Summertime, Part Two
As I write this, much of the nation, including New York City, swelters under a blanket of one of the worst heat waves in half a century. Outside my writer’s window, where six short months ago intrepid souls were skiing snowdrifts that were as tall as the tops of the buried cars, the sky blazes turquoise and the air shimmers with golden sunlight. One feels the intense heat with the few steps it takes to move the trash to the curb. And while we grouse about the heat wave and alternate turning up the air conditioner with trying to moderate its use to conserve power, we remember that our few days’ discomfort is not the same as that experienced on a tour of duty in the desert, or weathered without benefit of indoor climate management.
We also remember that it is summertime. While summer is the season everyone looks forward to, summer sunshine comes with the price tag of summer heat just as surely as Christmas presents come with the price tag of ice and snow. In writing about summertime last year, I see I mentioned everything from summer vacation to the first harvest to canning. Last July, New York City also experienced its requisite heat wave, one I navigated not just through the peaks and canyons of Greenwich Village and Chelsea but through a labyrinth of doctors and nurses and technicians and administrators and service agencies, culminating one blistering day in late July with heavy reliance on my fiancé (and partner of twenty years and counting) and friends and family as, for the first time since adolescence, I was wheeled into an operating room.
This weekend, I marked the one-year anniversary of being diagnosed with cancer. I alluded to this in my summertime column last year as well as in additional columns since, but I did not disclose the disease itself. I didn't go into details because I didn't want to focus on having been sick and did want to focus on being well.
Cancer is an invasion by means outside of your control but within your body. That feels like a betrayal that is, in turn, incomprehensible. So, to be honest, I needed to conserve my strength for battling the disease. I hope none of my readers ever learns this first hand, but one of the first things they tell you during what will turn out to be many “you have cancer” talks is to tell who you want, when you want, how you want and how much you want. “Cancer” is a terrifying, ugly word, and people almost always react to it badly. The person with cancer is the one who has to fight the battle, and there is no describing how real and how dire that feels. The battle is not helped by encountering someone else being upset, especially when the person with cancer may be hoping to rely on family and friends for support during what can be guaranteed to be a challenging and often difficult time. Perhaps it is selfish and demanding, but it is no less true for being so.
To that end I would like to say this to my friends and family: I knew. I knew you were upset and I knew when you were managing that offstage for my benefit. Words cannot contain my gratitude then and now for your unselfishness and heroism during this time. I cannot begin to recount the calls and emails. Lissa and Allison sent care packages of chocolate and trashy movie star biographies. Carrie made sure to get food into the house during the recovery period. Kat sat with John (perhaps more accurately, they sat together) while I was in the operating room. As for John . . . words fail me. He was an absolute rock during this period. I am tearing up as I write this, for if ever there was the living definition of a husband standing by his spouse during a time of need, it was John. I so appreciate that the state of New York finally got around to granting legal recognition to our marriage, because if last summer didn’t seal the truth of our relationship as spouses, then the word simply has no meaning.
I am also grateful to my general practitioner, whose watchfulness did not rest as I negotiated the often challenging medical establishment through the protocols for detection, diagnosis, treatment and cure. Having cancer requires a lot of navigation physically, emotionally and bureaucratically, and for help with those I cannot thank the Livestrong organization enough. Every time you see one of those yellow rubber bracelets, it represents real help to a real person fighting a real battle. I gratefully wear mine every day. I am grateful to the specialists and their staffs who were part of my cure: urologist, radiation oncologist, cardiologist, otolaryngologist, neurologist and psychologist. I had a cancer only males can get, so I would be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to entreat every male reading this to do a self-examination once a month. It is simple and painless and the key act to saving lives potentially impacted by male cancers. Cancers specific to males have good recovery and cure rates (at least one such is over 95%) if correctly addressed, and a key element of that is early detection. To learn simple, easy self-examination instructions, click here.
There is a phrase among cancer survivors: five years out. This refers to an important landmark in the journey of surviving cancer: reaching the half-decade point. In a waiting room last week I flipped through a coffee table book of the same title, written by cancer survivor Chris Moschovitis and filled with his wonderful travel photography. Moschovitis’s images are shot with a knowing eye and, importantly, are not arranged by locale or time. As one looks at the images their power accumulates through the seeming randomness of their organization. Awareness surfaces that Moschovitis’s true subject is less the destination than the places and moments along the journey. It’s a lovely, powerful metaphor, anchored in equally lovely and powerful images. For cancer crystallizes your experience into a vivid flash of awareness at a specific point in time – usually, and certainly in my case, the moment you were diagnosed – creating a new threshold through which you step, and from which everything will now proceed. There are both changes to what you thought you knew and greater surety in what you know, each in good measure and increasingly in agreement with each other.
