Miscellaneous thoughts

The 7/6/2013 Quote of the day was Thor Heyerdahl's, "For every minute, the future is becoming the past."
I remember having that thought when I was very young. Even to think "Now!" takes a second that will never come back. When people finish something unpleasant and say, "Well, there's an hour of my life I'll never get back!" I know exactly what they mean.

I have a book on my shelf called, "Living Through Breast Cancer." Every single time I catch it out of the corner of my eye, I think "Better Living Through Breast Cancer," and smile to myself at the silliness of the thought.

For me, lying on the grass with my dog is like yoga. I feel my spine click around, feel my shoulder and neck muscles relax... I become aware that my skin is an organ of my body, and I pay attention to its messages. All that is among the reasons I like warm weather. It isn't as much fun lying on crusty snow with an icy wind blowing over me. I have tried it and I know.

I read the other day that everybody in Europe is genetically related to every other European, as close as cousins. I can't now find the article but it didn't surprise me. It's about the same as the village I work for: if you start counting through people you know, you'll shortly come to a relative of the person you're speaking to. Europe's the same way, just bigger. It's a "six degrees from Kevin Bacon" thing. We are all related. Depending on one's feeling for Family, that's either good or bad.

Perfectionists learn to take time to do a thing properly. I always used to think I was a perfectionist because I was always frustrated with my mistakes. I have, however, always hurried through chores because I wanted to get to the "sitting and reading" part of my life. Morning job and observing Morning Boss have begun to teach me that it's all right to take a little more time to make sure I'm on the right course.  Removes a lot of the tension from any task.

I wish I liked myself better. I have accused so many people of thinking I'm not good enough, when, really, it is I who has no use for myself. (Should that be "I who have no use...?") 

The really good thing about mowing the lawn on the tractor is that I'm creating my own breeze while I'm accomplishing something that needs to be done.

And yet another EVENT!

Thank you all for your kind sympathy on Max's departure. We're still breathing here, I've settled down and gotten over myself in regard to poor Husband's attempt to lighten the mood . . . and, while I would have the little pink boy back in a heartbeat if he could be well and happy, it's so easy having one cat and one dog. 

Angus has almost stopped looking over his shoulder when the supper dish goes down. For years, he's had to give up his dish for Max. He's moved to the foot of the bed to let Max have the next-to-Mom's-head spot. He's retained enough of his little wild man personality to shine through, and now I think he's enjoying being an only dog. He bounces around like a little rocking horse and playbows at MiMau, at Husband, at me: he clearly is not aware that he is just as old as his brother who is no longer among us.


The EVENT is that today is my birthday. I have reached an age seven years beyond the 54 that my sister's friend, playing psychic, said would be the end of me. I have lived two years beyond a cancer diagnosis and cure. I've lived long enough to have been a drunk and have seven years of sobriety under my belt. 
Life is good.
I'm a lucky woman.

Post-mastectomy: Fun Facts to Know and Tell

With hope that none of this grosses anybody out . . . Murrmurrs wrote recently about her mammogram experience and a few of her readers' comments indicated that people still avoid making the appointment. Murr's response:  "As the late and much-lamented St. Molly Ivins said, Get. The. Damn. Mammogram."
Last August 4 at 9:00am I had two breasts. At noon I had one. During the following several weeks I had the emotional upheaval that, I read, accompanies the removal of any body part. Time and Life filed off those edges and I'm fine . . . and still me, for better or worse.
I wasn't prepared for some of the physical effects that remain. None of these is traumatizing, but nobody tells you about them beforehand. Maybe they aren't fun facts, but from my point of view, they are . . . interesting.

• The most salient sensation I had prior to diagnosis was itching. I still have an occasional itch but the itchy part is no longer there. Or the itch feels as if it's deep inside somewhere, perhaps near my liver. I have tried finding the spot where the nerve was truncated and scratching there, but it's unreachable. In either case, it's frustrating to have an itch that can in no way be scratched. The affected exterior area is absolutely without sensation, which makes that itch even more odd.
• One has a silicone blob to wear, of course, and with it in place, my exterior is quite unremarkable. Without the accessory under a t-shirt, that part of the body is amazingly flat. Beyond flat. The original structure never was, and is not now, impressively convex, but as I look down from above it appears that I have Mount Everest sitting directly adjacent to the Dead Sea.  
• Remember 1980s shoulder pad buildup? The shoulder pads in the coat overlaid the shoulder pads in the blazer, which overlaid the shoulder pads in the blouse and it appeared that my earlobes were resting on my shoulders. Put clothing on this guy to the right and you have the image.  During surgery, the various layers of tissue get stitched up separately, of course, from inner to outermost. If all goes as it should, which it has in my case, all those stitched-up layers knit together and make a hard little ridge in the middle of the Dead Sea. 
• All those knitted-together layers connect the outside to the inside:  One's skin feels as if it is Super-glued to one's rib cage. Reach for something that requires a stretch, particularly at an odd angle, and the subfloor shifts a little. Not painful, but perceptible.

