Putting the CAN in Cancer

Writing at Pink Tractor Farm

2011-02-02T12:25:00.000-08:00

Originally Posted 12/30/09 on Save the Farm Blog:

As part of my campaign to hold on to our way of life, I am doing something I haven't done in a very, very long time. I am teaching writing workshops in my home.

A wonderful teacher and friend, Eunice Scarfe, encouraged me to take this step.

"What's your place like?" she asked. I answered without hesitation, "Cozy and warm." Eunice smiled and nodded, and a new purpose for Pink Tractor Farm was born.

Registration for the sessions beginning in January has been light so far. I tried leaving small piles of flyers around town, but apparently nobody allows that any more.

A notice posted on a bulletin board or in a window was the best I could manage. I did those postings with my grandkids so it was worthwhile whether anybody sees them or not.

I must now decide whether or not to go with small workshop groups this time out. And, if I don't do that, should I offer these workshops again at another time, perhaps a less busy season?

I do like the idea of writing and sharing in my welcoming living room. We shall see if that is meant to happen.

I am copying the text of my flyer here, in case you haven't yet seen it and would care to comment. Meanwhile, cross fingers for me if you are of a mind to do so.

WRITE FOR LIFE WORKSHOPS
And So We Begin….
A gathering of women writing and sharing.
Telling stories from our lives, then and now.
Circling in to a community of words and feelings.
Given voice in stories deserving to be told.
We come together in January when it can be dark
and we will create light.

Let Our Lights Shine

2011-02-02T12:20:00.000-08:00

Originally Posted 12/30/09 on Save the Farm blog:
I always go overboard with decorations at holiday time. Lights on the tree, lights bordering the windows, even lights on the pink tractor.

The lights shine especially bright this year because, against all odds, we are still in our house at Pink Tractor Farm.

The tussle with the bank goes on. We continue our trek through the labyrinth of this administration's Making Home Affordable Program which may or may not reduce our mortgage payment to manageable size. We have read the reports of how this program has actually benefited relatively few Americans for the long term so far. Still, we trek on.

In the meantime, the holidays were bright. Family and friends were with us. Our wonderful grandchildren stayed for nearly a week and will be back soon. We laughed and ate too much and prayed. We missed those who were absent and prayed for them also.

On the day after Christmas, Alice celebrated her sixty-ninth birthday, and Jonathan cooked!

It is a small miracle, or perhaps a large one, that we are still here in our cozy yellow house. We celebrate that miracle and wish that each and every one of you were here to celebrate with us.

Happy Holidays. Blessed New Year. Keep shining.

Signs

2011-02-02T12:16:00.000-08:00

Originally Posted 9/30/09 on Save the Farm blog:

The Pink Tractor Farm sign was fashioned by a fine carver out of fir fit to withstand the wildest Pacific Northwest storms. I was pleased as punch on the day several years ago when my husband Jonathan bolted it to our front fence.

The sign weathered nobly and became more natural to the place every year as if it had sprung from the soil, a cousin to the cherry, apple and pear trees nearby.

Our carver friend, Jonathan, myself, our island neighbors who drove past that sign so often they took it for granted as part of the landscape. None of us anticipated the storm so devastating it howled down our sturdy fir marker and replaced it with another made of base metal that said For Sale.

I hated that sign, tried not to see it when I turned into our driveway, told myself it could not possibly be real.

Then two things happened – an afternoon at the bank and a roofer sneaking down our driveway. I’ve told those stories already. They led to this one.

Somewhere deep inside me my own storm rose. It grew in fury and burst forth, toppling that flimsy metal sign into the ditch. Realtors, curiosity seekers, buyers scrambling for a steal of a deal were swept away in this tempest and have not yet returned.

The Pink Tractor Farm sign is back on our front fence. Jonathan and our grandchildren put it there a few Sundays ago. We have no idea how long fate will allow our sign to reign over our orchard pasture. We only know that is where it belongs.

Fear and Anger

2011-02-02T12:02:00.000-08:00

Originally Posted 9/9/09 to Save the Farm blog:

Long ago, I was a community organizer working with mothers on public assistance. The plight of these women and their children was dire. Everywhere they turned, the circumstances of their lives conspired to hold them down. Their only hope was to rise up against the system and demand what was rightfully their due under the law. They were terrified of doing that. They understood that, if they did fight for themselves, they could end up worse off than they already were.

My job was to find potential leaders among those women and guide them toward becoming more angry than they were afraid. My job was to stand by them as they guided other mothers to do the same, to become more angry than they were afraid. In the process of all of that becoming, those women discovered their personal and collective power, and I discovered some of that for myself also.

But, like all of us tend to do sometimes, after a while I forgot what I had learned. Consequently, six weeks ago, when my husband Jonathan lost his job and we knew that without his income we would not be able to afford our high monthly mortgage payment, I was afraid. I prayed. I grappled for scraps of hope. I grew more desperate every day. I concluded that we would have to sell our home.

Nine years ago, we bought this house and five acres on Vashon Island in the middle of Washington State’s Puget Sound and moved here from New York City. The transition was difficult, and it has taken me just about all of this time to think of myself as living here instead of back there in the city I loved more than any place I had ever been in my life, except maybe Paris.

I valued our island farm and life so little that I even gave it up once to move to Seattle on the mainland. Eight months later, we admitted what a mistake that was and moved back. The people we had sold the farm to disliked island life so much that they sold the place back to us. Unfortunately, the bank wasn’t quite as cooperative. Our new mortgage payment would be twice what it had been before we left the island.

Two months after our return, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. The next year and a half was consumed by my struggle to survive that diagnosis. Thirteen surgical procedures, three of those on the same day, but no chemotherapy or radiation, so I actually felt rather lucky. Especially because, through all of it, I was in our yellow house on Pink Tractor Farm, a blessed sanctuary if there ever was one.

I was still healing from the final surgical procedure and still exhausted when Jonathan was laid off from the job he had devoted himself to and loved for our entire nine years in the Pacific Northwest. Then, suddenly, the farm was for sale in the worst housing market anyone around here can remember, and we were camped out at our son and daughter in law’s house on the mainland while strangers tramped through the rooms where we had lived our life.

All of that time, I was afraid. I was afraid of what would happen if we didn’t sell the house. I was afraid of what would happen if we didn’t sell the house for enough to give us even a remote chance of buying another someday. I was also afraid of how it would feel if we did sell the house and those tramping strangers took up residence where I now understood that we belong.

I was afraid, but I had not yet become angry. That happened three days ago.

We were back in the yellow house for a few days with our grandchildren doing our best to behave as if this were a normal Labor Day weekend on the farm. My granddaughter and I were preparing to make applesauce out of fruit from the trees in our front pasture while my grandson played with the toys he was rediscovering after our month-long absence from what both kids think of and love as their second home.

“Grandma, somebody’s in the back yard,” my granddaughter said, sounding anxious.

I opened the door to discover a man I had never seen before headed down our driveway from the truck he’d parked in front of our garage. He looked startled to see me and took a step backward toward his vehicle. “Didn’t the realtor call you?” he asked.

No one had called. No one had told me that this guy, who turned out to be a roofer, would be coming to climb up onto our house looking for a reason to drive our already rock bottom selling price even further downward.

I began to tremble inside, but I would not recognize until sometime later that this trembling was the deep down seismic beginning of an eruption. In the meantime, my granddaughter and I milled apples into sauce that she decided should be tarter than my usual recipe. My grandson constructed one of his wonderful concoctions out of a building set he had forgotten he owned.

Jonathan would not come home till hours later from the job where he works now as a carpenter among men a third his age. He would take aspirin for his aching knees while I told the story of the guy with the truck who obviously believed we would not be home while he trespassed across our roof.

Somewhere between the beginning and the end of that telling, I knew that we were not ready to give our home to people who had no respect, much less reverence, for the sorrow we were suffering or the loss we faced. Somewhere in there, I recognized that we had inside us what it would take for at least one more battle to save the farm. Somewhere in there, I became more angry than I was afraid.

Good News Squared

2010-04-22T21:14:00.000-07:00

Many of you have been with me for a long time – through my breast cancer, Jonathan’s job loss and the threat of foreclosure on our home. You have sent encouraging words, prayers and hopes for the best. The reward for your generosity is that at last you can share the joy of those hopes and prayers being happily answered.

It all happened the middle week of March. That Wednesday, we signed closing papers for a new mortgage on Pink Tractor Farm with an affordable monthly payment. The good bank had saved us from the bad bank. A dramatic story really.

At the end of January, I had walked into our island branch of US Bank clutching the fat, green file that documented months of maneuvers on my part. All of my maneuvering appeared to have arrived at no good end. Our home would be lost and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

I was there that day for advice from Cheryl the branch manager or maybe just for solace because I believed we were fresh out of options. Cheryl and her husband Chris had been wise and kind during my cancer ordeal, and I was in need of wisdom and kindness yet again.

Cheryl recognized my proximity to despair. She reached across the desk and took my hands in hers. “You won’t lose your home,” she said. “We won’t let that happen.”

Six weeks later, with a lot of relentless determination on her part in between, those words and Cheryl proved to be absolutely true. The five acres of Pink Tractor Farm were firm under our feet once more.

