Almost forty years ago, I moved from my hometown in Waterford, Michigan, to Charlottesville, Virginia, to pursue a Master of Education degree in Secondary English Education. The underlying reasons for the move at that time were twofold. After two years of working a job to pay student loans while writing fiction in my “spare time,” I realized I needed a better fit for my day job. I had already received a Master in Writing from a reputable university, but I found that my job in a stock brokerage office took me further away from my goal of writing. If I pursued the education degree, which contained within in it a teacher certification piece, something I’d neglected to pursue with my undergraduate degree in English, I might find that magical day job; I’d always enjoyed teaching.

My other reason for the move involved the location and my relationship to the man who eventually became my husband. I wanted for the two of us to live in the same city in separate lodgings to see if we had the kind of compatibility that a marriage would require. We would both be in graduate school at the same time, though he had a head start, having moved to study at the University of Virginia a year earlier.

During my first semester in my program, I fell in love with my course in Adolescent Literature. One of the course requirements was to read a certain number of books and journal about them. I can’t recall the number – fifteen or twenty. We could read anything we wanted, if the book could be deemed appropriately as appealing to young adults. For one of my selections, I chose Carson McCullers’ A Member of the Wedding – I’d had exposure to some of her short stories in high school. I remember reading the novel in my bedroom apartment on Stribling Avenue in Charlottesville, trying to get a feel for the adolescent main character, fascinated by how the novel evolved. The novel was set in the South, and I was living in the South for the first time, looking out my apartment window at the lush foliage.

The experience of reading that McCullers’ novel reminded me of how I’d loved a short story of hers at some point earlier in my life. In “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.,” an adolescent paper boy meets a man in a streetcar café one day, a man who is trying to recover from his past, having lost a woman whom he’d cared about deeply. The patrons of the café and the owner himself view the man as a potential “drunk” or someone suffering from an instability. Shortly after the paper boy enters, the man tells him that he loves him and explains that he is learning to love the world one item or person at a time. Perhaps if he practices that act, he can learn to live and love again.

The tone in the story is not unlike that in Hemingway’s often anthologized story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” Both McCullers and Hemingway write about people searching for explanations, people who want answers. They want to know how to exist in the world with purpose; sometimes they want to understand how their lives turned out the way they did.

I’ve gleaned from what I’ve read in the intervening years that Carson McCullers’ life was challenging at times. While readers, critics, and other authors praised her writing and considered her a truly gifted writer when her work emerged, her friendships, while rewarding, were complicated. She married a man, struggled with the marriage, which ended in divorce, and later remarried the man, who committed suicide some years later. She had lesbian lovers as well, though she reportedly never embraced her identity as a lesbian, even though she wrote honestly about the complications of sexual orientation. She suffered from rheumatic fever early in life and later died young because of the lingering effects of the resulting rheumatic heart disease.

Thus, it seems clear that McCullers knew, experienced, and sometimes even embraced the complications and complexities of life.

I still hold on tightly to what I learned from “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” I’ve applied the knowledge I gained from that reading experience to my life with stage IV lung cancer for over nine years. There are complications and complexities in my life. Deteriorations. When cancer is not in remission but dwelling in an odd sort of abeyance, a hidden suspended animation, there are breakthrough events requiring treatments, in addition to the daily dose of the oral targeted therapy drug I take each day. You live your life in as normal a way as possible, with infirmities. You deal with COVID-19, adjusting as well as possible to the reality of the mounting deaths.

Yet it’s hard to make plans for the future. For me, it’s hard, during any given year or on any given day, to determine whether I’m actively living or dying. That’s why I latch onto the serious mission of the struggling man in “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” and the process he outlines. There is a simplicity to the approach, a mindfulness. Focusing on the trill of a nearby bird or the shadow of the sunset on a patch of carpet and embracing such things can be soothing to a person living with a chronic, terminal disease.

If we take the wisdom from that story and marry it to what we know about the mindfulness process – valuing the moment, valuing the in-and-out breath of the moment, settling the anxiety by embracing small things and breathing in and out as we embrace them, holding on and loving that thing we embrace – we can find a bit of joy and simultaneously dispel some of the gloom.

A little over a month ago, I went to the desert in California with my husband. He had a business trip for work. I had the option of staying home or going with him. Staying home meant caring for the dog and dealing with potential snowfall and ice, activities I wasn’t sure my body could tackle. Going with him meant braving airplane travel with a mask and being exposed to more people in a week than I see in two or three months.

The visit wasn’t perfect. It was colder than I realized it would be in the desert, and I just couldn’t get warm. My body felt out of sorts, out of its rhythm. Just before I returned home, I lost my phone, which caused headaches just as the trip concluded. But I saw an old writing friend. We talked about books and movies and walked along a beach to the changing colors of a sunset. The visit was a luxurious gift for someone like me who wants to say good-bye to people I’ve loved, not too soon, but somewhere close to the end, whenever that might be.

Despite my weariness, I found a bit of rebirth. I found things to embrace — metaphorically. A Joshua Tree. The San Jacinto Mountains. A cactus. The trip provided a respite.

Yet shortly after I returned home, Russia invaded Ukraine. I weep now for the people who must deal with this ongoing tragedy and for the people who’ve already been lost. And I’m faced again with a common dilemma, one so many of us face. How do we reconcile the dissonance we find when we try to focus on moments of beauty and stillness, questing for inner peace, while acknowledging widespread pain and suffering, whether in a war-torn country or any other place of sadness in the external world? We dealt with the harsh realities of COVID-19; we’ve known atrocities in the past. Those atrocities don’t go away, even if you try to ignore or bury them.

I don’t want to live in a bubble; I want to extend my empathy and fight complacency, but I don’t know how to salve my soul as well.

I don’t have any easy answers. I will continue to search for a balanced and safe state of mind. Like the man in McCullers’ story, like McCullers herself, I will try to love small delights and moments and celebrate their beauty. And if only in my heart, I will try to take the radiant light those things produce and bend it toward Ukraine.

This past autumn, around September, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel started singing in my ear:

Slow down, you move too fast

You got to make the morning last

I’m hoping that as you read these words, the melody plays in your head. If you like, try to keep it going as you read. I’ve written before in this blog about the speed of life and my increasingly slower pace as a cancer patient. All around me, events swirl at a breakneck speed, like an accelerated clip from an old movie. In the past, I’ve often viewed this slowing down as a necessary step, imposed on me by my life with cancer. But I’m beginning to recognize that slowing down may be a choice, a preferred way of being in this world that is accelerating, becoming more frantic and louder with its sounds of dissonance.

We’ve just lived through two years of a pandemic. In the final month of 2021, “Omicron” made it into our vocabularies in bold and noxious fashion. In the political realm, pundits and politicians alike daily question what we as individuals and as a united nation believe about the democracy that governs us. I have three children in their twenties and early thirties who tell me that they have serious concerns about what their futures will hold.

In December, I “celebrated” nine years of being on a daily oral cancer drug for my stage IV lung cancer. Yes, I’m happy to be alive (“Stay Positive; Stay Grateful” being the mantra most cancer patients are urged to repeat to themselves), but I’m falling behind. After nine years of dealing with the disease itself and the side effects of the drug I take to keep the cancer in check – a drug which fights the cancer but does not offer remission and simultaneously attacks my skin, my eyeballs, my brain, and my psyche – I want to be that stubborn child who digs in her heels and cries, “No! Stop!” In truth, I’m losing the ability to keep pace with the world. But observing the day-to-day turmoil in our society, our country, and our world, I question daily whether I want to continue to do so.

One can argue that the advent of COVID-19 offered the world a chance to slow down, and like many others, I’m honored to have observed so much goodness in people who performed from balconies, cheered health care workers, and extended humanity to others around them. But we also know that anxiety levels have increased over the past few years; those increased levels have contributed to hyper-charged social media posts, assuming social media posts weren’t already on steroids before the pandemic.

This combined speed and frenzy is not what I want for my life. I didn’t drag myself through the last nine years with cancer to experience what feels like the world yelling in my face to speed up. I need to retreat.

For most of my life, I’ve done what people asked me to do, without complaining too much. As a cancer patient, I’ve followed all the rules, and I continue to go through the paces, but it’s getting harder. To make and keep doctor appointments, to wait at the end of a cell phone line to get through to the human voice to order the prescription or the CT scan. No one told me I’d have to do this long, slow, living-with-cancer, dying-from-cancer dance during COVID, without a solid job, while still trying to help my children launch themselves into adulthood.