I haven’t made five years out, but one year out I do feel that I have been changed. I mean that beyond the physical, but the physical changes do bear mention. Part of the protocol for the cancer I had was a multi-week course of targeted radiation therapy. Despite the cool factor of numbering among one’s tattoos six medical ones that were designed by nuclear physicists and served as bull's eyes for a laser beam, I have to tell you: radiation therapy takes it out of you. There were days when I was so exhausted that I didn’t even have the energy to get into a car to be taken to the radiation suite. As predicted, my energy did start to return once I finished treatment, but the truth is, it is still not where it once was, where I’d like it to be. As anyone who knows me will not be surprised to learn, having my energy compromised is a serious hardship for me. There is a lot to do in a day, and I don’t like it when the reason I can’t get everything done is that my energy gives out. I understand the necessity of downtime, but inactivity so easily trips over into laziness. Assign it to my being a Capricorn if you wish (Scorpio rising and Leo moon, if you’re keeping track), but laziness is one character trait I cannot find a way to respect.
And that leads to something that cancer hasn’t changed in me: the awareness of time passing. Even as a child, I was aware of time – more so than children are popularly supposed to be. Adults were amazed that I was never fidgety – to the point that a few of them, acting from the faults of their own perceptions, tried to bait me into having a reaction. But I knew that an hour of being told to sit quietly would pass just as quickly as one filled with a game. I loved to read and never objected to having an hour to spend with a book. But I also never objected if that hour included a task to accomplish. In my case – as will not surprise readers of Urban Home Blog – that included not just homework but mending the pocket of an apron, snapping beans for summer canning and then washing out a raft of jars to put them in, straightening out the collection of amber Depression glass in the dining room hutch.
It seems that everything I write circles back to my grandmother, and here she is again. Decades after her own journey ended, her profound influence helped – helps – me during my cancer journey. Among the ways her Osage heritage manifested was a profound reverence for the ever-spinning wheel of time, evidenced by how she inhabited it. Though the sacred details of daily living were given their due, time was experienced seasonally rather than hourly, daily, weekly. Living seasonally teaches the invaluable acceptance of the accumulation of experience through the march of time. But by its very nature as a gift of the spinning Earth HerSelf, it is a subtle lesson. It just seeps in, like rain to roots. At some point, you perceive that you understand it, and that it was always there waiting to be understood.
There are other changes as well. That cliché about not letting the small stuff bother you? It’s absolutely true. A cancer diagnosis – not that different from any other serious life event – teaches perspective. Actually, it forces the issue. Having cancer places you into a community where, whatever your own story, there is always someone whose story is better and there is always someone whose story is worse. Something about encountering serious illness grants freedom from getting too overwrought over life’s grievances, because it puts annoyance into perspective and assigns pettiness the scant respect it deserves. Just this week I weathered a two-hour-plus delay to see my oncologist for our twice-yearly follow-up. I did not mind the wait as the doctor had been called into surgery to help someone who may not have had as much time for waiting as I did -- which, in turn, was true because of that doctor's contribution to efforts on my behalf.
And, if you let it, having or having had cancer invigorates your sense of adventure. Whether we are five years out or ten years out or one year out or just diagnosed or currently in treatment, cancer survivors embrace both the mechanics of daily living and the sacred gift of right now. You find you procrastinate less but you also become better at prioritizing. Outside responsibilities don’t evaporate and we tend to those, but we also tend to our responsibilities to ourselves: to step away from the fray, to balance demands with wishes, to do something if we can because we want to. Of course, this takes innumerable forms. Some of us travel the world and some of us visit our families. Some of us go hang-gliding and some of us make lunch plans. Some of us take that long dreamed-of ballet class and some of us go see the ballet. Some of us cook and garden and clean and decorate and write about it all.
Like many serious situations that life doles out, cancer slams us with the fact of our own mortality. One year out and counting, I am more determined than ever to honor the gift of time by maximizing every moment of the gift. That’s been the philosophy of Urban Home Blog since I launched it, and it was my philosophy long before I was writing about it, when I was just living it. To that end, full circle through the transit of a year and to mark the anniversary of this event that was life-changing for both of us, for the past month John and I have been working on a big decorating project. We are switching the bedroom and home office and updating both in the process. Readers of Urban Home Blog know to look for columns about big decorating projects around Labor Day, but we decided to get started now. Summer presented us the gift of itself. And, frankly, there was no good reason to wait.
