disease

Disease as Teacher.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

About a year ago, a friend asked to borrow knitting needles, a request I almost certainly ignored as I could hardly walk up the stairs in my house, and forget the effort of opening the closet door and searching through my needles. A year ago, my family moved my bed downstairs, and I wondered, Well, is that? Am I now confined to one floor like an old woman? I was not, thankfully.

Half a year out from chemo and surgery, my family moved my bed back upstairs. The first morning I wake, I stand at the window looking down at the mock orange planted decades ago. In June, this giant bush is covered with small white blossoms, but in November, the bush is mostly sticks, save for a few withered leaves.

Standing there staring down, I felt suffused with profound grief. Almost immediately, I chastised myself. Why grieve when I survived a terrible illness? When this might have easily gone otherwise? And yet, grief.

Nearing the holidays, I think often of my mother who died not so long ago. She and I had years ago separated our lives for reasons both silly and profound. Only at the end of her life did I begin to have empathy for her and see her not merely as my mother but a woman in her own right. So that morning, thinking of her, my grief is for her absence, for what might have been between her and my daughters and myself. So many years I invited her to holiday meals, and all those years, she refused to join us. How I would love to invite her this year. Surviving cancer (thus far) broke me in so many ways, shoved me right up against the fragility of the world, revealed my own meager strength, but it also allowed me to grieve the loss upon loss that is not endemic to me but woven integrally through our mortal lives. Cancer empowered me to hold that grief without rage, to acknowledge simply what is.

But sadness, of course, is one variation of the complex symphony of our lives. Yesterday, walking along a hillside dirt road in the November sunlight, hat pulled off my head and in my hand, eyes on the spine of the Green Mountains in the distance freshly covered with snow, pure joy suffused me at simply being in the world. Six months ago, my companion had walked with me from my house to Main Street. It wasn’t at all certain to me that I could manage that short walk there and back. Now, the two of us moved quickly through the world, talking poetry and plans. How remarkable is that?

What if we embraced the messy, evolving, surprising, out-of-control happening that is life and reckoned with its proximity and relationship to death? What if, instead of being afraid of even talking about death, we saw our lives in some ways as preparation for it? What if we were taught to ponder it and reflect on it and talk about it and enter it and rehearse it and try it on? What if our lives were precious only up to a point? What if we held them loosely and understood that there were no guarantees? So that when you got sick you weren’t a stage but in a process? And cancer, just like having your heart broken, or getting a new job, or going to school, were a teacher? — Eve Ensler

Travels.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

I’ve been away and now I’m home, the mist this first September morning flecked through with cold, writing in bed and drinking coffee, my cat Acer purring between my legs, jubilantly happy in the way of well-fed toasty-warm cats.

The (brilliant) oncologist and the (amazing) surgeon and so many others (gratitude, gratitude, gratitude) eradicated the lymphoma in my body, chopped me up and stitched me together, exorted me on. Now, after a summer of learning to walk and eat and sleep again, relearning how to be a body in this world, existential questions propel me to a remote part of Vermont, seeking answers to the questions I’ve always had — what are the meaningful threads that hold this life, my life, together? For nearly a year, I’ve held the imminence of my death against my chest, a sputtering candle, and the questions are rubbed raw.

Because I am myself, too, always, I’m seeking the ending to a book I’m writing. And because this is the way my mind works, I’m seeking the details of cause and effect, how these stitches work into the whole cloth.

A friend loans me his tent. The first night, I wake freezing, hands knotted between my knees. I no longer have a once-cheery immunity against minor cold. I stumble down to the farmhouse, sit on the porch talking, drinking coffee. A stranger remarks that I looked chilled. I am cold down to my bones. He brews tea and offers me a steaming cup. I drink it quickly, heat, steam, strength.

“A world which increasingly consists of destinations without journeys between them, a world which values only “getting somewhere” as fast as possible, becomes a world without substance.” ~ Alan Watts

A fluttering stir like a fledgling first stretching its wings…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

On my way home (again) from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, I’m at a pharmacy, picking up prescriptions. The one I really want – the pain meds – is apparently not available, simply not stocked, which surprises the heck out of me. It’s a common opioid. In my brother’s car, I phone Dartmouth, miraculously reach a nurse who sorts out my problem swiftly. My brother drives down the road, where another pharmacy tells me I’ll need to wait.

