disability – Pink Stinks

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.

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.

The Last Straw: On Transitioning From the Old Body Into the New

My body has changed, and I’ve got to learn to accept its changes.

It’s difficult. I used to run 10ks, work full time, whip up recipes from Bon Appetit, shop, garden, plan social events here at home, dance with my husband and daughter, flip pancakes, and generally fill our house with the kind of life I’d always wanted in a home. It wasn’t perfect, but my body was an actively orbiting planet around a warmth I hoped to harbor. I worked hard. Like many of us in our productivity-obsessed culture, I bought into the feelings of self-worth associated with being “on top of it.”

This new body is different. Parts of me are gone. I’ve lost strength, lost mobility, lost stamina. A good friend of mine, a fellow traveler on this road of chronic illness, made an analogy that I come back to often. He said, paraphrased, “You used to have 50 straws in a cup. You held them and you could use them every day. When you woke up, they reappeared.

orange and yellow straw — *So much sweetness to savor.*

Now, you may have 25, or 20, or 10 straws. They take longer to come back. And when you select your straw (or task, or thing-to-do) you must make more strategic choices.”

I think of this often. Fewer straws, less energy. Fewer straws, less done. Messier house. Forgetfulness, fatigue, contracting the circle of my hoped-for life.

It’s not that I’m choosing to wallow in grief, although I think it’s essential to our healing that we recognize and allow ourselves to feel our losses fully. It’s not that I’m hanging on to loss. It’s that I feel like I’m in a process of transitioning from an able body into a differently-able body, and what that means is that less gets done. I attend fewer social engagements. I cook less, I attend fewer meetings. I set up fewer social engagements because I’m afraid I’ll have to cancel. I miss my friends.

So, what takes the place of my previous productivity? What do I do with the empty cup space, the space where the straws used to sit?

I rest. I meditate. I go to doctor’s appointments and physical therapy (7 months later, and still going). I write when I can. If I’m able, I’ll do a few chores. I sit and talk with family. Drink coffee or tea. Sometimes I binge watch Netflix shows. I lay down and think. I read.

Sometimes the pain from my surgery and chest scar tissue renders me incapacitated, unable to concentrate on anything but pain relief and sleep. Sometimes the fatigue is so extreme, as it was this past weekend, that I am barely able to rise from bed.

And so I am learning – in the present continuous, as it’s a process – to be compassionate with my new limitations. I am learning to test how far my right arm can reach, how far I can walk (a 1 mile a day workout so far is about my limit). I turn my gaze to the gratitude in small things, to the garden with its blooming borage, ballhead waterleaf, scarlet flax, bachelor’s buttons, poppies, and violets. I think of water, of berries, of the rise and fall of a mockingbird’s tail. I think of spring and summer, my daughter and her laugh, my husband and his deep, true goodness.

This learning is not a straight line.

What keeps you grounded as you transition and think of your new life? Your body’s losses, its gains?

drinking glass with pink beverage and mint leaves — For you.