We also remember that it is summertime. While summer is the season everyone looks forward to, summer sunshine comes with the price tag of summer heat just as surely as Christmas presents come with the price tag of ice and snow. In writing about summertime last year, I see I mentioned everything from summer vacation to the first harvest to canning. Last July, New York City also experienced its requisite heat wave, one I navigated not just through the peaks and canyons of Greenwich Village and Chelsea but through a labyrinth of doctors and nurses and technicians and administrators and service agencies, culminating one blistering day in late July with heavy reliance on my fiancé (and partner of twenty years and counting) and friends and family as, for the first time since adolescence, I was wheeled into an operating room.
This weekend, I marked the one-year anniversary of being diagnosed with cancer. I alluded to this in my summertime column last year as well as in additional columns since, but I did not disclose the disease itself. I didn't go into details because I didn't want to focus on having been sick and did want to focus on being well.
Cancer is an invasion by means outside of your control but within your body. That feels like a betrayal that is, in turn, incomprehensible. So, to be honest, I needed to conserve my strength for battling the disease. I hope none of my readers ever learns this first hand, but one of the first things they tell you during what will turn out to be many “you have cancer” talks is to tell who you want, when you want, how you want and how much you want. “Cancer” is a terrifying, ugly word, and people almost always react to it badly. The person with cancer is the one who has to fight the battle, and there is no describing how real and how dire that feels. The battle is not helped by encountering someone else being upset, especially when the person with cancer may be hoping to rely on family and friends for support during what can be guaranteed to be a challenging and often difficult time. Perhaps it is selfish and demanding, but it is no less true for being so.
To that end I would like to say this to my friends and family: I knew. I knew you were upset and I knew when you were managing that offstage for my benefit. Words cannot contain my gratitude then and now for your unselfishness and heroism during this time. I cannot begin to recount the calls and emails. Lissa and Allison sent care packages of chocolate and trashy movie star biographies. Carrie made sure to get food into the house during the recovery period. Kat sat with John (perhaps more accurately, they sat together) while I was in the operating room. As for John . . . words fail me. He was an absolute rock during this period. I am tearing up as I write this, for if ever there was the living definition of a husband standing by his spouse during a time of need, it was John. I so appreciate that the state of New York finally got around to granting legal recognition to our marriage, because if last summer didn’t seal the truth of our relationship as spouses, then the word simply has no meaning.
I am also grateful to my general practitioner, whose watchfulness did not rest as I negotiated the often challenging medical establishment through the protocols for detection, diagnosis, treatment and cure. Having cancer requires a lot of navigation physically, emotionally and bureaucratically, and for help with those I cannot thank the Livestrong organization enough. Every time you see one of those yellow rubber bracelets, it represents real help to a real person fighting a real battle. I gratefully wear mine every day. I am grateful to the specialists and their staffs who were part of my cure: urologist, radiation oncologist, cardiologist, otolaryngologist, neurologist and psychologist. I had a cancer only males can get, so I would be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to entreat every male reading this to do a self-examination once a month. It is simple and painless and the key act to saving lives potentially impacted by male cancers. Cancers specific to males have good recovery and cure rates (at least one such is over 95%) if correctly addressed, and a key element of that is early detection. To learn simple, easy self-examination instructions, click here.
There is a phrase among cancer survivors: five years out. This refers to an important landmark in the journey of surviving cancer: reaching the half-decade point. In a waiting room last week I flipped through a coffee table book of the same title, written by cancer survivor Chris Moschovitis and filled with his wonderful travel photography. Moschovitis’s images are shot with a knowing eye and, importantly, are not arranged by locale or time. As one looks at the images their power accumulates through the seeming randomness of their organization. Awareness surfaces that Moschovitis’s true subject is less the destination than the places and moments along the journey. It’s a lovely, powerful metaphor, anchored in equally lovely and powerful images. For cancer crystallizes your experience into a vivid flash of awareness at a specific point in time – usually, and certainly in my case, the moment you were diagnosed – creating a new threshold through which you step, and from which everything will now proceed. There are both changes to what you thought you knew and greater surety in what you know, each in good measure and increasingly in agreement with each other.
