reading

Meeting the Red Devil.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

In my foolish pre-cancer days, I pretty much covered up my ears when I heard about someone’s chemo treatment. That said, I’m not a complete jerk; my heart twinged, especially for parents of young children, and I offered sympathy, meals, a compassionate ear. But in some profoundly hidden place in my thinking, I tried to pretend that my garden squash and chard and those miles of walking would inoculate me. More likely, I was too cowardly to consider a possibility that hadn’t arrived.

This morning, I texted an acquaintance, I’ve now met the Red Devil, too. Looking forward to a long conversation over coffee this spring about your experience.

Yesterday, morning sunlight filled this Dartmouth-Hitchcock infusion room. Nuthatches and chickadees and juncos flitted around birdfeeders. Two wooden reindeer were linked by a red ribbon.

Without a port, the poison/healing infusion flowed into my vein. Remembering clearly my breathless and rigors! reaction to the rituximab, I burbled my fears to the nurse, who sought consult. She told me she only had good experiences with patients; I assured her I am a striving A+ patient. Then she worked her mojo and set up some black case that was never opened, assured me the nurses’ station was actually all of five feet where I was sitting, and then, drip, drip, drip, she released the poison that presumably will save my life into my vein. She stood talking to me and my daughter about the merits of studded snow tires and a recipe for gingerbread cookies, and then showed me that I was twenty minutes along with the rituximab. All was well.

Here’s the thing: there is no ease or comfort in this cancerland. The nurse is gowned and double-gloved to protect herself against these chemicals. I’ve read my chart thoroughly and know that innocuous word complications could rapidly spin my life into a dire Shackleton sea. And yet, in the warm rare-in-December sunlight, with my daughter and her stack of Christmas cards, my knitting, a novel I’d plucked from my shelf that I’d wanted to read, those downy birds flickering — a calm outside time’s relentlessness.

As for the Red Devil (the crimson of young Lucy’s magic potion in the Narnia books), the nurse injected a long fat vial into my arm. During this, she had me eat sherbet, pressing the icy substance against the roof of my mouth as the Red Devil would seek the tender places in my body and could erupt mouth sores. My daughter held the cup as I dug into the frozen substance. The nurse pushed the liquid slowly into arm, careful, careful not to burst the vein. The infusion would burn and destroy my arm, one of the nightmarish complications which would plague me for months, maybe years, to come. At the end, this confident nurse set down the empty vial and breathed deeply.

I thanked this woman for her steady hands.

Much later, 90 miles north by interstate and state roads, my daughter and her partner hold my hands as we walk up the path into my house. If I stumbled, I imagined them holding me between the two of them.

On the doorstep, my potter friend left a package with handmade yellow candles and a flower candle holder and a mug glazed the blue hues of the midsummer sky. So many happy days my kids spent in her studio — Mud Club, Clay Camp — and the cups of tea we’ve shared as mothers and crafters. A gift of light.

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.

Small Soup Bowls. Quarantine. Icicles.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

My brother returns home, and I immediately slip up, ignore a morphine dose, am unable to eat. A lesson in my own laziness or foolishness learned: keep to the path.

For days, he sets small bowls of heated soup on my kitchen table – chicken and dumplings, our childhood favorite of pea soup, lentils with savory carrots. One night, my daughter bakes biscuits, opens a gift jar of raspberry jam (July!), and we revel at a nameless soup from a woman we’ve never met. Potatoes with the skins left on, chicken and maybe tarragon, celery, onion. There is nothing we could imagine adding.

Like these soup bowls, my physical life has narrowed to these warm rooms with cats, hours unfurling patiently as I stop counting days and treatments. Each day unfolds. On Saturday, I sit on the couch and return a friend’s call. Sunday, I return another call, listening to my laughter, their laughter, these friends who have been down their own stony journeys.

Quarantined, I’m connected to the world in ways I didn’t anticipate – emails and calls, books, prayers– a rosy swaddling aura. An acquaintance phones me with her cancer story and describes her year so straightforwardly she buoys me with courage. A friend offers to plow our driveway all winter; perpetually on the skimp, I’ve shoveled for years, but it’s a great gift to my people who are anyways busily feeding my wood stove and picking up morphine and antibiotics and driving me to bloodwork and The Good Doctor — not to mention, working their own jobs and walking their dogs and generally going about their lives.