And there’s the rub. I’ve realized that as a cancer patient who needs to slow down, who wants desperately to take the meandering stroll (with walking stick), sing the slow songs, enjoy the increasingly rare deep breaths, I worry about leaving my children in this world of craziness. I want to sugar-coat their beings with the words of encouragement I won’t be able to speak to them when I’m gone.

I worry that if I don’t slow down, I’ll work myself into a frenzy about scheduling medical appointments, staring at my cell phone screen while I’m on hold and the minutes tick by, becoming a wound-up, tangled ball of self-absorption who can’t see beyond herself, her needs. I worry that I’ll lose my capacity for an external focus and instead dwell within my disability.

Yet how will I help my children if I don’t stay in the game? If I don’t keep learning the technology and maintaining the persistence to make the appointments and take the medicines? How can I slow down and still help them learn to live without me once I’m gone?

Paul Simon has said that he was just learning how to deal with the fame of the “Bridge Over Troubled Water” success when he wrote “The 59^th Street Bridge Song,” while travelling across that New York landmark, a bridge where traffic moves quickly, and drivers need to hear a message to slow down and stay safe.

As I examine the song’s lyrics, especially, “I’m dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep,” the words capture what I want for my slower life. “Dappled” suggests a slow, meandering pattern of light playing over color. “Drowsy” refers to that lovely pre-sleeping state where the body slows down and starts its even breathing – ready to sleep. Ready to succumb to the peaceful moment, half-conscious. And yes, I want to make the morning last, too. Carpe diem and all that, not in an urgent way but in a remembering, appreciative way.

I honestly don’t know how I’ll resolve the tension between slowing down and trying to stay aware of the world just enough to support my children as they deal with their futures. Perhaps for now, the best I can do is seize my good days and search for those small moments that offer luminescence. Seek out the dapples and share them.

My apologies. I haven’t written a blog post in a while. The fall of 2019 brought many good things into my life – the publication of a full-length book, Winded: A Memoir in Four Stages, and a launch party to celebrate my 60^th birthday and my seventh cancer birthday with a stage four lung cancer diagnosis.

Yet in close proximity to those positive events, I had to deal with new findings from CT scans on the small, inconclusive, but clearly growing spots on my lungs. Repeated scans revealed increases in those small spots. The fall of 2019 with its powerful and positive events brought me some revitalization, yet as 2020 dawned, I lost ground – more fatigue and increased mysterious twinges in my lungs and bones.

All terminal cancer patients who enjoy “more time” know the duality of these kinds of twinges. They could mean nothing. Or they could point to the beginning of the end.

And then there was COVID-19. With seven years of survival under my belt, I know well how guilt, an insidious infusion in a survivor’s veins, can make the heart and body quake with the recognition of unfairness. COVID-19 plays a diametric role in a cancer patient’s life. At the basic level of survival, it can transform a relatively normal person into the hermit of hermits. How likely is it that a stage IV lung patient would survive COVID-19? But the psychological and emotional effects become even more twisted as a cancer patient watches others die of COVID-19, with little notice and considerable suffering. “That should have been me,” she says. “At least I’ve been able to prepare a bit. I’ve had ‘more time,’ as the commercials say.”

After a final, mid-year scan in 2020, during the summer’s brief pause in the pandemic, my oncologist and I were able to negotiate a new treatment plan. I would go off my daily oral pill of Tarceva, the miracle drug for my particular mutation, and begin taking a new oral medicine approved in recent years, Tagrisso. Tagrisso, also known as osimertinib, and created by AstraZeneca,

Would it do the same for me? After nearly eight years on another drug, I was a statistical outlier Could that happen twice? What were the chances? It would not be fair. I knew three women with my kind of cancer who had found hope in the narrative of my extended life on a miracle drug yet failed to receive the same benefit.

On November 7, 2020, three months after I started taking Tagrisso, I travelled to two Henry Ford facilities for tests. After getting labs and scans at the hospital, I drove to the office building where my oncologist saw suburban patients one day a week.

I had suspicions about how my body was reacting to the new drug. I felt cautiously optimistic that I might be experiencing an upsurge in energy. The side effects of the medication were far less drastic than those I’d experienced in the almost eight years I’d taken Tarceva.

My oncologist asked, when he entered the room, if I was nervous about the results, and I told him that I thought I knew what they might be. He confirmed that the spots were shrinking. Significantly. And the pleural effusion that had begun to grow again in my lungs was once more receding.

Good news. Something to celebrate. Yet throughout the day, I’d been thinking about the card I needed to write to the husband of the woman who had died that previous year, shortly before my book launch and 60^th birthday party.

How do I celebrate my good news? My minor triumph?

Here are the facts:

• I was diagnosed with cancer in November 2012, just before my 53^rd birthday.
• After being a writer and creating manuscripts for my entire adult life, I was awarded with book publication at the age of 60.
• I also began my second reprieve from cancer, a second regeneration, at the age of 60.
• In May of 2021, at the age of 61, I will publish a second book, the novel that I began writing thirty years ago.

It is all good news.

It is also not fair. Nor is it a miracle. I assert to you most pointedly but humbly: Life is not fair.

Yet I am trying to grow from that little girl who found it hard, for so many years, to take a compliment. I must take this good news and allow it to be a humble little light, not unlike the flame of a candle one has just ignited, trying to gain purchase on the wick.

I am cupping for a moment that small flame and its wick.

It’s a quiet whisper: Good News.

(Photo of Glenoory Bay, Donegal, courtesy of Alison Hirschel and Gene Burns)

In one of my last posts, I talked about being a tortoise rather than a cheetah.  I recently saw a friend and roommate from college, Marilyn Beals, and she reminded me that I am a cheetah when I eat – at least I was in college – but that may be because she is a tortoise when she eats!  She wanted to affirm for me that I can still do some things quickly.

For months now, I’ve been thinking of a William Wordsworth sonnet, “The World is Too Much with Us,” which is a poetic companion of sorts to my cheetah vs. tortoise post. Although I was trained as a fiction writer, I have read and taught enough poetry over the years that lines from poems often come to my brain unbidden, which happens, I think, when you love words, and also when you share/teach the same poem to four sections of literature-based composition on any given day, as I did in the 1980s at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

At some point I must have committed the sonnet to memory, because different lines come to me at different times. Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet, and the poem is often described as asserting his frustration with the Industrial Revolution and the way in which it moved humanity away from nature, robbing the human spirit of mystery, beauty, and the capacity for wonder. His message certainly resonates in our current era as well, even though we long ago moved past the Industrial Revolution and into the Information Revolution.

Wordsworth’s message also resonates for me on a slightly different plane. As I have intoned “The World is Too Much with Us” to myself in the last few years, what I’m positing is that I have become too slow for the world. Because of the speed of everyday life and my slow pace, I can’t keep up. We are out of step, the world and I.

Yet I am not alone, and recent events have underscored this point for me.

The dissonance and the space between my speed and the speed of the world is no more evident than when I am traveling and must manage the GPS system on my phone while driving. I expect the navigational guide to reign on the screen; when a random text or email message interrupts the navigation depicted on my phone, my blood pressure rises, and I panic. If I lose my navigational screen, I will be lost. None of the paper maps on the seat next to me will do any good after dusk has arrived and I ‘m in the middle lane of some six-lane expressway. My hands grip the steering wheel; my neck moves as if on a hinge, snapping right, then left to check the lanes around me. “The world is too much with us,” I mumble to myself, and what I means is that I am frightened at how old I have suddenly become, how inept I feel in this world that moves at a pace even my adolescent self could never have managed.

I wrote the paragraph above several weeks before I learned of the sudden death of one of my daughter’s high schoolclassmates.  He was driving with two friends on a rock-climbing adventure in a western state, just a few weeks before he was to be married.  In the afternoon on a precipitation-free day, a car drifted from its lane on a two-lane road and hit his vehicle head on.  He was killed instantly. One of his passengers died just over a week later.

In the media report, the law enforcement officials suggest that some driver inattention on the part of the other driver might have been involved.  That driver was also hospitalized.

Driver inattention.  That two-word phrase could mean so many things.  It could mean that the driver, like me, has difficulty trying to follow the GPS on her phone to determine her travel path.  It could mean that she was texting while driving.  It could mean that she has undiagnosed narcolepsy. It could mean that she was under the influence of alcohol or some controlled substance. There are a host of possibilities for that two-word phrase “driver inattention,” but in the end, none of it really matters because so many people’s lives have been irrevocably changed by the consequences of the driver inattention, regardless of the specific kind of inattention.

