#cancer

Crazy-Making.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 20 Comments

Yesterday, my oldest and I made that drive again down I-91 that flanks that Connecticut River. My knitting in my lap, I counted exits, St. Johnsbury first exit, then the second, the third that heads east to New Hampshire’s White Mountains, the fourth Barnet, which I took when I stayed at Karmê Chöling. We talked about fall colors and a meatball recipe and family, of course, all the way down to exit 13, the Norwich and Hanover exit, where we stopped for coffee and scones, as if a good luck charm. Coffee and sweets, not a dash to ER. We watched the time, careful not to be late for what I hoped would be a mere routine check-in.

All summer this day has hovered in my mind — what will this day reveal? — but this past week this coming journey was as near to me as something I held in my hand as I went about my days, doing what needs to be done. The day before, talking with friends, the fear of this day erupts and I hear myself on the verge of screeching, nearly crying. All summer, I’ve relished my good life, learning to walk again and eat again, to read on my back porch in that hand-me-down butterfly chair. To marvel that I am not in pain. That I might sleep and reasonably expect I might wake in the morning exactly as I want, in the pre-dawn darkness drink milky coffee and write. That I will witness the unexpected autumn buds on a yellow rose bush open, these final velvety blossoms of the season.

At Dartmouth, we wait again in 3K, in the cancer center. I am no longer one of the pallid-gray-faced chemo patients, hobbling, enduring. How desperately I never want to return here. My oncologist gently reminds me that he’d assured me I’d pull through this winter, even as I was admitted again and again and again, a dozen times. Add to that, more ER visits.

Later, a friend asks about the scan’s sign-off, but the only rules that matter are what the hidden mysteries of my blood and flesh reveal. The markers are that the lymphoma has not returned. I know that the reaper’s scythe heads towards me as that inarguable blade poises over each of us. But not this day for me. Not yet.

Driving home, people crowd the interstate bridges with RESIST signs. As our car sails beneath the metal and steel, we wave. I’d told the oncologist that my wellness plan was four-fold: eat real food, walk, do my work, and try not to go crazy.

He said, This is crazy-making. Just do your best.

There is only one heart in my body, have mercy
on me…

Thank You for letting me live for a little as one of the
sane; thank You for letting me know what this is
like. Thank You for letting me look at your frightening
blue sky without fear, and your terrible world without
terror, and your loveless psychotic and hopelessly
lost
with this love

~ Franz Wright

Small Kindnesses.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

Writing a novel, you pay attention to action. What are the characters doing? And why? At the midpoint, the action often switches; the protagonist ceases to react and, instead, acts — and not without mishap, without complications.

I’ve long thought of labor as a metaphor. The mother’s cervix dilates (helped, sure, by walking, by receptivity), followed by the uncertainty of transition just before the mother engages in the pushing phase, the brief or lengthy or sometimes stigmied phase of bringing this child into the world.

I’m in the transition phase again in my life, beneficiary of cancer treatments and so much medical care. Mornings this winter when I woke, I began each day with a survival mindset; I would endure my body’s illness. Now, June, the birds wake me, the feathered creatures intend on nest-building, procreation, survival, maybe the joy of communal singing. In the garden, the tithonia abruptly deepen their green, expand their leaves. The hydrangeas sprawl into a fortress.

At my desk, I lean into my day’s work, hours and hours unspooling.

Late afternoon, my friend arrives with her little girl, and the three of us walk in the cool town forest. The child removes her shoes and runs over the pine-needle-spread paths. She buries her bare feet in the shallow stream’s mucky mud. Yes, June…

Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.

We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,

and to say thank you to the person handing it… 

We have so little of each other, now. So far 

from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.

What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these

fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,

have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

~ from “Small Kindnesses” by Danusha Laméris

“Everything blooming bows down in the rain…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

We make the trek again to Dartmouth for a surgical consult, the sign-off after surgery. I’ve met numerous members of this team, but not this kind NP, who’s read my history and says, What an ordeal. I’m not expecting these words, and I pause. Last November, when was I first admitted to Dartmouth, I had unplanned surgery. That snowy November night, the surgeon spent so much time with me. Then her Fellow returned and answered my endless questions. In May, I had surgery again. Two bookends – that November night and this sultry summer day. I’ll be treated here for years, but my hope – and none of know squat about the future – is that I’ll never need a surgeon again.

