life

No Restitution.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

As a child, I went rarely to a physician: once for strep throat, secondly when I was eighteen for a required physical to enroll in college. I had a smallpox vaccine in sunny Santa Fe, surely one of the last in this country as my younger brother skipped this one. My mother brought her three kids to elementary school clinics for DPT and polio vaccines in gloomy Manchester, New Hampshire. We were healthy kids, and my mother, an RN, believed firmly in keeping healthy kids out of the medical system.

As a 21st century cancer patient and now survivor, I inhabit a different world. Through the Dartmouth-Hitchcock portal, I message my oncologist (my oncologist? this pairing of words still makes me cringe), who kindly replies. My recent bloodwork results are “unrevealing.” I’m reading Geraldine Brooks’ Caleb’s Crossing, a gift from a friend, set in the 1600s, and I study that “unrevealing” word, pondering its roots. I have a slightly-above-average vocabulary, and yet this disease has shoved me against so many words I’d never encountered. For instance, salpingectomy: removal of a fallopian tube.

Among much else, I’ve observed how my oncologist (again, that wincing) uses language: use words precisely for what is known and what is not known. The precision of oncologist and surgery saved my life; yet, I was never given the illusion that all is known. For now, on this cold morning, crossover between a full moon already waning and the rising sun barely quickening the horizon, I’m well. Which arrows to the heart of the human condition. The nascent day stretches long, an infinity of possibilities.

“There is no restitution for people like us, no return to days when our bodies were unscathed, our innocence intact. Recovery isn’t a gentle self-care spree that restores you to a pre-illness state. Though the word may suggest otherwise, recovery is not about salvaging the old at all. It’s about accepting that you must forsake a familiar self forever, in favor of one that is being newly born. It is an act of brute, terrifying discovery.”
― Suleika Jaouad (in all her awesomeness….)

“beyond the face of fear”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 20 Comments

I’m at the dentist for an X-ray of a front tooth that’s gone sour three times before — two failed root canals and one beastly apico — which also equals pain, more pain, and so many dollars. We compare the X-ray to the one taken six years ago, just before the pandemic, around the time when my brother and I were marveling at drone footage of empty cities in China. The tooth looks pretty darn fine. I explain that I recently endured chemo, and I’m off every which way. I no longer seem to know this body. Plus, the added layer of paranoia.

He says simply, Chemo will do that. He offers me antibiotics. I’ve had enough antibiotics in the past year to reasonably heal a village, or at least a hamlet, and I pass.

The very last day of December, the day is cold and sparklingly sunny. I work at my kitchen table for a bit, and when the sun shifts around, I drive to a nearby town to return library books. It’s the holiday season yet, and the library is nearly empty and quiet. The librarian and I have known each other for years now. We were once farmers market colleagues. Eventually, I buckle down and work hard for a good long while. When I leave, twilight is just beginning to settle in. The library is warm, and the staff is setting up chairs and cushions. Parents and little kids troupe in, their cheeks glowing with the afternoon cold.

On my way home, I drive up to the ridgeline and take the walk I learned from my poet friend Mary. The cold sinks its teeth into me as I hurry along. The gibbous moon appears and vanishes in the scrim of clouds. All summer and far into the autumn I felt surrounded by a holy veil, a phosphorescence, trial by devastating disease and the violence of chemo and surgery, a trial I survived. I counted each moment as a lucky gem. Slowly, my pockets began to fill with the world’s detritus, with those nagging financial fears, the inevitable disappointment of relationships, the ever-present terror of relapse a knife against my gullet. In plain words, the stuff of living.

Walking, I studied the horizon as the blue deepened, pure ineffable winter, and the night cloaked me. I passed a few farmhouses with little twinkling lights. I was so cold and yet I did not turn back. Instead, the winter night flooded into my heart. My whole adult life I’ve been a crepuscular woman, seeking the radiant edge of sunrise and sunset, reveling in twilight, the majesty of the starry heavens. I’ve transformed grit and solitude into books. Enduring lymphoma made me wary of those recesses in my soul. I relied on others for sustenance and heat, for clean clothes, for glasses of water, in the way of very young children. Both my beloveds and strangers kept me alive. But slowly I’m beginning to admit that the coarser and rougher shades in my soul kept my body alive, too.

All of this is to say that a heartfelt seemingly casual chat and a walk into the cold night quelled my uncertainty, steadied me again. At home, I’d let my woodstove fire burn dead so I could unscrew the back plate and clean the ash-choked metal filters. My ruined hands could not hold the wrench. So I shoveled out the coals, set a match to birchbark, and lit a fire. Good enough for now. Soon, I’ll summon the energy to ask for stronger hands…..