A much more mundane example of how the world is too much with us is apparent in the recent presidential debates for the Democratic candidates. While these debates are arguably no different than those in the last half century, the number of candidates make the compressed intensity of the debate style more apparent. In order to narrow the field, the candidates must “take on” each other with respect to key issues.  Each candidate’s team members perform research and develop talking points based on opponents’ past policy decisions.  The television viewers watch to see which candidate gets to have a “moment” in the limelight, based on his or her delivery of a one-liner or zinger.

Seriously?

Let me make a pointed statement. I will vote for any candidate who is not Donald Trump.  But the media runs the risk of turning all of these candidates into miniature Trumps with its focus on minute- and seconds-long answers.  Whether a candidate is talking about his, her, or their policies, plans, platforms, or values, a tweet-sized thought is not substantial enough.  Candidates deserve the opportunity to articulate their ideas.  There are so many of us who just can’t live any longer in this sound-bite world that Trump has harnessed for his reign.

And finally, the obvious example of the “too much with us” world. Wordsworth is mourning the loss of the natural world: “Little we see in Nature that is ours,” he says.

The ice in Greenland is melting.  The temperatures in Europe and elsewhere have soared.  Trash floats in and chokes the earth’s bodies of water.  Every night, a different expert on a different news show explains to us that we have only ten years to alter the path that leads to the earth’s destruction.

At times, over the years, I have stopped in my tracks, often in a quiet room, and intoned Wordsworth’s words: “Great God! I’d rather be/A pagan suckled in a creed outworn….”

A pagan.  For Wordsworth, the idea is radical, his “Great God!” serving not only as an exhortation but also as an exclamation.

Regardless of what creeds we follow, we must slow down. A slower pace is imperative.

When we are driving.  When we are speaking and even arguing with others.  We must embrace the quiet in the world and linger much longer in some silent, natural moments. We must turn to others, speaking gently and with humility.  We must extend our empathy.  Above all else, empathy, respecting the dignity of others.  The dignity of humanity.

 

The World is Too Much with Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

William Wordsworth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the most part, I am doing well these days, arguably feeling the best I’ve felt in nearly seven years with stage IV lung cancer.

Nearly seven years. And yes, my survivor’s guilt has grown considerably with each year. I wish every terminal cancer patient could have nearly seven more years.

My book Winded: A Memoir in Four Stages comes out in the fall, fulfilling the writing and publishing dream of my lifetime. I will spend twelve days with my family in Ireland in August, something I never thought possible back in 2012, when I was diagnosed.

Perhaps most exciting of all, for the first time in all of these years, I have earned permission to skip the quarterly scans and appointment I usually have with my oncologist, which means I have permission to enjoy my book launch without having the specter of bad scans — six months instead of the usual three months, and I will take that anxiety that usually builds for those three months and spread it in a thin layer over the six months as if it were a lite anxiety sandwich, so much easier to chew and swallow than the regular version.

The scans that preceded my oncologist’s permission were fabulous in their “unremarkable-ness,” unremarkable being the word that pops up frequently in radiology reports when things are going well in one’s body. Unbelievably unremarkable, and to be honest, completely unexpected. Since I required stereotactic body radiation in February of 2018 for what appeared to be a growing spot on my left lung, I was pretty sure I was on my way out of the universe; I had appreciated my five years beyond diagnosis, and it didn’t seem fair that I should have more than that. People on my drug who make it past the two-year mark often start to succumb somewhere between the five- and seven-year mark. I didn’t want to be greedy.

Yet the latest scans revealed that every spot in my lungs appears to be stable. Nearly every lab result for my blood tests falls within the normal range.

In the previous six weeks, I’d even had success with a new antibiotic to treat the daily cancer drug’s rash on my face, and for the first time in six years, my face, especially my eyebrows, revealed no external signs of the dreaded Tarceva rash. For years I’ve lived with the unpredictable pimples and the ubiquitous Frankenbrow that has transformed the follicles of hair above my eyeglass frames into two inflamed and ragged patches of hair-peppered angry skin.

In the meantime, wearing a relatively rash-free face with which to greet the world, I attended a lovely writing retreat at Interlochen, enjoying writing sessions, craft talks, and readings. I hadn’t been to the workshop in a few years, but the previous time I’d attended, I came home rejuvenated and full of energy.

This time, when I returned home, I hit a wall.

I hit a wall just like one of those cartoon characters who thwacks into a solid surface and bounces away, a goose-egg knot emerging on her forehead. I experienced the exhaustion that I’ve felt on and off over the years, the kind of exhaustion you can’t sleep through, can only roam the rooms of your house and try to shake off, like you try to shake the cobwebs in your brain each day.

I knew that the rash would come back when I cycled off the antibiotic. My new dermatologist had told me so. I used to take a different drug continuously with no breaks. I’d stopped this new drug just as I’d headed to Interlochen.

I didn’t know the rash would return with such a vengeance after I returned home. For the first time in years, I’d felt that the face I presented to the world was almost normal.

But it wasn’t just the rash that frustrated me.

Call me the naïve puppy who refuses to learn the lesson her owner is trying to teach her, keeps antagonizing the tenured family cat, keeps dragging that one kid’s favorite t-shirt out from under the bed to chew on, keeps finding ways to creep into that patch of wildflowers entwined with poison ivy.

I know better than most that the rash always returns if the drug is working. I’ve known also throughout this journey that the fatigue can be relentless at times, stemming from a combination of the Tarceva drug’s side effects, fibromyalgia, depression, and poor sleep.

I solved the sleep issue for several years by taking a sleeping pill, which seemed to provide at least nine good hours of sleep each night. But I hated the fog that sometimes resulted from the drug, and I worried that I suffered from short-term memory loss. Thus, I gave it up, making myself return to plain, unadulterated sleep. Which means that on some nights I am wide awake and move to another bedroom to do Sudoku, my strategy for emptying my brain of unwanted distractions and perseverative thoughts.

Perhaps my good fortune in the last year – my book’s publication, my recent stable scan and blood results – caused me to temporarily forget about the fatigue that has troubled me throughout my cancer journey. It’s a strange fatigue, because it isn’t relieved by naps; I used to be a religious napper before I was diagnosed with cancer. But somewhere along the way I lost the capacity for long two- or three-hour naps on weekend afternoons. My mind doesn’t often let me shut down in that way anymore.

And I suspect that one of the ways in which I’ve tried to outwit the fatigue is by simply ignoring it, charging through days, making myself do, do, and do. Yet I know that when I do anything in a public setting, I lose energy. I love people, but as an introvert, I lose energy when I am around people. It should have been no surprise to me then that while being at Interlochen for four days added fuel to my emotional and intellectual reservoir, it depleted my energy.

Still, I felt such sadness when I hit that wall and knew I would have to pull out of the universe once again and sit. Just sit.

And remind myself that I am a tortoise. That’s the other thing I keep forgetting. Not only do I deal with fatigue and exhaustion; I am also slow.

It’s not clear whether I’ve always been slow. As a kid who suffered from chronic and often acute asthma, I knew that I was slow at all things physical. Before I was given an exemption for gym class, I was the slowest runner and could never haul myself up that rope to touch the beam at the top of the gym ceiling.

But I also had early indications that while my body was slow, my mind was fast. I was a fast reader. I did math problems quickly. I remembered things faster and more accurately than many of my peers.

In my mid-forties, I began to have some indication of how my tortoise tendencies might affect my mental capacities as well as my physical ones. One summer I did test scoring for Pearson, the educational company with a finger in nearly every education pie in the country. Math tests. That summer I sat in my grading pod in front of a computer screen, grading for hours on end, quick numerical assessments of how a student solved a math problem, often related to a graph or a geometrical figure. From time to time, the pods would be assessed as to their members’ skills at grading. I scored high on accuracy. When I was normed against others, it was clear that I viewed the test answers in the same way as countless other graders did.

However, when I learned my efficiency score, I was mortified. I graded exams much more slowly than other graders. I made up for my deficits in efficiency with my accuracy, but it was clear that I was not a rock star in my grading of exams when it came to speed.

What I learned that summer about accuracy versus efficiency as it applied to my brain helped me to understand, in some fledgling way, why I could not grade student papers quickly or efficiently. Friends and colleagues gave me a bit of a pass – “But you’re so thoughtful,” they would say. “So conscientious.”

I could tell myself that, and I’d like to believe that some of that “excuse” was true. But I also believe that my brain simply took longer to go through a series of steps that involved complex skills: reading what was on the page before me, summarizing what I thought the students were getting at, analyzing how they might improve their manner of articulating their thoughts or their manner of supporting their ideas, and finally, communicating my observations to them in a concise but articulate way. Putting a grade on their efforts. (That last step for me was its own quagmire, triggering a myriad of concerns about how I might damage some student’s self-esteem or tip a depressed student’s mood into dangerous emotional territory).