I haven’t made five years out, but one year out I do feel that I have been changed. I mean that beyond the physical, but the physical changes do bear mention. Part of the protocol for the cancer I had was a multi-week course of targeted radiation therapy. Despite the cool factor of numbering among one’s tattoos six medical ones that were designed by nuclear physicists and served as bull's eyes for a laser beam, I have to tell you: radiation therapy takes it out of you. There were days when I was so exhausted that I didn’t even have the energy to get into a car to be taken to the radiation suite. As predicted, my energy did start to return once I finished treatment, but the truth is, it is still not where it once was, where I’d like it to be. As anyone who knows me will not be surprised to learn, having my energy compromised is a serious hardship for me. There is a lot to do in a day, and I don’t like it when the reason I can’t get everything done is that my energy gives out. I understand the necessity of downtime, but inactivity so easily trips over into laziness. Assign it to my being a Capricorn if you wish (Scorpio rising and Leo moon, if you’re keeping track), but laziness is one character trait I cannot find a way to respect.
And that leads to something that cancer hasn’t changed in me: the awareness of time passing. Even as a child, I was aware of time – more so than children are popularly supposed to be. Adults were amazed that I was never fidgety – to the point that a few of them, acting from the faults of their own perceptions, tried to bait me into having a reaction. But I knew that an hour of being told to sit quietly would pass just as quickly as one filled with a game. I loved to read and never objected to having an hour to spend with a book. But I also never objected if that hour included a task to accomplish. In my case – as will not surprise readers of Urban Home Blog – that included not just homework but mending the pocket of an apron, snapping beans for summer canning and then washing out a raft of jars to put them in, straightening out the collection of amber Depression glass in the dining room hutch.
It seems that everything I write circles back to my grandmother, and here she is again. Decades after her own journey ended, her profound influence helped – helps – me during my cancer journey. Among the ways her Osage heritage manifested was a profound reverence for the ever-spinning wheel of time, evidenced by how she inhabited it. Though the sacred details of daily living were given their due, time was experienced seasonally rather than hourly, daily, weekly. Living seasonally teaches the invaluable acceptance of the accumulation of experience through the march of time. But by its very nature as a gift of the spinning Earth HerSelf, it is a subtle lesson. It just seeps in, like rain to roots. At some point, you perceive that you understand it, and that it was always there waiting to be understood.
There are other changes as well. That cliché about not letting the small stuff bother you? It’s absolutely true. A cancer diagnosis – not that different from any other serious life event – teaches perspective. Actually, it forces the issue. Having cancer places you into a community where, whatever your own story, there is always someone whose story is better and there is always someone whose story is worse. Something about encountering serious illness grants freedom from getting too overwrought over life’s grievances, because it puts annoyance into perspective and assigns pettiness the scant respect it deserves. Just this week I weathered a two-hour-plus delay to see my oncologist for our twice-yearly follow-up. I did not mind the wait as the doctor had been called into surgery to help someone who may not have had as much time for waiting as I did -- which, in turn, was true because of that doctor's contribution to efforts on my behalf.
And, if you let it, having or having had cancer invigorates your sense of adventure. Whether we are five years out or ten years out or one year out or just diagnosed or currently in treatment, cancer survivors embrace both the mechanics of daily living and the sacred gift of right now. You find you procrastinate less but you also become better at prioritizing. Outside responsibilities don’t evaporate and we tend to those, but we also tend to our responsibilities to ourselves: to step away from the fray, to balance demands with wishes, to do something if we can because we want to. Of course, this takes innumerable forms. Some of us travel the world and some of us visit our families. Some of us go hang-gliding and some of us make lunch plans. Some of us take that long dreamed-of ballet class and some of us go see the ballet. Some of us cook and garden and clean and decorate and write about it all.
Like many serious situations that life doles out, cancer slams us with the fact of our own mortality. One year out and counting, I am more determined than ever to honor the gift of time by maximizing every moment of the gift. That’s been the philosophy of Urban Home Blog since I launched it, and it was my philosophy long before I was writing about it, when I was just living it. To that end, full circle through the transit of a year and to mark the anniversary of this event that was life-changing for both of us, for the past month John and I have been working on a big decorating project. We are switching the bedroom and home office and updating both in the process. Readers of Urban Home Blog know to look for columns about big decorating projects around Labor Day, but we decided to get started now. Summer presented us the gift of itself. And, frankly, there was no good reason to wait.
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