None of these sensations is constant, except the numb, and most of the time, even this short time after the mastectomy, I forget that I am an amputee. And all of the time I'm glad It was dealt with so simply. 
So, that's all. Just another day in the life. Who else would tell you these things?

Let there be light. Please!

I've been funking for several days. The cold wind, the white-gray sky, the early dark (soon to become earlier darker, DST ending on 11/7), the care of aging animals, two evening meetings that were . . . difficult . . . to live through, not to mention the tedium of preparing the minutes, which, in these cases, I feel, need to be verbatim. It wears me down. During the week I had one of my rarely-indulged twelve-hour sleeps: went to bed at 7pm and stayed there, mostly unconscious, until time to get up and, once again, shoulder my yoke. 
The season of dry hands, dry skin everywhere, has arrived. Lotioning, as an activity, is not so luxurious in the dark and cold as it is in the balmy warmth of summer. 
Life has not been fun.


Deprived of sun, I have turned to illusive sources of light and warmth. I dig in the jewelry box for all the sparkly things that I own. Pearl and silver and faceted jewelry, the prisms of color and glimmers of light provide remembrance of human-friendly seasons. Pearly-pale nail polish to reflect any stray glimmer of illumination in my environment. I have discovered sparkly body lotions: gold, silver, pink.
Arrayed in my faux glow I emerge luminous as the interior of an oyster shell.


Remember that gaudy colorful bracelet? Wore it yesterday, received compliments from fellow color addicts. I could recognize them by their glazed eyes as they stared hypnotized by the jewel tones.
Listen: We take our pleasures where we find them.


I have run through every possible eBay item I might want and am now shopping for things for friends. Told Little B yesterday: "I bought you a couple of nightgowns. If you don't like them, we'll give them to the poor people."
"Why are you buying me nightgowns?"
"Oh . . . they were a good deal..."


Yesterday, in the shop that specializes in fitting those of us who are breast-challenged, a fortuitous introduction to an eighty-something woman twenty-six years further along in this experience. Baring of, comparing, what remains of former bosoms, sharing of stories, tears of gratitude and celebration and empathy. Sometimes just the right person appears at just the right time. Sounds dramatic, doesn't it? It was, in a minor this-is-my-world-now way.


And now it's Saturday, the forecast is for "milder with some sun" and 58*F. Today I will be able to be see and feel the sunshine, freed as I am from the week-long office captivity.  A respite from the long clawing-through-winter that has barely begun.

Unrelated thoughts and stories

I shouldn't have made that promise in the last post. Ever since, I've been feeling unpleasantly pressured to present something worthy of the buildup. 

I have grown worn out with typing thoughts not my own, what with the tape recordings to catch up on.  There were two meetings at work during the two weeks I was out of the office. I prepared for my absence by buying (from my own pocket, mind you, a recent local political debacle involving tape recordings making it inadvisable to submit a purchase order for such a thing) a Dictaphone. The nights that I was at home while the meetings were being held, I sighed with contentment: "There's a board meeting going on right now. And I am not there taking notes."  Yes, but then I had to live through those meetings in real time to get the meeting minutes finished. 

The notes and inspirations mentioned in that most recent post were random impressions that floated into my mind as I sat on the porch admiring a sunny afternoon. They appeared as twinkling sparks worthy of enlargement. Upon these several days' reflection I see that they, perhaps, are neither twinkling and sparky nor worthy of enlargement. But now I need to get something out there, so I can get beyond this and back into the routine of noticing what's going on in my own head.