Last and certainly not least, you readers have poured such love towards me this year. I’ve been sparse in writing here as I struggle to find footing in my changed world. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for reading. And may this new year shine joy for all of us, in the universe’s mighty and myriad ways.

A dear poem from Lucille Clifton:

blessing the boats

may the tide

that is entering even now

the lip of our understanding

carry you out

beyond the face of fear

may you kiss

the wind then turn from it

certain that it will

love your back     may you

open your eyes to water

water waving forever

and may you in your innocence

sail through this to that

Another Plot Point.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

A friend inquires if my summer’s adrenaline, the post-chemo and post-surgery and cancer-remission wave of energy has waned, and, indeed, that has, the winter and cold and what’s called fatigue but is actually a lifeless bleak plain setting up quarters in my household.

Winter is a reckoning time. In a strange kind of way I begin to see the pieces of my life jostle into a pattern — childhood and college years and those years in my twenties when I ran back and forth across the country and then to northern Vermont, how I built a marriage and house, the young mothering years of children and friends, how we taught ourselves to sugar and run a business and I taught myself to write. Then I broke that life apart and took the children, created a new life, kept writing books, learned to view the world askance to keep danger from our door. Danger slunk in anyway. The world, indeed, is cause and effect, not a linear straight-shot but a dense sphere. Surely the human story is the same for you and me, with its endlessly profound and terrible and awesome variations.

This morning, the harsh cold has relented, just the slightest, snow sifting down, the blue dawn pushing away the night’s darkness.

I’m encouraged to seek “protective factors” which I glean as my daughters’ merriment, a purring cat on my chest as a I read by the woodstove, a walk with a friend on a snowy road. My heart longs for the season of those #10 Pond swims, with friends or without, the sun hot on my bare knees. Spectator to the loon world. Not iced coffee but hot coffee. Now, these days of small light. In a considered burst of optimism, I mail a carpenter a check in a card with snowy evergreens and seal our agreement. Come when the weather splits and put two more windows in my house. Open the view of the valley and the village. Another plot point.

What would people look like

if we could see them as they are,

soaked in honey, stung and swollen,

reckless, pinned against time? — Ellen Bass

Small Celebrations.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

Each morning presents a new skein of yarn, knotted and jumbled as if carelessly carried in the bottom of my backpack, beneath leaking and softening apples, a sandwich wrapped in wax paper whose crumbs have escaped, the shuffling of notebooks, pricks of pens.

A friend asks me to xc ski this weekend. I pause and then warn her of possible abject failure. Can I balance? Can I even snap boots into bindings? Talking, I think of my ski boots in the upstairs closet. A year ago, a knitting companion asked to borrow needles: an inconceivability. A year ago, I couldn’t walk up my house’s wooden staircase, let alone swing open the closet door and shuffle through needles. I might as well have considered mining for gold with a plastic spoon. Pulling together boots, skis, poles: that alone would mark a kind of success. I am a lousy skier, but the glide of ski over fresh snow has given me so much pleasure. I imagine again stopping at the trails on my way home from work, how the cold winter twilight gleams on snow.

A theme that emerges in my writing over and over is order versus chaos. How laboriously I endeavor to keep the chaos from my life, from vacuuming the ashes and bark shreds around my woodstove to ordering my work life. Be productive. Get my work done…

When I first emerged from surgery and chemo this summer, I flung myself into living with buoyancy and joy. Now, I am in the longer stretch — grateful to be here, but mindful of sinkholes. A longstanding quarrel in town rises up again and grabs at me. I remind myself, this was not my doing and not my requirement to undo. What I do, instead: I force myself up from the couch, lace up my boots, and walk. In town, I fill my backpack with library books, zip my coat against my throat as the gloaming sprinkles down. I take the longer walk home through the neighborhood built near the coal-dark Buffalo Mountain, these houses built for Hardwick’s granite workers, a hundred years and more ago, once filled with hardscrabble people from other places, seeking not a fortune but a livelihood. The kind of work where a slip or accident had horrible consequences. I pass a house with a family of small children, strung with glowing lights, sleds jammed in snowbanks. The empty house where the old woman with the two barking dogs disappeared in my illness, and another empty, for sale. On my road, I’ve strung red globes in an apple tree, bits of brightness, small celebrations, better than order.

