cancer

Survivors.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

Friends appear at my kitchen door with a rose and gossip. Midwinter, and I’m happy to keep my cats sprawled belly up before the glowing wood stove. The creatures sleep on the hot metal floor guard, their fur gathering ashes and birch bark curls. The snow bends down my thorny rose bushes. My daughter texts with news of a robin sighting. We talk about the usual — town meeting day approaching, the strangeness of an administration determined to chop apart the country. In Vermont, we do our usual thing: heads together, we strategize how to endure, how to keep our hearts open.

The snow is no fresh news. The unbroken cold (and hardly that awful — I’ve seen 40 below, albeit just once and that was enough 40 below for this lifetime) is no news, either. The sun begins to return, the days spreading out at either end, although the icicles remain icy, dripless daggers.

For me, this winter is the most profound of my life, surely the most sacred. I’ve had my own lovely share of winters with my newborns nestled against my chest, of small children delighted with swirling snowflakes, of long skis through woods. On the night before the Presidential election, an ER doctor gently told me I had cancer. Months later, I’ve immersed myself in the mundaneness of insurance and how to navigate the multi-levered medical system. Beyond that, my life slowed, often to simply enduring an afternoon, a night….

I’m adding to my draft of this post, a day later, now hospitalized again. Let there be no mistaking one of the world’s realities: infection is a mighty (and frequently fatal) force. Now, my daughter and I have this down: fluids and pain meds, with the curve now of puzzling out with the oncologist why I’m back. I contracted Giardia last summer from swimming in unclean water. Although I’ve been treated, the question lingers… has this bizarrely lingered?

But I wanted to return to the beginning of this short piece, about the kindness of friends and strangers. Lymphoma is my disease to bear, my bone marrow and veins and intestines and organs. But now, I — who so long saw myself as a lone running wolf — have been humbled to realize I’ve never been apart from the world, all this time. All around me, strangers and loved ones alike hold me together.

From my friend Jo, who sends me an audio poem every night:

“Survivor”
Adele Kenny

A jay on the fence preaches to a
squirrel. I watch the squirrel quiver,
the way squirrels do – its whole
body flickers. I’m not sure why this
reminds me of when I was five and

something died in our drain spout.
Feather or fur, I watched my father
dig it out, knowing (as a child knows)
how much life matters. I have seen how
easily autumn shakes the yellow leaves,

how winter razes the shoals of heaven.
I have felt love’s thunder and moan, and
had my night on the wild river. I have
heard the cancer diagnosis with my name
in it. I know what mercy is and isn’t.

Morning breaks from sparrows’ wings
(life’s breezy business), and I’m still here,
still in love with the sorrows, the joys –
days like this, measured by memory, the
ticking crickets, the pulse in my wrist.

Unsurpassable February.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 20 Comments

For days, the forecast has trumpeted news of impending snow this weekend; still, sunlight floods into our kitchen this morning. Sure, it’s a few degrees above zero, nothing to sneeze at, but the icicles gleam, skinny stalactites, proof of this week’s warming. A crimson cardinal perches on the feeder.

We are in deep midwinter, the annual mark of collective cabin fever, of generalized bitching, of snow pile comparisons and, in precise detail, what is now hidden from view. It’s the season for skiing, for chocolate, for mooning over seed catalogs.

In my own cancer world, I mark the merge of days and nights in my own way, writing my thousand words a day (sometimes more, sometimes not at all), as my own shepherd’s crook to right my crooked self. In the afternoons, spent, I read and read, returning to that great pleasure of my youth. Around me, my family shifts and jostles, their own lives crammed full with their living, with jobs and classes and loves or longed-for loves. My daughters call me with stories about a grapefruit drink that I vow to drink this July and August, over smashed ice, my bare feet on the grass or maybe a sandy shore of Lake Champlain. It’s the time of year when we long for rain drops on our cheeks and clotting in our eyelashes. But February rain holds ice and sleet, not the green wash of spring, the scent of soaked earth, the tang of emerging garlic.

Every day, I talk with my old father in New Mexico. He asks, Are you sticking to the plan?

I am, I assure him, holding to the course of what the medical realm prescribes, meds and applesauce and so much water — but the here’s the refreshing, liberating, unbelievable thing: there’s no bones with anyone at all in the cancer world that this is a hard dirty blow. So seize this opportunity, turn your life inside out, remake it anew. Make no excuses. Take.

Driving, again driving in the dark to Dartmouth, the full moon hung over our shoulders the entire journey, a creamy light, brilliant on new snow, unsurpassable.

And here’s a poem from Ginger Andrews I used to read in my shut-in mothering-toddler days….

The Cure

Lying around all day
with some strange new deep blue
weekend funk, I’m not really asleep
when my sister calls
to say she’s just hung up
from talking with Aunt Bertha
who is 89 and ill but managing
to take care of Uncle Frank
who is completely bed ridden.
Aunt Bert says
it’s snowing there in Arkansas,
on Catfish Lane, and she hasn’t been
able to walk out to their mailbox.
She’s been suffering
from a bad case of the mulleygrubs.
The cure for the mulleygrubs,
she tells my sister,
is to get up and bake a cake.
If that doesn’t do it, put on a red dress.

What’s at the heart of a story?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

Crack in the windshield, the snowy interstate, the winter metaphor for this cancer journey.

