Infused, transfused, and woobering away

I'm sitting in a waiting room at The James, stressed out after a bizarre and busy week and exhausted after driving two hours in the foggy morning to get my son to Columbus in time for chemotherapy, a blood transfusion, and a lumbar puncture, so I close my eyes and listen to the lively music someone is playing on the grand piano in the lobby. Lovely. But wait--is that the theme from MASH? A high-tech hospital resembles a MASH unit the way a calculator resembles an abacus, but beyond that, what sane person sitting at a piano in a cancer hospital full of patients undergoing excruciating and sometimes futile treatment thinks it's a great idea to play a song called "Suicide Is Painless"? 

The player is highly skilled but the selections are eclectic: the charming holiday tune "Some Children See Him" followed by "The Entertainer" and "Lord of the Dance." And "Suicide Is Painless." I take comfort in the assurance that a majority of the people listening aren't aware of the lyrics. 

My son is weathering his treatments well, starting with an infusion of Madagascar periwinkle (vincristine) in the early hours while I suck in an infusion of caffeine. How early do I have to get up to fulfill my early-morning trasnport duties? Fourish. Autocorrect thinks that should be nourish, which reminds me of the transfusion nurse who keeps trying to feed us and finally takes me to a locked room containing a refrigerator with a big sign on the door: Patient Nourishment Only. Uncrustables and ginger ale--sweet! I'm not a patient but I leave there well nourished.

In my purse is a book that ought to nourish my soul while I wait, but after the early start and the long drive, my eyes and brain are too fatigued to focus on the words. Instead I listen to the nurse's enthusiastic explanation of the need for a transfusion: red blood cells are like little delivery vehicles transporting oxygen and other essential elements all over the body, but chemo cripples the blood-cell-making equipment. What do you do when your car breaks down? You call an Uber! It's amusing to think of a fleet of tiny Ubers zooming into my son's blood vessels, but it's even funnier when the nurse keeps pronouncing it Woober. 

If retirement gets dull I suppose I can pursue a second career as a Woober driver, given my recent mastery of the art of driving long distances while barely awake. But the pay can't possibly be worth the hassles. I'll get up before the sun and drive to Columbus to help my flesh and blood battle lymphoma, but I'd be less motivated to transport people who aren't my son. I am not, after all, a red blood cell. I need to take time to nourish my own soul with poetry and nature and music.

Though maybe not "Suicide is Painless."

Working through the glitches

In the quiet darkness of the planetarium I may have heard some snoring, but I swear it wasn't me. I was breathing deeply and at times my eyes were shut, but I was just resting. Honest.

Well you can't blame a bunch of faculty members for falling asleep in the dark right after lunch on our big workshop day. Final grades were due at 9 a.m. and I know some profs were scrambling right up until the last minute, but enough of them showed up to make our morning workshop sessions worthwhile. We learned things, shared stories, and laughed together, which was good enough for me.

Which is why I was a little annoyed this morning when a colleague expressed sympathy over how badly the workshop turned out. How could we have been at the same event? Granted, we endured a few technical glitches--an intransigent computer, a clock stuck in a time warp, and a presenter delayed at a rail crossing. But while we waited for these problems to resolve, we filled the time by talking about great things our students had accomplished this semester.

If there was one unexpected throughline in the day's presentations, it was the need to accept and learn from imperfection. A presenter talked about what he'd learned from a new assignment that was "somewhat okay some of the time," and a small group discussion led to a great piece of advice for profs facing disruptions to teaching plans: "Accept imperfection." Another presenter reminded us that we need to acknowledge our students' right to fail: if they resist all our attempts to help them succeed, then "we may feel like we have failed them when they've failed us."

Our campus caterers didn't fail us: the lunch was perfect and the conversations even better. And then a bunch of us went over to the planetarium to see what the whizzy new equipment can do, except those comfy chairs in a darkened room were an invitation to relax perhaps a bit too deeply. 

