Tag: MASC

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A year and some change…

I have Covid. Again. I got it exactly one year ago this past weekend, which I remember because it was Labor Day. The delta variant then and omicron now, I assume. Before and in-between, I’ve been fully vaxxed and boosted and am beyond grateful for this, as my symptoms have been those of a nasty head cold and not much more. But I find myself curiously sidelined from life again (much like I was during our long year-and-a-half of sheltering in place and, prior to that, my treatment for cancer), which has me feeling both reflective and a little bored. How I used to live in mortal fear of this virus that I now experience as a minor annoyance! And how I know that that fear was warranted because it’s claimed so many lives but also, perhaps, excessive because I’m relatively young and healthy and have taken all of the necessary precautions that have been available to me (masking, distancing, becoming vaccinated as soon as I was eligible, quarantining when I’ve been sick, etc.). Did my fear protect me in those early days when we all knew so little about the strange virus ravaging virtually every corner of the globe? It certainly influenced my behavior and decisions, so perhaps. And I remind myself that it was also shared by my doctors, who advised me to exercise caution because of my recent cancer diagnosis and treatment. But did my fear also inhibit me in ways that it needn’t have; did it cause undue suffering and isolation and anger and, at times, despair? Yes. Increasingly, the longer I live (or am lucky enough to live), the more I find myself confronting–even inhabiting–paradox. That is, two (or even more!) opposing claims, feelings, or realities being true at once. Logic tells us that this cannot be so, but experience consistently (and maddeningly) proves otherwise. I’m sure those older and wiser than myself know this; perhaps they’ve even tried to tell me as I’ve struggled to shape the morass of life into something clean and solid and coherent. Hellbent upon this furious yet futile task, I’m guessing I didn’t listen, or was unable to. Perhaps those who loved me left me to my work and those who didn’t laughed at it; either way, the lesson may be just starting to sink in now. It takes a long time to learn some things. Some days, after the upheavals of the past five years, in which so many of my certainties were shattered (or rather exposed for being assumptions and nothing more), I feel as though I’ve just been born. Like I’m looking out on the world with eyes that are newly opened, nothing quite in focus. 

Yet.

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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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Things you have to learn after cancer…

Now that school and fall are in full swing, I’ve had my first bouts of a cold, cough, etc. Last week, I also experienced some excruciating lower back pain. After consulting with my general practitioner, we concluded that I’d probably strained a muscle while exercising but, initially, I was convinced that I’d developed a tumor. Yep, I thought my cancer had metastasized, overnight, into my lower back. While not everyone who has received an unexpected cancer diagnosis necessarily thinks this way (i.e. in paranoid extremes), my guess is that some of us do. And part of the process of healing after treatment, at least for me, means not jumping to the worst possible conclusion each time some new symptom pops up. I don’t know why it never occurred to me before, but, in the next five years as I’m working toward remission, of course I’m going to get sick. And those (hopefully, minor) illnesses will likely be unrelated to my cancer. This is just something I’ll have to be mindful of moving forward, so I thought I’d note it here.

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The postmodern poetry of pathology reports

For a time now, I’ve been able to put cancer behind me. I’m doing–and thinking about–other things. But this Friday, I have my first post-treatment CT scan, and it’s looming large on the horizon. I keep rehearsing the afternoon’s appointment in my head by recalling how things went down the first time. Drinking that awful barium sulfate solution, alone, in a freezing cold room; the brisk manner of nurses and lab techs; lying on yet another narrow table; feeling the contrast dye saturate my veins; repeating the mantra I said to myself, before, as the machine pivoted around me: My body is a dark city, my body is a dark city. Like London during the blackouts of WWII, I don’t want it to light up. (Obviously, my understanding of how these things work is vague, but I believe the radiologists are looking for some kind of “activity”–for cancer cells to react to the chemicals coursing through my body by luminescing.)

For some reason, my mind also keeps going back to my initial pathology report. I don’t know why doctors give these to patients; mine consisted of a dense paragraph of medical jargon followed by this stand-alone sentence, in all caps:

THE LESION IS MALIGNANT.

Reading it felt like the closest I might ever come to visiting an oracle. But what seemed, at the time, like a fixed decree–an intractable fate–has since revealed itself to be a bit more pliant. Much can still be done in the wake of such things; choices can still be made. Which may be why I’ve been questioning some of my own lately. Small ones, like becoming irritated in traffic, or with the endless stream of students filing into my classroom to borrow my stapler this morning. Do I, alone, have the earth’s last functioning stapler, I wondered. And then I took a deep breath, a proverbial step back. I do a lot of that now. Trying to notice how I’m responding to certain things and why. Trying to hold onto the perspective that the past nine months has brought, though it was dearly purchased (does perspective ever come cheaply?). Is this worth the worry or frustration it’s causing me? Can I let it go? We all have so many heavy things to carry. Friday’s appointment is one of mine.