MiMau and the Lazarus chipmunk
One late outdoors afternoon, MiMau came toward me from the tall grass. Her mouth looked funny. I squinted. She was carrying a chipmunk the size of her head. Having regained her good health she is now working at obtaining another parasite with which to endanger it. But that's what cats do: so be it.  She sat in the driveway facing me, put the chipmunk down. I warmly thanked her for her good hunting skills. I thought the 'munk was dead until she patted at it with one paw, then the other. One hind leg made a feeble up-and-down motion. Ah: not dead yet then. Husband emerged from the barn and MiMau proudly stalked toward him, accepted her praise and lay down fifteen feet from her prize to bask in sunshine and her family's admiration. I went back to my book. A few minutes later, a sudden turn of MiMau's head caught the corner of my eye. Astonishment in every hair of her face, she saw the dead chipmunk roll over, get up, and run for the stone wall. She pursued, but the 'munk reached the rocks first. MiMau sat for half an hour on top of the stone wall, hyperattentively listening, but the 'munk had gone deep.  I feel as if everybody won that one.



I recently read Jean Harris' Five Quarters of the Orange.  
It's set on the Loire in the late 1930s and there are frequent mentions of eels. It reminded me of my father-in-law's story about watching a farm wife he had known beheading eels: "Hold still! I'm only gonna kill ya!" He would laugh as he told the story, laugh so hard he could barely speak.


I have heard that beheaded eels writhe and flop and bang inside freezers for hours and hours when any other creature would have accepted its demise. 
All of it horrifies me. 


The story reminded me of many things, not many of them pleasant. I thought it was a darkish, but intensely absorbing, book. 


I am, at last, past the stage of having to wear the chest girdle, for which I thank the stars above, my Higher Power, all things great and small, Jesus, Mary, Joseph and all saints 'round.  A fact of which many of you will be blissfully unaware: Wearing a girdle on one's chest is even less comfortable than wearing a girdle on one's abdomen. 
Nothing, however is bad or good, but thinking makes it so.  The fine thing about the chest girdle was that, using my mirror that showed me only my upper body, I appeared thin as an eight-year-old. 
I always thought that a woman never looked fat unless her stomach stuck out past her chest. I'm in trouble there now. But if I never again look in a full-length mirror, I'll be a happy woman.


Language: Some people can't say "sausage." 
This is one of those memories from my waitress days. 
Canadians always asked for pizza "all dress," ate heartily (and tipped penuriously). I always loved it when Canadians asked for olives noir, because I was the only waitress who knew what that was.  Some Canadians asked for sah'-oo-saj'.
"Sausage" was problematic for several ethnic groups; more often than not some people-from-down-in-the-heart-of-the-city asked for shaw'sheej. So much work of jaws and lips for two seemingly simple syllables.
I understand that Asian-speaking people have no "l" (or is it "r" sound?) and therefore cannot hear the difference. That's why there are jokes about the interchanging of those sounds when they learn English, for which they have my utmost admiration, as a second language. 
It has to do with synapses. 


I have mentioned previously that I like sparkly things, things that dazzle me with color. If I can get both characteristics in one item, I am (see above) A Happy Woman. Imagine my delight, then, at having won this shiny colorful item on eBay:

Look. I know it's crap, but it didn't cost four dollars. And it's pretty. Goes with everything. Reminds me of sunrises and sunsets and the iridescent insides of shells, and just thinking about it lifts my spirits. I figure this giving in to low-class highly-colored jewelry is one of the rights I have gained by having reached . . . let's call it Late Middle Age. It's my right and I'm going to enjoy it. And enjoy it I do. 

Here's a question, a poll, if you like: 

Dare I wear that bracelet with this blouse? 

I vote yes!

Ho hum. Life goes on.

I fold my hands, and wait patiently, and it all comes out right.
Sooner or later.


I bought liverwurst: Max's pilling goes well. Liverwurst is the only edible that he will swallow without suspicious lingual examination for foreign objects.


MiMau has lost all her sharp and bony angles and has become soft and rounded once again. Whatever it was that, nearly overnight, turned her all limp and bony, has passed. She's been quite a little comfort kitty for these two weeks of my recovery. One morning I woke to find her sleeping furry forehead and nose pressed against my forehead and nose . . . giving me a mind-meld of healing.


