Snow falls early on this Thanksgiving morning. The nurse wakes me for meds and vitals. I am eighty-four miles from home. My window looks out into a courtyard with a fan of three white birches. In a wind, their papery bark ripples in the breeze. Nearby, an office window glows where someone is already working.
I am here for a haul. My daughter brought me the striped blue and green quilt from my bed, the worn hand-me-down that reminds of home.
Monday, the pain and awfulness returned. My daughters drove me not to the local ER this time, but down the interstate, the two of them in front, me in the back with a pillow staring out the window, to Dartmouth-Hitchcock. At the ER, they took blood, asked my story. Someone in the waiting room, who must have been a frequent flier, had been waiting for four hours was threatening to leave to get something to eat. The nurse said she couldn’t go. I was sent out, waited less than four minutes, and was taken in for antibiotics and saline and pain meds, another CT scan.
An MD, a second. An oncologist who explains slowly that the lymphoma I have often responds well to treatment, so reassuring. This raging infection. I am taken upstairs. My daughters, folding with exhaustion — it is now late again — head back up the interstate. Shortly afterwards, the oncologist returns and bends down to look directly at me, eye level. I know this position means bad news again. In the three-week span of CT to CT, the cancer has grown and possibly eaten into my bowel. Surgeons will be in shortly to speak with me about emergency surgery to remove a section of bowel. My thoughts immediately surge from Thank god, I may be alive in May with my family and see blue squill bloom to Are you fucking kidding me? It’s the middle of the night.
Middle of the night or no, the surgery team comes in and out, talking, talking. The lymphoma renders the CT scan unclear. Because my mind works this way, I size up the head surgeon: she’s long experienced in trauma and general surgery. Her fellow tells me he’s been working with her for six years. She tells me so much, all the terrible — and these are devastating — things that could go wrong me for in the next few hours. In the end, I trust my life to her. It is the only course.
I call my brother. We call my daughters, who have not yet slept. My brother gets in his black Subaru. My youngest drives our red Subaru and drinks a quart of cold coffee, a more experienced driver than her sister after a cross-country trip this summer. Is the moon guiding them? I don’t know.
In the OR, a woman whose name I don’t know holds my hand as I instantly go under. When I wake, so confused, in an enormous dark room — it’s the still the pitch of night — I immediately lift my jonny and look at my abdomen, asking what happened? My flat abdomen has no huge bandage. The surgeon had gone in with a camera and decided what remains is sufficient, for now perhaps, forever perhaps, to change perhaps. My oldest showed me a photo she snapped of my family curled in the empty ICU waiting room, sweatshirt hoods over their heads. Let me write this: what a hard awful night, and how much worse it might have gone.
….. Then, that morning, in and out with the surgery team, with phlebotomists, nurses. The lymphoma oncology team arrives in a pack. The lead pulls out a chair, tells us to record, and begins talking. He’s brilliant and confident without cockiness in his ability to cure me. He outlines that complications of infection and my bowel will keep me here for the first chemo run, deep into dark December. I decide to do exactly he tells me.
My family again leaves. My daughters refuel with fast-food chicken and sandwiches for their drive. I sleep and wake in a drenching fever, which creates a flurry among the nursing staff. They come in and out. Somewhere in the miasma, I really wake up and decide to pull myself together. I’m going to be here for month, and I need to quit feeling sorry for myself. A nurse tells me to eat some chicken soup with rice — remember Maurice Sendak? The soup is delicious. The fever breaks. I survive a ten p.m. MRI — a blind descent into a cave where dwarfs bang around me while Freddie Mercury sings.
This is a long way of writing a fragment of how I arrived here, medical center land, not a Thanksgiving morning where the kitchen is savory with sage dressing, and I’m out in my boots, admiring the first downy snowfall in my garden. Living is a nonstop risk, the whole she-bang, but we don’t always tread such a thin pinnacle. By chance, as I packed my laptop and socks for the ER trip, I stuffed in the Vermont Almanac that had arrived in that day’s mail. Later, when I had decided to embrace where I am now, I opened the envelope. This volume, as the others, is exquisitely beautiful. A phlebotomist arrived to take blood. She admired the cover — especially the view of the mountains through the window — and she told me a little of her story from rural Vermont to Lebanon, New Hampshire.
In editor Dave Mance’s opening, he writes, now post-election, how we might return to embracing the complexity, rugged and elegant, of the natural world and our very lives. (Gracious, when I’m able to untangle myself from cords, I’ll update with his poetic words from the book just out of reach on the windowsill.:)
Complexity is precisely where I am, enmeshing in this crazy mixed-up jumble of the medical system’s turbo drugs and powerful machinery, the stories of the people who labor here, a nurse training for her first half-marathon and another with three young sons, welcome news of a friend’s first grandchild, my own energetic and loving family.
All of you, too, on this Thanksgiving or perhaps just a plain old weekday morning — in our lives, how much we’ve chosen and so much we haven’t — gratitude for being alive in this world. For chicken soup with rice.
Stony Soil Vermont 
I can’t imagine what it is like to be in the midst of a whirlwind of medical care swirling around, and the best you can do is to let the experts do what they do best. My thoughts are with you on this Thanksgiving morning and the days to come.
Thank you!
I’ve been through my own medical crisis at the same time as a family crisis. Our worlds blow up around us. The familiar is no longer familiar. It feels like the Earth has shifted. I am sending you love and hope and healing and prayer and more love. I have gratitude on this Thanksgiving morning for so many things, amongst them your words that are always like finding a treasure in my in box and that you are in good hands.
I love your line — the familiar is no longer familiar. I hope you survived your crisis well. Thank you again.
Dear Brett Ann, i’m thinking of you, there is no doubt that you are a courageous lady with a great curiosity. You are an inspiration. Claudia
What a generous note. 🧡
For nearly a year I have been following you. While eating my cereal…. staring out the window with the light snow falling, I felt compelled to write to you. Sadly illness does not take a holiday. It doesn’t matter that it is Thanksgiving. Any malady can come upon us in a flash. From past experiences, I know you are in the best place, where you have the “cream of the crop” watching over you. I want you to know that I enjoy your writing. Through you writings, I have always thought of you, as a brave, strong and independent person. Know that I will continue to keep you in my thoughts and prayers. Though I am not a religious person….. I strongly believe in “the power of prayer.”
Brenda, thank you for reading my words and writing in. It sounds that you have had your share and maybe more of this disease land. How kind to you to reassure me. ✨
Thank goodness for Chicken Soup with Rice, through all the seasons. That was a favorite book of mine as a kid.
And thank goodness for you weathering through all that you had to this week.
Wishing you the best on this day of celebrating Thanksgiving in the most unexpected of ways.
Thanks for sharing your beautiful writing and your potent stories.
I loved it as a kid and read it to my daughters. Happy Thanksgiving to you…
Oh Brett, you amaze and inspire me with your determination to ride this tidal wave in the medical realm with courage, curiosity, and a sense of knowing in the power of your words to help guide you. I’m so sorry for these unimaginable turn of events, and think of not only you, but your sweet daughters and brother, always at the ready. I’m glad you have such a strong community and please know we in your readership offer you love and comfort, and may your beloved blankie quilt give you a hug and some assurance that many hands and hearts hold you very tenderly!
I’m so grateful to have my family and friends, but the writing community is such a strong pulse in my life. I’m so thankful for all of you, too. It really is a community.
Thanks for finding your usual plain spoken eloquence and ordinary humanity in the midst of the wires and beeping and pain and uncertainty. That eloquence is a gift that I always am thankful for, particularly today. Wishing you well.
🌻
Holy moly, what a hellacious descent into medicine-land, and yet your writing is clear and beautiful and evocative and I can only hope that I would have the presence of mind and generosity of spirit that you have while being poked, medicated, scanned, examined, hopes dashed, and I don’t know whatall, along with all the stuffing and giblets. Even grabbing the Vermont Almanac on your way to the ER. What? Who are you? I will remain, sipping once, sipping twice.
Writing does keep my soul at least together. Love this!
Thinking of you ❤️
❤️
❤️ I hope you can feel the love coming from your friends and even strangers like me who read your blog.
Please let us know if there’s crowd funding or meal train or any other tangible way we can help.
I will…. Thank you! At this point, we are all stitching this together day by day. 🧶💕
Dear Brett, I have just re read your post for the third time today and I just want to say that this writing is rivoting and we feel what you are going through intensely through your descriptions. It brings back the last year of Peter’s life (during Covid) when I spent hours at Dartmouth Hitchcock. As much as I so wished we weren’t there we too put ourselves in the hands of these incredible medical professionals. They were so good and I am so glad to know you are there and letting them take care of you while you get rid of the infection and then on to chemotherapy. I keep you in my thoughts and wish for you strength and with your indomitable spirit and the love of family and friends time to get through this rounds of therapy. Love, Cacky
Dear Cacky,
I’ve been thinking of you and Peter during my stay here. Even when he wasn’t well, Peter would often stop by the library to talk, and I realized recently he must have been very ill during the pandemic, which seems such an added layer of unhappiness. I am on chemotherapy now, so I am definitely on the path. While I’ve never liked hospitals, this place is suffused with a light, too, from the kindness and dedication of people…. I’m profoundly grateful for who’s around me, here and now, and I’ll be glad to get back home…. I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving… Love, Brett
Goodness, prayers for healing Brett Ann. Thank you for sharing your story.When I was an elementary media specialist, I always read Chicken Soup with Rice as we came back in January to the little ones. I love the whimsy and rhythm of Sendak’s words, and I’m glad that his simple little book is bringing a smile to you and that the chicken soup nourishes your body. Millicent Flakehttp://www.maflake.com 706-260-8665
Hang on Brett Ann! There is much healing energy coming your way. Keep writing! Thinking of you and sending love. You are in a really good place.
How I hope and pray that your reprieve becomes remission, that you have a good long time yet to be well and to be with your family and friends, your garden, this sweet earth you love. Thank you for your gorgeous writing, for taking us with you through the awfulness and the tenderness and the ecstasy.
My goodness, what a journey you have been on. Thank you for sharing your story and your insight, even in this difficult season. Take care–I hold you in my heart.
Oh, my heart is going out to you, and to your daughters driving and redriving the highway. We had a month of in and out at DHMC last fall. It’s good to have books to escape the monotony. So good for soup. So good for beautiful book covers. Holding you in love.
💛