Category: Radiation

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Why I Vote

Where does one begin when the world is burning in every sense? Perhaps here. Most words and gestures feel laughably inadequate. Action, less so, but we’re continuing to shelter in place, so I haven’t joined those rightfully taking their rage to the streets. I realize that privilege underwrites this decision, just as it has so many other aspects of my life detailed in this blog: my ability to work from home, the fact that I have a home and stable employment, my access to healthcare when I fell ill, the very breath that fills my lungs and has not been taken prematurely. It has never been more clear that these things are–and ought to be–basic human rights, not privileges. So that is what this ballot will reflect.

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Let the record show…

…that sometimes, they were happy. There is so much to miss re: life before quarantine that finding oneself feeling good, while in it, can come as a shock. Yesterday, for example, was the official start of my daughter’s summer and it was, well, lovely. The hours–even minutes–passed at a leisurely pace, even more so than a usual Saturday. There were no forgotten online assignments to track down; no flooded inboxes; no Brain Pop, Splash Learn, Freckle, or other inane platforms to remember and toggle between. The heat had arrived, along with the mosquitoes, but both belong here and we went outside, anyway. Meals also punctuated the day in such a welcome, ritualistic way that I took notice. Perhaps because it was exactly one year ago now that I finished radiation and found myself floundering without them. Everything I consumed then was liquid, meager, awful to taste, and painful to swallow. The fact that I can enjoy all foods again is something to celebrate, so I am by noting it here. I hope I don’t forget how I felt last night while preparing dinner–how happy and at ease, despite everything–because such moments are rare, for me and for so many others suffering, each in their own way, at this time. My daughter thundered around the living room in her gymnastics unitard, dead fucking serious about the improvised routine she was performing for no one, while my husband folded laundry to a delightfully random playlist of his choosing–Curtis Mayfield, Procol Harum, the Beatles–and I thought, yes. This is it. This is everything.

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Swim At Your Own Risk

How many times have I seen this sign and ignored it? Or worse, “No Swimming”? Maybe four or five; I remember them all. Lake Cochiti, a cement plant, Seville’s Guadalquivir River… They come to mind now because I spend a lot of time thinking about risk–what it is, how one decides whether or not to take it, what it used to be. The only logic of these past weeks has been a kind of dream logic. I am floating; I am holding my breath; I am a sunken stone. When I scream, no sound comes out. You don’t think to notice the wrist unadorned by a hospital bracelet, the toe without a tag. 

Every day when I walk, crest a hill, and am greeted by a gust of wind, I like to imagine it blowing through me like a gutted house. My body becomes skeletal–all bones and no flesh–sacred as a ruin. Did James Spader just ride past me on a bicycle? I can’t tell because he was wearing a mask.

My six-year-old tells me to feed her stuffed swan Kung Pao chicken. The roses already look ragged, but this is the most beautiful spring I’ve experienced. The scent of baking bread emanates from one house; fabric softener, from another. I try not to take my daughter’s new preference for being read to by a robot personally. Everyone I see houses panic in their heart. The sirens are faint enough to be mistaken for birdsong.

I teach my daughter how to draw a star. I also neglect her. I cannot remember if I took my medicine. I play tag. I’m not very good at tag; I don’t like it. My daughter really wants me to watch Pup Academy. I don’t want to watch Pup Academy. I want to barter away my soul by scrolling through my phone, instead. I find nothing there that I need. 

I keep opening my day-planner to March, even though it’s May, because that is when time stopped for us. I don’t know how to keep a record of these days, but it seems important to try.

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Life under quarantine

What, exactly, does it tell us? Several things:

  1. Even the simplest tasks are performed under a pervasive general strain on all of one’s faculties during this bizarre, sad, and maddening time.
  2. I am well enough, and my daughter is well enough, to undertake such simple, ostensibly heartening tasks.
  3. Somehow, we have an abundance of construction paper, but a dearth of the other kind (see below).
  4. I remain a perfectionist when it comes to many things, even under the shadow of a pandemic that, it would seem, might provide a welcome opportunity not to be SO. DAMN. ANAL.
  5. My daughter and I have creative differences.
  6. Our ability to reconcile these differences and complete the friggin’ rainbow has become an internalized metaphor for–and imagined predictor of–my own ability to get to the other side of this day, week, month, etc. in one piece.

As of right now, the rainbow remains… in progress. Will (try to) report back.

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There’s no place but home…

This is the album that got me through yesterday, courtesy of my dad’s old record collection. You would think that, having survived a year of something akin to self-quarantining during my recent cancer treatment, I’d be primed for this new normal. I’m not. A curious corollary of acute illness is the myopic focus it induces (something I wrote about in a previous post), but the current COVID-19 crisis has resulted in pain and anxiety that feel much more diffuse. I’ve wanted to write here again in an attempt to manage it, but finding the time, space, and energy has proven difficult while working and parenting from home. Here’s hoping that might change.

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Turn and face the strange…

A year out from my cancer diagnosis and a month out from my last scan, I still find myself trying to reconcile how I thought I would be feeling now with how I am. The following is excerpted from a journal I keep more or less sporadically:

The depression I was feeling a week or so ago now appears to have morphed into anxiety. It hits me when I arrive at work in the mornings–really, whenever I leave my daughter and husband. […] The news I follow (both local and national) every day is no help. I’m anxious about the rise of white supremacy, coronavirus, fires in Australia, the fact that the common flu killed an otherwise healthy thirty-five-year-old man… If I list them all here, will my worries go away?

I guess it’s part of post-cancer existence, this knowing in one’s bones–no longer just one’s head–that life is both fleeting and finite. Like those coins in the Borges story, this knowledge is so heavy induces a kind of paralysis; I don’t want to go anywhere, do anything, take risks. Which is not where I was a few months into my recovery after treatment. Then, I felt uninhibited and impulsive, like I wanted to grab life by the horns and wrestle it to the ground, or ride it over a cliff. I contemplated things like dyeing my hair (which I did), and getting a tattoo (which I didn’t). I felt hungry for new experiences, for higher frequencies of feeling that now terrify me. Who was that person, born again and almost feral at forty? It’s decidedly not who I am this morning. 

I share this because I thought perhaps readers in a similar boat could relate.

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Birthday Greetings

Yesterday I turned 40. Cancer has changed my relationship to many things, time being first and foremost among them. I welcomed this birthday with elation, despite the fact that this particular age is dreaded by many. There’s no shortage of over-the-hill/you’re now officially OLD cards and other doomsday paraphernalia out there heralding one’s transition into a new decade (be it 30, 40, 50, or beyond), and I know, from observing those around me, that aging can be an especially fraught experience for women. There is so much cultural currency in youth and beauty–indeed, women often seem valued for these things, alone–that losing them is a terrifying prospect. But, after cancer, I can’t imagine begrudging a single birthday from here on out.

I covet all the years.