Angus had something like a seizure one night a week ago. Since early puppyhood, he's had a little Parkinsons-like wobble that comes and goes. The vet said then: He's five weeks old; it's probably an immature nervous system. The wobble seemed very slightly more frequent after his mauling by the fisher, and it accounts, I think, for his occasional stuckness on the stairs. During Last Time Out last week, both boyz ran all over the yard sniffing and barking maniacally. Something terrifically exciting . . . I hoped nothing more unusual than a rabbit . . . or maybe the local feral cat, but who knows? . . . had recently visited. Max was out at the edge of the light cast by the roof-edge floodlight, bouncing back and forth and yelling his curly pink-blond head off. I turned my head to check on Angus' position, and saw that he was on the front walk,  wriggling on the ground as he would in a particularly lovely fresh pile of woodchuck poop. Almost that way . . . but a little less wriggling, a little more stiffness. I went closer to get a good look at him. His eyes rolled toward me; he was in there. He grew quiet. I patted him, told him he was all right, stood next to him wishing Max would shut up, settle down, and come over closer to the door. After a few minutes . . . less than five . . . Angus rolled from his side to his chest, and got up on his feet. Max returned and we came inside. Angus didn't seem distressed, and he hadn't lost control of any sphincters; whatever it was came and went and hasn't recurred. I'm not especially worried. The way life has been going around here, it seemed like just another bump in our road. I'll mention it to the vet next time we go, or if it happens again we'll make a special trip.


With three pets, trios of bad luck are predictable. It could have been worse. I might have had to give him a de-woodchuck-pooping bath at eleven at night.


Two weeks ago tonight I was wandering around the hospital looking for some way to pass the time, finding a dogeared magazine aimed at an audience between the ages of, I'd say, fifteen and twenty-five, and being astonished at the clothing styles. Can it be that the current fashion is to gather several articles of clothing that bear no relation or resemblance to each other, throw them together and call it good?


I had a wonderful last day of sick time today. Moderate temperature, low humidity, a pedicure on the patio, an absorbing book to read, a nap in the afternoon. Tomorrow I'll return to work. I'm just about ready, physically and psychologically. 
I have the coffeepot and my clothing prepared for the early morning launch.
Tomorrow at 8:30 as I go out the door to start my commute I will be sad, the same way I was always sad when a new school year started. But it will be good to be back among people, doing the tap dance by which I earn my bread. And at the end of the day I'll get to come home again. Blessed home!


So now I'm a breast cancer survivor. 
Frankly, I consider myself to be a survivor just having managed to keep breathing through the first utterance of the diagnosis. Now I'm at the other end of it, and I have all but the last, formal pronouncement of "all clear," which will come, in due time, from the Yale laboratory.


The routine resumes.

Buh-bye!

I am home.
And I am well.
I still have, at least, all the lymph nodes I was born with...none of them, not a ONE, had to be removed!

So IT, 


The Disease, 


The Scourge,


is All Gone!

Today's the day!

Max and I are managing with the Tramadol, and we're on the lookout for empty gelatin capsules to hide it in and thereby ease the pain of the twice-daily horror.  He eyes me whenever I come near him, but he still loves me, God help him.
MiMau has Clavamox twice a day, and has been (for the second time in as many months) wormed . . . a huntress of her skill does have to suffer the consequence. She dove into her food last night for the first time in nine or ten days, and it did me good to see it.
Husband is planning a field trip around town after
(a) seeing me into the inner sanctum, or
(b) handing me over to the caring medical team, or
(c) abandoning me to my fate.
Check-in time is 9AM and I'm so looking forward to it! Almost like being at a spa, the way the nurse shepherds me into the changing room and takes away my uncomfortable restrictive clothing and supplies me with that crisp blue paper gown with the nice airy rear and the tissue paper shower cap. That getup always makes me feel so attractive and girly. 


Angus is prancing around feeling quite superior to all of us, and wondering how Dad will do with all these medications while Mom is down for the count.

Things I have learned this week

There is no disguising Tramadol's taste in order to get it down Max's gullet. The best method is a spur of the moment sneak attack and a quick shove of an unadorned teensy little quarter tablet down his throat. Done. Over. No spitting foam and softened diguise material, as he violently rejects the whole mess and flings it two feet from himself where the medication is half-dissolved and useless and I have to wipe up the slop and start over, muttering, "I'm so glad I paid actual money for this medication."