We've all worked hard this semester and we needed some relaxation, and some laughter, and some commiseration, conversation, and compassion. I offer no apologies for presiding over a glitchy workshop. We're imperfect people working in imperfect circumstances and sometimes being somewhat okay can feel like triumph.

Time to hang up the regalia

Clues that it's time to hang up my regalia for good: 

Early in my career here I taught a terrific student...who returned for this year's Commencement as our distinguished speaker. How did she accomplish so much so quickly?

My second year here I served on the search committee that hired a wonderful young colleague...who will retire as soon as he gets his grades turned in this week. How could someone I hired beat me to retirement?

I survived all the standing and processing and sitting in uncomfortable chairs at Commencement ...but afterward my legs were so sore I could hardly walk. When did I get so old?

We suddenly need to fill in some blanks in the teaching schedule because of a colleague's unexpected departure...but I don't want to step up and teach any of the unmanned classes, even for overload pay. What happened to my sense of duty?

After Commencement I should have carefully hung up my regalia so it'll be ready the next time I need it...but it felt like too much work, so I left it draped over a chair. When will I need academic regalia again?

 

Pencils down, forks up

What a semester! I'd like to put a fork in it and call it done but the thick bits are still stewing. 

I've graded all the final exams except for one that a student had to take online, and of course it's a pain for me to write an online version of a face-to-face exam and post it to Canvas and arrange for online proctoring but it's more of a pain for the student who broke his leg very messily and is still at home recovering from surgery. So I did all the things and checked yesterday to make sure his exam was complete in Canvas but I didn't grade it, but now that I've graded all the hand-written exams (and my goodness my students wrote some great essays!), I can't get into Canvas at all because it is "currently undergoing scheduled maintenance." Did I receive an email about this scheduled maintenance? Maybe I did. I don't remember. At any rate I can't finish that last bit of grading or post the grades until the scheduled maintenance is complete so here I sit, stewing.

I've been stewing a lot lately over any number of silly little things, which is probably one reason my hair is falling out. It's probably not noticeable to anyone else, but my hair has been thinning on top since around March, due, no doubt, to stress caused by trying to live a semi-normal life while helping my son endure the throes of cancer treatment. But at least I still have hair. The chemo was making my son's hair fall out in clumps, so he finally got a buzz cut to even it out, and my husband got the same cut in sympathy, so now they have matching hair. So okay, one is more gray than the other, but you can certainly see the family forehead.

So while I'm stewing over any number of annoying little things, I have to remind myself: I still have hair, and my students wrote some wonderful essays, and the grading is nearly done. At some point scheduled maintenance will be complete. Meanwhile, I'll sit here with my fork at the ready.

A triumph of boredom

The thing no one tells you about cancer, I told my son yesterday, is that it's really boring. 

They tell us it's a journey, an unexpected adventure that might lead to new wisdom and purpose, or that it's a battle in which we might find triumph, but more often cancer is just a slog through muck that tries to enforce stasis, or an attempt to stay awake despite overwhelming fatigue, or an inability to relish things that once brought joy. Like food, for instance. When chemo destroys the taste buds, everything turns bland, and orange Gatorade can only go so far to assuage the ennui.

Mostly it's about waiting, but any cancer patient's patience can be tested when appointments require a two-hour car ride that makes you queasy, followed by various snafus and delays at the hospital so that your two-hour appointment turns into a 13-hour day, most of it deadly dull. Get a lumbar puncture and then lie flat on your back for an hour or so staring at the same old boring ceiling tiles. Sit still while chemo drugs drip, drip, drip into your blood vessels. Wait for test results, wait for answers, wait for food, and then regret it when it arrives because it tastes like sand.

So when my son's Gatorade supply ran out last night and he asked me to take a quick drive down the highway to pick up more, I suggested that he come along for the ride, just to get out of the house. Not much new to see--some new tar and chip on part of our road, a spot where milkweed is coming up on the shoulder, a view of the creek, the river, the sky. But it was better than staring at the same old boring walls in the same old boring house where nothing much ever happens. 

