Greetings from the Altered States of Euphoria

The lumpectomy went well yesterday, thanks for asking, and now I have to wait a week and a half for the pathology report, which will determine "next steps," as the medical folks like to say because it sounds less threatening than the possibility of radiation and chemotherapy. My surgeon thinks it unlikely that I'll need further treatment, but it all depends on what shows up in the lymph node biopsy.

We'd driven up to Columbus Sunday afternoon so we could spend some time with my son before he entered the grueling regimen of whole-body radiation that will destroy his bone marrow this week, and we spent the night at a hotel where we'd stayed before, close enough to the fairgrounds that we could smell the horse barns while hearing trucks whizzing past on the interstate. The room was a bit tricksy: getting the door to shut and lock properly was a challenge, and someone had rigged the TV to come blaring on right in the middle of SpongeBob. But I slept well, avoided eating or drinking after midnight, and arrived at the hospital ready to get chopped.

Which was fine. I mean, I was sedated the whole time, so what do I know? I'm in no pain at all today, thanks to lots of Tylenol and Ibuprofen. They prescribed some Tramadol just in case, but so far it's been unnecessary. After previous surgeries I often tried to do too much too soon and suffered the consequences, so today I'm loafing around in my jammies and leaving more comments on blogs than I generally have time for. 

There were, however, side effects, some of which were a complete surprise. For instance, thanks to all those pain-killers, my knee doesn't hurt! And my daughter beat me at Spelling Bee! We have a friendly rivalry over several of the New York Times daily games, where we're pretty evenly matched. She's more likely to beat me at Connections and Wordle, but I almost always come out ahead on the Spelling Bee. Until yesterday, when my brain was apparently in a different place.

What shall we call that place? La-la Land, Spaced-Out Sector, The Altered States of Euphoria? I paid a lengthy and unpleasant visit to Nausea Nation, which is not uncommon after anesthesia--in fact, I'd warned everyone who would listen, including the anesthesiologist, that I often get vertigo and I'd once suffered a severe bout of vertigo after being sedated with Propofol. He gave me a little lecture (between sneezes that he blamed on asthma) about how Propofol is really the best option in this situation, and he promised to give me something to counteract the vertigo, a little Scopalomine patch on my neck.

It didn't help. In fact, the patch was so unhelpful that the recovery nurse tore it off when my vertigo kept me tied to the bed holding my head completely still to try to make the room stop spinning. They gave me a barf bag and I had some dry heaves but nothing came up, which is not surprising since by that point I hadn't eaten for more than twelve hours.

In fact all I ended up ingesting the whole day were a few dry crackers, two little bags of pretzels, and a can of ginger ale. They sent another can of ginger ale with me to get me through the drive home. We'd hoped to leave by 5 p.m. so we could listen to the Cleveland Guardians game on the radio, but I spent so much time in the Extended Recovery Unit that we watched most of the game on television. Well, I saw bits and pieces as I swung in and out of a drug-induced doze. It was close to 10 before we finally made it home, which I wish the Guardians had managed to do a few more times.

But I'm back and I feel pretty okayish, considering. Among the things I'm not allowed to do today are showering, vacuuming, lifting a laundry basket, or mowing, to which I can only say Hurrah. The discharge instructions warn me not to make any important life decisions or sign any contracts for some time after anesthesia, which is a good thing because if a hit-man had been hanging around the recovery room while I was fighting vertigo and nausea, I definitely would have put out a contract on myself just to make the room stop spinning. 

My only goal for today is to write a blog post, which I can now cross off my list. Next I'm planning to dig into the massive care package my wonderful colleagues gave me, dig out some chocolates and Sudoku puzzles, and wrap myself up in the warmth of the love I've been feeling from all my friends and readers. I appreciate every one of you, even if I'm sometimes too spaced out to say so.

Care package with everything I need, including chocolates, Goldfish crackers, and Jane Austen.

Here I am in recovery, rocking that hospital gown while the Guardians lose their game.

Friday poetry challenge: Passing the test

The whisper of pages being turned and papers shuffled, the gentle scratch of pencil on blue book--as my students write their midterm essays, the room is so hushed that the clickety clack of the computer keyboard up front sounds like a series of gunshots. So I turn off the computer and start typing on my phone, a challenge in the best of times, which this isn't.

Typing on the phone slows me down. My fingers are too fat and awkward to fly accurately across that tiny keyboard, and if I don't proofread, I end up with ridiculous spellings. Just a minute ago I typed sliws, and the other day I nearly hit Send on a text message that said I hope it all hoed well. Hoed? Goes!

But today I am even slower and less accurate than usual because I'm a little overslept. Overslept? No! I typed verklempt but autocorrect didn't like my sowlling. Spelling. Whatever.

This morning some wonderful colleagues came into my office carrying a huge gift basket, a care package to get me through my surgery and my son's bone marrow transplant next week. It's full of things I live--er, love. Like chocolates and hand lotion and puzzles and a whole stack of cards that I will enjoy reading when my eyes get a little less teary. It is good to be loved and supported by such terrific people.

But it's hard to write about it on this tiny screen. 

My nature students are writing midterm essays about the costs and benefits of being tested in the wilderness, so I think I will attempt a little test of my own: can I write a Friday poem in the time it takes them to write an essay, using only my phone? Well it's worth a try:

The pencils fly across the page

As students reach that trying stage

When midterm in-class essays test

Their progress through the wilderness

Of education. Meanwhile, I

Attempt to make my fingers fly

On tiny keyboard, mangling words

Until my message is absurd.