As I said, that was Wednesday. Two days later, I was still stunned that months of siege could be so suddenly over, on the home front at least. I went for my Friday morning walk around the beautiful two miles of what we Vashon Islanders call the Burton Loop. It was a brisk day but sunny. Carla walked with me, and we chatted about how Jonathan was at a breakfast job interview.

There’d been many interviews over the previous seven and a half months, and the result was generally the same. They were favorably impressed, but times were tough so they weren’t hiring. Meanwhile, Jonathan had taken a job that was out of his field and not well compensated but a blessing nonetheless.

Carla invited me for another circle of the Loop, but I was tired from the excitement of the week so I declined. I was back at the parking lot in my red Wrangler when my cell phone rang. Jonathan had been offered the position he was interviewing for, and he had accepted the offer.

This was the kind of job I had hoped and prayed he would find. Work that would satisfy his productive soul and challenge him the way he thrives on being challenged. I shouted rather loudly several times until I realized that people were looking my way, wondering if rescue was in order.

I was on the road driving toward home when I spotted Carla returning from her second lap. I pulled the Jeep up next to her and rolled the window down. “Jonathan got the job,” I said, still shouting a little.

I only know Carla from our once weekly talks as we walk, but she shared my elation all the same smiling, cheering and jumping up and down. I invite you to join in that joy. Feel free to smile, cheer and jump up and down.. as I am for sure doing.

Happy Holidays -- Let There Be Light

2009-12-30T12:50:00.000-08:00

Go - Dream - Imagine

2009-12-30T11:42:00.000-08:00

My precious grandchildren gave me a coffee mug for Christmas that reads: “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve imagined.” – a quote from Thoreau.

My granddaughter Maya saw me looking at that mug one day when we were Christmas shopping. “That’s what I’m trying to do,” I said.

What I didn’t say was that I feel as if I’ve gone after my dreams enough times already, imagined my goals and even achieved them enough times already, and I am more than a little tired.

Today I press on toward a new year with the mug here to remind me that, tired or not, I am challenged by circumstance to go and imagine and maybe even achieve yet again.

You haven’t heard from me for a long time because I have been rather discouraged by those circumstances I mentioned. I’ve tried to write to you before this, perky pieces about hope and perseverance, but they didn’t ring true so I never sent them.

On the other hand, persisting somehow, is the Buddha quote I so often press on others, “Fall down seven times, get up eight.” Those words fly back at me now as I gather courage to get up again. There are a couple of projects on my plate that require this rising to the occasion.

First a book, written out of the darkness of my cancer experience, miraculously turning into pages filled with light. My agent likes what I've done so far, and that is a good beginning step. The title is Focusing on the Angels: A Story of Struggle Told from the Bright Side of the Road.

Next are the personal appearances necessary to convince publishers I can market this book for them. Five booked so far, and I’ve hired a publicist to help me come up with more.

We will target writers’ groups, in 2010 at least, with a new seminar titled “The Do It Anyway Guide to Getting Published: Adopting an Attitude of Abundance in a Time of Scarcity”. Feel free to suggest possible venues if you can think of any.

Thus… I am standing again, for whichever numbered time this may be, praying to proceed confidently, improvising the dream as I go.

It occurs to me that many of you are doing the same as we enter the unknown territory of this particular new year. I wish us all Godspeed in the direction of our dreams.

You've Got to Be Joking

2009-09-30T05:22:00.000-07:00

The article in the waiting room magazine was titled “Cancer Should Be a Laughing Matter” so I paged straight for it. The author, a comedian and veteran of testicular cancer and a melanoma at the back of his eye, quipped about specializing in “tumor humor” and how he loved to make his doctors laugh.

I chuckled along with him and wrote a few marital jokes in my orange notebook. No tumor humor. That wasn’t what I needed to laugh myself through at the moment. My cancer crisis was long-gone, last year’s anecdote. The soap operas of a thirty-seven year marriage were my one-liner material now.

I was there at the breast center for a chest wall exam, the first since my bilateral mastectomy a year and three months before. I was just six months past my reconstruction surgery. Today would be routine, a celebration of what the oncology nurse called a success story.

My breast surgeon and I were all smiles when we saw each other in the same small room where we had been together so many times on less happy days. We hugged and chatted. She admired my plastic surgeon’s handiwork – two small breasts sculpted from my own belly flesh, almost perfect except for the scars.

We continued chatting as I lay down on the exam table and she began to palpate my new breasts. There was a time when these examinations embarrassed me. A year and a half of procedures much more invasive than a little palpating had sent such modesty packing long ago.

Then she said, “We’ve got a little nodularity here.”

I’d been around this block enough times to recognize that as doc-speak for a lump. I searched my shell-shocked brain for a laugh line, but I was fresh out.

Two very anxious days later, thank heaven, I heard the word that may not be the most amusing in the language but most definitely is the most divine – BENIGN.

The Monster Ate Our Wallet

2009-08-05T10:50:00.000-07:00

Being human and therefore egocentric, I almost believed the world would stop short and tiptoe delicately past in deference to my delicate situation… the cancer and such… but I was wrong.

Wars rage on, disasters continue to devastate, the economy circles the drain as we all pray the final flush will fail to sound and Jonathan and I celebrate the successful outcome of my thirteenth surgical procedure by being forced to sell our home.

The story is increasingly familiar these days. Jonathan’s career in the building business careened for a time at the edge of the abyss then toppled in. Our savings waved goodbye along with everyone else’s long ago. Then there were the medical bills. One, two, three punches and the wallet went down.

Consequently, the yellow house that was respite and sanctuary for us and so many friends will pass on to another fortunate family. At a bargain price in the bargain to inspire a sale in this threatening-to-flush-itself real estate market.

Nine years ago, I re-designed the yellow house, and Jonathan built my designs into reality. A great deal of both of us resides in those five acres and always will. Now the time has come to move on.

But let’s get this into proper perspective. We may be losing our house, but I appear to be winning my battle for life, an outcome we accept with gratitude.

The yellow house – its safety, comfort, beauty and loving fondness – lives on in us, in Jonathan and me, and we will always offer warmth and welcome there.

P.S. Thanks to a generous friend with space in his barn, the pink tractor remains our symbol of pink ribbons and hopeful mornings, ready to tend the fences once more when the time comes for Pink Tractor Farm to rise again.

P.P.S. Our mailing address continues as P.O. Box 13531, Burton WA 98013. Phone is now (206) 714-2843. Call if you need a crackerjack carpenter or a top-of-the line project manager… that’s Jonathan. And check out aliceorrseminars.net for workshops to keep your writing, publishing and personal trajectories on track toward bright tomorrows… that’s me.

Without Number

2009-06-20T14:28:00.000-07:00

I am not certain how many of my summers have been punctuated by a trip to the International Women’s Writing Guild Conference at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. I’ve missed a few since 1978, but made it to twenty-five at least.

I am not certain how many of those years I’ve been privileged to teach there since I was invited to do so sometime in the early eighties. First about how to write popular fiction, then about how to weather the storms of the publishing business, more recently about how to craft and tell stories from our inner lives.

I am not certain how many hundreds – could it be thousands by now? – of women have paid me the honor of listening, pushed me toward better answers to their questions, pushed themselves to express their deepest truths and pushed us all to recognize our shared humanity as they stood and read their words, sometimes with trepidation, always in triumph.

I am not certain how many wide, warm smiles I have watched break across the faces of old friends and new or how many embraces I have been blessed to receive and return.

I am not certain how many times I have laughed, cried, been joyfully surprised, gratefully enlightened and inspired to grow in directions that have changed my life and me.

I am certain that each Saratoga summer has been a jewel of unique cut and splendid sparkle strung one by one through three decades, now launching into four, and that there can be no counting the priceless IWWG Skidmore memories I shall hold forever in my heart.

Thanks to Hannelore Hahn and my Guild sisters for yet another summer wonder in 2009.

Taking It to the Limit One More Time

2009-06-09T08:04:00.000-07:00

A week or so ago, the stitches holding my abdomen together turned to the consistency of wire and went literally medieval across my lateral middle. They come out today, just in the nick for me to hobble onto the path of most resistance one more time.

The path of most resistance – I once gave that title to an essay about adopting a huge, cross-eyed puppy who wreaked havoc on everything he could get his jaws around.

Why did we adopt that particular puppy? Because he was the only one available, and I insisted we absolutely must come home with a puppy that very day.

This is how I characteristically set my foot on the path of most resistance. My pig head insists something or other absolutely must occur, this instant this way. Then, I make a plan.

If you want to hear God laugh, make a plan. Listen for chuckles because I’ve done it again.

I made my current plan a century ago. January 2008, the month I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Think of this as one bracket at the left-hand side of a shelf-load of experience.

June 2009, come hell or high water, I would fly across the country to teach at the International Women’s Writing Guild conference at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.

High water did indeed come, hell at its heels. Time swept forward, tide receded, hell got bored and moved on to burn down other lives for a while. The plan remained.

Tomorrow morning, I board the plane. Tomorrow evening I disembark in another world, the one I used to inhabit that century ago. The right-hand bracket of this hell/high water passage.