There is something called cat flu, and I think that's what MiMau has.  Husband took her to the vet's office last Monday and saw the vet in the practice in whom I have the least confidence. The vet took a blood sample, said it would be back Wednesday or Thursday and would call. We haven't received a call. A call to the clinic resulted in, "Dr. B. is out until Monday and will call you then." In the meantime, MiMau's perking up in tiny increments, and has begun to be interested in food, although only a kibble at a time, carefully mouthed until she finds a spot in her mouth where she feels like chewing it. I currently have some kibble soaking in the drained juice from canned tuna. We'll try that. Her personality is much in evidence now though, unlike last weekend, and she's drinking water, so I think we've turned the corner. Apparently this cat flu is self-limiting, and there's nothing to be done for it anyway, so we just have to ride it out. 

I'm glad I don't have the daughter for whose birth I longed for years.  I probably would have birthed and raised a daughter with a personality like my own.  I'm guessing that she would have had the same introspective, mulling personality, and she would have gotten herself caught in a morass of emotional turbulence of her own making, and none of my hard-won wisdom would have made the slightest bit of difference. I only got smart after I'd been to Hell and back, and some people just have to do it that way. 

The less I worry about stuff, the better it all goes. It was an absolutely stellar week in Jane's office, with nary an error except other people's, which I, feeling magnanimous and heroic, found and fixed.  It started with Payroll Monday when I got to work late after a doctor visit (pre-op physical physician said, "Get that blood pressure down before surgery!" so off to regular doctor for yet another BP reading and prescription). I bustled into work, pulled together the materials I needed and just did payroll. It was flawless. And angst-free. Imagine that.  Whenever I do something without paying too much attention to it (vinaigrette salad dressing comes to mind) it always works out better.

The prospect of my (next Wednesday) transformation into a Uniboob doesn't bother me as much as other people expect it to. I seem to have friends hovering around, waiting for me to turn into a quivering wreck, and I've been waiting to see if I'm in denial and will, in fact, come to a crashing realization of . . . something.  I think I've truly come to terms with it. Overall, since last . . . what, March? . . . I've had maybe a total of seventy-two hours of "Oh my God!" and now I'm looking forward to getting it over with and moving on. The options presented to me were two:

1. Traditional simple (total) mastectomy, or
2. A second lumpectomy followed by five weeks of five days per week radiation treatment.

The third option was, of course, to do nothing and wait to see when (not if) the remaining slightly odd cells would turn invasive. That made both #1 and #2 look quite a bit more attractive.  I chose the first option because I don't feel like making a career out of having breast cancer. It'll be gone, done, over. Much like pilling Max. We'll worry later about whether or not I feel the need for two lumps instead of one.  I'm thinking . . . if, down the road sometime . . . the other one has to go, I'll opt then for two gigantic Dolly Partons. At this stage of my life, the one remaining Natural One on the right and Smooth And Flat on the left will probably appear more similar than one Natural One and one Firm And Perky.  The deciding moment was when the surgeon told me that, even lying down, a new one would be up there, while the other reclined in my armpit. That would be just silly. And exceedingly painful in the achievement. For what?  Or, you know, when I feel the need for more time off from work, I can decide I need reconstruction. I gather recovery from that is far longer than the two weeks I'll need to get over a simple boobectomy (which term, incidentally, Lord Wellbourne tells me he always thought of as a euphemism for divorce). 

I'm so glad I still have the husband I started out with. There have been times when I've wished he were more romantic in the candlelight-and-rose-petals way, and times when I've wished for him to be more this way or that way...  I'm so glad we rode out all that stuff. Now we know each other and while it isn't exciting and heart-fluttering, it's such a comfort to have somebody to see every day who is completely familiar and who says, "You won't be disfigured. You'll have a scar. So what?"  That might be one of those "y'hadda be there" moments, but I was, and it was a pretty significant moment.

Thanks to Hilary for choosing this as one of her Posts of the Week

-Ectomy, Conservation, Reconstruction, O My!

I truly don't want this blog to turn into a personal saga of trial and tribulation and/or a sucking up of sympathy. 
Howsomever, there is this great big thing going on in my head and about to go on in my life and I'm in need of a vent to the great cyberspace.  


The End of the Lump was not the end, it seems.
It's all about margins and, like real estate, location, location, location.
Benign is not, it turns out in the surgeon's parlance, the same as benign in my world.
There is More to Come.


I have choices. Two. In order to prevent a change of the mildly odd cells to something far more worrisome.
"A little bit more off and radiation," or "all off and no radiation."
The choice seemed very simple to me at first. And then I began to gather information. Being uninformed about this stuff is not to be desired, but ignorance surely is more blissful.