To pass the test, my students pay

A price: more study means less play.

I pay a toll in awkward rhymes

Composed in very trying times.

(The benefit, of course, is clear:

I get to post my poem here.)

 

A sonnet! I wasn't expecting that. Did I pass the test?

And how about you? Write a testament to your trials and leave it in the comments.

That's one way to increase cancer awareness

So I'm sitting in the waiting room in an ill-fitting beige robe, surrounded by women wearing identical ill-fitting beige robes, each carrying the same accessory--a clear plastic bag containing bra and shirt--and I'm pulling my beige robe a little tighter where it gapes open in front while trying not to notice the traffic whizzing past just outside the wall of windows, when I receive a campus email announcing an upcoming Breast Cancer Awareness Lunch. I want to send off a snarky reply pointing out that I've recently reached my lifetime quota of breast cancer awareness, that in fact I'm sitting in the freaking Stefanie Spielman Comprehensive Breast Center being comprehensively inundated with breast cancer awareness, but I decide against it. A simple no will suffice.

And so I won't have an excuse to show off my handy-dandy little card announcing that I'm radioactive. I've never before been required to carry a card explaining my radioactive state to anyone whose Geiger counter goes off in my presence, and it would be a shame to possess such a card without ever having the opportunity to use it. I'm especially fond of explaining how the doctor announced that the radioactive seed had been successfully inserted in the tumor in my breast: "Okay, she's hot!"

Come to think of it, if I do happen to set off any Geiger counters, I could forego flashing the explanatory card and just announce, "Don't worry--I'm hot!"

The tiny radioactive seed marks the tumor so that my surgeon can find it easily when she goes to yank it out next Monday. Today I spent the day in Columbus being prepared for surgery: pre-operative education, lab tests, EKG, chest x-ray, radioactive seed placement aided by ultrasound, mammogram to make sure the seed was placed properly, meeting with the radiation oncologist, and I don't remember what else. I was comprehensively cared for by a horde of medical professionals whose names I could not recall if my life depended on it. My life may depend upon their competence, but if it takes me two weeks to learn the names of a classroom full of students, I can't be expected to instantly remember the names of all the medical professionals crowding around the ultrasound room and remarking upon my hotness.

Everyone--nurses, doctors, lab techs, schedulers--keeps saying perfect, an odd word to bandy about while wrangling with the imperfections of ailing bodies. Have I stopped taking ibuprofen? Perfect. No family history of breast cancer? Perfect. Blood pressure lower than last time? Perfect. 

But I can read and I know my blood pressure wasn't perfect. I'd drive through horrible city traffic and was comprehensively stressed out, so my blood pressure was no more perfect than anything else I've experienced since radically increasing my breast cancer awareness, but if the nurse wants to apply the word perfect to the fact that I've successfully managed to don the ill-fitting beige robe, then I guess I'll accept it. 

Today's gold star goes to the phlebotomist who drew four vials of my blood before I even knew she'd stuck the needle in my arm. I generally walk away from lab work with multiple band-aids and bruises on both arms, so getting a good blood vessel in one painless stick is just short of miraculous. 

But four vials is nothing--nothing!--compared to what my son and daughter have been experiencing in a different building at the same hospital. My son will be admitted to The James Friday to begin the long process of preparing for his bone marrow transplant, and my daughter spent seven hours this morning having bone marrow harvested, though I reject the use of the word harvest to refer to my child's blood products. The advance testing process had required her to give up fifteen vials of blood at the same time, and for the past week she's had to inject herself with a drug that increased her body's production of white blood cells--and made her feel tired and achy like someone coming down with the flu. But this morning's seven-hour harvest festival produced a precious gift that will help her brother get healthy.

But first he has to get less healthy. Over the next week or so, his diseased bone marrow will be destroyed to eradicate the cancer and make room for his sister's donation. That's not a pleasant process, and for a while he'll have no functioning immune system. But then that perfect gift of healthy marrow should start making him better over the course of the next couple of months.

So right now our whole family is more aware of cancer than we've ever been, and we're trusting in the comprehensive care of a horde of medical professionals to get us through the coming challenges. If one day we get so far removed from all this pain and anguish that we can allow our comprehensive cancer awareness to lapse--well, that would be just about perfect.  

 

Brother and sister.

 

The same river twice

My final time teaching A River Runs through It and I realize I don't know how to teach this text. The film, sure--focus on how color, composition, and movement emphasize the connection between people and nature, etc. But the book? Students find it boring, all those words, all those long descriptions of geology and fly-fishing and fish. I put students in groups and ask them to identify what would constitute paradise for each main character; I talk about fallenness, how people are a mess who need grace and strength and art; I read passages aloud, about the rhythms of life and Paul's being encircled by a halo in the water and the moving closing lines:

Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

Norman is haunted by waters because the waters tell stories of loss--of innocence, perfection, and loved ones. The loss of his brother looms large throughout the book, which is why it's so shocking that Paul's death takes up no more than a page and a half of text. The question of how to help Paul, though, suffuses the entire novella, alongside the larger question of how anyone can help anyone else, particularly those closest to us. How do we help those who don't want our help? How do we accept help when doing so requires admitting vulnerability? How do serve as our brother's keeper when our brother resists the very idea of being kept by anyone?

