Not a Gardener & No Scans

I'm not a gardener, but I do garden. Having a garden, for me, is not so much an exercise in futility as it
is in benign neglect. I put some seeds/plants in the ground, water them, try to keep the weeds down, toss my hands up at the first sign of blight, and mostly let the plants manage on their own. We end up with some pails of cherry tomatoes and basil for pesto and enough fresh herbs to keep our summer fare savory. Husband complains how, after paying for all the stuff one needs for a little urban container garden, our Sweet 100s are the most expensive tomatoes in town. But we eat them in caprese salads all summer long.

Here's the remarkable thing. I'm here another year to watch my peonies unfold. Soon I'll get to see the hydrangeas cheer on the yard with their pink and periwinkle and white pom-poms. Again. So I sing a little song as I dig around in the dirt:"You can't always get what you plant/You can't always get what you plant/But if you try some time/You just might find/you get what you seed...yeah yeah...you get what you seed.

And just like that April is over. It has been a BIG month involving a BIG and beautiful shift in my reality that, at the moment, I am not ready to share publicly. But it's a really really really good change, miraculous even, and it has nothing to do with cancer. I hope to be able to write about it here, or in some other way sometime soon, but right now, I'm sitting with my new reality in a quiet all-to-myself kind of joy, which feels like the right way to be just now.

That said, I also don't have any cancer news to report about myself, anyway. I had to reschedule scans, which were supposed to happen this past week, but didn't, because I came down with a nasty bout of covid. That was no damn fun. Thankfully, the antiviral has worked pretty well, and I made a pretty quick recovery except for a lingering cough, a constant low grade headache, and fatigue. Husband got it too and is recovering. Each day is better than the one before.

So, stay tuned for May, for news of those upcoming scans, and a bit of news on the cancer advocacy side of things. The ROS1ders have some things brewing for the coming months, and it's gonna be GREAT!

Thank you for your continued love, prayers, and support. 

Hold On

Spring got to Tennessee while I was gone. When I finally came home from too much rambling (Tucson, Reno, Puerto Rico, New York), the first blooms were already fading. My hardy daffodils, which popped up in early February, had lost their glowing yellow heads, and wearing only their long green sepals, stood like lanky little sentinels between my neighbor's yard and mine. The forsythia was full-on frothy yellow, and I hadn't even seen the light green fuzz of buds unfurling. My neighbor's early hyacinths had lived better days by the time I lighted in the driveway, and the stinking Bradford pears, bald when I left, were shedding white petals like fast-falling snow. But the season hasn't been a total loss. My so-called-memorial-cherry-tree was still blooming five years and a day after we planted it in the back yard. Also, husband and I got over to Cheekwood Botanical Gardens for the tulips and found them sleek and bright, still holding on strong.

And that's what's happening generally, a lot of holding on. For instance, I got to have another birthday, my fifth since I was first diagnosed with a birthday-stealing disease. That makes fifty-nine and has me looking forward to finishing this decade around the same time next year, hoping to be as healthy as someone with metastatic cancer can be. That thought never crossed my mind five years ago. 

But I know not to take this relatively long period of disease stability for granted. Or to complain. Because things could, of course, be otherwise. The trick, as always, is to live every day with this diagnosis as if it's, well, a day I might not have had, but a day I do have, but not a day that defines everything about who I am or what my life means, but a special day, but an ordinary day nonetheless, but a day that counts, and who's counting? And why does it make me nervous? And is that a long dark train I hear?

So yeah, I finally saw a therapist, because, obviously. 

And as one does in therapy we talked about how when you have a diagnosis of an illness like this stupid cancer, that goes into and out of remission, that behaves mysteriously, takes victims indiscriminately, etc. etc...how everything, EVERYTHING feels URGENT, how you don't want to WASTE ANY OF THESE PRECIOUS MOMENTS, but you still have to clean the bathroom and put away the laundry and make some dinner and pay some bills, and do some work, and, well, do all the things. And look after your people. 

And people you know are dying of the same disease you have.

And you still have to be you, living your meandering, uncollected, disorganized life, same as it ever was. And even though you're doing the work to address your issues with mortality, to let go of whatever it is you are supposed to let go of, you're still schlepping the sorrow and grief and pain of the imperfect world and your increasingly imperfect self. Because, you've noticed that the longer you live, the more imperfect you and the world get. And once upon a time, you thought it was the other way around, that if you just did more of something and less of another thing and worked harder and tried your best, things—maybe even you— would at least...improve. 

And that's not always so.

No matter, I say. Hold on.

My So-Called Memorial Tree

Last year on March 20th, John and I planted a small weeping cherry tree  in the backyard. The weather was chilly that day; rain and sleet took turns falling and calling the calendar into question. We could have put off the planting for another day when the weather was fine, but we'd bought the tree specifically to plant on March 20, the first day of spring and my 55th birthday, the first one since my metastatic lung cancer diagnosis. I was determined to get that twig in the ground. So we put on our rain parkas, dug a muddy hole, set the tree, and filled more mud in around it. It felt like an act of defiance, of the weather, yes, but also of something else, the nagging fear that tucks in alongside a metastatic diagnosis. I crossed my fingers and prayed that the tree would root well and bloom the next spring, and that I'd be around to see it. Of course, there was always that other possibility, one I didn't want to entertain – the weeping cherry could end up becoming my "memorial" tree, and its roots maybe even home to my ashes.

That's not what happened, obviously. Instead, I went ahead and had myself a 56th birthday, which I celebrated today with family and friends and neighbors on this first day of spring at one of our favorite East Nashville restaurants, Lyra. I didn't used to always go big on my birthday, but I've changed my mind about that since, well, ya know.  So carpe feliz cumpleaños and all that!

In that spirit, we had a community happy hour (actually a happy two hours) of cocktails and kabobs (cooked outside on the grill Lebanese style by Chef Hrant) and a wonderful Armenian layer cake (made by co-owner Liz, who happens to be married to Hrant). I invited lots of lovely people, and lots of them came. It was sunny and festive and kind of perfect out there on the patio honoring the Vernal Equinox. Plus a portion of the proceeds from that little party are going to The Addario Lung Cancer Foundation for the ROS1 Research Project.  So it was an entirely wonderful 56th first day of spring. And birthday.

And –
this: