Happy Fourth

 

Happy fourth day of Christmas! It's also my fourth Christmas season alive on the planet since being diagnosed with incurable cancer. Yay for survivorship! On top of that, it's the first year since that diagnosis that the awful cancer hasn't been actively trying to kill me—my most recent scans show I've had a whole year of disease stability, in this, the most unstable of all years my generation has ever seen. So, ya know, deep, deep gratitude here, because I love a cruel irony that keeps an otherwise healthy, travel-loving cancer patient from running around the globe doing bucket-listy things during said spate of good health. But there's privilege at work. I didn't do anything to deserve being cut such an easy break at such an awful time. 

So here I am, for the moment, well enough to work (yay for editing projects!), and fortunate enough to do that work from home. Also on the list of blessings: there's a stocked pantry and fridge (and liquor cabinet). We got to see the bright--heavy conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter just over the horizon a few days before Christmas. We decorated the bare Bradford Pear trees in the front yard with Christmas ornaments and put up some lights and garland, and it only felt a little forced. I made a wreath and an advent calendar (both of which turned out okay) and tried to learn knitting again, and failed, again. My family gave and received nice holiday gifts (nothing too extravagant, everything thoughtful); we had delish holiday fare on the table, and everyone in my household and extended household has kept well.

Still, the shadows fall deep in the winter darkness, and they chill some part of my soul with fear and anxiety. Two of my best friends risk their lives every day on the COVID frontline, and I worry about them constantly. One of them got the virus and, thankfully, recovered after being pretty damn sick. 

December has some tough anniversaries for me too. Last year in December I lost two friends to cancer, one on December 4 and one on Christmas Day. The year before that, my dad died on December 3. As we approach a new year, I'm reminded that I lost another friend to cancer in this past year, another 2020 shadow. In March of 2020, my city was hit with devastating tornadoes, and on Christmas Day, just four days ago, a man bombed our downtown. 

And I'm still alive.

I'm doing, what they call in Cancerland—or probably in any Gravely Ill Land—survivorship. I'm living, with the disease in the midst of all that is crazy in the world. Phrases like "for now" "at the moment" "stable" "disease in check" pepper my responses to queries about my well-being, underscoring the temporariness of it, the other-shoe-ness, but also calling attention to the fact that I am in the most enviable of positions. I am well. Well enough, anyway. And I have friends and family members who have cancer and/or other severe health problems who are not well enough, who are struggling with treatment decisions, suffering from severe treatment side-effects, struggling to access treatment, friends who are actively dying as I write this.

I don't say that to be grim. We all live in this world, with its shadows and griefs and aching hearts, with lives approaching terminus. I'm not telling anyone something they don't already know. The losses, the anniversaries of the losses, mark the time for us; weirdly, they become steady points of reference in the before and after of this crazy kinked and loopy path we're on. Periodically the iPhone and the social media accounts throw up "memories" (gee thanks) that startle—oh! that picture was taken BEFORE diagnosis; that one was taken the last time I saw Ann, and that one was the last time we were all together. 

The one for this post was taken for The Fourth Day of Christmas in the fourth year of diagnosis. Four calling birds. Three french hens. Two turtle doves. And a partridge in a (Bradford) pear tree. Counting blessings. So many. So very many.

On Scanxiety

I have scans tomorrow morning. They are “routine,” a regular feature of the territory in Cancerland. These hulking clanking machines, these sound tunnels and sliding beds, making images of my insides with magnetic field & radio waves, with x-rays, with contrast dyes. 

I messaged a friend who has breast cancer the other day about the things cancer patients put their bodies through in order to stay here and hang out with all y’all cool people. The needles, the time spent in tubes getting pictures of one’s guts or brains made, the ports and drains, the insanely priced pharmaceuticals, the side effects. The stigma, especially with lung cancer. But it beats the other option.

When I first started having scans after starting regular treatment, I always got terribly anxious the day before. What if the treatment had stopped working? What if the machines found more disease, more tumors, more spots? What would I do then? 

Well, then the machines found spots. The cancer had outsmarted the inhibitor. So we tried a new inhibitor, and that worked for several rounds of scans. I was so elated the first time I heard No Evidence of Disease. But of course things didn’t stay that way. More spots appeared. We did infusion chemo and radiation, and went back to the inhibitor, which has held me for about a year now.

I guess what I mean to say, is that I still get scanxiety. And because my disease is metastatic, the reality is that it will probably return at some point. I’d like to focus on the “probably” in that sentence, because that gives us some wiggle room. Probably isn’t definitely. Still, the likelihood is pretty good that at some point something will show up on the scans. What that point in time is remains unknown. 

So, perhaps it’s not the prospect of the scans that produces anxiety, but rather the specter those scans raise of the unknown, of having to move from one way of thinking about the world and one’s health to another. The prospect of the sudden pivot.

The good thing is that at this point, we’re not out of options if something does show up. Still, I’d rather we didn’t have to discuss them this time around.

I’ve taken up a mantra to help steady my psyche while I’m in the scan tube. It’s from a 14th Century Mystic, a nun who lived in isolation for a long time and who eventually became an abbess. In the book of “showings” or Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich shares the wisdom she found in holy visions she had and in the voices she heard comforting her in a time of illness and distress. She believed in God’s assurance that “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” 

She also, reportedly, liked cats, as shown in the picture above. 

I like to think of Mother Julian’s words writ large on the cosmos. No matter what happens with my scans.

And all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.