When I finally let go of my teaching responsibilities, I didn’t have to think so much any more about why I was such a tortoise. At least when it came to reading, commenting on, and grading papers.

But the cancer diagnosis requires me to keep that tortoise aspect of my brain’s functioning in mind. This weekend, while writing long overdue thank you notes to friends, I wrote that I was “living like a tortoise in a cheetah world.”

A comparison between the tortoise and the hare might have been more apt, as Aesop already established it in our literary canon. Plus, there are lots of rabbits – hares – that wander through my back yard. But today’s world really is a cheetah world. The cheetah runs fast and sleek, its claws digging into the earth to give it balance. In my yoga class, our instructor Marie gives us metaphors to help us think about what to do with our bodies. I hear her say “Plant yourself! Spread those toes! Grip that mat!” With my newfound Google/Wikipedia knowledge of cheetah’s claws and balance, I want to add, “Grip that mat like a cheetah?”

Will that help me speed up?

It is time for me to accept that for whatever reason, I am a tortoise. By disposition, by virtue of the cancer, by virtue of my depression, by virtue of the many things that have weighed me down over the course of my life, slowing my pace.

I’ve finally relinquished the desire to be the cheetah. Sleek is not for me. Fast is not for me.

But I will claim those claws.

For as a tortoise, I, too, know about claws. If planting those claws, gripping the mat, clenching the earth or the rubble underneath me will deliver balance, I will gladly accept it. I will welcome the slow way in which I sometimes teeter, clawed foot in the air until I can place it down firmly, at whatever slow speed I can muster.

And then take the next step.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” That refrain is what I remember most from hearing the story of Chicken Little as a child. “Chicken Little” or “Henny Penny,” as she is sometimes called, is the bird who feels something drop on her head and comes to the hasty conclusion that a calamitous event is about to occur – the sky is about to break up or explode above her. For whatever reason, Chicken Little believes that the object hitting her head is a piece of the sky, and she feels compelled to alert others to the danger that she expects in the near future.

I don’t know how old Chicken Little is at the time of the incident, but because of the adjective “Little,” I think it’s fair to assume she is on the young side. Young, maybe impressionable as well. Some might even say “ditzy.” Certainly not very wise about the universe or the physical properties of the earth and the solar system.

I’ve thought about Chicken Little lately because I’ve been pondering what compels people to share their thoughts and fears with those around them. Sometimes people reveal a thought or a detail of their lives to another person; sometimes they proclaim their ideas to a group. Some people need to share frequently. But there are some people who rarely speak. It is not always clear why some people speak often and speak up and why others keep their thoughts to themselves. Beyond the issue of introversion versus extroversion, there must be key situations or circumstances which compel individuals to give voice to their ideas or worries. I wonder when it is that we are mostly likely to speak?  Beyond that wonder, I’ve also worried that I’ve been a bit too Chicken Little-ish in recent months.

The version of this story that I heard as a child left me with a three-fold impression that has developed further over time. Chicken Little’s cry constitutes the sounding of an alarm. In fact, this cry is one syllable short of the reported Paul Revere cry, “The British are coming!” The reaction I first experienced when hearing about the cry was related to the incredible harm Chicken Little appears to sense in the offing as she adopts a doomsday ethos. In simple terms, Chicken Little has a message to communicate; in. extreme terms, she has a warning to deliver.

In order to hear this message, Chicken Little’s audience must silence the static and mundane noise of everyday life and let her message ring out clear into the countryside. My second childhood observation, probably that of an older child, such as an adolescent, was rooted in the gossipy nature of Chicken Little’s message. There is a spread-like-wildfire quality to Chicken Little’s frantic delivery: HAVE YOU HEARD? The repetition of the message carries something unseemly, almost tawdry with its insistence. When I reflect on an earlier self’s observation of this aspect of Chicken Little’s warning, I experience a tinge of frustration that this chicken is a woman, at least in the version to which I was exposed as a child. And I worry that I subconsciously adopted a stereotypical view of women as the primary purveyors of gossip. I don’t like considering this possibility.

But my adult self has recognized a third aspect of Chicken Little’s message delivery that goes beyond the gossipy nature and gets at the mundane noise I mentioned above. For Chicken Little to sound the alarm, others must choose to be quiet. Or in a more sinister light, others must be silenced.

Because Chicken Little must be allowed to sound the alarm.

Like Chicken Little, the young male in the Aesop’s Fable, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” can be viewed as a bit of an alarmist. The various versions of the fable present a range of reasons for the Boy’s lapse in judgment, but all of them tend to the frivolous. The Boy has a tedious job. He is described in some versions as “bored,” finding life “very dull.” Some versions describe his decision to raise an alarm as a “plan to amuse himself.”

When I compare the two characters, I must admit that I lay more culpability at the feet of the Boy for his lack of responsibility. His job is to watch the sheep. It’s a significant responsibility, watching the sheep. He’s been placed in charge and bears the burden of this charge, but he also has a measure of recourse. The villagers have told him that if he faces a threat from a wolf, he can call for help. He just needs to sound the alarm.

For whatever reason, he makes the decision to summon the troops and call “Wolf” when none has been sighted. Not once, but twice. When I envision the scene in which the villagers arrive after his first summons, I imagine the Boy with a sick look on his face as he realizes he’ll have to fess up. Yet most printed versions of this Aesop Fable claim that the Boy laughs when the villagers come. How can he laugh?  Laughing is so cavalier and insensitive. In addition, laughing so boldly in their faces seems rather foolish. I like to imagine an alternative version of the story in which he at least pleads to an advanced case of anxiety and says he needs to practice his summons because he wants to make sure his voice is loud enough. I want to believe that his call is prompted by fear –  that he worries about whether the villagers will come at all – whether they value him enough to put him first.

As the reader of the story, I find it even harder to imagine his face the second time the villagers arrive. They really believed him. Again. And again, he merely laughs. This time, the villagers must be both angry and disgusted, feeling more than anything else, that the silly boy does not value their time or their industry.

So we have these two alarmists, the chicken and the Boy. Why am I so interested in them?  Because I want to understand what causes them to raise their alarms, and not just what causes them to create a furor but what prompts them simply to utter their concerns in the first place. Chicken Little delivers a complete, full sentence, twice: “The sky is falling.” The boy calls out one simple word, “Wolf.”

I want to understand them and their impetus to speak, because even though I’ve lived the bulk of my life as a steadfast introvert, I’ve had those moments when I’ve sounded an alarm or talked too loudly. I cringe to use the phrase, but on occasion I’ve even “drawn attention to myself.” On one hand, as an introvert who has, in many ways, grown more introverted with my cancer diagnosis, I know how easy it is to fall silent, too weary to contribute to the conversation or too reluctant to start a story with twists and turns that get lost in the translation, lost in the world of quick news bites and tweets. On the other hand, as an individual with terminal cancer that is not currently progressing, I’ve felt an odd shame at sharing even the most minimal of details about the odd turns of my diagnosis, thinking that I should be thankful to be alive when so many others are not, and for that reason, I don’t deserve to speak.

Last fall, after a stressful series of events, my body reacted strongly to that stress with various ailments, and I became convinced that I was dying, convinced that the odd findings on my CT scans were proof that I’d finally reached that dreaded spot on my journey – the beginning of the end. I gave voice to that fear. I said aloud to several people, “I think I have started the process of dying.”

And when my quarterly oncology visit did not produce the proclamation that I expected, I felt at first the rush of relief and gratitude for being granted even more time than I’ve already had. But after that rush passed, I immediately felt shame at having voiced my fear aloud.

Really, though, haven’t I given voice to that fear over and over again in a variety of ways, since I was first diagnosed in November of 2012?

The plight of the metastatic cancer sufferers and temporary survivors who take a miracle drug to live longer is that we can never really know exactly what the true message of our health is, and feeling like imposters, we wonder how often or how loudly we should therefore share that message.

“Telling begins in an atmosphere of urgency,” the authors of Finding Your Writer’s Voice: A Guide to Creative Fiction claim. I used the book over a decade ago to teach a class, and I’m sure I embraced the quote by Thaisa Frank and Dorothy Wall because I needed to take heed of the advice for my own writing. I have learned that in my life, as in my writing, I do not often use the voice of urgency to deliver my messages, whatever they are. Yet from time to time, when I am overwhelmed by the stresses of my terminal diagnosis with its absence of end dates, I become the Chicken Little, whose world seems to be falling apart. “My sky is falling!” I cry out. “Help me, please. My sky is falling.”  Or I am the Boy. “Wolf!” I cry out. Then, again: “Wolf!”