When it comes right down to it, what do I need the thing for?
I keep thinking of analogies...if I had a "questionable" fingernail with a chance of eventual invasion to my whole arm and body, I would have my finger removed without blinking an eye. And I can get along without this particular mound of flesh far more easily than I could without any of my fingers. 
D Day (the D standing for either further Discussion or Decision) is on June 24.

The End Of The Lump

For those who are interested in The End Of The Lump Story:

The surgery went well, I felt fine soon after, had a nice five- or six-day (depending on whether or not you count the day of surgery) vacation during which Husband allowed me to do No Thing because I was "recovering." I love him. I sat in the sun, courting skin cancer and reading. And slept at will. The semi-circular incision was held together with steri-strips.  No big deal there.  They're still there, to my surprise. Any other place on a body there would have been flexing and they would have worn off by now. 

The Thing (soft, and the size of a golf ball, more or less) has gone back to Yale's laboratory and I'm still waiting for the final word on whether or not there were bad cells in there somewhere. I'm guessing not.

I'm feeling fine, and I still have all my parts, and they all look pretty much the way they did pre-surgery.

So that's that.

I had a good wakeup call to enjoy my life a lot more than I have been doing, and I didn't even need to suffer for it.

Imagine that.


Oh. And never again will I skip the annual mammogram.

No time

I had thought I would write and write and write and I haven't. I have, instead, spent all the time in the world sitting in the sun reading, staring at the sky, the birds, the driveway's border of Norway spruces with their new growth . . . green soft toes all over their trunks and limbs. I have regularly refreshed the oranges on the birch trees for the orioles. 

Occasionally I remember to have the camera with me.

On Tuesday morning I took off my watch and put it in a brass candy dish near the kitchen sink.  I have thought about replacing it on my wrist, but haven't.

This morning Husband said something about the weather . . . wondering if it would be good weather for lawnmowing when he gets home tonight. 

"Tomorrow is supposed to be a great day," I said. "Sunday too."

I have lost all track of time; what a relief.

Four days off to recuperate, two more (weekend days, they don't count for as much) to go, before the Monday morning descent from the hill across the valley to work.  


If I had no job, no place I needed to be at any given time, would I develop a routine? 
Would it seem desirable to do so? 

Counting down

Image from  from I LOVE TYPOGRAPHY

I have two and one-half hours to eat, drink beverages, smoke, chew gum, before I shall sew my lips closed until after surgery. It's a wonder I'm using my fingers to type; I should have rigged up a bungee cord around my neck with a plate suspended at my chin. Or a feedbag.


In twelve hours I will be approaching the La-La Land of general anesthesia. I am promised an aperitif of Versed if I am nervous. The nurse warned me that it might make me "a little woozy."  
"Woozy's good," I told her. (Listen: I stopped drinkin', but I can still enjoy a little justified, supervised woozy when the occasion warrants.)


I gather I'll be under for less than an hour, and then comes that waking up process with the nurse urging me to take ever-deeper breaths when all I'll want to do swat her out of my way so I can go back to sleep. I'm not looking forward to that but I won't remember much of it anyway. 


And then home with Husband, who will be close at hand until he has to travel on Wednesday.
...at which time I will have a friend come to babysit me. 
I have made her promise to sit next to my bed and read fairytales to me should I request it.

Two Most Beautiful Words

Benign
Outpatient

Boundless

I have been captive to my senses for these last two days. 
When I have written long lyrical posts about the sounds and the smells and the feel of the air, it has been a process of making a mental cast of the feelings, then later taking it out and pouring, sifting, wedging words into it. 
I break open the cast and have a sculpted post.


All weekend I have been an animal alive in the moments.
In remembrance later, in the cold fall wind or watching the winter fire, I will find the cast, put away somewhere in my mind. 
Tonight it is too big, too soft, with no edges or bindings.

Light of heart

I have been increasingly and ridiculously lighthearted lately.

I have resumed my mid-afternoon gigglefests at work. My coworkers have once again begun saying to each other, "There goes June, must be about 2:30," before they check the clock.