Stitch marks still tender, stamina insufficient, hubris intact – I fly away, though not eternally as could have been the case. Eternity may not be God’s plan for me just now.

I’m not laughing yet, but I think I feel a smile approaching.

Ten Things Cancer Taught Me

2009-05-29T03:00:00.000-07:00

1. How to max out the life in a floral gift arrangement the same way I max out the life in me.
2. How to say, “I’m feeling better every day,” even when that is at best a well-intentioned fib.
3. How to smile and mean it when folks who never really cared much for my big-mouthed self suddenly can’t stop singing the praises of feisty li’l ol’ me.
4. How to ride the pain meds coaster without getting caught too long in the whirl.
5. How to live in anticipation of another shoe dropping.
6. How to count my blessings when the numbers don’t feel particularly high – the secret being to pay close, close, close attention until one, then another and another pops into view.
7. How to detect the perfume of compassion on the slightest breeze because all I have to do is sniff in the right direction and it will be there.
8. How to be scared and know there will be a fearless moment ahead somewhere sometime somehow.
9. How to accept. How to accept. How to accept.
10. How to see the angels all around, including the one in the mirror, ready to let me hitch a ride between their wings.

Composed in great gratitude for what looks like a successful surgical procedure on May 28, and in greatest gratitude to all of you who prayed this outcome into being. Though we won’t know for absolutely certain until June 9, one day before I wing eastward to rendezvous with an angel assemblage like no other (The International Women’s Writing Guild Conference, June 12 to 19, at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, where I will be presenting a writing workshop inspired by my experiences during the past year-and-a-half most appropriately titled “There Had to Be Angels.”) Would you care to come along? Call (212) 737-7536. You’ll be oh so glad you did!

I'm Still Here and I Need A Boost to Move On

2009-05-27T13:13:00.000-07:00

I prayed for Easter to be a new beginning, and in April I thought my prayer was answered. The waiting appeared to be over, the doubt less doubtful. Hope had migrated from the far horizon to my front door.

Then one of the two major incisions from my March 30th surgery failed to heal properly. Tomorrow morning, May 28th at 8 a.m. or so Pacific time, my surgeon will make a third attempt to close that incision once and for all.

I am struck by the image of closure denied, rebelling ragged margins refusing to adhere, an unwelcome fissure where smooth healing was supposed to be.

This has been the shape of my life for a year and a half now – a gaping space between the life I thought I knew and the life that will return in a form yet to be known at a time I hope will be soon.

My sojourn in the gaping space has been far from unproductive. I have experienced a lot and learned more. In fact, if I wanted to go profound on you, I could say that I now know firsthand that the soul and the self can be dealt dizzying blows at dead center and endure.

Nonetheless, the body needs to endure as well, and my story needs to move on. Successful closure of the fissure in my belly could be prelude to closure of the wound in my life. Tomorrow morning could be the charm, the key, the boost that blasts me off this dime.

I’m asking you for some help with that. I’m asking you to have a brief chat on my behalf with the universe and your higher power. I’m asking you to say, “Please, allow Alice to heal well and for good this time.” And, when you are done, simply breathe, “Amen.”

Thank you.

Waiting

2009-03-19T10:16:00.000-07:00

I remember a summer afternoon when I was twelve or so. I lay on my back in the grass and stared up into the branches of a tall elm tree in front of our house.

I might have been taking in the beauty of the filigree of leaves shot through with sunbeams far above me. I might have been relaxing in the peaceful stillness of the one-block street where my family lived. I might have been reveling in the sensation of warm breezes on my skin.

Instead, I was waiting for my life to begin, languishing in adolescent agony with nothing to do that suited the in between of childhood slipping away to make room for unknown adventures ahead.

My adult self smiles affectionately at the melodrama of that young girl so eager to be unleashed on life. I had no idea she would return.

Yet, here I am, in between again. The space I once described as following the period where my previous life stopped short, not yet arrived at the capitol letter jumpstarting whatever is to come.

I imagined this space as a crevice in time. It turned out to be a wide, dry riverbed. Now, after months of cautious trudging across, I dare to look up and see the grassy bank where I may say, "I'm moving on."

If I can just get past one more patch of trudging, an appropriately melodramatic third act. Surgery that would have sounded like science fiction to the girl under the elm tree.

One section of flesh moved to another, veins and arteries stitched by a filigree of threads shot through with micro light to make the body, we hope, whole once more.

I understand that what felt like agony at twelve is more like tedium at much past sixty. All the same, I am her, waiting for my life to begin.

Doubt and the Dark Stuff

2009-02-24T12:25:00.000-08:00

I encounter doubt regularly these days. My biggest doubt: Do I have what it takes to get through this thing and over the obstacles that come with it? Failed procedures, drug-induced diabetes, new drugs that make me ill, another major surgery ahead.

I read the messages so many of you send me. You tell me I have a warrior spirit, strength and courage. I have experienced your wisdom. So I say to myself, "Do they see something I've lost sight of." I consider the possibility that it could be there inside me, whatever I will need to get through.

Another doubt assails me: Will I be able to stay focused here on the CAN in cancer as I pledged to do? I remind myself of two wise women, each named Margaret, each mightily challenged, one by age, the other by cancer. Both meet their challenges by emphasizing what they CAN do. If they struggle against CANNOT, they do so bravely and with grace.

The temptation to get lost in a long whiney wallow is always close at hand. "Jump in," self-pity beckons. "The temperature's just right. Murky and soothing." No mention of the danger in wallowing out too far, in too deep where the darkness pulls us down, rises over our heads, carries us away.

Will I allow myself to be carried away, simply let go and drift off? Or, will I struggle, as the two Margaret's do? I almost believe I can manage the latter. One inch at a time, an impatient soul accepting slow progress.

I remember somebody saying once, "If you can think it, you can do it." I have a curious suspicion that somebody was me.

Hope On the Horizon

2009-02-10T07:15:00.000-08:00

When somebody says, "Let me be perfectly honest with you," it's time to head for the hills because you can bet they're not bearing welcome news. So you should start running right now.

The truth is, on New Years Eve Day, they got rid of the infection in my body but not before a taint of it touched my spirit. A friend asked recently, "What happened to that bravado of yours?" I told her I only ordered a year's supply. I didn't tell her that bravado is at best a pose.

The truth is that this particular life phase has been a slog. To pretend otherwise disrespects all of us who live with and too often succumb to the monster of disease. Ours is a dance with the devil, and we struggle mightily to keep in step.

The truth also is, my breast reconstruction has failed and must begin again. But with a new surgeon, and there is hope in that.

The truth is, all of this has gone on way too long. But we now embark upon a new timetable, and there is hope in that.

The truth is, some friends have drifted away to nurse their understandable compassion fatigue. But others remain stolidly in place, and there is hope in that.

And, I am still here. There is definitely hope in that.

Stephen King, Do I Have a Story for You!

2008-12-29T07:32:00.000-08:00

On January 22nd of this year, if I had understood that I was being thrust into the maw of the medical monster, I'd have shown up with more than a black and red plastic spatula.

It was the kind of frigid morning I long ago left Northern New York State to escape. I'd decided to sleep in when the phone rang, too early to be anything but rude.

"You want me to do what?" was my equally impolite response to the sunny voiced young woman who'd called to obliterate my warm, lazy day.

A moment before, I'd been snuggled under my bright yellow comforter. Hunkered down where it didn't matter that my hair looked as if it had been assaulted from behind by a wrought iron frying pan. Now, I was supposed to get myself ASAP to Seattle's Pill Hill, nicknamed for its preponderance of medical facilities.

As the crow flies, this is not a long journey. Crows, however, are not concerned that our island has no bridge. Nor do they give a flap that on January 22nd, one ferry boat was out of service. Which meant that getting to the mainland would be even more of a pain in the patoot than usual.

Meanwhile, I hopped from foot to freezing foot in the gravel patch that passes for a driveway on Pink Tractor Farm and stared at my red Jeep Wrangler, covered from roof to bumper with a thick coat of frost.

Back home in the Northeast, I'd have been better prepared, but the Northwest is known for its mild winters. The narrow, uneven surface of a black and red plastic spatula was my sole anti-frost device.

A few ineffectual scrapes later, I was inching my way from then to now. Had I known how rocky the road would be, I'd have remained under the yellow comforter.

It is currently another anomalous winter in the Northwest, blizzards and deep chill compounding the frost to increase patoot pain exponentially. Fortunately, my hero husband recently acquired a bona fide ice scraper.

Unfortunately, the red Wrangler now auto-pilots to Pill Hill, where the maw of the medical monster has grown to a chasm over which I dangle, holding on for truly dear life to the nearest fang.

You've probably heard the hospital horror story where the trusting patient enters with a hangnail and ends up an amputee. I've been inserted into my personal version of that tale. Anyone who can say, "Possible pending litigation," will understand why I don’t share the details.

All I can tell you is that I now face surgical procedures #8 and #9, instead of only #8. The added attraction involves Lavage, and this lilting French has nothing to do with charming cafes or pain chocolat. Picture instead internal power hosing with a concoction strong enough to decimate the beasties in residence and maybe some healthy stuff as well.

