A Bajillion Sonic Suns (Cancerversary #7)

What the heck? It's my seven-year cancerversary, and today I am at a writers conference listening to a guest speaker talk about publishing, with a posse of excited middle schoolers by my side. Deja vu. Seven years ago, I had turned up at another writers conference to give a workshop to middle and high schoolers, and I was toting a 1-day-old lung cancer diagnosis that took up a lot of space in my psyche. On that beautiful fall day, I sat with a dear friend under a circle of trees on a bench in a university quad and told him I was probably going to die before too long. The disease was stage 4, incurable, with a terrible prognosis, according to my "extensive" research online. He thought maybe a higher power had other plans for me. I was skeptical. Who was I to deserve any special consideration from the universe?

But he was right. I didn't die soon after that conference. Instead, I got treatment, well, multiple treatments of targeted oral therapy, infusion chemo, radiation, and more targeted therapy, which I still take every day. I was fortunate enough to join a clinical trial. And at seven years into this crazy cancer dance, I have crammed in a lot of living I never thought I'd get to do when I was handed a diagnosis that sounded a whole lot like a death sentence. Instead, I got a miracle. To honor that miracle, which has the hand of the divine in it, along with the hard work of researchers, my medical team, and the loving kindness shown to me by dear ones, family, friends, and even complete strangers, I am inviting you to support research into ROS1 cancer by donating to my personal fundraiser through Network for Good here: Leslie's ROS1 Research Fundraiser

And for your viewing pleasure below, to celebrate this miraculous stretch of life, last week I took one of my old radiation masks I'd been saving since 2019 when the cancer had metastasized to my brain, and I cut it up, painted it, and made a weird mobile out of. Plastic, wire, paint. I wrote a poem on it:

Your dreaming body

dreams of dancing

atomic be-bop

cells and organelles

muck and mud

germ and bud

a bajillion sonic suns

believe believe believe

breathe

And that's what I hope to do for a good long while...just breathe. Oh, and make weird art. And maybe, just maybe, make a wee difference by helping move the needle on cancer research.