I have become a madwoman with my variegated hosta. I come home every day and rip into the big established clumps to separate them and spread them out to make the garden border continuous. The frenzy always starts with my simple intention of digging out one or two dandelions.
And then I notice, eye, the bare spaces in the edging around the shrubs, and think, "Oh, just this one clump."  And in half an hour my fingernails are packed with dirt, my palms black, my neck cramping and my head aching from the chilly breeze. There follows the self-congratulatory promenade to admire my work, to envision how the transplants will look in a few weeks when they've become accustomed to their new locations and round themselves out into hearty and fluffily exuberant bunches. Forgiving plants, hosta.

So many earthworms! Finding them inches deep in the dirt, I feel sorry to have disturbed them at their work, and carefully try to dig around them so as not to cut them into pieces. Not always successful with that, I hope that the ones that get . . . damaged . . . will be able to regenerate their missing parts; some can, if cut in the right places. I school myself not to think about it. I pick them up and set them aside, throw some damp dirt on top of them for safekeeping, and then replace them as I place the new planting. They're doing me a favor with their existence in my garden. I'd hate to look a gift earthworm in the mouth . . . or really, in any other orifice . . . should I be able to find it.

Here's a piece of new self-knowledge:  I like the singular feature. 
The wild trees along my route to my job are beginning to be a solid mass of new green.  I love seeing the spread of new growth, but part of my heart misses the odd one pale green tree, spring's sentinel salient among the gray and brown.
The graceful spare shadblow is blooming, sparse flowers among the indifferent disorderly brushwood. My mother called it shadblow. Its semi-formal name is serviceberry (dressed up in whitetie, Amelanchier). Maybe the ones that are cultivated . . . planted as decorative landscape trees . . . are serviceberry or Amelanchier. The unbound ones, I think, should always be called shadblow: the name suits their nature.

Image borrowed from Saratoga Woods and Waterways

Driving slowly up the hill to home, the car's tires scrabbling and shifting on loose small stones in the dirt road, I came upon a bird dawdling across the road. Unperturbedly aware of my approach, he sauntered, stopped, sauntered, so slowly that I was able to examine him through the driver's side window as I passed: a funny little banty-chicken-looking thing with a long thin neck and a little pointy crest on his head. I have seen ruffed grouse only a few times in my life: I had to come home and check my Audubon book to be sure that's what it had been.

Photo borrowed from A Passion for Nature, a blog I'll have to keep track of...

Wildlife North America has pictures of the male displaying, something I've never seen. Such a tiny thing exhibiting himself so proudly, exactly like a big wild turkey, is endearingly precious.

Thank you all

I have insufficient time to craft anything like a "post." Today is Friday, which means that within twenty-four hours I should be working on one, prior to going back to bed at 5:30am. The wee hours of weekend mornings are my usual times to float into my interior and put words to whatever I find there.


I had planned to respond to each comment on the last post. Now it's too late for anybody to find my responses, so this is it. Each of you who wished me well: thank you warmly and most sincerely. To those of you who have had similar experiences and felt that I expressed what you, too, had felt: Humbly, thank you.  To the ones who offered praise for the writing, ahh, thank you. 


A friend wrote me recently:  "I've been thinking about how they say cats take pain well. What, exactly, can a cat do but take it? And what can we do, but take it?" I think that's funny, philosophical, and perfectly true. 
The bonus is that, as #1Nana said about her storyteller friend, I got a story out of this experience, and apparently one that touched some people . . . because of their own experiences or those of friends.  I expect more "stories" will emerge as I explore this new landscape. At the very least, I hope that during my recovery I'll be blogging my little heart out. 


And the good news on the employment situation is that 4/20 has come and gone and I am still employed full-time.
Power That Be stopped by my desk in the afternoon of the meeting that he had predicted would either plunge me into unemployment or trim my hours to a "no benefits" status, and told me there would be no discussion about my employment at the meeting. "There's just too much else on the agenda.  But no promises about next month." 
"Okay," I said.

"I thought you'd want to know. . .  I know I would . . . I know you have been worried."

"Well," I said, "I have been, and I haven't."

So I need not worry about having health insurance coverage for another month.

The world grows more beautiful by the minute.

Live like you were dying

On April 9, I went to the doctor for a long overdue checkup. And because I had found a lump where a lump should not be. 

On April 12, I had some non-invasive diagnostic tests.

On April 13, I had a biopsy done. Four skinny little worms of core samplings of my tissue laid on a saline-soaked gauze pad. The doctor showed them to me. I could see the white of the tumor among the pink of the apparently normal tissue. They looked like two-and-a-half-inch-long strips of chicken meat, with a little white fat.