As I await another phone call and another command appearance, I wonder. Does it sound powerless and futile to vow that if they screw up again I'll smack them with my spatula?

All I Want For My Birthday Is...

2008-12-16T07:54:00.000-08:00

So let's talk about life in the maw of the medical monster.

First off, instead of saber sharp incisors, this beast has itty-bitty toothlets. "The better for chipping away at you in relentless nibbles, my dear." His favorite appetizer is your dignity.

For example, there is the matter of nearly perpetual undress. In my case, an ever-growing number of strangers troop into underheated rooms to stare with insulting lack of prurience at my breasts.

Well, they aren't exactly breasts. They are more like outcroppings. Semi-spheres resembling those herb planter domes advertised on TV. The ones you pray not to find under your Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa bush.

Which is only the beginning of the absurdity.

At this point, the males among you might prefer to scroll down to the nice holiday stanzas just below this post. I assure you, there is nothing even approaching erotic about my mammary melodrama.

The ludicrous truth is that mine presently reside under my armpits. I have been applying deodorant to them for months now. I have also concocted a camouflage

At uglyundergarments.com, I found a bra with pockets on the inside. Into each pocket I shove half a sanitary napkin until they meet in the middle. "Ingenious," you might say were it not for the following visual.

Instead of disguising the rather wide valley between my outcroppings, I have created what I refer to with all due affection as my uni-boob. Straight across from mid-right underarm to mid-left. I could hardly wait for baggy sweater weather to begin.

My surgeon says, "No problem." Too bad her credibility has declined since the emergency re-do of her initial planter dome insertion and the outbreak on their surface of what looks startlingly like a staph infection.

Nonetheless, she assures me that on the 29th of this month, I will awaken from anesthesia sporting new seventeen-year-old breasts on my sixty-eight year old body. Having completed my stumble to that age three days before.

Those of you searching for birthday gift ideas might consider sending me to a meltdown motel. A special kind of spa with pillow replicas of problematic medical professionals to pummel at will in therapeutic delight.

Meanwhile, I have purchased Post-It's as bright as headlamps. On surgery day, I shall stick one on each side of my chest in anatomically appropriate positions. They will read, "Please, put it here."

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

2008-12-07T05:52:00.000-08:00

With thanks for what this year has been
A feast of caring prayer and friends.
Hope to light the darker days.
Life to love and God to praise.

We sing to you the season's song
Of jubilation deep and strong,
And ask that you may each be blest
With grace and joy and peace and rest.

Love, Alice and Jonathan
December 2008

In Praise of Howling

2008-11-29T05:05:00.000-08:00

A neighbor of ours has a small herd of exotic cattle. Long horns, shaggy coats and tawny hides. Not at all like the Jerseys and Guernseys on the decidedly non-exotic hay and dairy farms of northern New York State where I grew up.

But it is not the look of these animals that has caused me to take special notice of them. It is the howling.

The first time it happened was a few months after we moved to the Pacific Northwest. One night in early spring, I was awakened by a sound like nothing I had ever heard. A high-pitched yet throaty sound that I might have described as a bellow, if not for its poignancy.

What echoed from the pasture across the road was more accurately a howl, magnified to the point of heartbreak by its duration. Through the remainder of the night, the following morning and into the afternoon when the neighbor himself arrived at our doorstep to apologize and explain.

He was breeding his exotic animals, and what we were hearing were the howls of a mother when her calf was taken away. I am still not sure why the calf had to be taken away. I only know that I have never experienced a more vivid expression of loss and longing than that sound in the night.

Since then, I have personally encountered loss and longing and the potent mix of emotions they travel with. Anger, grief, helplessness, desperation. I have needed an outlet for all of that at times, for how much I felt and how deeply I felt it.

Crying didn't do the trick, and besides crying makes my sinuses ache. Screaming offered some cathartic benefit, but a scream is a short-lived thing. Emitted, given volume, then gone. I found insufficient satisfaction there.

Nothing reached deep enough to offer real release. Until I took a lesson from the cow across the road.

The first time was late in the afternoon, when the light was beginning to fade on the second floor of our house where I was standing at the time. All of a sudden, without forethought or planning, I lifted my head, opened my throat and howled.

I'm not sure how long my howl continued, but when it was done I felt as if a load of darkness had been lifted up and out of me. I was exhausted and grateful.

Since that afternoon, I have howled many times. Usually, for some reason, on the second floor of our house, and I have found sufficient satisfaction there.

Though, like the cow across the road, a precious part of me is forever gone, and I shall forever mourn its loss.

Life According to Liz

2008-10-15T11:54:00.000-07:00

Liz Aleshire and I go back so far we had time for a falling out and a falling back in. We were a crusty pair. Jokers on the outside, anger to burn within. We went in and out with the tides of ourselves, up and down on waves of grace and disillusion. We weathered, aged, ripened and occasionally rotted a little though never enough to be tossed away.

We loved our children, and they were taken from us so we sank to the bottom and howled. Until there was yet again a sea of eager faces waiting to be opened by the lessons we had learned. We crawled back then from the empty womb to teach a thing or two, arouse a laugh or two.

We tasted many things. Triumphs of the moment, love that lasted or became a memory, faith like a candle flame fading to an ember, flaring up, flickering. We swallowed things we wished we could spit out, but ours were human stories. The bitter and the sweet lie on the banquet table side by side.

Liz taught me to cook vegetables on the grill without burning them. She taught me that if you keep people amused you will keep them in their seats and they may even come back for more. But the most potent thing she taught me was the parable of the boxes and the envelopes.

Once upon a time, there was a bunch of stuff, unruly and unkempt with ragged edges protruding at odd, defiant angles. "Put me in order. Shove me into place. Just try it. I dare you," the bunch challenged because it was belligerent as well as bedraggled.

A champion was required, a warrior equal to the beast. The call went out far and wide for this mighty manager to show herself and do battle. She didn't want to hear. She would rather have taken tea in a glass and scones with clotted cream while she watched the cup pass by. Except that this was a necessary thing, and it is the destiny of heroes to do the things that must be done.

After only a couple of mock weary sighs, Liz stepped forth armed with a bevy of boxes nested together among their cardboard selves. After only a couple of rib-tickling anecdotes, she pried the boxes from their nests and arranged them in a semi-circle.

"Behold the boxes," she said with only a touch of irony. "These humble containers shall be receptacles for your grand ideas and major themes. Thou shalt label each one accordingly, with permanent marker of course. Having done that you shall approach your personal bunch of stuff, reach out boldly, grab one disheveled item at a time and deposit it in the box where it will best serve to elucidate that grand idea or major theme."

After only a couple of flamboyant flourishes, she swept from the depths of the firstmost box a sheaf of manila envelopes and held them aloft for everyone to see. "Behold the envelopes," she said with only one a touch of mirth apparent in her sonorous tone. "Thou shalt single out the box that most loudly cries to be singled out. Leafing through its contents, you shall identify the components of the story that box has to tell.

"The people and what the story commands them to say or do. The places where these things are said or done and, most importantly, the struggles that inevitable ensue. You shall give to each of these components an envelope, labeled with permanent marker of course.

"Finally, though shalt divine from this plethora of envelopes the natural order they yearn to occupy. Fear not whether you are equal to this task, for your heart and your story shall whisper into your imagination all that you need to know, if only you will allow them to do so."

Most of Liz's grateful students went forth from that lesson enlightened, but I stayed behind because we had one more episode to share. The challenge of the body assaulted, bent, broken and, for Liz, given rest at last on Monday, October 13, 2008, just past the toll of midnight.

The rest of us continue on with our boxes, envelopes and memories. I for one will travel better because Liz once walked with me.

Putting the CAN in Cancer: Driving Down Toward Fall

2008-09-16T10:04:00.000-07:00

Putting the CAN in Cancer: Driving Down Toward Fall

Driving Down Toward Fall

2008-09-14T11:23:00.000-07:00

We live behind a white paddock fence with a hand-carved sign. "Pink Tractor Farm".

I point my red Jeep, headlights first, down our long driveway. Tall Japanese Birches wave in a haphazard row along the strip of green that separates our two-wheel track from the neighbors' to the west and north.

For months now, their phone number has been written on a note taped to our refrigerator door. "Call whenever you need us," they said, though before that we knew them only to say hello and smile.

At the end of our driveway, across the road, a couple lives in a Quonset hut. Their three horses chomp grass in the pasture that parallels ours.

The woman, Cindy, cooks in huge batches because she grew up in a family with a dozen mouths to feed. She sends Matt across the road with bags of containers. Venison chili, red sauce with bison meat, fresh clam chowder, large rounds of wheat bread, homemade noodles and more.

Yet, we never knew them at all before a few weeks ago when Cindy knocked at our backdoor with a card offering her help and another phone number for the note on our refrigerator.

Out of the driveway at last, I turn left, then right onto the road perpendicular to our own. I used to take this as a shortcut, a quick dash south to avoid the highway where traffic would have slowed me down.

I would drive this road of humps and hollows so fast that I believe the Jeep left the ground at times. I was getting from here to there, from home to someplace else, nothing less or more. Today, I take it slow.

There is still mostly green in the lush growth along this corridor. Some yellow, and soon there will be more orange. A farm gate left open to my left would make a marvelous photograph. Angles, foliage and the ribbon of road.