The oncologist… “knows not to describe everything all at once.” — Marion Coutts, The Iceberg

Trainwreck.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

On the year anniversary of beginning chemotherapy, childishly I crab at my siblings. It’s a small thing—a bad internet connection, a request to make a phone call that might have taken 10 minutes—and I’m angry as all get-out, fury galloping in my blood. The common lingo is that chemo equals nausea, like a bad flu. That is not true, or was not true for me. Enduring chemo was like lying between two burning rails while a train sped over me. I held myself still as could be to survive that months-and-months-long train (how could something be so large?) rattling over me. Sure, there’s a few moments where the train slows, and you think maybe I’ll survive this, but steaming metal rushes right over your face, your mortality far closer than spitting distance. While the rest of the world is immersed in meetings or drinking wine in Spain or skiing, there you cringe, the pain so intense in your bone marrow that morphine means nothing.

In the first round, I had a common and horrific reaction to one of the drugs, rituximab, which stole my breath and shook my bones so hard the bed rattled. The room filled with people in scrubs. I did not know one person’s name. They kept talking to me, and I could not understand a single word. I was under that train, remember, the wheels hammering on tracks.

I never considered myself a warrior battling cancer. But my body was a war zone between two matched enemies: would the chemo quell the lymphoma, or would all of us go down together? A year later, in remission, I’m suffused with gratitude for my life, for so many people who got the train off me. And yet, a year later, there are days I’m still turning the pieces of my life over and over, wondering WTF? Like anyone, jab a shovel into the soil of my life, and the layers appear infinite. Twenty-two years ago, I left my crying four-year-old (“I want to come!”) behind and drove to the airport with my brother in my sister’s time of need. I had left in such a rush that I’d forgotten my driver’s license. It was not long after 9/11, and I had to cry to get on the plane without ID, but I finangled it. Coming home, we hit a snowstorm. My friend and her four-year-old drove over the White Mountains in a white-out to bring me home. At the crest of Franconia Notch, she pulled over. I got out to clean snow from the windshield and lights. No one else was on the road. Snow billowed through a freezing wind. I looked through the window at her son in his carseat between us. I had bought him a little toy, a hexagon of blue fluid with a yellow fish, and he was turning it around and around in his hand, so the fish would swim. It seemed like we were the last three souls on the planet. Such a long and treacherous way home to my little daughter and her twiggy braids. But my friend drove carefully in her red pickup. That story shook out into all’s-well, something that needs no bow-tie of a moral. Simply, all were saved. Our lives went on.

So many pieces of a life. On this Thanksgiving morning, how grateful I am to remain yet here, disease-and-treatment battered, broken by fate and my own rough actions. The terrain of the living.

… And last, I’m honored to have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize (a secret dream of mine) by Under the Sun for my essay “Weeds.”

How We Spend Our Time…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

Sunday, I ask a friend to take a walk. It’s been a morning of housekeeping and writing chores, vacuuming and laundry, and the easiest thing would be to lie on my couch all afternoon and read. A light snow falls — pretty flakes and scant accumulation. As we walk, I pull off my hat and take off my mittens. It’s not the swimming season, not an afternoon where we meet at #10 Pond and talk about kids and work, about old parents and gardening, the loons calling and the sunlight thick with pollen. November is the honed-down season, stick and bone season, where your eye admires the landscape’s starkness. On these back roads, we pass farms, fields scattered with equipment, the shorn-down remains of last summer’s crops.

For so much of my life, I seemingly always had somewhere to be — and, raising kids, I probably did. I hurried to work and home to make dinner, or to pick up a daughter at school or a soccer game. Now, my girls are grown, with their own places to be; how hungrily I’m anticipating the abundance of our small family and apple pie this holiday. But this Sunday, I leave my post-it list on the kitchen table, check the woodstove dampers, and lace up my boots.

A year ago, I was for the first time in the Dartmouth-Hitchcock ER, in the trauma room with my daughters and the first oncologist I met. I was so new to the cancer patient world that I did not yet understand IVs and fluids and pain meds. That night, a surgeon told me I had to have surgery right now, immediately or I may not live, and I might not live through the surgery, either. It was the first time I had gone under in an operating room and woke in a dim recovery room and wondered, what now?

What now is the privilege of the living, and my god, I embrace that.

A year later, a few hours in the afternoon on a slippery dirt road. Later, I arrive home as twilight falls, the darkness so impenetrable in late autumn, back to my clean house and the cats who insist upon their dinner immediately, my solitary and sometimes un-solitary life, and what I’m making of my mortal time: fiercely writing, keeping the cats and myself fed, the hearth glowing, a holiday meal imminent. These earthly joys.

“… how we seek to spend our time may depend on how much time we perceive ourselves to have.” — Atul Gawande