In a dusty midafternoon sunlight, I take him on a downtown tour of Barre, around the courthouse where I spent so many hours. I point out the window where I stared at the chickadees in the crabapple trees. We keep going and walk around the Civic Center where my daughter and I went to basketball games. The lot is empty, dirty with winter sand. We talk for a bit about these neighborhoods and where we grew up, our mutual interest and speculation in local history, how towns rise and diminish.

In the Walgreens parking lot again, I pull up my sleeve. Where a nurse recently pulled out an IV, the band-aid is soaked. I show it to my brother. “Don’t touch,” he tells me, as I wince, creeped out. “We’ll clean it when I get you home.”

That blood-soaked band-aid, in a filthy parking lot, feeling beat down to hell and just wanting to head home, wash off the hospital reek and nuzzle a cat, but waiting for pain meds… is a sliver of cancer. In Walgreens, they’ve received my prescription. The pharmacist asks me if this is going to be an ongoing thing or what.

Hello, I think. I am clearly a cancer patient, with my scalp wrapped in a sparkly scarf and my eyes underscored by lines. The backs of my hands are red-dotted with red needle sticks from blood draws. My fingernails are broken by chemo. But there’s enough of me, yet, to lay into the pharmacist and both get my prescription and make him apologize. I know the deal about opioids. I’ve published a book that included Walgreens’ role in the devastating opioid crisis. Nonetheless, I’m determined to get my 21 pills, and I’ll send family back for the remaining allotted 21 pills, and I’m darn grateful for that. This, I tell him, is getting me to the finish line. And I’m going to get there.

I ante up my $4 copay, and then my brother drives north, over the Winooski River, where I happily point out the first spill I’ve seen of coltsfoot this year.

Later, at home again and opening my email, I’m gratified to read that my essay “Red Devil, Survivor Herself,” has been accepted for publication this April, my way of rowing against disease. A line from the essay reads: “Here’s a lesser known side effect of my chemo mixture, cisplatin: lying in bed, a whooshing revolved in my left ear, a fluttering stir like a fledgling first stretching its wings.”

Last, if anyone is so inclined, my youngest has signed up to walk in Dartmouth’s Cancer Center‘s annual fundraiser. Many thanks again, all, for reading my words. Happy April, wherever you may be.

From Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, my hospital read:

And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

Inauguration Eve. Cold. And me, the mad mutterer.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

On this Sunday inauguration eve, all day long, intermittently, as I go about the things I do, I’ve been thinking of a Mary Oliver poem. As I’ve written before, a friend has been sending me a poem each day that she reads aloud in her voice as clear as winter wind. Mid-January, Vermont, is the season both of winter settling in for the long haul and, conversely, as life often is, of lengthening days. We seek the merest brightening of the light as proof of spring’s promise. In her recording, my friend mentions seeing the division of seed packets in farm store, solid evidence of spring’s inevitability.

Later, just before twilight filters in, I walk out alone, tromping the short path through the woods and cemetery to the upper edge of the village. A few flakes of snow twirl. Otherwise, no one. My boots crunch over hard, packed snow. My mind is jammed with its usual monologue, when suddenly I realize my euphoria at walking along this wide road, flanked by white pines with broken branches, a single crow winging its way over the snowy Little League field. Yes, yes. I’ve forgotten my mittens, and my hands knotted in my coat pockets throb with cold, and yet I keep chortling like a mad woman, Yes and yes and yes.

Like any writer, I’m quite capable of running wildly with words, but as for the politics and national people, I’ll simply leave Mary Oliver’s words from her poem “Work, Sometimes.”

… What are we sure of?  Happiness isn’t a town on a map,
or an early arrival, or a job well done, but good work
ongoing.  Which is not likely to be the trifling around
with a poem.

Then it began raining hard, and the flowers in the yard
were full of lively fragrance.

You have had days like this, no doubt…. Ah, what a
moment!

As for myself, I swung the door open.  And there was
the wordless, singing world.  And I ran for my life.

Losing hair, blue dawn, foreign objects in flesh.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

Before dawn, brushing my hair I sing On the road again, just can’t wait to get on the road again, that old Willy Nelson song my mother loved. In the kitchen, making coffee, my daughter calls, Wait? You know that song? We played it everyday on our road trip last summer.