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Healing is hard work, cont’d.

I haven’t written in a while because I’ve been waiting for “news” to report. That is to say, some kind of change or improvement. There has been change and, I suppose, modest improvement. The sores on my tongue and the walls of my mouth have more or less healed, and the pain I felt in my throat when I swallowed has migrated to my right ear. In fact, that’s pretty much the only pain I feel anymore and it’s lessening, little by little, each day. This is most fortunate, considering the fact that I’ve been weaning off of Oxycodone over the past week. Next week, I will be weaning off of Gabapentin, but supplementing all the while with Advil and Tylenol. I also feel my energy returning, but slowly and in small increments. A single outing or errand will still wear me out more than it ever used to.

I think the next challenge in my healing process will probably be figuring out food. My last actual meal was on April 14, which I know thanks to this blog. I’ve been on a liquid diet for forty-four days now, and a limited one, at that. Given the changes to my taste buds, the only things I’ve found tolerable over the past month-and-a-half have been water, Ensure, butternut squash soup, drinkable yogurt, and vanilla milkshakes. That’s it. That’s what I have every. single. day. At the behest of my speech therapist, I will try a bite of something else here and there (applesauce, mashed potatoes, cottage cheese, other soups, etc.), but these either taste terrible, or I can’t manage to swallow them. My natural saliva production, which I’ve learned helps break down food as you chew, has gone completely haywire, and food will simply get stuck to my teeth, tongue, or the roof of my mouth, causing pain and discomfort. It’s really very frustrating. So, I stick with what I know works because my body needs calories to heal.

Much like a recovering alcoholic, I’ve started to realize how heavily our social rituals revolve around food and drink. It’s hard when you can’t participate, and a little lonely. But it’s not the end of the world. And, in my case, it’s hopefully temporary. I just wish I knew when I’ll be able to eat again. No one has told me, and I can’t find it in the two other MASC blogs I’ve located on the internet. It’s hard to continue to be patient, and to live with uncertainty. That’s pretty much the crux of this entire ordeal, in fact, from my diagnosis right up until now. A serious illness pulls the rug of certainty out from under you, and it’s difficult to regain your footing. I still have my sea legs, I guess, and might for a while.

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Healing is hard work

Consider the cucumber. We bought one at a plant sale my daughter’s school was having, and watching it grow has been fascinating. The students staffing the sale told us that cucumbers are climbing vines, and would need a trellis or cage to latch onto (if you’re an avid gardener, you already know this, but I’m a novice; I try to grow a few potted vegetables and herbs every summer, with varying degrees of success). We followed their instructions, and I was awed by the first little tendril that unfurled from the stem, delicately coiled as calligraphy. It listed far from the cage and I thought, there’s no way it will latch onto that! It seemed blind, like a worm or some deep sea creature, tonguing its way, vainly, into the air. But then, a day or so later, this tendril had somehow found the thin metal rib of the cage, and curled around it with such grace and precision that I felt oddly moved. That nature is ingenious and resourceful shouldn’t surprise me, but it did. It struck me as miraculous that this seemingly lost and fragile fledgling of a stem found what it needed in the night, even though it’s merely a rote machination of the plant–what it does, what it’s designed to do.

I’ve wondered if my body is functioning in a similar way. I wonder how much invisible work it does every night to heal and repair what has been ravaged. And I’ve wondered how it knows to do this, without any books, instruction, or bidding. I was in so much pain last week, and felt so vulnerable, that I couldn’t believe my doctors had sent me home to deal with it, alone. I don’t see my radiation oncologist again for six weeks. Six weeks! I would think to myself, enraged and incredulous that I’d been left to flounder through the hardest part of all this, unmonitored. But maybe it’s because there’s really nothing she could do for me, aside from prescribing the heavy regimen of pain meds. Maybe she knew that my body would begin to heal itself on its own, and my job now is to simply wait it out. Only it’s not so simple, because the process has been slow and strangely hidden from me. I wake each morning wondering how I will feel–whether the pain will have subsided some, or my energy returned. Whether my body, in its distress, will have found some kind of mooring.

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I’ll take what I can get

This probably gives you a good sense of where I’m at today. The hours pass at a snail’s pace, but I’m growing accustomed to this. Time is marked mostly by the dosing of different medications, in-between which I sleep or make myself drink something. Monday is a big day, however: my last radiation treatment!