Maybe my students are too young to find such questions compelling, but for me, the questions grow richer and more meaningful with each passing year. I have seen loved ones struggle to help those closest to them, and I've seen the pain that results when someone close can't be helped. I've kept my deepest struggles to myself so as not to burden others, but now I want to--need to--help my son as he faces his most demanding trial, and all I can do is offer money and comfort food and encouragement. He is grateful, but it never feels like enough. 

Now others are stepping up to help me and my family: covering my classes after my surgery, offering meals when I'm in recovery, sending gifts to help with my son's medical expenses. It's all more than I could have dreamed of and more than enough but, at the same time, I wish we had no need for anyone's help and could turn it all away.

And so I read A River Runs through It through different eyes this time, knowing the weight of loss like never before and wondering whether I can get through those final pages without collapsing in tears in front of my students. I may just lead them out into the deep waters and encourage them to feel the mist rising, ensconcing all of us in a halo of waters, and then I'll let them find their way back to shore on their own.    

Doing my breast--er, best--to be transparent, but not too transparent

The next question, of course, is what to tell my students--and when.

Seventeen years ago when I was fighting an entirely different type of cancer with a treatment plan requiring radiation every weekday for a month and chemotherapy every three weeks until Thanksgiving, I knew from the start that I would have to tell my students something. My hair started falling out during the first week of the semester so I couldn't pretend everything was fine. Besides, I had to arrange online activities for chemo days, so from the start I enlisted my students' help in making all the logistics work right.

This time is different. No chemo, no hair loss, and not much chance that I'll look visibly ill before the surgery. Afterward I'll have to take a little time off, but how much do my students need to know about why?

The good news is that the lumpectomy itself will be on October 5--in the middle of our four-day fall break. I plan to stay off campus that whole week and I've already found colleagues to cover my Wednesday and Friday classes. The Thursday capstone students were already scheduled to have a research day in preparation for their annotated bibliography assignment, and I trust them to use the time wisely even if no one is in class taking attendance. 

But I have to tell my classes something about why I won't be on campus and why I won't necessarily be responsive to emails, and I need an explanation more compelling than because I'll be taking really great drugs.

I don't remember how much I told my students last time--did they know what kind of cancer or where? Would they even know the meaning of endometrial? I think I kept it vague, but I don't remember. 

This time I'm telling them that I need to have a medical procedure that will keep me off campus and mostly inaccessible for a week but it's nothing to worry about. Is that too vague? I mean, I don't want students thinking about my breasts, and I certainly don't want them thinking about the fact that one of the pre-op procedures involves inserting a tiny radioactive seed into my breast ACK OOF YIPES. I'd rather not think about that myself so I'm certainly not telling anyone else about it. (Except you. You I can trust.)

Most of all I don't want my students thinking about me at all. I want them to think about poetry and fiction and nature and culture and history, but it's impossible to do that when someone is poking a radioactive breast in your face. So I'll shut up about the breast.  

So we've agreed on a plan: be as vague as possible; focus on the course material; reassure them about the positive prognosis. Don't even breathe the word breast. (Breast breast breast breast breast.) 

Friday poetry challenge: Ordinary heroes

Sept. 11 is a good day for appreciating heroes: the first responders who run up the stairs of a burning building when everyone else is running down, the airplane passengers who disable a hijacker intent on terror, or the workers who sort through piles of mangled metal to retrieve barely recognizable bits of bodies. We salute them and rightly laud their extraordinary actions.

But sometimes a perfectly ordinary action can feel heroic, as I reminded myself yesterday while running through my mental list of friends who would be willing to answer a phone call at 5:30 a.m. and drive clear out to the middle of nowhere to lend me a car. It's a short list.

"I'll call Tom," said my husband, and within minutes neighbor Tom, barely awake, was parked at the end of our driveway in his Subaru, which he kindly allowed us to drive to Columbus for a many-test medical marathon.

Why couldn't I drive my own car? Because a violent thunderstorm in the wee hours of the morning had dropped a tree across the top of our bridge. 

The bridge was fine, and the newly repaired part of the driveway was fine, but some gravel had washed away at the end, leaving a one-foot sheer dropoff that my car couldn't have managed even if there hadn't been a tree on the bridge.

So off we went in Tom's car, leaving when it was still so dark that I had no idea what color it was. I had visions of wandering around a parking garage clicking the key fob toward random vehicles until the right one responded.

My son did the dark morning driving, dealing ably with road debris, standing water, and slick silty lanes, not to mention rush-hour traffic in Columbus. We had something like eight separate appointments in three different buildings but somehow we made it through everything. My son stayed in Columbus for the night so he can have more tests today and meet up with his sister, who will drive down to take the next step toward donating the bone marrow he'll need--another kind of ordinary heroism.

And I drove home in Tom's car, relieved to have learned that a lumpectomy and radiation ought to take care of my little health problem and it can all happen within the next four weeks. The logistical challenges of scheduling the surgery and covering my classes will be nontrivial, but having a plan in place is half the battle. 

It was a long, exhausting day that brought relief and results--but none of it would have happened if neighbor Tom hadn't answered his phone. 

O sing with me of neighbor Tom
Who took a call with pajamas on,
Brought a Subaru when all hope was gone--
my neighbor Tom! 