I don’t laugh when people come running; it’s not funny, this fear of my impending death that I live with every day. And I want to make it clear that I don’t gain power from “telling” my message with any urgency. There is no power or control in this telling. My fear is just a weight that grows on my chest, and I need to push it off from time to time. To tell it.

I have other fears I live with as well, unrelated to my own life. I fear that we are living in a type of hyped-up urgency, with intense messages flying into the airwaves every day. Some of us will simply learn to speak louder, more forcefully, or more often, deeming each one of our messages to be urgent. Others will grow silent, feeling their messages unworthy of the “urgent” label, unable to decipher what it is that they most need to articulate. There is an atmosphere of urgency, yes, but how many voices can speak in this atmosphere? Whose voice will be heard? Whose will be drowned out?

Perhaps we need not speak or tell at all; perhaps we need to listen.

 

–Thanks to Christine Jason and The Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts & Sciences in Rabun Gap, Georgia, for allowing me to photograph the chicken in the photo above!

 

 

It dropped.

That other shoe.

Let’s pull in a slow-motion sequence here and see if we can capture the physics of that moment – the transformation from the shoe in the air all the way to the shoe on the floor, in a series of freeze-frames.  Let’s watch it tumble and roll over, grommets flashing metallic in front of us, then hidden as the shoe rolls, flash of shoelaces whipping the air, lashing out into space.

That’s exactly how it fell.  Slow motion.  First there was the odd entry in the Michigan Medicine portal, the note written by the physician’s assistant.  My follow-up email to my oncologist, Dr. Gadgeel.  His reassuring response, and the promise of a phone call.  The subsequent phone call, an odd conversation in which two people who respect each other spoke at cross purposes.  The suggestion that we move up the date for the next set of scans.

Confirmation of a growth in those scans. A subsequent PET scan revealing growth of a nodule in the left lung.

For the first five years that I survived after the diagnosis of my stage IV lung cancer in November of 2012, I belonged to a group of cancer patients who enjoyed the privilege of progression-free survival, known in most PubMed articles as PFS.

According to the Dictionary of Cancer Terms provided by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), progression-free survival is “The length of time during and after treatment of a disease, such as cancer, that a patient lives with the disease but it does not get worse.  In a clinical trial, measuring the progression-free survival is one way to see how well a new treatment works.  Also called PFS.”

More simply, the term suggests that the treatment agent or intervention halting the growth of metastatic cancer has remained successful. The treatment has kept the cancer from progressing. The cancer is not developing, growing, or moving forward. It is progression-free. The patient’s state of survival, then, is called progression-free survival.

Since metastatic cancer is cancer that has spread from one site to one or more other sites of the body, the cancer bears the potential to progress to several areas at once.  Therefore, it’s important to note that when an individual with cancer lives in the realm of progression-free survival, the cancer has been halted in all areas of the body.  In my case, that meant in the lungs and in the bones.  The cancer was still there; a patient with stage IV lung cancer is not cancer-free or in remission. When one is in the state of progression-free survival, the cancer is present, but not progressing.

I like to describe my cancer as being in solitary confinement within my body, in whatever nooks and crannies it inhabits.  That term, “solitary confinement,” oddly enough conjures up a positive association for me – one of watching Burt Lancaster on black-and-white television with my parents as he starred in The Birdman from Alcatraz.  Sitting with them and watching the images flicker on the screen provided me with one of my earliest moments of intellectual and artistic appreciation as well as one of my first twinges of social justice.  As a result, when I think of my cancer in solitary confinement, I imagine Burt Lancaster and his birds inhabiting in miniature form all those areas of my body marked by the cancer.

I don’t remember when I learned the term “progression-free survival,” but I appreciated having a term to describe my cancer situation.  It’s difficult to describe one’s cancer to someone who may not be familiar with the disease in all its variations.  Many people think that cancer sufferers are actively undergoing chemotherapy or radiation therapy, or they are in remission.  But cancer mutations are on the rise as scientists begin to understand the mechanisms that cause cancer to grow and as researchers develop drugs to address those growth patterns.  Being in a state of progression-free survival while taking a daily, oral targeted therapy pill is not the same as being in remission, although the two states may look very similar to the beholder.

Progression-free survival for the stage IV lung cancer patient imposes a heavy psychological burden and a proliferation of quandaries when it comes to making short- and long-term decisions.  While I am ultimately quite thankful for those progression-free years, there is clearly an irony here which researchers and oncologists may or may not talk about at their conferences and conventions in between appointments at their clinics in which they counsel dying patients. For the patient, progression-free survival may mean that while the cancer is not progressing, the patient’s life may not be progressing either, particularly in the case of a stage IV diagnosis.   Cancer may have arrested the patient’s development as a human being.  The patient may be like a bug cast in amber, trapped, unfulfilled.  Preserved but immobile. Behold the progression-free patient, unable to move forward for any number of reasons but often because it’s difficult to make decisions when you don’t know what the future holds.

Well-intended individuals point out that none of us knows the future.  That statement is quite true, but stage IV cancer patients on targeted therapy know that there is not presently a cure for their disease, which will eventually progress, unless a cure is found.  And if the cancer strikes while one is still in the midst of one’s employment years, the decisions about employment alone, separate from the burdensome issue of paying for cancer treatment, can be nearly impossible to address.

At the time that I left my progression-free survival state in late November and early December of 2017, I was too busy mourning the deaths of an aunt and my brother-in-law to mourn the loss of my PFS state.  Yet certainly, the change affected me.  Not only did I have to deal with developing cancer in my lung; I lost the term progression-free survival and the handy acronym that went with it.  Some might find that second loss laughable in comparison to the first, but given that I am a person who values words and, to a lesser extent, labels, and given that I’ve struggled mightily with identity issues over the course of my life, I found it sad to let go of my trophy status.  PFS.

As fortune would have it, I quickly found a new term to embrace, a new home for my cancer situation.  While travelling with my husband on one of his business trips in the weeks following my cancer’s progression, I began Googling information about the stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) I would be undergoing for the apparent growth in my left lung when I returned to Michigan. At an earlier session with the University of Michigan Hospital Radiology Department I’d been trained to breath and hold my body still.  When I returned, I would receive three treatments of 18 Grays (GY) each, three intense and powerful blasts of radiation directed at my lungs, for a total of 54 Grays.  This treatment, the literature said, worked well for individuals already undergoing targeted therapy with oral drugs, especially people whose cancer had progressed in minimal ways – oligometastatic disease.  As we drove to catch our plane on our return trip to Michigan, I said to my husband, “Hey, I’ve got this word with the prefix ‘oligo.’ The only word I know related to ‘oligo’ is ‘oligarchy’ as a form of government, but I can’t remember what it means. Remind me.”

“Government by the few,” he said. Another search of the National Cancer Institute’s Dictionary of Cancer Terms revealed a definition for “oligometastasis,” which is defined as “A type of metastasis in which cancer cells from the original (primary) tumor travel through the body and form a small number of new tumors (metastatic tumors) in one or two other parts of the body.” I had a new way to describe myself and my condition. I now had oligometastatic cancer or oligoprogressive disease. I lived in a new realm of cancer.

Now we must fast forward to February of 2019, a full year after I received SBRT for my cancer progression.  In the intervening time, I ignored this blog.  I’d lost family members.  In fact, even as I prepared to receive my radiation treatment, my mother-in-law slipped away. We mourned her.  We buried her ashes.  My husband and his surviving brothers cleaned her house.  I continued my studies in medical billing and coding.

Two women I’d met with the EGFR mutation died in those intervening months, their cancer having progressed in a manner much more ferocious than my own progression had been.

In those twelve months from February 2018 to February 2019, I had some odd scans, the radiologists’ reports noting new scarring, presumably from the radiation, and speculating on what the new observations meant.  In December of 2018, stressed and fatigued and confused about my health, I was convinced I was dying, and I was prepared to join my relatives and the women whose cancer type I shared.

But the latest scans in February granted a reprieve.  The radiologist who read the report for those scans didn’t see obvious signs of progression.  My oncologist remains convinced also that at this moment in time, my cancer is not progressing, in my lungs or in my bones. In other words, these scans reveal that even though I no longer occupy a state of progression-free survival, I seem to be progression-free within my oligo-progressive state.

If this seems confusing, I have captured the nuances perfectly.  I am confused also.

Who’s on first?