No traffic for me to impede on a sunny, September afternoon. For the moment I cannot remember exactly where I'm going, nor do I care.

In two days, we will have been married thirty-six years, Jonathan and me. A drive worth taking at any speed.

Energy Crisis

2008-09-08T07:20:00.000-07:00

My friend Mary, queen of quips, says, "I thought I had a heart condition, but it turns out I was just tired." I bob my head up and down in response, like a crowd at a ballpark doing the wave minus the enthusiasm.

How's that for dreary? I'd like to shake myself and say, "Snap out of it!" But, one shake and I'd have to snooze a couple of hours before I could even consider snapping.

What I need is an Energy Program.

I'm not talking about whether there's enough crude oil to go around, or which candidate will give us more pain at the pump. Nor am I compelled to confess my guilt for punching my own personal hole in the ozone layer by using hairspray in the early 1960's.

All I want to know is this. What happened to the human juice I once possessed in ebullient abundance? What viper in the grass slithered in and snaked it away, and how can I slither it back?

I suppose I could make conservation my campaign kick off, or at least nudge it a little with my large toe. For example, no more depleting my stamina stockpile with petty regrets. Who cares that everyone else is long out of the station while I'm stuck in the turnstile? After all, this may only be a temporary slowdown on my part… or not.

And, what about the mileage I squander on hurrying to start worrying? Why am I so eager to fill my angst tank anyway? Which is a perplexing example of precisely what I mean. Now I'm worrying about why I'm worrying.

Wait a minute! I've got it! Alternative resources!

Oh, dear, too many exclamations! I feel a swoon coming on. For a moment there, I almost had one foot off the couch.

Let's try a less exerting approach, such as using what's already hanging around somewhere. Like solar power leftovers from all those bright, perky years I still remember, though vaguely, as if they happened to someone who looked like me.

Not to mention howling gusts of hot air gushed out at cocktail time or pontificated over dinner. Imagine the wind power that might have generated.

Which exhausts my current supply of silliness and leaves me thanking heaven, literally, for two age-old standbys. Faith the size of a mustard seed that yields a thousand mercies, and Love, a truly renewable resource. The more I give, the more I have to give.

Team those up with a bit of Hope, and what better energizing bargains am I likely to find, especially so close to naptime?

Refrigerator Soup

2008-08-22T13:07:00.000-07:00

I open my refrigerator door. Inside I find solitary vegetables, meal leftovers, scraps of this and that. Inspiration for Refrigerator Soup in one of two variations. Chicken broth base or tomato. Both from cans and cartons because everything these days must be a minimum effort enterprise.
To begin, I prepare what my gourmet cook son calls the aromatics. A handful of chopped onion, a teaspoon or two of minced garlic, gratings of ginger if I'm in the mood. All sautéed fast in oil hot enough to make drops of water dance.

The base goes in the pot. Heat rises. I add the sauté with a mix of herbs and spices fine tuned for years but still a creation in progress. Now for the combo de jour. To make today's concoction unique from all the rest. Whatever it was I found when I opened the refrigerator door. Veggies, leftovers, scraps. Scrub them, chop them, toss them in.

Add, as inspired to do so, a can of beans, a dash of sesame oil, a splash of tamari. Let the pot boil. Lower the heat to simmer. Set the timer and forget about it except for the occasional stir as I happen to pass the stove.

That was that until Super Wednesday. Not a clutch of presidential primaries or a blowout sale event at the mall. Super Wednesday was the day that takes my prize for most medical tests at a crack in these past nine medical months.

Chris, the young technician who got me through those five hours, really knew how to talk. Maybe it was her job to keep my mind off what was being done to me or maybe she did it out of the kindness of her heart. Whatever her motivation, she kept the chatter coming and eventually we got to food.

She didn't hesitate to tell me she was a very good cook and that was because she had a secret. Squeeze a little lime juice into everything.

Those words changed my Refrigerator Soup forever. Just as these nine months have changed me. For one thing, into a woman with no inclination for cooking.

These writings have become my Refrigerator Soup. I open up the door to my brain. I pull out the bins at the bottom. I remove tops from the containers where I keep my leftovers, scrips and scraps of thought and feeling. I stir all of these together into something I pray will be palatable.

These concoctions, like the Refrigerator Soup of my former life, are a sometime thing. The stretches in between mark those days when my bins harbor only limp carrots and wilted greens. The contents of my containers have grown a bluish pelt. The onions are aromatic but no longer pleasantly so. There's not a squeeze left anywhere in me of anything that even approaches the tang of lime.

I tell you this to honor the full truth of what my pink ribbon sisters and I experience. As we stumble through this thing none of us brought on ourselves. As we do our best to keep our heads above the surface of this soup we are in.

Please, Just Hold Her Purse

2008-08-06T07:56:00.001-07:00

At the beginning of this damned ordeal, a woman who would rather not have been an authority on the subject gave me pointers for enduring the Diagnostic Ride. The period of many, many questions and hardly any answers. The Search for the Primary and related misadventures better off missed.

Charitably, she didn't speak of the unspeakable interim. Pumping poison through your veins and zapping your system with so much radiation you could rent yourself out as a nightlight. Both of which I have avoided… so far. Better to tutor solo re: those terrors in a late night room lit only by an internet screen.

We also didn't talk about the phase I'm learning firsthand now. Let's call it Re-Entry. As in the space shuttle's plummet back to earth atmosphere where it could end up burned to a crisp. This is a message from that place on behalf of my sister plummeters.

Most of us have received candles. Lovely aromatics for healing or protection or keeping our fingernails strong because we will inevitably have to hold on by them. Well, when one of us decides to burn her Lavender for Inner Peace Pedestal at both ends, don't try to stop her. Please, just hold her purse.

To be more specific, if she's trying on mini skirts because she is suddenly convinced they are her, though from the standpoint of aesthetics they definitely are not. Please, just hold her purse.

While she's slathering her head with chemicals that will render her hair a shade of red most of our mothers equated with harlotry. Please, just hold her purse, including the garish one that clashes with your ensemble.

Should she decide that an adventure of the flesh is in order, and she's teetering on the edge of scandal with the pool guy or the lawn dude or the coffee café barista. Please, just hold her purse, as well as any other personal articles she may scatter in her wake.

Perhaps, the fire that overtakes her is neither in her locks nor her loins. She has morphed into a flaming -ist or an anti- of her personal cause du jour. Please, just hold her purse, but check first to make sure there's bail money inside.

Both of you live in a little town where good behavior is a given. You haven't seen her in public for quite some time. Trust me. She's hiding. Run to your car right this minute and get her out of her house. Take her somewhere fun. If you order tea and she opts for a tini or two or three. Please, just hold her purse, even if she's throwing up in it.

Most important, when you encounter tongue waggers with her name on their hit list. Pick up your own purse, preferably one of those giant totes that are so in this season. Grip it firmly by the double shoulder strap. Assume a solid stance. Take true aim and swing… for all of us in re-entry everywhere.

AfterWorth

2008-08-04T08:00:00.000-07:00

My personal version of the Cancer Express roared in, stayed long enough to wreak havoc and is currently throttling up to crash on in search of more lives to derail. Was this a limited run never to devastate my station again? I'll have to get back to you on that.

Meanwhile, a metaphor switch. A cyclone this time. Six o'clock news aerial views of the aftermath. "A clean sweep as far as the eye can see," the somber voiceover exclaims. "All previously recognizable landmarks obliterated. Massive rebuilding will be required."

Translation: Critical choices required. Check my personal listings for possible new life options.

Super Grandma, the Sequel. Opportunity: Lots of laughs and love. Problem: Short-term solution. They grow up, take off, email for money.

Club Lady. Opportunity: Social interaction, intermittent sense of usefulness. Problem: Eventual restlessness results in probable injudicious behavior, inevitable shunning.

World Traveler. Oops! Forgot about gas prices, health care depleted cash reserves. Scratch that one.

Outdoor Enthusiast. All of you who know me personally, stop laughing right now.

Holism. Alco - Stomach can't take it. Narco - Current RX load renders this redundant. Foodo - Fat gut out of synch with new smallish breasts. Sexo - I told you to stop laughing.

Zealot. Can anyone think of a cause that doesn't entail leaving the house?

Sage and Seer. Wait a minute. Doesn't that require wisdome.

Maybe I could grab an empty Starbucks cup, locate an available off-ramp, scribble a cardboard sign. "Woman in Need of Future. All Suggestions Appreciated. God Bless."

Then I remember Gilda. She left us with fewer laughs but lots of Red Doors to open.

At the threshold I hesitate. A bit weary. I wonder what number self-reinvention this will be for me. Six? Twelve? A hundred forty-seven?

Then, I remember Roseanne Roseannadanna and shrug. "It's always somethin'."

Earning A Mimosa Moment

2008-07-10T16:12:00.000-07:00

Buddhism, as I imperfectly understand it, teaches that transcience is the only reality. We live in each flash of the present, moment to moment to moment.

A less ethereal way to put this would be that life is one damned thing after another. Like the flickering images of an old-fashioned lantern slide show.