Who are your ordinary heroes?

Which is why I handed in my journalist badge

I've been accused once again of burying the lede--a valid complaint if I were writing breaking news for the New York Times but I'm not so give me a break.

The lede, for the non-journalists among us, is that all-important first paragraph in a straight news story organized in the inverted pyramid form. The lede succinctly serves up the Who, What, Where, Why, When, and How of some newsworthy event in words readers can easily digest. I worked as a journalist long enough to master the form and I have the trophies to prove it, but I've always preferred feature writing.

Feature writing tends to be less urgent, less formulaic, and more colorful than straight news, often meandering down a leisurely path and trusting readers to make their way without a road map. Or, to switch metaphors, the feature story doesn't force-feed readers the meat of the story all at once but instead allows them to taste a bit here and a bit there until they've well and truly feasted.

Feature writing is appropriate for stories that are interesting but not especially pressing; straight news serves up facts while features use facts to move toward insight or understanding or, sometimes, amusement. 

I'd be the first to admit that the difficulties I've been facing this year are far from newsworthy to anyone outside my immediate circle. The catastrophic flooding in Nepal makes our little inundation look like the aftermath of a toddler's bathtime, and the other ills that have plagued us (cancer, mold) are common to thousands of people all over the world. So when I write about my experiences, I'm well aware that there's nothing particularly special about what we're going through. This is not front-page news but merely the human condition. Nothing to see here. Move on.

But writing helps me make sense of things and may provide insight or understanding or amusement to others, which is why I keep doing it but also why I don't feel any obligation to follow traditional journalistic conventions. I write for myself and for those few people interested in following me down a meandering path, and sometimes I like to provide some rewards along the way, little nuggets of insight or information buried long past the opening line.

For those readers who can't stick with me past the first paragraph--what are you even doing here? Surely you can find something more newsworthy to peruse.

For the rest, thanks for coming along on the ride. Better buckle up because it's bound to be bumpy.

An earnest approach to assigning blame

Earlier this week I enjoyed a chat with Lady Bracknell--or with the colleague who will be playing the role of Lady Bracknell next week in a community production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. The usual administrative claptrap is so much easier to stomach when I imagine the words spoken in the distinctive cadence of Lady Bracknell, who is remembered for lines like these:

Thirty-five is an attractive age. London is full of women of the highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.

Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit: touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. 

[After asking Jack Worthing whether he smokes and receiving an affirmative reply]: I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind.  

My favorite line occurs as Lady Bracknell questions Jack Worthing about his suitability as a match for her daughter:

Lady Bracknell: Are your parents living?

Jack Worthing: I have lost both my parents.

Lady Bracknell: To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. 

Cracks me up every time. Blaming an orphan for the loss of parents is ridiculous, of course, but it becomes more ludicrous when it comes to light that, in this situation, the child was not the careless one. 

We're not comfortable blaming Jack for being left behind with the baggage, but Odysseus is certainly comfortable blaming Poseidon for raining disasters down on his head--even though Odysseus himself bears a big chunk of the blame. A hero enmeshed in horrors may need to assign blame outside himself, but pointing the finger doesn't do much to get him out of trouble.

Yesterday someone tried to assign blame for the recent string of disasters besetting my household: "We all know who did this to you--the Man Upstairs." As if some all-powerful being gets his jollies by targeting my office with mold, my house with floods and windstorms, and my son with lymphoma. I don't intend to engage in theological debate regarding the origin of pain and suffering, but I have always felt that there's so much awfulness oozing around loose in the world that I shouldn't be surprised when some of it sticks to me. The rain falls on the just and the unjust, etc. It just seems like we've met our quota of rain for a while so we ought to be due for a long dry spell.

Silly me! 

The good news is that my son and I both have appointments at The James next Thursday, so we can share the ride.

The bad news is that his appointments deal with the extremely scary prospect of getting a bone marrow transplant while my appointment is a consultation with a surgical oncologist who would like to remove the cancerous lump from my breast. 

Lady Bracknell might say that having two members of the same household undergoing cancer treatment at the same time looks like carelessness, but whose carelessness? Finding someone to blame won't help any of us cope, but what will? 

I won't have a treatment plan until I get more imaging, so I have no idea how this new diagnosis will affect my ability to teach and perform my administrative tasks. Plenty of people have offered to help and I will take them up on those offers as soon as I have more information. Meanwhile, I teach my classes and perform my administrative tasks and take care of my household and try very hard not to think too much about what lies ahead. 

But if a little comedy from Lady Bracknell can lighten the load, I'll grab hold of it in earnest.   

A birthday wish: more dullness, less drama

Would a grown man feel silly carrying a Happy Birthday balloon around a hospital all morning long? If he did, he didn't admit it. 

Yes, my son celebrated his birthday with chemotherapy--not exactly the top item on his wish list but he'll take it. Hospital staff gave him a birthday balloon at his first appointment, and everywhere he went for the rest of the day total strangers smiled and wished him a happy birthday. 

We had a little time to kill in Columbus afterward so I drove us up to Belle's Bread, a Japanese-owned French bakery known for its curry donuts. I bought some baked goods to take home and then my son wandered into the nearby Asian market and looked with longing at the sushi selection, knowing that raw fish is not a good choice for a guy with a compromised immune system. I remember the first time I ate sushi again after finishing six months of cancer treatment. There's nothing better than that long-delayed first bite--but it'll be a while before he tastes it. 