I got dressed and met the surgeon in the hall at a little writing desk.  He told me where the tissue would go, when the results would be back. He was putting a rush on it, he said, and I should have my husband with me, or a friend, on April 16.

That's when I made The Mistake.

I asked him, "What do you think?"

He said: "I'm concerned that it's a breast cancer. But I've been wrong. That's why we do biopsies."

For a good portion of the drive home, I was talking to myself.  

• Of course he thinks it might be cancer. Why else would I be having a biopsy? 
• There are lumps that aren't cancer.
• You don't know yet. You don't know yet. You don't know yet.

Jack Daniels whispered in my ear, "Let's talk it over." He was my companion in times of trouble for so long that it was a simple reflex of my brain.

I stopped and bought a chocolate mocha cake.

I stopped and filled the car's tank with gasoline.

I cried the three miles home from the gasoline station.

The trees, just beginning to be limned in green fuzzy buds. The sky. The hills. The hills!

I said to my Higher Power, "Please let Heaven be at least as beautiful as this."

When I was little, the beginning of summer vacation felt like standing on a mountaintop in the sunshine, surveying a limitless number of days of reading, playing croquet or cowboys, long warm evenings of catching lightning bugs.  Now I know school summer vacation is sixty-five finite days.

Driving home, stopping at the mailbox, coming down the driveway and seeing the house that we built standing against the background of hill and sky, driving into the barn, turning off the car, hearing the dogs' ecstatic barking: all were numbered now. Tick, tick, tick off a list of checkboxes.

I got out of the car, clutching the mail and cakebox.  


I let the dogs out and we walked around the yard. I stopped in the front walk and let out my two milligrams of Fiery Anger: I deserve MORE. I deserve BETTER! 


We all came inside and I fixed the dogs' supper. I told myself I should go outdoors and enjoy the weather, but my body was too tightly clenched.  I took off my clothes and put on my robe . . . and went on this informative and comforting website.  

...and then decided if I wasn't dead yet, and if the treatment might not kill me, I might as well go outside and live. That's when I got the garden trowel and Max's ball...

The sky was even bluer than before, the clouds perfect little puffs of silver white, the hills stronger and more steadfast.  The dogs' voices were music, the dandelions snapped out of the garden beds as if they were joyfully jumping free.  The trees, the messy brush and weeds along the stone walls, were just as they should be and impossibly beautiful in their perfect random arrangements.  The breeze was perfume. I laughed with the love of all of it. 

I brought in a wagonload of firewood against the forecasted damp cool days. What patience I had with that process . . . a chore that I have habitually hurried through, making it harder than it had to be.  Like so much of life.

On April 16, the surgeon's office phoned at 12:40. The doctor had a cancellation, could I come in at 1:30 instead of 4:00?

"I would be delighted," I said. "Let me call my husband and I'll call you back in five minutes."

Husband said, "Sure.  I'll meet you at the doctor's office." I called the office to say I would be there within the hour.

We sat in the examining room for ten minutes before Dr. S. blew in, dressed in blue scrubs that matched his eyes. He was smiling.

"You have everybody confused!" he told me.

"The lab always has two people look at each sample. One said, 'I think it's...' The other said, 'Mmm, it might be, but I don't know.' So . . . your tissue has been sent to Yale for examination."

I had been prepared for "It's nothing," or "You're dying." So unprepared was I for nuanced speech that I couldn't grasp what Husband was able to hear. Between Dr. S. and Husband I finally understood that yes, it is cancer, but most likely (no one wants to say it out loud until Yale weighs in) it's cancer that is usually encapsulated and doesn't go speeding off to lymph nodes. Dr. S. hastened out of the room and back with his book, "The Breast," and showed me pictures of the likely suspect: "This is what it looks like under the microscope."

Usually this kind of cancer occurs in two percent of breast cancers . . . in non-Caucasian women fifteen or twenty years older than I am. That's why the lab technicians are so keen to make sure that it's what they think it is.

All the way home, the completely overcast sky looked bright blue. 

May 6 at 9:00am we will have confirmation.

And we will proceed.

Given the choice, I wouldn't have missed this last week for anything.

"And I loved deeper and I spoke sweeter, 

"And I gave forgiveness I'd been denying."

~ from Live Like You Were Dying, Tim McGraw

Thank you to Hilary at 

The Smitten Image

4/21/2010