We see an instant image of something happening. Then the slide comes down. After a moment of blackness, another instant image appears. Then the slide drops down again. And so it goes.

Fourth of July the image is of friends, family, food, fun.

The next day our grandson falls through the plate glass window of our garage. Images of fast reflexive action. An ambulance ride without sirens. An emergency room with fast gurneys rolling. Shallow breathing till the verdict comes. Grandson will be fine. Exhalation allowed.

Later that day, flicker to the surgeon cleaning my incisions. Beating back infection. Cutting away lifeless skin. Prescribing yet another portion of pills. Words spoken meant to reassure. We smile and thank her then drive silently home.

Middle of that same night, our enforced calm finds its limit. In a flash of an instant my husband and I break down. We hold each other. Sob wet tears. Wash out the tough moments of today. Sobbing still. For all the tough moments of these past several months.

Cancer Months. Tension drawing ever tighter toward the fear and crisis of this harrowing day.

The next morning is Sunday. The weather is fair and mild. I gather my frayed nerve endings, some appropriate clothing, a resolve to go to church for the first time in what feels like forever.

We are greeted with warmth and joy. Our faith family is an unexpected blessing of recent years. Images flicker of loving smiles, prayers whispered in the ear, laughter with my womenfriends.

I am elated yet calm. Enough stamina left to manage brunch, another first after many cloistered Sundays.

The lantern shutter opens on me holding a delicate flute of Mimosa. I lift the glass to my nose and breathe in soft, sweet effervescence. I hold that fragrance for a special space of time before moving the glass to my lips.

One small sip and I am transported. Has anything ever tasted so glorious? In all my years of sipping without truly tasting, living without truly savoring, flitting here to there without truly being anywhere. And, managing one damned crisis after another.

This is the moment to lift the lantern shutter. Hold it open for another instant and the next and the next. As nectar and bubbles slip over my tongue, down my throat, into my consciousness at peace, at peace, at peace at last.

Crystal Clear

2008-07-04T11:23:00.000-07:00

We have lived on an island in Puget Sound for seven and a half years, not counting the time we tried to move away then scurried back as fast as we could. There are many reasons for loving Vashon Island so much we would throw our lives into chaos twice in a single year to be here. For me, the greatest among those reasons is community.

Yesterday was my first post-surgical solo outing. I got in the car, drove off our property and ventured all the way into town. There I experienced, once again, community Vashon style. Which means that everywhere I went I was greeted with smiles, hugs and delightful conversations that stretched my outing much longer than I had intended.

My energy was running low as I headed back toward my car. Then I encountered Jim the gem guy. Jim sells beautiful jewelry from a sidewalk stand. I wasn't up to buying baubles, but we chatted anyway, especially about the earrings I was wearing. They were a gift from my daughter in law, who had told me they have healing power.

"Those are Quartz Crystals," Jim said. "Would you like to read about them?"

He rummaged under the velvet drape that covers the table beneath his display cases and pulled out a thick, well-worn paperback book. He turned pages until he found the mineral I was wearing, Laser Wand Crystals.

I expected a factual geologic commentary, but Jim's book turned out to be more magical than scientific. Before my cancer experience taught me there is more to life and healing than meets the scientific eye, I would have scanned the pages to be polite, thanked Jim and continued on my way. Instead, I read slowly and allowed myself to be enlightened.

A Laser Wand Crystal is long, narrow and tapered, with sides cut into curved or straight facets referred to as faces. The healing power of the crystal radiates from the narrow faces at its tapered end. This power takes the form of white light focused like a laser beam in whatever direction the wand of crystal may be pointing.

My crystal wands hang from my earlobes lasering straight down toward the place where my breasts used to be. The place where my surgical wounds now struggle to overcome the infection that threatens to short circuit our plans for medical procedures to come and casts my future into the shadowy unknown.

I re-read those passages once more, slowly, before deciding right there and then to believe in the magic of my crystals.

I envision their healing energy as beams of transformative light urging my damaged flesh toward wholeness. In that light, the unknown becomes knowable and the path ahead is crystal clear.

Goodbye to the Girls

2008-06-25T14:52:00.000-07:00

The girls are gone. They were with me for decades, and now they have been retired. But not without this remembrance of our shared history.

The girls didn't appear in noticeable form until later than expected. During the Marilyn Monroe era, the preferred style was to have a pair of Cadillac bumper guards precede you into the room. I was an adolescent then with nubbins where my bumpers should have been.

In the delivery room after the birth of my first child, a nurse said, "You're back to your boyish figure." She meant to be amusing. I was not amused.

After the birth of my second child, the girls finally arrived in full bloom. Just in time for the hipless boobless Twiggy era. Once again, my body was out of fashion. The rest of me was simply bewildered.

Long legs had long been my most attractive body part. The mini-skirt was my fashion mainstay. But what was I to do with these new appendages? My first instinct was to hide them. I filled my closet with turtlenecks and consigned the girls to Undercoverland.

Except for a single public viewing in a purple, plunging party dress.

The occasion was my thirtieth birthday celebration. Which turned out to be a memorable experience. Intelligent men I had conversed with for years as mental equals lost their power of speech. I could not get them to look me in the eye, entranced as they were by my cleavage.

That was enough of that. The girls returned to turtleneck territory and remained there in pleasant obscurity. Until this recent spate of medical attention thrust them into the spotlight yet again.

Now the girls are about to be replaced altogether. A perky new pair will stand in their stead at permanent attention. But the original sisters of my girl and teen and womanhood will never be supplanted in my heart. In their memory I say, "Bless you, Girls. You served me well."

Though I must confess that, every now and then, I contemplate a possible encore appearance of visible cleavage, newly enhanced and freshly entrancing by surgical design.

Think Pink

2008-06-12T09:09:00.000-07:00

I used to object to the signature Breast Cancer Awareness color. Pink struck me as insipid, faded and weak. I refused to identify with any of that. I intended to establish technicolor power over my personal relationship with the black abomination of this disease.

The past few months have shown me many valid reasons to reconsider my long-time, knee jerk responses to pink and other things. Previous impressions, assumptions and objections that felt as if they were programmed into my DNA may, in fact, only be patterns in my head. Patterns that could turn out to be prejudices.

In addition to the calcifications in my breasts, I may also have calcifications in my mind.

So began the hard labor of chipping away the granite of entrenched attitudes. Excavating far more weighty issues than the color of a lapel button or tee shirt. Until, leaning on my jack hammer for a brief breather, I asked myself, "Why not take a break from dynamiting quarries and re-think pink?"

Unfortunately, I was still in granite blasting mode. I thought so intensely about every aspect of pink that I gave myself a headache. I forced myself to lighten up. And, not long after I let go of the jackhammer, the connection I'd been mining for simply appeared.

Pink as in blush. Blush as in the beginning of something, however faint that beginning might be. A blush of understanding or a blush of hope or a blush of enthusiasm.

Darkness ends with the blush of dawn. On the other side of an obstacle lies the blush of renewed possibility. Wait out the darkness. Scramble over the obstacle. Neither is an easy assignment. But after the waiting and the scrambling, you get to the blush. This is an aspect of pink I can get down with, or maybe climb upward toward.

Thus, I inaugurate the new look of this site. From here on, we are In the Pink. And, I may have a new, too. I think I'm blushing!

Lapsey Daisy

2008-05-31T10:47:00.000-07:00

Some people talk about being in the zone. I am in the space. The space between the period at the end of the last sentence and the capitol letter at the beginning of the next sentence.

The last sentence was the life I lived before my cancer diagnosis. The next sentence will be my continuation of living after the surgeries, procedures and healing are done.

You might say my life is what I am living at this moment, but that would be only partially true. I breathe in and out. I move here and there. I fill my days with one thing or another. Still, all of that happens outside the continuity of my regular life. I am in a lapse.

A lapse is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, if I choose to, I can make it a good thing. Beginning with an embrace of my altered pace. Gone is the relentless forward motion that was my prevailing velocity when "I rush therefore I am." was my prevailing philosophy.

I have been reined in by a force far more powerful than my will. Brought to a jolting halt, from flat out full speed ahead to dead stop. "If I'm not rushing, who will I be? What will I do?" I cried as I teetered on the brink of panic.

The answer came in the words of Jesus to his disciples. "Watch and pray," he said.

Now, I watch as I pray to become a person who watches and prays. I watch as I pray about this lapse I am in, between the end of one sentence and the start of another. I watch for the lessons of this lapse. I learn that watching requires a certain stillness.

In that stillness I turn my gaze inward as well as out. In that stillness, I hear, "Don't just do something, stand there."

I watch as my characteristic restlessness slows its agitated pacing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. I watch as that pace loosens its grip on me and gradually lets go.

I watch as I remember three decades ago, before my relentless forward motion began. What I wanted most then was to write. I rushed into becoming a book editor, then a literary agent, then a lecturer. I believed those things would lead me to being more successfully published. Except that those things became what I did instead of writing. Until I had nothing to publish.

In this lapse, I find my Writing Self again. I watch me moving into her. Not metamorphosing, which would be too drastic. Not evolving, which would be too graceful. More like lurching. I lurch toward becoming a person who writes as a significant facet of who I am.

