one year

“Can I share this on the family group chat on Friday?” she asked. 

Her inquiry stopped me in my tracks. “How’d you know it was this week? I didn’t know you had a copy of that.”

“Well, my pictures sometimes tell me when something happened a year ago.”

A year ago she and her brother were off with family while the hubs and I ordered our favorite local pizza and folded into our home. It was the swiftest of chemo treatment days I’d known, colored with the support of family, friends, and a nursing staff most remarkable. We were exhausted but charged from the day’s significance. I could hear the other half of my heart down the hallway, sending the bell ringing video to family and friends as he cleared his throat and surrendered to sniffles from time to time. I was in the other room doing the same with tears streaming down my face as the rush of every other week chemo for six months was finally through. The video gets me every time. …for so many reasons obvious—the support, the completion, the moving on—and for so many reasons that I continue to wade through.

I don’t talk about my cancer a whole lot. If you lived in the community we’ve known affected by this disease, you might tuck under the radar a bit too. When you’ve lost friends, when you’re in remission, when you got a stage II “good” cancer, when you got to ring the bell… Well, to talk about my tour with this cancer feels like I’m pointing at a hangnail amidst others in triage. Illustrating it today, though, could be about you or someone you know and love. 

card by @wetreefree // imagery by @katiecreatie

In the fall of 2018 I was utilizing just about any option I could get my hands on to right what felt off with my body. I wasn’t sleeping, I was sweating, I was itching, I was battling from the moment I woke for the majority of the day a fullness in the bottom of my throat that I was told by more than one source was anxiety. But really? Why now? Why not when that or that or that had happened in life? It just didn’t add up. My body was talking to me, and I was trying to listen all while endeavoring to decipher if it was actual fullness that I was feeling or this constant sense of ‘on alert’—like how the body reacts to a hard conversation, an overwhelming emotion, the anticipation of whatever an encounter might bring. Or, you know, the 2020 we’ve all been living. I must have been a dreeeam to live with right around then. “Is there a bulk option for all the celery and lemons you’re going through?” he’d asked. That I was prioritizing such a concoction before coffee in the morning should have been a red flag. 

For months I lived with it, juiced through it, yoga-ed it, walked the blocks with it, talk therapy-ed it, consulted physicians about it. I was given a sleep medication for starters, called to follow up, and then got busy with the holiday season. It wasn’t until months later when back pain was so wrenching that the Nurse Practitioner who was working that day said, “Let’s go ahead and take an x-ray just to be sure we know what’s going on here.” Because of her cross check we learned what was really causing the fullness. There was an internal push of masses outgrowing the nest they’d been feathering in my mediastinal cavity—that spot that holds the heart right between the lungs. 

I still can see her calling over our primary care doc to take a look at the imagery on the hallway monitor, and I knew. I knew before she slid the door closed behind her. I knew before she took the deep breath. I knew before her eyes grew soft as she carefully collected the words to convey. I knew, sitting there that January 2nd day—with a hubby at work and kids off with a bestie—that I was about to hear some very sobering, shifting news, indeed. 

It would take nearly a month more—with three biopsy attempts and finally a surgical procedure—to determine my stage II lymphoma diagnosis. Soooo… what if I hadn’t had that back pain? What if pneumonia hadn’t set up camp in my lungs for the x-ray to also tell us about the two masses centered in my chest? What if I just kept pushing through with grit, acceptance, and epsom salts baths between sips of bone broth? (Two cure alls that I still champion, but medical expertise gets a hearty vote too.)

Someone shared with me the downturn in cancer diagnosis amidst COVID this year. I’m pretty sure I don’t have to say that cancer hasn’t gone anywhere here. I don’t have the official stats on that, but the mere thought of people avoiding medical facilities, pushing back yearly checkups, or dismissing what feels not right as a byproduct of legitimate 2020 stress and strain is beyond concerning. What if my 2018 symptoms had been felt this of all years? I think I’d be second guessing them as a result of what so many are experiencing, absorbing, sorting through right now.