A thing to savor in this cancer: how my daughters and I discover these tiny things about each other.

My youngest cut the snarls from my hair that lingered from that hospital stay, when I couldn’t raise my arm to brush my long hair. Now, hanks of my hair slip out in my brush.

Outside, I stand for a moment, the waning moon hung over the neighbors’ roof, the emerging dawn a river-stone blue. A thaw’s set in, and the air is redolent with melting snow, a hint of loosening compost and soil. Raindrops hang from the three apple trees I planted.

We drive through the village, the coffee shop lit up where I’ve spent so many hours writing and talking, a young woman sweeping at the door. Colored lights string through the trees and over store windows. Out of town, day warms over farm fields and forests.

At the hospital, blood’s drawn for my chemo course this week. In my rudimentary cancer thinking, while doing the darnedest I can to forget about the orange fluids that will enter my body, I reckon that this week’s treatment means one third of the way through. If I can endure a third, I can endure half. If I can endure half, I can persevere to the finish. Talking with my daughter about December monochrome, I silently counsel myself to knock off my silly math. I’ve factored in no variables, and the variables are inviolate.

Before we leave, the nurse shows me a model of a port that may or may not be inserted in my chest. I hold the pad for needles, finger the plastic tube as she explains how it will lie under my chest. At the end, in the shape of a calla lily, is the opening that will drip the chemo beside my heart. The whole apparatus seems enormous to me, that plastic calla lily wider than my small finger. I hand it back to her. In the end, with the Good Doctor, how much of this will be my decision, and how much will be wisest course forward? In this age of truth/untruth, facts are powerful. I thank her, and we leave.

It’s a pleasure to be outside again, on this tiny road trip, my daughter at the wheel, drinking coffee. The fields and mountains and sky are layered quilt batting: blue and pearl and silver. Around the trees, rain’s pushed the snow away from the trunks, opening the earth again.

From Lauren Markham’s A Map of Future Ruins:

We don’t live steadily toward epiphany; our truest stories move back and forth in time, in space, in memory. Life is a mosaic, not a line.

A smidgen of writing.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 16 Comments

The clocks cease meaning for me. To gird myself for an appointment, a call, I set an alarm, ask a daughter for a reminder. Counting backwards proves stupidly difficult: what hour to we need to leave? Write this on a sticky, please.

The flip side: I wake early one morning, kibble the cats, open my notebook and begin writing the pieces of this book I’m rewriting in my head. Daunted, I copy my draft into a folder. Someday whole sections might become another book, an essay, trash. Weeks before I heard the cancer diagnosis, I took a class with the remarkable Lauren Markham. All these weeks, these endless hours sleeping and half-dreaming, reading hungrily, much of this solitary but never lonely, much surrounded by skilled strangers who spill snippets of their own remarkable lives in the wee hours of the night, syringe in hand.

Now, aided perhaps by exhaustion, I envision the skeleton of this revised book, the joints that hold these stories together, beginning in a moldy basement, rising to a glass complex, surely, the endless firmament.

Neuropathy comes and goes, reappears in my fingertips. The knobby bones of my wrists and knees expand beyond my dwindling muscle mass. The prednisone prescription reappears for five chemo days, beginning next week. I try not to think of that, of the force these mighty drugs will weld over my body, how I will yield, pray for their power, try to keep to my feet at least marginally, moving my body, keeping in the everyday realm.

Like anyone, I’ve hard used this woman’s body I’ve been gifted, through pregnancies and nursing, decades of sugaring and the countless cords of firewood I lifted and burned each year, churning ice cream to sell with a baby on my back, fourteen years of peddling syrup spring to snowy autumn at farmers markets. The bleeding fissures on my fingers from washing wool filters. But so much pleasure, too, the ineffable joy of cuddling a daughter in my lap, of mountain climbing, intimacy, of lying on the dewy grass under the creamy rising moon. Women my age often complain about the indignity of hot flashes, but the real indignity for me has always been when the flush of my changing body courses through me in a male-centered meeting in my difficult work of budgeting for a town.

A rambly post here….. a variation of my inside-out world where the former rules are revealed as trite. Patience, patience. An hour of work. Half a cup of tea. Another half hour. December sunlight.