He stayed the night in Columbus so he can get more chemo today, so I was a long way down the highway before the big event: our daughter and son-in-law drove to Columbus to take our son out to dinner with his nieces and nephew. Chemo can make things taste horrible, dull the appetite, make swallowing painful, and even inspire vomiting, but this time he was able to enjoy a meal without too much drama.  

It wasn't a normal birthday but this hasn't been a normal year. My mother used to insist that normal is just a setting on your dryer, but after four full months of cancer treatments, we're really hoping that next year's birthday will involve more fun and less drama, more cake and fewer needles and nasty chemicals that make swallowing painful. Maybe it could even be a little, dare we say it, dull. Enough with the drama already! (But a few balloons wouldn't hurt.) 

Lost in a familiar place

I'm driving to campus on the same route I've driven at least three times a week for more than 25 years and suddenly I look around and can't figure out where I am. On state route 60, yes, alongside the Muskingum River, but have I passed that BP station yet? Nothing looks right.  

Moment of panic. How could I lose track of myself in a place I've known and loved so long?

I blame sleep (disturbed) and stress (sick son) and feeling overwhelmed (work work work). Now I'm looking at the laptop screen through tired eyes and trying to make progress on a project that keeps getting thwarted by other people's (in)actions (because I'm not the only person who's stressed out and distracted right now), but all I want to do is put my head down on the desk and sleep, except I can't because I have to check my phone to see if there's any news from my son.

He's in the hospital again, in Columbus. He had some funny numbers on a blood test yesterday so, long story short, my husband drove him to The James last night, which was a relief because my night vision makes driving in the dark stressful. Downright dangerous, even. But it means I'll be on taxi duty when our son gets released, which could be today or tomorrow or Friday or whenever. If it's Saturday, he's out of luck because I have to teach a class (and probably I should go ahead and print out the handouts today in case I can't get back to campus or in case there's another power outage or in case, I don't know, a meteor destroys all life on earth between now and the weekend).

So last night I had trouble sleeping while awaiting news from the hospital, and then I had trouble sleeping after my husband arrived home in the wee hours, and then suddenly it was morning and I had trouble staying awake while driving to campus but now here I am trying to get caught up on a ridiculous workload while awaiting a text telling me to drop everything and drive to Columbus. Frankly, I'm hoping that they'll keep him until tomorrow because I don't believe I'm mentally or physically alert enough to drive to Columbus and back today. 

And frankly, I'm tired of hearing myself complain about sickness and uncertainty and work. I am doing all the things I need to do because I love my son, which is my immense privilege as a parent. It's just hard to do the Mom things when the work things are also in disorder, and it's hard to make progress on the work things when I might have to drop everything to tend to my son.

This is temporary, I keep telling myself. Someday this will be over. True, but while I'm struggling through this ridiculous journey, maybe I can forgive myself if I occasionally lose my way.

Dumb luck

Lucky guy, the aide said as he handed my son a chicken salad sandwich and a bag of chips. 

Lucky? A luckier person would have avoided lymphoma entirely, but I guess luck is relative. If you get out of bed just after 4 a.m., eat a quick breakfast and then vomit it all back up again before being driven two hours to the James cancer hospital, and if you survive the first two (of four) annoying procedures before 11 a.m., and if you then realize that you're feeling a bit peckish and ask the aide for a bite to eat before starting chemotherapy, and if the aide then delivers a chicken salad sandwich and your favorite brand of chips, that's some kind of luck! We have to take our victories where we find them.

In the four months since my son was diagnosed I have been lucky enough to avoid driving duty on four-procedure days, but yesterday I drew the short straw. Blood work, chest x-ray, two kinds of chemo, lumbar puncture--a scenic tour of hospital procedure rooms and a very long day. 

Twice my husband has been the designated driver on multi-procedure days that have stretched beyond twelve hours, but then he is also better equipped to entertain himself for long periods at the hospital. By the time he's ready to leave, he will know the personal history of everyone in the waiting room and will have stories to share about their interesting lives. 

I have a different method of surviving long hours of waiting: I mentally wrap myself up in a warm cocoon sequestered from the hospital milieu. Sure, I'm up for a conversation with my son and I'll ask for his help on whatever crossword puzzle questions fall within his areas of expertise (like what's on the flag of Mali or which U.S. state capital has the second-smallest population), but mostly I retreat and try to be anywhere but where I am. On good days I can read a book or article or draft a blog post on my phone even though I can't even see the letters on that tiny keyboard, or I'll play some mindless game that makes my eyes so blurry that I can't read road signs on the drive home.

It's hard to wrap myself in a warm cocoon, though, in those frigid hospital rooms. When we arrived before 8 a.m. yesterday the outdoor temperature was already close to 80 with humidity to match, but I carried a thick sweater because I knew where we were going. The aide who provided the lucky sandwich also gave my son one of those wonderful warm blankets, but no one ever offers me a warm blanket. 

Of course I'm not the patient, the person whose suffering is the center of everyone's attention, but that doesn't mean I'm not miserable. His illness shrouds my every thought, especially when he e gets coughing fits so severe that each cough feels like a dagger stabbing me in the heart, but I'm the healthy one in the room, the one who doesn't have to choke down a dozen pills a day or inject himself with medications that seem to make him sicker or shuffle through a growing pile of medical bills. Lucky me!