In the meantime, I remain in the lapse between the period and the capitol letter. Why do I not plummet down into that crevice? I pray about that question. I watch and listen as the answer appears.

I do not plummet because I am resting in the everlasting arms of God.

Swiss Cheese Brain - or - How to Cook a Beet

2008-05-19T16:07:00.000-07:00

Food for Friends, a group of women from our church, kept Jonathan and me eating for almost two months during and after my first three surgeries. One evening, a Food Friend who also happens to be a gourmet cook brought us a lovely piece of salmon ready for the oven. But, it was her artfully arranged vegetable platter that enthralled me most. Especially the yellow beets.

They were sliced crosswise in an overlapping row. Concentric circles ringed each slice like the ages of a tree. When I could finally bear to destroy the design by eating them, they tasted as wonderful as they looked. I had to have more. So my husband went to the market.

He cell phoned from the vegetable aisle to describe every round thing there that might possibly be a beet. He purchased our best guess then came roaring home, my shining knight in his white GMC charger, with the golden prize. My difficulty didn't begin until the next day.

They lay gracefully arched on my red tile countertop. Dark green stems and leaves above smallish orange orbs with tails trailing into wisps, all crusted in good garden earth. I would make my preparations before disturbing them. But what preparations would those be?

Stark still in the middle of our terra cotta kitchen floor, I asked myself, "How do you cook a beet?"

I'd cooked beets before. I had to know the answer, but the place where that knowledge once dwelled was somehow vacant now. I turned in a half circle as if the answer might spring forth from a silverware drawer. No relief for my bewilderment appeared.

I called my son, an inspired cook. "I've forgotten how to cook beets," I said. "My mother wants to know how to cook beets," he called to my daughter in law. After a pause, he answered. "You boil them or bake them." "Isn't there another way that comes out better?" "Can't help you there," he said.

I let him off the phone, suspecting he might think I'd gone slightly balmy. I also suspected he might be right, and that turned out to be the case.

I have Anesthesia Amnesia. A friend of mine calls it Swiss Cheese Brain. After general anesthesia, memory returns gradually to full function. In the meantime, the mind could be compared to Swiss Cheese. Certain facts and memories slip through the cheese holes. Random information, like how to cook beets.

Nothing major of mine has slipped away. No protracted time periods or events. Not even those I might want to forget, such as my first marriage. It's more like, I can't recall the whosis who did whatsis last whenever. At least, I can't recall it, as in call it up, at the moment I may want to.

I observe the phenomenon as the cheese becomes less of a filigree each day. I assure anyone else recovering from surgery that they are not losing their minds. They are only taking a vacation from disparate mental crevices for a while.

I have begun to consider how we strain to remember what we might as well forget. Except that I could really use a good recipe for cooking beets if you have one.

The Responsibility of Red Hair

2008-05-16T12:21:00.000-07:00

Everybody kept telling me how pale I looked. Which was bewildering because I have always been pale. Then I looked in a mirror and realized they were right. My skin had lost the little color it previously possessed. And, my hair had gone pale, not gray but pale.

There may be a scientific link between hair paling and cancer, but I didn't care about that. I simply wanted to look healthy. My solution was to become a redhead. It would be a homemade job with my husband acting as beautician since my arm movement was limited from my surgeries. I wish I had recognized the video potential in that scene.

Jonathan began by pulling on the flimsy plastic gloves from the hair dye kit with such force I was amazed they didn't explode. I advised an apron, oblivious to the fact that real men don't wear aprons except for barbecuing. From then on, it was pure slapstick.

He was obsessed with the timing. Using the stove clock in the kitchen, he dashed back and forth to and from the bathroom. I told him we were only dyeing hair. Nuclear fission would not be involved. He continued to dash all the same, as if the fate of the planet depended on it.

The result was a so-so red, but I didn't care. I assumed I would be bald soon from chemotherapy. Then the no-chemo verdict came down from the medical mountain. So-so red would no longer do. It was time to go all the way.

I made an appointment with Evita, a petite woman with a giant soul. She took charge immediately. "I've been every shade of red there is. I know exactly what to do," she said.

I was a bit shocked by the result. I'd envisioned something demure and understated or, in other words, pale. It took me a while to adjust to the really red red on my head. Everybody else said it looked natural on me. That it suited not only my pigmentless skin but my feisty personality as well.

Red hair and feistiness go together. Which set me thinking about Margie. Margie has endured the most protracted physical and mental challenges I have ever personally witnessed. One setback after another for years, but she never gives up. I ask myself why.

Margie is courageous, tenacious, strong, determined and she has a heller of a spirit. She also has red hair. She understands the responsibility that goes with carrying a shock of shocking color on her head every day. People expect her to be feisty, out there, vivid with life. She doesn't disappoint those expectations.

Sticking my head in a vat of red dye gives me a responsibility also. The responsibility of living up to Margie's good example. Just shooting my mouth off, which many people confuse with real feistiness, won't cut it now. I have to be genuinely courageous, tenacious, strong and determined with a heller of a spirit.

I've got no choice. I have red hair. Thank heaven I also have Margie to show me how to wear it.

Surviving and Thriving

2008-05-02T16:52:00.000-07:00

Have you ever been devastated? Knocked so flat you had to struggle for breath before you could even think about getting up again?

Of course you have. That's why you will recognize how off-target I used to be on the subject of surviving and anybody who made a big deal about doing it.

I had a bad attitude about surviving. Why take pride in being a Survivor when the point of life is to Thrive? Fortunately, experience can be an antidote to such shortsightedness.

You are dealt a blow that topples your life from where it was the instant before to an entirely new and not so pleasant place the instant afterward.

I won't enumerate the variety of assaults. You can each provide your own specifics. I won't enumerate my specifics either. You probably know more than enough about them already.

I will simply say that most of these devastations have to do with loss. Something once significant to our sense of wholeness is gone. Sometimes it happens all of a sudden. Sometimes it creeps gradually in.

Either way, this loss is very intimate,very painful. An unrelenting ache in a now empty place. That ache can take on the dimensions of our entire life with the rest of what happens to us feeling less real by comparison.

After the assault, the topple and the gasping for breath, survival begins. It is a struggle, and that struggle is noble. The nobility lies in the determination it takes to keep on keeping on.

This is not a straightforward trek. We are in tricky terrain. Stumbles and falls are inevitable. The Buddha reminds us, "Fall down seven times. Get up eight." I celebrate all of you whose box score at crawling back upright exceeds your plummets to the pavement.

For those of you who find yourselves down at the moment or straining to regain momentum, please, allow me to share another leap in my experiential learning curve.

Reaching out. That's the secret. Many among the standing are ready to reach back and help haul you upward.

Which may be where thriving begins. After celebrating our own survival, we extend ourselves and our souls to bring others along.

There IS a Monster in the Closet

2008-04-22T12:41:00.000-07:00

Cancer is a monster disease. A monster that slips in unnoticed and counts on remaining so. Early detection is our most potent weapon against this stealthy beast that lurks as surely on the periphery of your life as it did on mine. Which brings me, as usual, to a story.

Five months ago, I sat in a doctor's office listening to one man of medical science shouting into a telephone at another man of medical science. I would soon realize their heated exchange was crucial to my chances of staying alive and the quality of that life. At the moment all I heard were warring egos and impatience.

They were arguing about the results of my third mammogram at their facility, a well-regarded big city medical center. My primary care guy should have sent me out of earshot. Thank heaven he didn't or I might never have pieced the story together. I hate being out of the know, but this time there was more at stake than my curiosity.

I had only clues to the full scenario when suddenly I found myself shunted off - mammogram films, ultrasound reports, CT scan results and all - to an even larger facility and a new menagerie of medical professionals. I arrived in less than congenial temper, which did not improve when they told me I must endure the same tests over again plus several more.

As it turned out, I should have been giving thanks rather than grumbling. Well-regarded as the previous medical facility may be, their mammogram technology was and still is inadequate to detect the invasive cancer under my right arm.

They were using Analog Mammography, a film-based vision that missed the footprints of the monster trekking through my body tissue. Remember the arguing-doctors scene? In their frustration, they were apparently considering a "wait a while and check her again" approach. Fortunately, they sent me packing instead.

I grudgingly submitted to a Digital Mammogram at my new medical digs, and there it was, plain enough for me to see even through my contact lenses. A tiny abnormal something sitting on a muscle far out under my right armpit with lymph nodes lingering dangerously nearby.

Digital Mammography equipment is expensive, as is retraining staff to use it properly. Savings on film eventually offset those initial expenses, but many facilities avoid the transition anyway. My previous medical facility tells me they plan to convert next year. Next year might have been too late for me. It would certainly have lost me the battle advantage of early detection.

Are you a woman like me? Is there a woman like me in your life? A woman like me wouldn't know an analog from a digit until we'd been trampled over by them.

I do not claim any radiological training. But I have learned from my own experience. I pass that knowledge on to you. Once a schoolteacher, always a schoolteacher so those lessons come with an assignment, three assignments actually.

1. Find out if the mammogram equipment screening you or your friend is Analog or Digital. If it is Analog, take yourself and your money (or your insurance company's money) to a Digital screening facility asap. Money talks. Our annual mammograms represent a huge payday. Enough money walks to digital facilities, and the others will be forced to catch up. If that walk, or drive, is longer than you prefer, consider the alternate trip, through the terrifying terrain of not early enough detection.