I thank her and the surgical team and student entourage who appeared in all those ER and hospital floor rooms where I stayed – me, the reluctant patient, who tried to negotiate some other outcome than surgery. To my surprise, she’s grateful for my words, too. We try our best but it’s hard to know how we come across to patients. The surgeons who operated on me are trauma surgeons. My surgery was routine, but routine surgeries go south. Mine did not.

Afterwards, my daughter and I stop at Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum. There’s a Georgia O’Keefe painting we want to see and two Monets. The current exhibit has mesmerizing photographs. This is a good day and a good visit. We eat sandwiches in King Arthur Flour’s patio, where so many families have pudgy babies tucked into a parent’s arm. We linger, talking about my mother who would have loved eating here.

So many of those drives on the interstate home, I slept, nodding in and out of conversation. My weak days are long passed, and we keep talking, the interstate edging near the Connecticut River and up on the ridge again. In June’s green, the drive no longer seems so desolate. Traffic here is always sparse. We pass a trailer of hay bales, a pickup with three wheelbarrows.

Enduring cancer turned my world (and my family’s world) inside out. In the first five-day continuous course of chemo, I forced myself to wash every morning. In those days, my hair had not yet fallen out. I was too weak to brush my hair, so I tied it at the nape of my neck. That month, my daughter cut what snarled hair remained. Those miserable uncertain November mornings, how grateful I was for hot water and soap, to have access to a brutal but hugely effective treatment, in a sterile hospital in one of the richest states in a phenomenally country. I made my choices, but I had choices.

In the inside-out world where I am now, I’m ticking through my list: profusely thank my oncologists and surgeons for saving my sometimes-surly life, tend my garden, figure out my youngest’s college bill, finish my book, accept the ravenous roaming woodchucks….. my domestic realm.

In our little end-of-the-road neighborhood, visitors come and go on my back deck, gardens on three sides, the wild pressing in on the fourth. My own nexus.

Everything blooming bows down in the rain:

white irises, red peonies; and the poppies

with their black and secret centers

lie shattered on the lawn.

~ Jane Kenyon

Seeking the Something New.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

A friend arrives with a box of seedlings, including tithonia, AKA Mexican sunflowers, a tall, brilliantly orange, hopeful plant. A few mornings later, more friends appear with seedlings and a pitchfork. Lucky, lucky me.

I am a gardener who allows the Johnny-jump-ups and forget-me-nots to spread where they like, pulling back a few and nestling in basil, scallions, poppies. Why unroot a flower? Eventually, I weed diligently, ruthlessly. The garden mirrors my approach to novel writing. My friends leave with their boxes filled with forget-me-nots as a gentle rain falls on the tender seedlings.

Every day is a further day from surgery and chemo, the days and night accumulating like pages read in a book. I put away the narcotics, the Tylenol, the ibuprofen. Mornings, I drink a single cup of café au lait. I sauté mushrooms, bake a quiche. I ask for a ride to drop off my car at the garage, worrying about walking up my hill, but picking it up is mostly downhill. I walk.

For a little bit yet, I’m a person of interest in this small town. The postmistress asks me, no, really, how are you? For months, the PO staff has stuffed my box with cards and books and sheaves of medical bills from two hospitals. I’m there to pick up a book of essays (a gift which quickens my heartbeat). I tell her I’m in remission, that word still awkward as it emerges from my throat. I want to add that remission does not mean cured, does not mean that this strange and uninvited cancer beast has left my body – and certainly not my soul. I don’t know this woman at all well, but she looks steadily at me, as if she understands what I’m thinking.

Here’s the thing: how afraid I was of cancer eight months ago; honestly, I’m still fearful of it. Yet, cancer rooted in me, infested my family, my friends, a great wide circle of people around me, including my readers here. This is not unique. In its myriad forms, cancer spreads widely. I lived for years with the putrifying secrets of addiction. I refuse to repeat that with cancer.

Last November, I thought I wouldn’t live to see spring. I did. If jaywalking doesn’t do me in, cancer certainly might. Or I might die as a scrawny old woman from a stroke or heart attack. In this rainy late spring/early summer, I’m grateful for the possibly random dice throw, for plants and gardeners, for an infinitude of people. Among these are the people who’ve shared their stories with me, of decades-ago cancer diagnoses, almost always offered sotte voce, as if not to tempt the fates. Their stories ring clearly: I endured, I transformed, I thrived. This possibility can be mine (maybe yours, too).