Where are we here? We have a dropped shoe, a movie allusion to Burt Lancaster and The Birdman of Alcatraz, a comparison of my cancer to time spent in solitary confinement, and an allusion to Abbott and Costello and their famous baseball word-play skit.

Disorientation reigns.

I am confused, but grateful.  In the fall of 2018, when I experienced some heavy stress, my body reacted, and I thought I was dying.  The problem with cancer is that if you have it, you are always looking for it, waiting for it to peek around the corner. Yet sometimes other non-cancerous things affect your body, changing your thyroid numbers, your labs in general, your energy level, your ability to concentrate. So how do you know what’s happening to your body? How do you read the signs?

I am determined to stay abreast of my health information, study my disease, and understand its nuances.  I believe strongly that our nearly broken medical system will be fixed only when we can train individuals to understand their health and disease and not view physicians as magicians who hold the secret elixirs that will save us.  Our health model needs to be based on shared information and collaborative decision-making.

In the very end, maybe I can’t read the signs, however determined I am to try.

My oncologist says there aren’t any studies I can look up on PubMed to help me chart the future and understand how much time I have left.  He reminds me that we zapped the supposed growth in my lung; we didn’t biopsy it first.  Perhaps it wasn’t cancerous?

I am confused, but grateful. Yet angry as well.  I keep living; other people are dying.  How do I deal with how that makes me feel?  How can I be truly grateful for some circumstance of cause and effect out of my control that has me winning the lottery while others lose? I can’t make sense of it.  I want to be like Burt Lancaster.  I want to find peace and contentment in the birds while I’m living in solitary confinement.  I want to value my time on the planet and appreciate its beauty, find a measure of design and pattern in its making.

I feel I should embrace my current status with oligoprogressive disease.

Or perhaps I should go outside the realm of cancer terms and acronyms.  Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called Outliers which bears the subtitle, The Story of Success.  He begins the Introduction with two definitions for the term “outlier:”

“1. Something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body. 2. A statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample.”

I have not been successful in the world that places value on artistic achievements, economic prosperity, physical prowess, or extraordinary vision and acumen.  But perhaps I can claim success in this small arena: staying alive beyond statistical expectations.  It is not anything I’ve accomplished as a result of my own efforts; it is a feat that simply occurred.

Lou Costello finds enlightenment as he nears the end of the baseball monologue “Who’s on First.” He figures Bud Abbott’s patter out; he understands the names and positions of the players.  He is no longer a dupe, frustrated and confused. He has achieved success.

I want to understand my disease and its progression, but perhaps as an “outlier,” I can claim only success, not understanding.

Outlier.

 

I took two years of chemistry in high school and another semester in college, yet I don’t remember specifically learning about the concept of alchemy until I was much older. Like many pieces of information stored away in my brain, this concept has been married with a visual image because of various reading experiences I’ve had. The image, not surprisingly, is that of a crucible.  Not Arthur Miller’s, but a simple vessel.  And a flame.  For me, alchemy relates to transformation with a touch of magic thrown in – white magic or dark magic or maybe even gray magic – because we don’t know who practices the magic.  In my dance with cancer, alchemy is a process that takes place regularly in my body, whether I am aware of it or not.

When my children were younger, we had a picture book floating around the house called The Toy Brother by William Steig. We had many children’s books floating around the house – some we purchased for the kids, some the kids ordered from Scholastic flyers once they were in school, books they got from the public library and the elementary school library.  Books their grandma gave them, books from a monthly book club their uncle enrolled them in. The Toy Brother must have been one of the latter.  I liked William Steig as a cartoonist and a children’s author, but it would not have occurred to me to buy a book about alchemy (and this book came out several years before Steig’s Shrek became a household word after the movie was released). Yet there it was, floating between the bedrooms, between bookshelves.  Set in medieval times, the book addresses the story of a young alchemist-in-training, Yorick, who illicitly conducts experiments with his father’s potions in the lab while his parents are away, shrinking himself into a very small person.  To negotiate the world in the days before his parents return from their week-long trip, Yorick must rely on his younger brother Charles, whose intelligence and skill level he has not always valued.

I remember being a bit mystified by the medieval setting for the book’s story, although once my children began their elementary school classes and teachers talked about picture books in relation to stories that presented problems and offered solutions, I began to see how the world of alchemy could provide a vehicle for a story about family and acceptance, about sibling rivalry and role reversal, giving children the charm of the magical and unexpected, not unlike a Mickey Mouse Sorcerer’s Apprentice tale in Fantasia or the equivalent of body transformation in Disney’s Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

 

In the spring of my junior year in high school, Mr. Johnson, my fearless leader for two years of chemistry, gave us the rules and procedures for our “Unknowns” project.  We would receive two substances to identify, and the process of identifying both would provide a major grade for the semester.  We would deal with one at a time, starting with a series of lab procedures that would help us narrow down the possibilities.  At any point, we could make a guess, but that option of making a guess came at a cost.  We only had two guesses per unknown substance. If we were wrong with our first guess, a “C” was the highest grade for which we could qualify for that substance determination.  If we were wrong with our second guess, we would earn an “F” for that substance and would move on to the next one.  Those of us who protected our 4.0 grade averages with a mixture of intellect and fret moved slowly and carefully through the rule-out laboratory tests, squelching any impulsive guesses.

All of Mr. Johnson’s 11^th grade chemistry classes were going through the same process. But early in that process, we came to class one day to find a substitute teacher who broke the news that Mr. Johnson had suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized.  Though we all loved and revered him, it was a well-known fact that he occasionally smoked in the storage room of chemicals behind his classroom. Probably none of us knew back then that smoking lead to heart disease.  My sisters and I had harped at our mother for smoking for years, but we focused on the specter of cancer, not heart disease.

I don’t remember the name of that substitute teacher who took Mr. Johnson’s place while he was in the hospital.  We were all glad he’d survived, and several of us went up to visit him, avoiding the subject of cigarettes and his heart, focusing instead on our unknowns.  He was sober about his health but almost gleeful in revealing that he’d been working closely with the substitute, and the “Unknowns” project would go on without him.

The substitute ended up having a much softer touch than Mr. Johnson, and when I guessed wrong on my first try for one of my substances, she found a way to provide a few hints, not an answer, to lead me in the direction of which tests I might perform next so that I could avoid the consequences of two wrong guesses: an F for that substance.

I’m not sure what final grade I earned for the project; I believe I scored a “C,” doing well on one substance and bombing on the other.  But I felt pride that I’d been a scientist during those weeks – that Mr. Johnson from afar and the compassionate sub who replaced him helped us to explore the glory, tedium, and capriciousness of the unknown, in all its power.

My relationship with chemistry ended a few years later.  Although I’d taken Advanced Placement Chemistry during my senior year and thought hard about going into science, the small creative writing scholarship I received from the English Department at Michigan State University required me to declare an English major.  I entertained the idea of a double major but found the prerequisite chemistry class I took during my freshman year hopelessly boring and confusing with no Mr. Johnson at the helm using trademark humor to enliven discussions of electron configurations, my least favorite aspect of chemistry; I was much more engaged in my English classes. Yet when I took the 1-credit lab class that accompanied the intro chemistry lecture, I became temporarily entranced again by the process of exploration, confident in my skills of recording and framing data, largely because of my high school experience.

 

Those who happen to give thought to alchemy might view it as a search for a process or substance to turn another substance or element into gold (the pursuit of wealth) or the search for an elixir or substance to provide eternal life (the search for immortality).  Another version of alchemy presents the search for an element that is basic to all matter. I read Honoré de Balzac’s novel The Quest of the Absolute for an independent study project with my European history professor when I was a senior in college. I was perplexed by the main character, Balthazar, a man who allows his family to fall into a life of ruin because of his obsession with searching for the absolute element. His quest, a mission borne out of what appears to be a combination of genius and mania, represents a pursuit of scientific research at the expense of personal life.  When I see the word “quest” and think of a quest fueled by passion and obsession, it is hard not to slip in the adjective “heroic” to modify “quest.”  Yet are all alchemy quests automatically heroic?  Balthazar’s quest uses scientific methods, methods which issue from the world of reason.  Yet I think that I, the reader of the novel, had and still have some prejudice in favor of science.  We do not know that the purpose behind Balthazar’s questing is heroic or even altruistic.  Yet I, lover of literature and science, have somehow made an association in my brain; scientific questing is noble.  Alchemy is noble, regardless of the results.