2. Be a big mouth and ask how many views they are taking. Mammograms are nobody's favorite way to spend an afternoon. We all wish them over as fast as possible. But thorough is what we need, not fast. Who cares if they've scheduled twenty-minute appointments to squeeze (forgive the pun) more of us in? That isn't enough time for a really good look, including so far up into the armpit it's almost off the radar. Insist on what you need to be safe and don't listen to pat explanations that condescend to your intelligence and your better interests.

3. While your blessed big mouth is doing its good work, find out if you have dense breasts or where on the spectrum of density you fall. I thought everybody's pictures looked white like mine, instead of gray. They don't. What color are your mammograms? Dense breasts are more difficult to diagnose.

Please, use what I have learned to help yourself. Please, share this blog site with your sister, mother, lover, friend or any woman you know. Spread the word however you can.

The cancer monster is loose among us, but we CAN force the medical establishment to listen with maximum ferocity for his tread.

Not Much to Say Is Good News

2008-04-10T08:17:00.000-07:00

I have nothing particularly thoughtful to say today. No insights to share. No pondering or contemplation to dump on you.

In this new blog, I plan to append personal updates to my posts. Those updates will be titled "Orr What? News."

But today there is only the update which has filled my spirit so full there is no room for anything else.

After weeks of anxious waiting, yesterday I found out that I will not need chemotherapy. At least not this time around. My breast cancer is in the 95% range of non-recurrence.

There is more surgery ahead, a big one in June, one or two more in the months afterward. But I am not thinking about that now.

Today I am grateful to you. For your prayers, fond wishes and kind deeds that have bathed me in so much light through these past weeks. May the goodness you have given be returned to you a thousand times over.

Today I am grateful to God. For sparing me, and those around me, from the chemo ordeal. And for blessing me with another chance at life.

I am humbled by all of that. Which may be the best news of all.

Getting It Right About Anger

2008-04-07T20:55:00.000-07:00

"Unlike yesterday, this morning I woke up not feeling angry."

I found this sentence in a journal I've been keeping since my diagnosis. The pain medication I was taking when I wrote those words disrupted my memory function. I don't remember the specifics of why I was angry one day and not angry the next.

I do remember the difference in the way those two states of mind and spirit felt as I carried them around inside me.

In Grace (Eventually) Ann Lamott says,"It's fine to know but not to say that anger is good, a bad attitude is excellent and the medicinal powers of shouting and complaining cannot be underestimated."

She got that right, especially the part about it not being fine to express anger. When you are sick, too often your natural anger is squelched by those around you. The sick, or grieving or aggrieved, person is told she must be upbeat and hopeful at all times.

Sometimes this already emotionally disarrayed soul is even accused of inviting a bad outcome to her illness. By allowing herself to be anxious or, worse yet, letting her anxiety show.

I am not indifferent to the virtues of a positive attitude. I promote a version of that virtue in my own lectures. "Attitude isn't everything," I always say, "but it affects everything." So, keep your sunny side up, look for the silver lining and whistle a happy tune.

I still support this point of view, though for a less over-the-rainbow reason. But before getting into that, may I make a suggestion?

Could we please let each other feel whatever we need to feel? Which includes an occasional healthy dose of being pissed off. An outburst of disgruntled energy can be exactly the fuel we need to get us through a prickly patch or a bad day.

On the other hand, I feel better when I am not angry. Lighter and brighter, maybe even stronger. Lightness, brightness and strength are helpful states of mind, but they don't always come easily. Anger arrives on its own steam then gains momentum and feeds itself. Cheerfulness is harder.

You may awake in a cloud of cheer in the morning and find it dissipated by midday. Work is required to keep it going, and sometimes the journey of that effort is simply too far to walk. We need to cut each other, and ourselves, some slack. It is a challenge to challenged.

Which reminds me. Don't you just hate what we do to the language these days? We take blazing technicolor conditions of the human experience like feeling crushed, shattered, devastated, or blindsided and water them down to a pallid pastel word like "challenged."

That's enough to make me angry!

Being and Doing

2008-04-07T19:47:00.000-07:00

Ordinarily, I am a doer. A situation arises, and I do something. Occasionally, I do the right thing, other times not, but I do something either way.

When I was fifteen, I considered another kind of life, one focused on being rather doing. I was young then but serious by nature, and might very well have taken my future in that direction.

On a church youth group trip to an Episcopal convent outside Rome, New York, the sisters had me in their thrall from the start. They wore pure white habits and spent their days tending and teaching children discarded by the world at a threadbare orphanage and school across the road from the convent grounds.

If only I could be like these women, I thought. Then my life would truly mean something.

As the day ended and heads were being counted for our return trip, I was missing. They found me in the meditation garden at the center of the convent, sitting on a stone bench hoping I would never have to leave.

I did leave, of course. I never told anyone how much I wanted to stay, how much at home and at peace I felt in that garden. I was a teenager after all, afraid of how weird such revelations would make me sound.

I returned to my North Country home and never shared with a soul how powerfully I had been drawn to the contemplative life that day. I was not yet mature enough to understand that what I yearned for was both the exuberant life of the world and the enlightened life of the soul.

We all live in those two realities. The minute-to-minute dailyness of the surface life we can see, hear, smell, taste and touch. And the other. Less obvious to our physical senses, more inward than outward, more abstract than concrete, more being than doing. In my experience at least, the balance between them is askew.

I have allowed and encouraged the pace of my life to be dictated by the mountain of doing I believed had to be done. Part of me resisted. But I kept up the pace all the same, racing along the over-bright forever-moving surface of things.

I am a doer even now. Much of what I once thought so crucial to accomplish has been superceded by doing what must be done about having cancer. Doctor visits, laboratory tests, insurance companies to grapple with, decisions to be made, surgery and more surgery.

The minute-to-minute dailyness recorded on my calendar and in my appointment book attests to all of that. The pace won't let up much for the rest of this year at least. This is a task-intensive disease. Some form of vigilance will continue for the rest of my life. This is an as-yet incurable disease.

Still, I hope for a way to pay closer attention to my inner life. Maybe these months of grappling with something so totally unprepared for and all-consuming could turn out to be a back door access to that way.

I have been stopped in what were once my tracks. There is release in that. Opening up of a space in my former forward trajectory. Room for something else to settle in. Even with so much staying alive stuff to be done.

The question remains. Will I pick up the surface race where I left off? Or, maybe just some of the time, will I find my way back to that afternoon in the convent garden with its aroma of tranquility and roses?

Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition

2008-04-07T16:56:00.000-07:00

When in need of a coping mechanism, humor is generally my first resort, especially the absurdist kind. So, here goes.

Beginning with my possibly lovable but definitely absurd scramble for order in my life. I've struggled long and hard toward getting my ducks in a row, maximum straight with minimum stragglers.

Cancer is a rude shock to that or any other agenda. I find my ducks suddenly all over the lot and barely recognizable as ducks at all. They look more like pigeons these days, heads abob, relentlessly cooing, too stupid to fall into formation even under threat of bread crumb blight.

According to Emily Dickinson, I should remain undaunted by this because, "Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul." I suppose she means that to apply whether the feathered thing is pigeon, poultry or Peregrine Falcon.

I'm in the market for hope wherever I can get it. Still, I wonder. While perching in my soul, do they poop there too? I guess the Amherst Nun simply doesn't say it for me.

So, I fall back upon a personally more suitable source of poetic inspiration. The Monty Pythons. Who did in fact assert, "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition." Which certainly does say it for me just now.

How might the Pythons respond to my present predicament? Having been pressed into the ranks of the Big-C Battalion without so much as a "By your leave," or "Bob's your Uncle."
Here's how I picture that response from my personal pyramid of Python favorites.

Michael Palin jitters upstage, downstage, right, left. Limbs spasm, eyes dart, mouth gapes. Image incarnate of a poor sod far out-of- the-know.

Graham Chapman pulls himself to full height, chin aloft. True Brit mans the barricades against soggy biscuits and tepid tea, pontificating absurdities both ludicrous and lovely as Rome burns.

Finally, dear John Cleese is perfectly attired for my current medical meeting opportunities. Dress shirt, regimental striped tie, calf-high socks with garters, white lab coat and boxer shorts. He prances about, knees nearly smacking his face, like a crazed Lippizaner stallion.

In other words, they haven't got a clue and surpass wonderful in their cluelessness. Still, I press for explanations, why's and wherefore's.

At which point I prevail upon you to endure another foul metaphor. Feel free to gather any spare prayers and let them fly in my direction. Specifically, pray that I may learn to surrender more graciously to my own cluelessness. Amen.

Hearing that, another of my favorite poets, Groucho Marx, might tap his cigar, wiggle his rectangular eyebrows and quip, "It couldn't hoit." Then, as unexpected as the Spanish Inquisition, a you-know-what drops down from the sky, orange bill grinning even on black and white TV.

And I probably won't be able to herd this bundle of feathers into one of my no-stragglers-allowed rows either. Maybe I should simply let it perch in my soul and poop at will.