughter still has homework, my husband likes a good meal. Friends are treasures, better than gold.

And yet I’m so sick of being sick. So sick of relating to people through the lens of disease. There are times when I wonder if someone is reaching out because of obligation, or because of something else. I blame no one for this. It’s the nature of cancer, and people mean well. But the lens of cancer forces all kinds of urgency, can make people want to be a “good person” and reach out, when really it’s not necessary. And yet sometimes it is. And the hard part is to navigate asking and receiving, distance and proximity, and knowing it’s clumsy and hard and the forging of a new relationship with people around you.

And understanding that the lives of others go on. Your disease is not the world. People have kids and dilemmas and issues and stories that I want to hear about, and to be a part of outside of cancer. The continuum still goes on.

In a lopsided, beautiful tree, the continuum still goes on.

Terminal is Liminal, With Updates

If you are reading this, you have or know someone with metastatic, or terminal, cancer.

For this person, or for you, a line has been crossed. A threshold. A door which can no longer be closed.

This makes metastatic cancer a space where transitions take place: there are shifts in the body’s capacities, changes in relationships, emotional high and low tides, financial ebbs, spiritual reckonings and ends. One website has a definition for liminal that I really like: “The word liminal comes from the Latin word limen, meaning threshold – any point or place of entering or beginning. A liminal space is the time between the ‘what was’ and the ‘next.’ It is a place of transition, waiting, and not knowing. Liminal space is where all transformation takes place, if we learn to wait and let it form us.” (Inaliminalspace.org)

To wait, and to let form.

And there is grief. Undercurrents of it as wide and deep as gyres linking east to west in surges of the unknown. Where am I? What is next? Who is this new, carved, scarred and asymmetrical self? Where are these treatments taking me? And when will I arrive?

Questions are the language of the liminal traveler. The departure island no longer exists, the destination unfolds during the duration, and so all we have are pivots, coasting, and turns. We are always consulting the map, which is the body, and often a scan. And so we query and trace and consider, uncertain and unresolved.

Waiting. Letting things form.

At some point I turn and recount the slow degradation of my body. Even as I write “my,” there is a part of me that does not want to own this, I reject and reject the ownership of this disease as “my,” but there it is, near my rib again, in my arm again, proliferating in its malignant exponentials. And so in three years the changes add up: mastectomy, lymph node removal, oophorectomy, rib removal, hair loss. Once I sat in the doctor’s office and caught my reflection in the mirror. I could not help the gasp of sudden, utter grief I felt at this, this ogre-like body I saw facing me – bald, gashed, pale, a compression-sleeved arm covering my eyes. “A transition.” A transition into what? Who?

The kind doctor: What’s going on?

Me: I used to be a person.

Silence.

Kind doctor, with a big intake of breath, taking my hand: You still are.

How this humanity breaks my heart. It is the one sure map I keep as I go forward.

* * *

And so where am I? I’m in cycle 6 of immunotherapy. Scans next week will determine if it’s working. If it isn’t, my treatment choices become limited. I’m on a list for a local hospital’s clinical trial. I could also try carboplatin – it’s the one last actual chemotherapy that might work.

We’re meeting with the palliative care team next week to discuss end of life plans. This doesn’t mean hospice is imminent or that I’ll die soon. It means that we’re planning a roadmap – there’s that word again, a way going forward, a plan as if – for pain management, resuscitation choices, financial directions, and so on.

My energy ebbs and flows. Some mornings I can walk and get groceries, but by afternoon I usually need a nap. Some days I am totally prone, in bed, can’t get up. I often have to cancel plans. Some relationships have fallen to the side. I have had to set boundaries when needed in order to preserve what time I have left. This is not personal. It is survival. And pain flares, stops, flares again in no predictive pattern. It is all liminal, day by day, and puts burdens on my family and friends. For their kindness and understanding I will always be grateful.

This liminal living is not all sadness. It has given me time to listen to the backyard finches, stop and hug my husband and daughter, watch the apples ripen on our tree. To have coffee and cherish friendships. It’s given me time to listen and to slow down. To read. To watch bad tv and enjoy it. I flew to Santa Monica with an old high school friend and ate nearly $100.00 worth of lobster. Bliss!

If there were a scroll with one destination, I would write friendship and offer it to you.

And love.

They are the only way – is it forward?

Is it out?