From Suleika Jaoad’s The Book of Alchemy:

But there are also moments when our internal compasses tell us it’s time to change course–to leave something behind and build something new…. Rebuilding is not easy…. But to me, rebuilding unfolds alongside becoming. It is crucial, if we want to keep evolving and flourishing, to get rid of things that are no longer serving us and make space for something new to grow.

The crying moments…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 43 Comments

I’ve written frequently in this space about living with cancer and cancer treatment since I was diagnosed with lymphoma last November. From the beginning, I was determined to hold myself together. Some of this was simply shock; I could not believe I had been walking around, working, going to birthday parties, hanging with family and my friends while cancer was devouring my body. By the time I ended up in the ER, telling the triage nurse I was circling the drain, the cancer had metastasized to stage four. I needed a moment. I was not about to get a moment.

In the long hours of yet another ER visit, my daughter told me that a longtime friend had asked her last November if I actually intended to undergo chemotherapy. I hadn’t heard about this inquiry, and the question stunned me. I’ve been my daughters’ sole parent for a decade now; even in the worst of these cancer nights and days, I remain foremost a mother, unable to relinquish my watchful eye. After diagnosis, it was immediately clear that the cancer was rapidly growing; without some kind of treatment I would die that winter. The lymphoma I have responds well to chemo. My other option, perhaps, was to seek an alternative treatment — where, for how much, and with what likelihood of success — was dubious at best. In my fifties, I was determined to live. My oncologist was clear that the chemo would shove me to the edge of demise. He told me, You are curable. So, in a rare action of trust, I stretched out my arms and said, Infuse me.

As the cancer was so advanced, I suffered numerous complications from the chemo, which resulted in all the hospital stays I’ve referred to in this blog — nearly a dozen — weeks and and weeks and weeks this winter.

Now, April, Easter rising tomorrow, I’m drinking a friend’s homegrown chamomile tea this morning at my kitchen table, watching the small rain feed spring’s green, alive, in remission.

From the get-go, too, I determined not to burrow into the rathole of despair that I’ve seen disease wreck upon individuals and spread to families. This recent ER visit, however, forced me to the crying day. I wept before the kind nurses, the warm hematologist with her sparkly hair, the PA who insisted I not leave even as I connived deals and plans for discharge. I did not cry before the elder hematologist, who had certainly been practicing medicine for most of my life. I said, yes, yes, I understand. And then I wiped my tears with my thumb when he left.

By the late hour when my daughter had left, and I was alone again in the darkened ER room, I’d taken stock of what I’d crammed in my backpack: two books, my laptop and charger, a handful of underwear, my notebook. I’d forgotten my knitting, which was unfortunate. The nightshift nurse brought me water and those eternal saltines. She was a traveler and had last worked in Iowa.

Much later the next night, two nurses wheeled me through the dim and empty hospital halls to another room. Of all the experiences I’ve had at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, I’ve oddly enjoyed these late night journeys through this huge building. So many stories here, so much living and dying, so much richness. By then, I’d finished with my weeping, joined the world again, all of us, doing what we’re doing. 

A driving spring rain
gliding, wending through the trees
speaks in little drops

~ Bashō

Determined to do/the only thing you could do…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 24 Comments

When I was six, I dropped a large wooden board on my toe, right where the nail emerges. My mother lifted me up and soaked my foot in the bathroom sink in Epsom salts. I cried fiercely, and my mother said she wished she could take the pain from me. Impossible, of course. Later, I lost the toenail.

The night before my last chemo infusion, I woke thinking of my mother who died nearly a year ago. She never knew I had cancer. Of all my family, only my mother endured chemotherapy, at age 80. Like so many mothers and daughters, we had a tangled and complicated relationship, sometimes fierce, sometimes outright silly and joyous. Not knowing about my cancer was one thing she was spared in her life, at least. No one seeks cancer, but in this long and snowy winter, I was spared the misfortune of being a parent of a sick child. Anything can change in this world, at any moment, but for now….

Recently finished with chemo treatments, how grateful I am to Dartmouth and its staff for their exquisite care. How humbled and thankful I am for the people who wrapped around me – some of whom I’d never met before. To write that cancer changed my life would sound trite. The deeper truth is that this disease will be with me for the remaining days of my life. But my life is in the present tense. I have not changed. I am changing. How blessed I am to be here.

… little by little…
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.

~ Mary Oliver