One day, I told him, you'll back at this time and it will be a boring blip in an otherwise exciting life. And I hope that's true. Meanwhile, there's always Gatorade.

Friday poetry challenge: reining in the nightmares

I show up at my office to find it changed, my books all gone and my art replaced by garish posters and one whole wall knocked down to expand the space and the carpet replaced by dull beige shag, and there's this woman there, young and pert with short dark hair and a bright smile, who says it's her office now. But I haven't retired yet, I insist, and I want to know where all my books and pictures have gone, not to mention the Jane Austen action figure and the Potato Head family and my stained-glass kaleidoscope, but she says she won the job in an online competition and if I have a problem with it I should take it up with HR, which I do, except when the HR director arrives she's a woman I've never seen before who can't understand why I'm upset. Yelling ensues. The argument ends when the HR director states that they had to hire this new person because she won the contest fair and square--and besides, she's so darned cute.

And that's when I wake up.

Is this my first retirement anxiety dream? Not very realistic. I mean, I'm sure some colleagues are already salivating over my lovely office, but even if the Powers That Be agreed to tear down a wall or put the carpet out of its misery, it wouldn't happen overnight--not without drastic revision to current purchasing policies. Once years ago a former colleague persuaded the PTBs that she couldn't move into a particular office unless (this is true) the doorway was moved to a different part of the wall because she didn't want to look at every dude who went in or out of the men's rest room across the hall, but I don't have the kind of clout required to move doors or walls or carpets. I doubt that anyone does.

We don't hire faculty via online contests (yet) or install them in prime offices because they're so darned cute, but any kind of faculty search would be preferable to no search at all. The PTBs have already selected replacements for my administrative roles, but my department was not permitted to replace the last couple of tenured professors who left us s0 they may be forced to replace me with an adjunct or two. Or a bot. Why not? They're hot! Suddenly I feel some doggerel coming on:

We've got
a bot.
Why not?
They're hot!
And cute
to boot.
Astute
offshoots
of bytes,
they might
delight
all night
and day
to stay--
no pay!
No play!
All work!
(A jerk.)

Now you try: rein in your nightmares by tying them up in rhyme.

What we've got here is failure to imaginate

Not a standard word, of course, and there's really no reason for imaginate to exist when imagine works perfectly well, but this morning in class I was thinking what we've got here is failure to communicate. I didn't dare quote the line because I feared that none of my students would be familiar with Cool Hand Luke--and why should they know anything about a film that came out decades before they were born?

I don't know who I represent in this scenario--the prisoner or the brutal captain--but I know I struggled to get students to imagine themselves in the starkly unfamiliar scenario presented in Natasha Trethewey's poem "Native Guard." I had to stand there and endure the awkward silence when they refused to look up unfamiliar words or read footnotes about unfamiliar historical events, but the most awkward silence occurred when I asked them to find the first mention of the word history in the poem. I had told them that Trethewey loves to examine gaps and erasures, stories left out of received histories, and I wanted them to think about how the poem employs history itself. It's a long poem, but history first appears in the tenth line:

Yes, I was born a slave, at harvest time, 
in the Parish of Ascension; I've reached
thirty-three with the history of one younger
inscribed upon my back. 

I endured the long silence as my students stared at the text hoping someone else would find the line, and then the silence grew even more awkward when I asked what sort of history a former slave might have inscribed on his back and how we might go about studying that sort of history.

I get it: it's the wrong time of the semester to ask students to think too much. They're tired. We're all tired. But we started the semester with Walt Whitman's "The Wound-Dresser," which took us on a guided tour of a hospital ward full of soldiers wounded in the Civil War, and I like to end the semester by taking another look at the Civil War to see if there's still anything left to learn. 

There is, but it requires some imagination. Trethewey suggests that poetry can help us understand gaps in the historical record by drawing us deeply into imagined lives, but do I really have to drag students kicking and screaming into engagement with imagination?

Some students you just can't reach--and I don't like it any more than they do.