A few years after I received my undergraduate degree, I would finally have a chance to read Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, a Pulitzer-prize winning novel which came to my mind the first time I read The Toy Brother with my children and again years later when my friend Marie and her husband bought me a copy of The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book on cancer, and we talked about Arrowsmith.  While much of medieval alchemy may have been about turning substances into gold, one of the branches of chemistry and scientific research that evolved from alchemy centered on the search for cures for well-known diseases.  Lewis’s 20^th century hero pursues a quest that can certainly be described as “meaningful,” “noble,” “purposeful,” and “heroic” in conventional terms.  Martin Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis’s protagonist, spends a career deeply rooted in the worlds of scientific research and medicine, two intertwined worlds that become, for him, and many other as well, full of contradiction and tension, neither world giving him the satisfaction he desires.  When he watches his wife die from the plague, a disease whose cure is almost in his wheelhouse, he sees the opposition at play between a world of pure research in which controls must be established and observed and a world of humanitarian medicine in which all patients have access to the cure, regardless of circumstance.

These writers – William Steig, Honoré de Balzac, and Sinclair Lewis – have brought this concept of alchemy into the present day for me, collapsing the time that has passed since I read their works, making the transformative nature of cancer and cancer-fighting agents a reality.

My body has become the crucible that carries and harbors the unknown.  I don’t have the kind of long-term history of hospitalization or compromised health that would allow me to speak from experience, but I have had enough health experiences – from asthma as a child and adolescent, to long-term chronic depression, to four pregnancies, one ending in miscarriage, to my parents’ failing health and eventual deaths in their sixties — to know that what happens in the body is NOT predictable and invariably involves a great deal of alchemy, whether in the manifestation of disease or in the course of treatment.

The makers of the drug that I take for my stage IV lung cancer have been involved in this process of alchemy.  Erlotinib, the drug more commercially recognized as Tarceva, gives hope to thousands of lung cancer patients each year.  It offers extended life to approximately 15% of individuals whose cancer has the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutation.  Scientists and lab researchers have isolated the genetic markers within the cohort of EGFR mutants that make one person more likely to respond to the drug than another.  Yet no one has been able to determine why one individual’s lung cancer can be “controlled” for five years without progression, while another’s cancer thwarts the drug’s action.

All drug companies are involved in this process of alchemy, and as much as each step of research is qualified and quantified through multiple trials and studies and eventual FDA approvals, with documented science about the cell’s reaction to the drug – it’s still not that much different from the medieval alchemy in William Steig’s The Toy Brother.  Yorick has been shrunk.  What do we do?

We have potions, but once they enter the body, they become part of that other branch of science – biology – and the chemicals transform the cells, and the cells transform the chemicals and something magical – sometimes awful, sometimes seemingly miraculous and good – happens.  Regardless of the outcome, a bit of magic has been involved, magic we’ll never know or understand.

It is good that the researchers work so hard to bring their drugs to the public.  It is good that the oncologists fight so hard to save those who have the disease. Yet the lines between research and marketing and profit-turning and life-saving become blurred. Are all of these quests noble?  For now, at least, there are unknowns.

I try to understand.  I get lost in the maze of PUBMED articles and the clinical trials on government websites, but I try to make sense of it all.  I understand the EGFR mutation, and the EXON deletions, and the role of erlotinib (Tarceva) as a tyrosine kinase inhibiter.  But beyond that, the world inside my body becomes murky, even as I read articles co-authored by my oncologist, Shirish Gadgeel, on MET/HGF pathway activation as a paradigm of resistance to targeted therapies.

I view the doctors and the drug makers as alchemists, and to be honest, I worry that I relinquish too much control to them as transformers.  I see them as the agents of change.  My body the crucible of transformation.  It happens, there inside me, whether the cancer is growing or dying off, the Tarceva beating it down.  Action occurring.

But what is my role in this activity? I cannot be passive and merely observe.

I am thankful for all of the alchemy that takes place as my cancer is kept at bay.  But there are times when I fear the unknown that is happening in my body in the same way I might have feared the “C” or the “F” in those days of the “Unknowns” project, when we all had to search for the answer to our mysteries.

I want to be able to embrace my fear and transform it.

I want to wrest the test tube and the Bunsen burner from the doctors and researchers and lead the transformation myself.

If only to feel one last surge of power before I die.

I have lung cancer.  Stage IV, non-small cell lung cancer, also known as NSCLC.  When I was diagnosed in November of 2012, the first oncologist I met with told me that I had six to eighteen months to live.  The PET scan on the computer screen in his office indicated the spots where the cancer had melded into my bones.  The tumors in my lungs weren’t so obvious – they occupied a murky haze left over from the pleural and pericardial effusion I’d suffered the previous month.

But the biopsy results clearly revealed lung cancer.

Before I go any further, I need to warn you that today’s edition is not a story of my fight or battle for survival.

Rather, it’s an admission: for five years, I’ve been alive, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Worse yet: sometimes I wish I could hand those five years off to someone else and get on with the business of dying.

Do I jinx myself by putting that thought into print?

“Jinx” is not a typical word in my vocabulary, though it does bring to mind distinct memories of my children watching Scooby Doo, a cartoon I’d viewed as a child. “Jinkies,” Velma says.

“Waiting for the other shoe to drop” is an idiom, it turns out, related to living in New York City.  Sources suggest that the expression dates back to the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century.  As manufacturing grew, inexpensive housing for workers did as well.  Apartment dwellers could hear the movements of their neighbors above and below them.  A thud recognizable as a removed shoe generally would be followed by another thud coming from the other shoe.

Some definitions for the idiom refer to the idea of inevitability related to the dropping of the second shoe.  Others imply a sort of dread related to the dropping as the definition has morphed from conveying the inevitable to the inexorable. I can’t help but think of Thomas Hardy novels I read in my college days, when I first learned about Hardy’s brand of stoicism and fatalism.

Currently, no known cure exists for stage IV lung cancer, although some people do somehow become cured, which accounts for the small percentage of survivors listed on websites.  Oncologists and researchers measure “progression-free survival,” and I want to emphasis that I find it entirely admirable that oncologists’ lives are devoted to seeking the longest “progression-free survival” they can conjure for their patients, despite my frustration with the term.

I learned shortly after I was diagnosed that my cancer had a specific mutation – the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutation for which a drug was developed in the early decade of the new millennium.  A pill.  The pill has different versions, or iterations, if you want to use technological terminology.  My version is erlotinib, known in the commercial world of specialty pharmacies as Tarceva.

I take a 100-milligram tablet of Tarceva each morning and have done so for over five years now.

The drug does not provide a cure.  Instead, it must be taken daily to keep the cancer “controlled.”  Not “in remission.” The term “in remission” suggests that cancer is gone.  Cancer controlled by Tarceva isn’t gone; it is in what I call “solitary confinement.”  Wherever it is lurking in the body in addition to the lungs for the lung cancer patient with metastases – the bones, the liver, the brain – it will remain.  But it can be radically reduced and actually appear to disappear.

Like magic, almost.

Except at some point the drug will stop working.  No one can predict when that will happen.  Fifteen percent of individuals who have the EGFR mutation and take Tarceva will live five years or longer.  It is not completely clear what “or longer” means.

And then there is the other eighty-five percent.

In the beginning, the concept was a little challenging for me to explain to people with whom I shared my personal health information.  These days, I don’t need to explain much at all.  I can point to recent television commercials.  Opdivo was the first drug that caught my eye on the commercials. A cityscape with first the sidewalks and then a tall building emblazoned with the phrase, “A CHANCE TO LIVE LONGER,” while pedestrian onlookers stare in wonder. Then the commercials for Keytruda showed up.  A woman preparing for what looks like a family portrait or a photo shoot of some kind.  In another rendition a woman getting up and going about her day, talking about her longer life and the new normal.

In the privacy of my family room, I make fun of these commercials, but please understand that I do not intend to make fun of cancer patients themselves or their situations.  I’m making fun of the Madison Avenue version of what it means to “live longer.”  The implication of the happy moments you’ll have.  All the energy you’ll possess to keep going in your regular life while you deal with your cancer.  Light-filled shots of the clean, clutter-free home you’ll be living in.

I’ve watched the commercials proliferate in the last year or so, watched them from my family room, where the floor is covered with my dog Clover’s fine white hairs, in spite of my husband’s efforts to keep them vacuumed up.  The couch and the chair, purchased at Art Van when we first moved into this house in 2002, are both threadbare, the perfect mixture of nubby and pilled to pick up dog hair, especially when one member of the two-member household allows the dog to climb onto the furniture in this room and the other does not.