So this is me PSAying that no one knows you better than you. Anything persistent, seemingly off, or newly felt of late deserves your attention and that of your care team. Ask. Advocate. Ask again. Of yourself, for yourself, and among those you know and love. Sometimes self care is an effort best shared. Maybe it’s nothing, maybe it’s something, but always there are professionals who can respond to any level of care needed—medically, spiritually, mentally, holistically. You do you so long as you’re taking care of you. …’cause the world needs your goodness in it—now more than ever. 

Ever since my daughter asked about the bell ringing video the other night, I’ve not been able to shake a tune in my head. It’s been over 20 years since my best friend and I sat slack-jawed with tears running down our faces as we rounded out our month of backpacking across the UK. The finale to our travels was seeing RENT in London. Until Hamilton arrived on the scene, that was hands down the most memorable theater performance I’ve known. For weeks after returning home, much like the last many days, the lyrics to Seasons of Love echoed in my heart and head. 

“In daylights?
In sunsets?
In midnights?
In cups of coffee?
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife?
In five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes.
How do you measure a year in a life?”

A dear heart who knows a lot—about me, about medicine, about feeding the spirit, about life—told me last year that I’d need to give myself a year. And right she was. 

I remember arriving at our Northwoods cabin last year after my final treatment thinking, as so many did, “Okay! Game on! Checked that box. Let’s goooooo!” And then my husband found me in tears in the bunkhouse because my body couldn’t do the yoga things that it used to know. “You just finished months of chemo, babe… you’ve got to give yourself time.” Time, though, is what I felt I’d lost—alongside my big curly locks, my sense of self, and a host of other this ’n’ thats along the way. I thought I’d been through the worst of it, that the chemo was the hard part. Turns out there are aspects in the after that can feel just as wearing. 

This made my day when this was gifted my way last year—gum pack by BlueQ.com 

The contrast from July 2019 and July 2020 me are, as my friend suggested, the result of what only time can gift. There are things changed about me that will never be the same, but to be feeling at home in my body again is such an essential, holy process of grace, patience, love, and continued OnOn! spirit that at times has been flagging in this chaser of a year.

“Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes.
Five hundred twenty five thousand journeys to plan.
Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes.
How do you measure a life of a woman or a man?”

The Miss and I took an art class together the other day. It was to take place at a nearby lake, but weather took us into town to consider landscapes and their many colors. In prepping the canvas and giving shape to our creations, the instructor talked about easing into our space a horizon line between the sky and water. That even in the undulations of the tree line or water waves, there’s a definitive line with the freedom to fill in with effect and color on either side. 

For nearly 20 years I’ve been looking at the same tree line with every evening dock sit or boat cruise here at the cabin. The setting’s remained, but the colors, cast, and clouds are a little something different each and every time. Like any one of us, on any one of our life tours—there’s the frame and then there’s the experiences, emotions, people, and knowings held both up above and below the horizon line of who we are. When the waves roll in here, I think about what we bring to shore—to steady or reshape before that same water folds us back in—both changed and still the same.  And for that grace in this space, I am forever grateful.

“It’s time now
to sing out,
though the story never ends.”

I’ve pasted below a blessing loved. Re-reading John O’Donohue’s words first gifted to me during a stretch last year lands anew in this year—a tour we’re all together knowing. My prayer is that we each find light in any given dark and figure a way to share such hope with another. 

A Blessing For One Who Is Exhausted

--by John O'Donohue,

When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,
Time takes on the strain until it breaks;
Then all the unattended stress falls in
On the mind like an endless, increasing weight,

The light in the mind becomes dim.
Things you could take in your stride before
Now become laborsome events of will.

Weariness invades your spirit.
Gravity begins falling inside you,
Dragging down every bone.

The tide you never valued has gone out.
And you are marooned on unsure ground.
Something within you has closed down;
And you cannot push yourself back to life.

You have been forced to enter empty time.
The desire that drove you has relinquished.
There is nothing else to do now but rest
And patiently learn to receive the self
You have forsaken for the race of days.

At first your thinking will darken
And sadness take over like listless weather.
The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.

You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.

Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.
Learn to linger around someone of ease
Who feels they have all the time in the world.

Gradually, you will return to yourself,
Having learned a new respect for your heart
And the joy that dwells far within slow time.

--John O'Donohue, Bless This Space Between Us