25 hours. Here’s a smattering of highlights… A hard-knuckled drive on unplowed and marginally plowed roads, a side stop to avoid a collision on the exit ramp. Who knew these things gathered such snow? The town lights dimmed by snowfall. On a hotel’s second floor, I lay in bed talking to my siblings while my daughter ate chicken curry. In the bleach-smelling night, I limped up and turned off the heat, stood at the wide window looking out at the neon lights across the midnight-empty highway. The storm had ceased; the neon gleamed GARDEN, so brilliantly red and commercial that, in my sleep-addled mind, I couldn’t pair that word with loamy soil, coiled earthworms, the promising nub of May sugarsnap peas. Unable to sleep, I lay awake, parsing together a story: hook, conflict, and what does resolution mean, anyway? What’s at the heart of a story?

In the early morning, two full lanes of traffic streamed towards Dartmouth Medical Center. On the short cold drive, we drank hot coffee. From here, the story unfolds into the parking garage, blue paper masks, the complexity of so many stories, with so many words. The words alone are brand-new to me — Doxorubicin, Methotrexate— and I labor to learn these, to put pieces of what I can know of my story together. The wide halls in this building soar high, softening voices as the daylight falls down. Always, I hold in my body this conflicted and twisted sense of how much I do not want to be here and how immeasurably grateful I am to be here — but more, too, the profound and sacred sense of so many people, patients and families and the immense staff, each with their own mighty stories, living these stories, in pain and in joy.

In the infusion room, where I sleep and sleep, this time no longer needing small talk, I wake and watch the juncos and chickadees, the nuthatches, flitter in and out of the hydrangea bushes with their brown last-year’s blossoms, perch on the feeders the nurses fill and tend.

The interstate home is clear. The cats yowl for dinner. My house is warm, the dishes washed, the hearth fed. February. The story spins on.

Picking at the salty remains of roast beef…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

Shortly before the November election, I’d heard word of a friend’s illness, and I determined to fly West and see this couple. At that time, I thought I was poisoned by mold and struggling myself, but I really wanted to visit. I decided to hold off buying the ticket for a few days until just after the election, because, well, what if? What if the grid crashed or something? I’ve lost money on airline tickets before.

What happened, instead, is I ended up in the ER the night before the election and discovered the mold was a red herring. I had cancer — although I hold, yet, that the mold was an element of a complicated equation that may, or may not, have added to turning on that cancer gene. By then, flying was impossible for me. Now, news comes to me of her final passage from this life. My friend has lived a long, loving — a good, very good — life, and yet…

All afternoon, another friend and I text back and forth. Remember the nights we ate in their dining room where the walls were painted light blue above a cream headboard? On the wall thermometer, we watched the January temps dip to 20, 21, 25 below zero, laughing at what would be a cold drive home. We never wanted to leave early. Instead, we kept drinking wine, eating chocolate cake, picking at the salty remains of roast beef.

Sorrowful, indeed. We are all now far enough along in life to know that no one dodges the Reaper, that the cut of illness or injury might fall swiftly at any moment. That, in the end, we leave as we entered. While my daughter drove me home the other twilight, I watched the stars ignite in the burnished blue along the horizon, one by one, these ancient untouchable illuminations. She followed the highway home; my eyes fastened on those seed pearls, the slender thread that thickened just the merest width as the night flushed in.

Here’s a line from Niall Williams that, by stroke of coincidence, I read today.

“… you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it.”

Vessels, Rooms, the Unbounded Sky.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

16 degrees on this sun-kissed Sunday, my cat considering the squirrels.

In cancer land, still putting my muscles together, I’m outdoors only with someone else these days, the long solitary walks yet a future promise, again. Early mornings, I brew coffee, fill the cats’ bowls with their breakfast. All day long, we’re filling and emptying things: water glasses and soup bowls and cat dishes (again), filling a notebook page with penciled words, a suitcase with my daughter’s clean clothes as she heads back to college, a new lightbulb in an empty socket.

Likewise, this disease has filled my body for months, now emptying; illness has slipped into every crevice in my family’s life, too, like the power of freeze in a river, rearranging the flow.

In a year that’s begun with so many families losing their homes on the other side of the country, the sunlight on this morning, a chilly walk this afternoon, the cold scraping at my cheeks – yes, yes – a scrap of gratitude for January Vermont sunlight. Here’s line from one of my favorite writers, Andre Dubus, who knew loss keenly.

“We receive and we lose, and we must try to achieve gratitude; and with that gratitude to embrace with whole hearts whatever of life that remains after the losses.”

Three things of varying importance…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 19 Comments

Because I’m writing from Vermont, first, the weather: cheek-slashing cold, furious wind.

Second, back at Dartmouth these past few days for a consult and an infusion. Checking in, my insurance card was denied. Denied because it’s January and the new year wasn’t set correctly, or denied because some system is broken? I imagine these numerous co-pays, from ninety-cents to $750, piling up in my electronic portal. I’ll kick that to Monday, begin to straighten that out then…

Halfway through my treatments, the Good Doctor gives me the heads up about what’s to come, including the shift from what I’m calling Cancer Land back to the Everyday World. Although I’m sure he hears this repeatedly, I say how otherworldly is this cancer journey. Rarefied isn’t precisely the word I’m looking for, as so much of disease isn’t lofty or grandiose but mundane and sometimes miserable. But the journey is like nothing else I’ve undertaken, laced through at times with impending death, elevating the stakes to the utter center point of what matters. There’s nothing trivial here.

Third (and certainly not last), I’m so grateful for the lovely mail in my P.O. Box – cards and books, seeds and poems, such as this one by Danusha Laméris.

Insha’Allah

I don’t know when it slipped into my speech

that soft word meaning, “if God wills it.”

… How lightly we learn to hold hope,

as if it were an animal that could turn around

and bite your hand. And still we carry it

the way a mother would, carefully,

from one day to the next.