The paneled walls need a serious dusting and cleaning.  The window looking out into the back yard needs some curtains.  (Disclaimer: the lack of curtains existed before the cancer.) Underneath the window, the paneling is stained with water damage when the eavestroughs dumped their overflow in recent years and it poured back into the ailing window. I have been out of work since 2015, a year after I was diagnosed with the disease, and have been unable to contribute much to the family budget.

It is hard to keep the room or the house clean.  Some days I have no energy, and until I shipped my youngest child off to college in the fall, I expended whatever energy and money I had on him and his older siblings, who are making their way in the world in large cities where they might occasionally hear one or more shoes drop.

I cannot express how happy I am that I have “lived longer.”  I have, in fact, had more Madison Avenue airbrushed moments with my family members than I ever could have imagined possible back in those dim days of December 2012.  I have immense gratitude for each of these moments: the graduations, the performances, the sessions playing “Cards Against Humanity,” and the family jokes about how I see striking similarities between my youngest son’s face and that of Barack Obama, my most favored president of my lifetime, because if I wanted to have anyone’s love child outside of marriage it would be his.

Shared understanding of our dog, Clover, and her submissive peeing practices.  The timbres of my children’s voices calling through the house, those timbres maturing over time, my constant “Pardon?” an annoying refrain because I need a hearing aid and it seems imprudent to spend money on one when it could go to waste sooner than I think it might.

That’s where the other shoe thing comes in again.  Once you have been diagnosed with cancer that doesn’t have a cure, you are always waiting.  “Live your life!” my oncologist told me a few years back, when I’d made it through the first few years, defying the initial Tarceva statistics. It is sound advice, it really is, but you can’t always erase those thoughts about your future and its truncation.  And if your family budget created at another time in your life assumed that you’d be bringing money in the door for your children’s college education, you can’t easily forgive yourself for not bringing that money in.

But if you have lived longer than most people in your situation – on your drug – have lived instead of died, you feel guilty for even uttering a complaint.  You have been given the gift of life.  So many others have died, so soon, so young, so tragically, from this horrible disease.

A tension arises then, between this waiting for the other shoe to drop and this guilt. Your driveway is crumbling and it will cost $8000 to fix.

But you’re alive!  Those other people didn’t make it.

Your basement is water damaged, a hole suddenly appearing in the foundation, letting in a pile of sand and dirt, which your husband had to vacuum, mop, dig up.

But you’re alive!

Your face is covered with the infamous Tarceva rash, and now, after five years, the “eyebrow thing,” another Tarceva side effect, drives you insane every day. Ingrown hairs.  Pustules.  Neutrophils.  Sometimes your eyebrows just ache with the breakouts and the skin healing and shedding.

But you’re alive!  You should be thankful.  You are one of the lucky ones!

(And don’t ever forget it!)

A sinister voice makes this last statement.  You try not to read into it.  But you do.  And you’re overwhelmed with guilt. You feel guilty for the dead who didn’t have your opportunity.

You need to maintain each day two separate “to do” lists – one for living and one for dying.

And some small part of you is even a little bit angry that you are no longer part of the cohort of people who get to talk about their retirement plans and their children’s weddings and their grandchildren, yet you feel you must keep your complaints to a bare minimum because you are one of the lucky ones.

You hate yourself – no, I’ll take ownership: I hate myself for each day I’m not happy to be alive.

And I hate myself for the weight I hang around the necks of others.

I long to be able to just appreciate every moment I’m given, without guilt, without regret, without resentment.

When my husband Tim and I were first married and living in Charlottesville, Virginia, he took a job as a sheet metal worker for a company working on an expansion of the University of Virginia hospital.  He’d taken a break from a PhD program in American history to figure out what he really wanted from an advanced academic degree. Each day he came home from a long day of hot, dusty work, telling stories of the men with whom he spent his time.  Since he’d worked at his father’s roofing company through college and afterward, he was no stranger to physical labor.

He was assigned to assist an older union worker named Bob.  The two of them labored side by side on projects, ate lunch, and took breaks together. Bob finally admitted that he was working in his advanced years to pay off the medical bills his wife had incurred before she’d died a few years earlier of cancer.

In the past five years, I’ve thought quite a bit about the man who toiled under the hot Virginia sun to pay off old bills. My husband’s employer provides excellent health insurance, for which I am thankful.  But we have other bills.  When I recently established a new repayment plan for the student loans we’d undertaken for our older two children, I realized that my husband might be paying off that debt himself until 2041.  I thought of Bob again, wondering how he distracted himself from the seeming futility of earning into the past instead of the future. I wondered if he ever wished his wife had died earlier.

When I think of those days – the hope and promise that colored our new marriage and the future, however much in turmoil we may have been about our careers at the time – I have an ache for an old life in which shoes came in pairs, always together, and I wasn’t waiting and measuring the sin of my lack of appreciation.

I force myself to remember, too, the empathy we felt for him – Bob with his work ethic, his unpaid bills, his loneliness.  And I try to hollow out within myself a place where that empathy can take hold, so that I can give a little to my own soul as I offer it to others, so many of us waiting for and dreading that soft thud.

You’ve stepped into the room, taking note of the strange squiggled pattern on the worn linoleum floor underneath your tennis shoes.  Behind you the key scrabbles in the lock, and the deadbolt clicks into place.  You’re alone, you don’t have much time, and you need to figure out a solution to the problem.

The room lacks windows, so the air already feels stuffy, and you’re a bit lightheaded, trying to remember your task.

Focus.

Focus.

The scent of mint overwhelms. Three kinds of mint all at once: leaf mint, fresh, picked from an old babysitter’s garden; chewed peppermint gum spit out underneath the bleachers of a school gym; blue mouthwash next to the sink for gargling.

If this were an escape room, friends would surround you, each of you would have paid upwards of thirty dollars for admission, and all of you would work together as a team to find the solution. People go to escape rooms for adventures.  The task, the locked room, the limited time in which to find a solution – these things contribute to adventure, the sense of an urgent mission, the development of community. If this were an escape room, you’d bounce ideas back and forth with your companions, like castaways on Gilligan’s Island, except without the lame jokes, the stereotypes, the slapstick comedy, because this is not funny business here in this room.

You would try to find clues, and if you got desperate enough, you’d ask your captors to release a clue, just one.

But for you, this room is different. You’re embarking on your own personal mission to find the urgency in your life.  In your days.  In your moments.  And then express that urgency aloud.  You know it’s there, the urgency, but the way your brain works, you find it difficult to isolate the urgent; you tend to give things equal value. Events, problems, simple tasks, conversations, objects, memories, worries, associations.  All merge together into one big bolus of thought in your brain. Thus, a recipe for black bean and ham soup is equivalent to a conversation you might have with the soloist after your brother-in-law’s funeral service.  Not in terms of the importance the events hold in your heart, of course – their meaning to you and the way they affect you. But the expressing of them as issues requiring reckoning, in any order of priority.

And the utterance.  The utterance has become so complicated, in part, because of the nature of your non-linear brain but also because of the complexity of the associations. If you could just prioritize these things in terms of their importance, and then utter them, one at a time.

Utter them.  One at a time.

Your cousin Fred, trained as a journalist, unknowingly provided a clue. “You buried the lead,” he said.  You called him again after leaving a cryptic message on his cell, not quite proclaiming but implying the death of your shared ninety-five-year-old aunt. You could have just said it.  You’d prepared him for the possibility the week before. Instead, you trailed off at the end of the message, unwilling to state the facts.

His first editor had urged him early on not to bury the lead.  But you weren’t trained as a journalist, you told him. Argued into the phone in the back yard while you watched your dog roam, looking for a 5:00 p.m. pooping spot. Told him that it wasn’t necessary to lead with drama.  And really, wasn’t that what the Trump era was all about with the tweets and the snake-poking?  We don’t need more drama, you told your cousin.  Why lead with drama?

Yet you knew he was right, and he’d hit on a truth he wasn’t even looking to claim. You always buried the lead.  Took the non-dramatic option.

The subtle.

You didn’t even realize how much you buried the lead in your daily life.

Which is why you need the room.  To sift through those thoughts in your head in a confined space, on a timetable, to find the one rising to the surface, bubbling up. The one that needs uttering more than any other at that moment, even if it was messy, that thought or explanation or occurrence, messy like all that grease you tried for years to skim off the turkey gravy, even sopping it with a paper towel, watching the oil become absorbed by the layers of the paper product.

You’re tired. But you have some things to say.

About living. And dying. And urgency.

You need to figure out what to say because you’re alone, you didn’t pay the price of admission for this adventure, and no one is going to come back and open that door until those first few words tumble out of your mouth.