I try to hide my misery so I can be helpful to the sick guy; I count my blessings to counter the nagging malaise, but every blessing comes shrouded with a but. I found a great parking space--but it was in a hospital parking garage that fills me with dread. I remembered to put barf bags in my car--but I'm living a life that necessitates barf bags in my car. The treatment is allegedly eliminating every sign of lymphoma--but the side effects make me want to lash out at whoever is hurting my kid.

So I guess I'm lucky, ish, but I won't feel really lucky until we can banish the word lymphoma from our family's vocabulary. Meanwhile, I could really use a warm blanket.

Typing with my eyes shut

I wrote 1000 words with my eyes shut this morning because (1) I was having trouble keeping them open and (2) I didn't want to abandon the one colleague who showed up for Writing Wednesday. She had just been telling me how writing in the presence of other people helps keep her on task and focused, and normally I would agree but seriously, I had almost no sleep last night and it was very hard to think or speak or put any kind of prose down on the page, so I decided to stop fighting and just close my eyes and type. It wasn't pretty:

I think of my eight-grade typing teaching, mr who? Who would walk around the room slowly calling out letters—a,s, d, f, j, k, l, sem—and we had tofollow along on those big bulky manual typewriters that took the force of ajackhammer to press down the keys throgouthly. I never again used a manual typewriter afer that class but it ws a good way to learn and strengthen findgers at the same time. 

See? Barely readable. Reminds me of what Truman Capote (I think?) supposedly said about Jack Kerouac's On the Road: "That's not writing--that's typing."

With my eyes shut I can type really quickly but can't reliably back up and revise, and I don't even bother trying to find the number keys so I tend to spell out numbers. It's an effective way to disempower that annoying internal editor, but at some point I have to open my eyes and re-engage the internal editor to try to beat the words into some semblance of sense. 

Why didn't I get any sleep last night? Long story involving my son's ongoing battle with chemotherapy side effects, a story involving more vomit than you'd really care to read about plus rampant feelings of helplessness, but the result is that he's back in the hospital to get some fluids and tests and heavy-duty nausea medications so he can get back on his feet before the next round of chemotherapy (Friday!). He's too sick to drive himself so my husband and I had to tag-team the commute, but fortunately he's in the local hospital instead of two hours away. I dropped by to see him today around noon. He ate a little bag of chips and about three bites out of a sandwich, which is more than I've seen him eat all week. 

So yeah, a little too much on my mind to be able to sleep, but I had to go to campus this morning because the only IT guy who's not on vacation this week had agreed to meet me in my office at 8 to convince my college laptop that I am indeed authorized to access college resources like the printer network and Teams, so I had to get up and get to town just a few hours after I'd finally drifted off to sleep. This is the second time this summer that my college laptop has decided that I'm no longer an employee. Next time it happens, I'll just agree and walk out the door.

Mr. IT got my laptop functioning again (six months until retirement...please let it survive that long!) so I had no good excuse to avoid Writing Wednesday, where I let gravity grab hold of my eyelids and wrote 1000 words about writing, and typing, and that annoyingly arrogant grad-school student who lost an entire term paper he'd been writing in a departmental computer lab after an explosion at a tobacco warehouse nearby caused a power outage, back in the era of big floppy disks and tiny clunky monitors and (maybe this is the most bizarre part) tobacco warehouses located within a few blocks of an R1 university. I wouldn't want to be the person staring at a blank keyboard where a paper used to be, but then again, he ended up with a great story. Imagine asking a professor for an extension because spontaneous combustion at a tobacco warehouse destroyed your paper.

He was typing with his eyes wide open, which is what I'm doing right now, which is why most of the words are spelled correctly and make some modicum of sense. I'm glad I stuck it out at Writing Wednesday and got some words down on paper (er, screen), words that I might find some use for at some point in the future. First, though, I need a nap.

The view from a waiting room at the local hospital. Not inspiring but what did you expect?

 

Friday poetry challenge: Glassy-eyed wonder

When I chose the window seat, I did not expect it to become the Falling Window Seat, offering a front-row view of a smashing performance that caused diners to leap from their seats in astonishment or maybe terror. I'm pleased to report that no one was injured in the making of this spectacle, but the glass shattered spectacularly and the show, alas, could not go on.

I'd driven my son to Columbus for chemotherapy at The James, and we'd arrived early enough to grab lunch at the hospital cafe. The Juneteenth holiday had thinned out the usual crowd, so we scored a table next to a window. But what was happening just outside our window? Thick coils of rope swaying like pendulums in the breeze, scattered tools and unrecognizable equipment, and one worker, a man in hard hat and yellow vest, leaned back and looked up over our heads as he held a rope taut, trying to steady something outside our angle of vision. Moderately interesting, we thought, but not much of a show.

And then BOOM!--Something big smashed down on the terrace. 

Inside the cafe, diners jumped from their seats and ran, some leaping away from the windows and some rushing toward them to get a better view. Suddenly the cafe was crowded with onlookers chattering in many languages, wondering whether they ought to call a doctor or flee for their lives.  

Meanwhile, the terrace outside was thronged with workers looking up at the building, looking down at the shards of shattered glass, looking inquisitively at the equipment they'd been using to try to raise a massive pane of glass into place. One man talked into a radio while others began to remove the suction cups from the glass lifter. A worker stood with hands on his hips, looking up and shaking his head. Anyone who had been standing nearby when the glass fell would have been studded with shrapnel.

