Double Nickel and a Tree

It's the first day of spring, officially. It's also my birthday, the double nickel year -- 55. A few months ago I wasn't so sure I'd even see this day, but here it is, and here I am, grateful and humbled by the grace and science that has put me here and kept me here. I am grateful as well for all the good wishes, wonderful food, and lovely gifts that have come my way in honor of this day.

It's certainly been an eventful day, full of light and shadows. We had an active shooter drill on campus this morning, so that was no fun at all, and a grim reminder of what I have come to think of as the Great American Sickness, worse, even, than cancer. But, after the drill, I made my way to a fabulous story slam arranged by two of our amazing speech teachers. The students who participated told wonderful stories of strength, sorrow, redemption, hilarity, and determination. I came away inspired and affirmed once again in knowing the healing power of storytelling, perhaps our greatest natural resource.

This afternoon, my husband John and I planted a weeping cherry tree in the backyard. I'd ruminated about my upcoming birthday in an earlier post, and one of my friends suggested that I plant a tree in honor of the season, which I thought was a great idea. I chose a weeping cherry simply because I've always loved them. We found a small one at a local nursery this past weekend; it had mostly already bloomed, but there were still enough blossoms left on the branches to enjoy, and I think of them as harbingers of springs to come. As we put the tree in the ground and filled in the hole, I asked for yet more grace. I hope I'll get to see that tree bloom for many more springs. As I write, the temperature has dropped, and today's misty rain has turned into a light snow. Spring indeed.

You Look Great

One of the really nice things about sharing my lung cancer diagnosis with people is that when we visit in person, my friends and acquaintances often tell me how great I look. It's not like nobody ever said that to me before, of course. I can clean up pretty well for a fancy dinner or a night on the town, and my husband is more or less required to comment on my especial loveliness at those moments.

I'm not what one would call a "beauty" in the moviestar/model sense of the word. My face is remarkably asymmetrical; one eye is quite a bit bigger than the other, and the two are not placed equidistantly from my nose. My face is also long and horsey-looking; I've gotten a bit jowly lately, and my teeth have gone crooked as I have aged, despite a couple of years in braces as a kid. That fact doesn't keep me from smiling, though, which I hope I do a lot.  I do have awesome hair, which is silvering, and nice olive skin. I'm not what Hollywood would call especially "great" looking on any given day, but my looks aren't scaring off small children either.

So this is the part where I am supposed to say looks don't really matter anyway, and it's what's inside that counts, etc., etc. Of course that's all true. It really is. And I absolutely believe it. You should too. Everyone should. And by now we all know that standards of female beauty especially are a bunch of patriarchy-concocted nonsense.

But that doesn't change the fact that it's nice to hear "You look great!" nearly every day, even several times a day. I know. I know. When folks say that to me now, sometimes they say it in part because, well, I'm incurably ill, but I don't look sick (though I did look pretty crappy back in December when I had a pericardial effusion). They also say it, of course, when I wear a cute outfit or an adorable hat. But when I discuss this lung cancer thing with someone, explain to them the grim prognosis and hopeful therapy, often the conversation closes with this exchange:

Friend/loved one: Well, you look great!
Me: Thanks! I feel really great right now.

And none of that is even a little white lie. I do look pretty great.  And it's so incredibly kind of folks to notice and to say so, even if the parenthesis might read "for someone who has terminal cancer." I feel great too. And my saying "right now" is a way to acknowledge that I won't always look or feel "great," because one day, just like everyone else, I'm going to be a corpse! In the meantime, though, I love being told several times a day that I look great, no matter where the impulse to say so comes from. It's affirming. It feels good. And I want the folks who tell me that to know how nice it feels to be told "you look great"  as well. So, I've got a new thing to say when people tell me how great I look. I've started saying "Thanks! You look great too!" Because they do!

DNA and International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day. The media is full of tributes to remarkable women -- athletes, entertainers, scientists, educators, artists, writers, leaders, adventurers, supersheroes, etc. I'm going to jump on the bandwagon with a tribute of my own.

Chemist Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) discovered the double-helix structure of DNA in1953. Most

often, the "discovery" of DNA structure is attributed to biologist James Watson and physicist Francis Crick, who received the Nobel Prize for their research in 1962. While it's true the two had theorized the double-helix structure, it was not until they saw the work of Franklin and a graduate student she was supervising in 1953 that they had much needed evidence to further shape and support their theory. Franklin had been using the technique of x-ray diffraction to produce images of DNA, and one of those images, known as Photograph 51, was shown to Watson and Crick by another researcher, without Franklin's knowledge. They used the information from the image to build upon their theory. Even though Franklin's discoveries were foundational to DNA research, her work was treated by the scientific community as a footnote to Watson and Crick's efforts.

Today, I am a direct beneficiary of DNA research. My diagnosis involved genomic testing, and the treatment I am on, Xalkori, was designed to treat specific genetic fusions and rearrangements known as ALK and ROS-1. I'm grateful for Rosalind Franklin's contribution to DNA research, since her work is the foundation for what's keeping me alive today. Sadly, Franklin died young of ovarian cancer, a disease which, like other cancers, is being treated now at the molecular level, again, thanks to the foundation she helped build.

Weather or Not

In the northeast part of the U.S., where I grew up, they've had some weather in the past few days. Snow measured in feet. High winds pulling down power lines. Freezing rain and sleet. It's still winter -- and how. Every year in early March everyone in my hometown hunkers down for the last of it. I used to be one of them.

Where I live now, in Tennessee, it's truly spring already, even if the calendar doesn't admit it. The daffodils have been up for a couple of weeks, hyacinths too. Forsythia spills its yellow froth into the yard, and the tulip trees have all popped pink and white against a cloud-mottled sky. Spring here in the American South feels to me both leisurely and relentless in its pace. It's a long season, with steady battalions of new blooms marching on us every week until we arrive in the heat of summer and the peaches come on. Bradford pear, red bud, weeping cherry, dogwood, iris, azalea, wisteria all unfurl their blossoms and blooms at their appointed times, bold and showy.

Today at church, Father Jean-Baptiste offered his regular first-Sunday-of-the-month benediction to those who have birthdays in the next four weeks. This month, that's me. I was born on the official-by-the-calendar first day of spring, and in the frozen northeast, that was kind of a big deal. We hoped the date truly marked winter's end, but we could never be certain if it would be snowing or if the robins would already be nesting in the bushes just outside the living room windows. Nature had her own plan, and if we'd bet, we would have lost.

But it's early March and already spring in Tennessee, so the official Northern Hemisphere start date for the season on the 20th is just an overdue formality. I intend to go ahead and have a birthday in a few weeks, weather or not. I don't know how many more I'll get to have, and in truth, who ever knows, right?

Still, having late stage cancer can make planning anything in the future, even a very near birthday, feel like an act of hubris. In academia, we begin arranging our courses and ordering our textbooks for the fall term right about now. As I emailed my course preferences off to our department chair this week, I felt like a Yankee in March, hoping for the best, but accepting the uncertainty of the moment. One goes through the familiar and habitual motions of planning something for the future as if mortality were an abstraction, all the while knowing full well that it is not. Plenty of evidence for that. So yes, hubris. But in the weird fun-house mirror of Cancerland, hubris can look an awful lot like hope.