So much kindness has come my way. The night the sainted nurse sat with me for an hour and a half while the final chemo infusion ebbed, ebbed, into my chest beside my heart, she counseled me to cultivate patience, that I will be able to give again, that the world spins and shifts.

In a wind gust, the robins’ nest falls from our porch beam. Icicles hang from the roof, radiant swords of sunlight.

…. A few lines from Louise Dickinson Rich, courtesy of my sister-in-law:

“All ordinary people like us, everywhere, are trying to find the same things. It makes no difference whether they are New Englanders or Texans or Malayans or Finns. They all want to be left alone to conduct their own private search for a personal peace, a reasonable security, a little love, a chance to attain happiness through achievement.”

Chemo ride…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

… took a bitch turn. Dreaded day 5 passed (thank goodness for the amazing anti-nausea meds), but with the last bag of this poison/healing fluid, a fist immediately grabbed my chest and squeezed my breath. My cheeks coursed with blood.Terror, say the word, terror. So much back and forth, oxygen and treatments and more liquids through this purple spaghetti plastic that drip, drip, drips near my heart. I shook fiercely – rigors – the nurses said. I was stuck on the word as my molars hammered, rigors!, where is this hard ride taking me? The fluid was stopped with a promise not to start again until I knew.

In and out of a fog, a dream of a herringbone jacket with a pleated flair my youngest wore as a two-year-old. In the evening, a nurse sits with me. As the drip-drops begin again, she talks, right beside me, watching me, close eye, about this disease, about infection and rest, about what I will need to do and avoid – do not knick your fingers with a knife, no dirt, no cat litter, no flowers, no illness. I ease from tension and realize, yes, yes, I am still breathing, I am still taking in this toxin that quite possibly will save my life. I glance up at the round analog clock on the wall that reminds me and my brother of school days. These are the moments Burlington’s Phoenix Books is hosting the Almanac intro in an online event. In my haze, I imagine the Almanac editors and reading and answering questions, this book filled with farm dirt and blooming flowers, hay chaff and sneezing, insects and sheep, and stories – so many stories – of people working on this northern place on the globe. In my half-dream, exchanging novels to read with this steady stranger, I feel my place in the world opening up, both descending into the long trek of illness and healing and, miraculously, an upward course, too, as this illness strips me down. Your bone marrow, the stranger says, marrow, a word I love and have been content to let lie, bone marrow doing its bone marrow thing. All this is changing, too, from nature, from medicine, from my fierce intent to reclaim my body.

All of you who have traveled or will travel this journey, bone marrow and rigors and fear, how simultaneously far and yet close this feels, all of us.

….. Everyday, a dear friend texts me a poem read in her clear strong voice. Here’s Rilke’s “Let Darkness Be a Bell Tower”

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29

Saving…. Who?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

One recent morning, on the lawn of the former schoolhouse where I work, signs appeared on the triangle green: Save Town Hall. Shortly afterward, with black spray paint, someone altered the signs to: Save Town.

This building has been around since before Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914. The entire top floor is a gymnasium, the middle floor four classrooms, the basement originally must have housed a coal furnace. After a $14k heading bill one winter for a building largely empty, I urged the Selectboard to consider other options. Oh, the furor that suggestion has now caused.

All summer, walking into the basement, I kept saying, I smell mold, I can’t work in a basement, I can’t think straight, can’t breathe, in a repetition that was doubtlessly whiny and certainly dull. But like the people arguing around this building, the building isn’t stagnant, either. I take my laptop upstairs to the empty rooms, where it’s me and the dusty windows, the paint shedding from the pressed tin walls and ceilings, the beadboard molding higher than my head.

In this wet, wet summer, mold blooms, and I rally the tiny office staff. Let’s move! I grab my jade plant. In a few hours, we’ve moved upstairs into the empty rooms, opening the windows and letting in the sunlight and breeze. I prop open the doors and sweep up cobwebs. Behind us, we leave so much. In our rouge occupation, we women set up housekeeping. I take off my shoes and walk barefoot over the maple floors .

We hire a crew to move the heavy things, and the men walk around remembering when they went to school in these rooms. Art classroom here, lunch there. All day long, with the doors open, the public wanders in and offers suggestions and stories.

A woman asks what we need. I’d like a pair of kittens here, frankly, or maybe a small old dog who wouldn’t mind sleeping on the rug in the sunlight.

Save Town? A question that opens up into a Jacob’s Ladder of questions….. in the meantime, we’re at least moving up into the light….