Indoors, onlookers scanned the shards for blood, expressed relief at its absence. Outdoors, workers in sturdy boots walked around oblivious of the dangers underfoot.

It could have been a disaster--it certainly sounded like one. But instead it was a bit of terror and shock intruding into our lunch hour before we walked back into our ordinary lives, relieved that today we would not be a part of a story on the evening news. Another day, another near-death experience. Ho-hum.

But the beat goes on:

Bless this mess, this glass that passed

so close--but missed! I must insist:

let's raise a glass and wrest a gloss

from this distress. (The shards got tossed.)

Now who wants to try turning an unexpected interruption into a smash hit?

Friday poetry challenge: Driven to excel at tedious tasks

Halfway through our long drive home from Columbus after my son's weekly chemotherapy treatment, the hospital called asking him to come back--not today but tomorrow AND Sunday. Yes: they want him to make the four-hour round trip three days in a row, and since chemo makes him too dopey to drive, I guess I'll be in the driver's seat.   

I had just been boasting that I'm getting better at managing this challenging task. If I set my alarm for 4 a.m., take an eye-opening shower, and eat or drink nothing before we leave, I can drive straight to The James without GPS and, usually, without a rest-room break. While my son gets his tests and treatment, I eat breakfast in the hospital cafe and suck in some caffeine so that I'm fully alert by the time we're ready to head back home in heavier traffic. 

So here's my reward for boasting about how well I'm doing: I have to do it again, and again, and again. 

It was a snafu not of our own making. His current treatment plan requires him to get a certain drug by injection four days in a row; he received the first shot during today's regular hospital visit and the remaining pre-filled syringes should have been delivered to our house by courier. Then the phone call came: the pharmacy was out of the drug and wouldn't be able to deliver more to our house until Monday. The hospital has enough on hand to give him the shots tomorrow and Sunday, but only if he can show up in person.

It's important that the treatment not be interrupted, and so, after a bit of back-and-forth on the phone, he agreed to get back to The James on Saturday and Sunday, but the hospital sweetened the deal by offering him some gift cards to pay for gas plus a deeply discounted hotel room for the night. Unless he can find someone else eager to take an unexpected junket to Columbus, I'll once again be doing the driving while he does the sleeping, which plays an important part in his recovery. While I'm getting better at driving, he's getting better at surviving. At this point, the tests are all pointing toward eventual success.

I thought he was asleep early this morning as I drove through dark and fog and traffic, but then he chuckled at the Fresh Air podcast I was listening to: an interview with David Sedaris. Near the end the author was asked why he still writes and goes on book tours and revises his work obsessively at the age of 69, and Sedaris said, "Because I want to get better." 

I immediately wished my students could hear--really hear--that message, but at the time I was thinking only in terms of writing. I have no desire to get any better at driving my son to the hospital, but if that's what it takes to help him get better, I guess I'll do it.

Let's wrap some rhymes around road hazards:

Long lines of orange cones
stretch toward the horizon.
Cars swerve--he's got nerve!
I've got to keep my eyes on
"variable speed limit" signs
and follow to the letter.
I'm not so hot on driving, but
at least I'm getting better.

Your turn: pour some pizzazz on a tedious task.

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."

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.

Tag-team parenting, in and out of the rookery

A great blue heron soared toward a sycamore tree and landed near one of many massive nests. It poked and prodded its partner on the nest, which rose up, shook itself off, plodded out onto a limb as if to take stock of the wider world, and soared off as the returning partner settled onto the nest. Tag-team parenting: as good a way as any to get it done.

I thought we'd reached the empty nest era in our house but my husband and I have been doing some tag-team parenting of our own, taking turns dealing with our son's health problems so that we can maintain some semblance of ordinary life. He's home from the hospital once again and rejoicing in the news that the tumor has shrunk to nearly nothing, but he still needs help getting to treatments and tests and we need to be alert in case he takes a turn for the worse, as he did last week. 

Today it was my turn to soar off into the distance to see my daughter's choir concert. Two hours driving, 90 minutes of music, and two more hours driving back--but worth every minute on the road, just to fill my senses with beauty in the company of my grandkids. 

An added bonus: the performance space was five minutes away from my favorite heron rookery. Family, music, beauty, birds--food for my soul to sustain me through a busy week. 

Random bullets of Wednesday, with sighs and howls

The accreditation team has left the building. Repeat: the accreditation team has left the building. And the entire campus heaves a sigh of relief.

My last time teaching "Howl" this morning and I wonder how today's students will react. So many words! So many opportunities to take offense! Taking offense would be evidence that they've actually read it, but I suspect that "Howl" is tame by today's standards of discourse. 

I wanted to howl myself yesterday, and yet here I sit in my office quietly not howling--but I'm howling on the inside. My son was in the local emergency room yesterday (not the main one in Marietta but the branch in Belpre, which I wish I'd known before I spent so much time circling the horrible parking garage at the Marietta hospital) getting tested and pumped full of electrolytes before they sent him off (in an ambulance this time, not a helicopter) to Columbus with possible pancreatitis, which is a common side effect of one of his chemotherapy drugs with a name that sounds like asparagus but isn't. I spent some time with him in the ER (in Belpre!) before he left. My husband left this morning to be with him at The James, and I'll drive up tomorrow or Friday if he's still there. When I'm with him I think about all I'm not getting done on campus, and when I'm on campus I think about the need to be with him in Columbus. Howling on the inside wherever I am.

