Buzzed

In the past week on my social media accounts, I have added my voice to the shrill, to the complaining and impatient, to the fearful. We're all sounding the same notes. Yes, I'm a little afraid. I'm anxious. Like all y'all, I've been a bit cooped up in the days of COVID-19 and spring rains. We're also fretful about the well-being of the good folks we know who work in healthcare. All the very good advice out there on how to deal with isolation, summon equanimity, to live in the reality of pandemic times is, after all just, advice.

Yoga practice. Check. Going for walks. Check. Washing hands and staying home (except for solitary walks and the very occasional grocery forage), yes and yes. I'm catching up on reading, on those little projects around the house, etc., etc.

As a cancer patient, I've had some experience with social distance, keeping a low profile after infusion chemo, and I'd be lying if I didn't say that I kind of love it, at least without the infusion chemo part. It looks good on me. But I know it's awful for others who have lost work, who have had to adjust to working at home, who have to suddenly become school teachers to their kids AND figure out their economic lives. I know I'm fortunate to be able to work from home and not to have to worry about the educational well-being of little ones.

I'm not bored. Even scaled down and closed inside the four walls of my bungalow, my life manages to be over full and pretty content.

But there's a buzz I can't tune out. It's that conversation we're being forced to have, the one about who gets access to which resources. Who gets tested and who doesn't? Who gets treatment, and who doesn't? You've read and heard how the elderly, the "infirm", those with cancer or other serious illnesses find themselves among the unchosen, in respiratory failure and left to die so that those with more "prospects," the younger, the more "fit," get access to one of the too-few machines that could save a person's life. That buzz is so loud. It's a conversation too about the failure of policy, of the current administration's inability to understand and apply basic science in shaping a national response to our current circumstances. There's a recklessness in how the people in charge communicate, and an insidious divisiveness that spells out doom. I hear it even inside the brick and plaster walls of my cozy little house. It gets louder and louder and louder.

My health is good AND I have metastatic disease. I can say those things together because my last scans showed that I have no active cancer in my body, and I have no other acute illness at the moment. But my health is also fragile. Because my body is busy trying to keep the cancer suppressed with the help of daily oral chemo, and because I've undergone more aggressive treatment with chemo and radiation, I know my immune system is maybe not in tip-top shape. So, yes, I'm being super careful, and as I said before, mostly staying home.

NED. Clean scans. And I just had a birthday, my third since a Stage IV cancer diagnosis had me believing I might not last the year. My oncology team and I have worked hard to get me here. My health insurance has shelled out an awful lot of dough to keep me alive. While I love irony in a good book and appreciate satire in a late night monologue, I don't want to be the main character in a narrative that has me dying from the opportunistic infection of a little virus after pushing back a metastatic disease. I'm doing my part to stay safe. I just hope everyone else is too. Because that is all I've got.