Meanwhile, yesterday I shot the best photo I've taken in years, entirely by accident. I stepped out of my building in the afternoon, looked up, and noticed sun shining through dogwood blossoms while storm clouds passed over. Raised my phone. One shot. There it is. Sometimes you just have to be in the right place at the right time (and sometimes every place is the wrong place)--but you won't get the shot unless you look up. 

 

Correspondence concerning "The Correspondent"

Dear old friend,

I've been wanted to send you Virginia Evans' novel The Correspondent but right now I can't seem to organize my life enough to put it in the mail, and on second thought it's the kind of book I look forward to reading again so maybe you should find your own copy. Sending you the book would be the kind of gesture that, over time, builds a friendship like ours, but you're the kind of friend who will understand that sometimes it really is the thought that counts.

How are things with you? Kind of difficult here, with frequent disruptions due to my son's health problems, although I hesitate to call them disruptions because it sounds so negative, as if I resent him for getting cancer. I would gladly take the cancer away from him if I could but since I can't, I'll drive him to Columbus for extra tests, cook the foods he likes best, clean up his vomit, and closely monitor my phone throughout an important meeting with the visiting accreditation team because my husband took our son to the emergency room while I was still barely awake this morning and I need to know what's going on. (Electrolytes are low. Maybe something more. Who can say? Nothing I can do for him at the ER so I'll keep busy here as much as possible considering multiple distractions.)

One of the things I really like about The Correspondent is how our main character, Sybil Van Antwerp, deals with the distractions that interrupt a life she considers alternately mundane and miraculous. A retired attorney and judicial clerk, she devotes her life to writing letters (some by hand, some by email) four mornings each week, an ongoing "correspondence that is her manner of living." She writes letters to friends and family members; to famous people like Joan Didion, Ann Patchett, and Larry McMurtry; and to strangers, some of them hostile, whom she somehow manages to transform into friends over time.

But that makes the book sound too saccharine. She's a feisty old lady, revealing fragments of herself to a variety of correspondents and requiring readers to assemble the puzzle of her complex character. Her voice is, by turns, angry, prickly, condescending, sarcastic, self-righteous, cranky, curmudgeonly, conciliatory, tender, and loving, and in the end she's a character with whom I'd gladly spend more time--hence my desire to re-read the book. 

You might enjoy this book because Sybil shares our love of reading. Nearly every letter refers to some book she's reading, and her letters to famous authors reveal how reading helps her understand herself and her world. In a letter to Ann Patchett, for instance, Sybil explains why she appreciates a particular character in State of Wonder: "I saw some reflection of myself in her. The agonizing ethical questions for which the reader puts her on trial. That amazement one feels at this stage of life--a sort of astonishment that is also confusion, which leads to a sort of worry, or a sort of fear, I guess. How did we get here?"

And I see some reflection of myself in Sybil's seeing some reflection of herself in Patchett's book, making the book a Russian nesting doll of character analysis. 

Like Patchett, Evans invites readers to put her main character on trial. Sybil has always welcomed the clarity law provides; at one point she explains why she pursued a career in law at a time when the field did not always welcome women: "The appeal for someone like me (us) to find, on the face of this mad, inside-out, senseless, barbaric, intolerably fraught and painful and mind-spinning planet, some semblance of order...well, of course it's appealing. There's nothing quite like the comfort of the law, black and white."

But the letters reveal that nothing is quite as black and white as it appears. Feisty Sybil first resists admitting culpability for both minor blunders and major disasters, but over time the blinders come off her eyes--even as she is literally losing her eyesight. She tells various versions of the truth to different correspondents but reveals the whole truth over time only to a correspondent she calls Colt, whose identity is revealed late in the book in a tender but harrowing revelation of personal pain.

Moving toward the end of an eventful but misunderstood life, Sybil seeks connection and significance. "I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction," she admits, adding that it is

a lonesome walk out in the wildness of hills and wind. Mountains. Snow. And sometimes there is someone to come along and walk with you for a stretch, and sometimes (this is what I'm getting to) sometimes you see in the distance some lights and it heartens you, the lone house or maybe a village and you come into the warmth of that stopover and go inside.

She returns to this image late in the book, after her correspondence has brought together disparate people from all over the globe, people who would not have known each other except for their connection with Sybil, who has transformed these isolated nodes into a rich and thriving community, including one character to whom she reveals her shame over a long-ago tragedy, a character she tells, "it's taken me some time to recognize how knowing you has been like coming in from the cold, lonely road to find a warm fire and a table laid, so thank you for that."

And that's another reason I wanted to send you this book: you have been on this road with me, have welcomed me into a comfortable space with a warm fire and a table laid, and I'd like to thank you for that before it's too late.

That's ultimately why the correspondence exists: to share the bumps in the road with someone willing to walk alongside. For Sybil, the letters she has sent out and those she receives 

are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn't there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one's life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it's a very small thing, to someone?

And that, I guess, is why I write to you and why I'd like to send you this book, to scatter puzzle pieces or chain links or dandelion seeds across the miles in hopes that some meaning will survive beyond our separate selves. If I can't send you the book right now--well, you're just the kind of correspondent who will understand.