It’s the last days of chemo and the leaves are turning on the trees outside my second-floor windows: gold, ochre, improbable red. Soon the branches will be stripped bare, and anyone walking by will have an unobstructed view into our treehouse, but right now they are a technicolor curtain, shielding me from the world below, and it from me.
Thanks to my busted fibula, I haven’t really left the house in days. Leaving involves scooting down the inside stairs on my butt, then navigating the outside stairs on crutches in a maneuver Paul has dubbed the “hug-n-hop.” More importantly, leaving requires another person, both to get me down the stairs and to drive the car wherever it is we are going though, let’s be real, the only place I’m really going is to yet another doctor.
I’m having surgery in less than two weeks – on my breasts not my ankle – and the preparations are in full swing. I feel lucky that thanks to the way my body has responded thus far to the chemo, I don’t have to have a bilateral mastectomy. Just a lumpectomy, scooping out a golf-ball-sized chunk of tissue, and a corresponding breast reduction, followed by five weeks of radiation, and monoclonal antibody infusions for another six months to a year. Oh and there’s probably some tamoxifen in my future as well.
Breaking my ankle has caused me to lose the thread. I was on top of everything for so long, but now despite the best efforts of MyChart, I’m having trouble remembering all my appointments, keeping straight what happens when, and to which body part. Before the fall I had a clear vision of the path from surgery to recovery and beyond. Sure, that vision may not have ultimately lined up with the reality of what is to come, but I had benchmarks; I was looking forward to not being sick, to going for walks, to rebuilding strength in my quads and calves. Now the future is blurry. The oncologists and the orthopedists don’t really care much what’s going on outside their respective domains and I’m left to piece together what it might look like, or more importantly, feel like, to recover from breast surgery without being able to walk.
Do I sound depressed? I guess I am, a little bit. Sudden immobility will do that to you. Also: I have a terrible cold, which has so far tested negative for covid three times. I am at least finally shaking off the final round of chemo nausea, though thanks to the drugs still making their way through my body I’m constantly chilly. So when I’m not working I sit, boot propped on a pillow, under a very beautiful wool and mohair blanket Anne sent me as a wedding present, and watch the onset of autumn through the glass.
While I may be getting a jump start on the interiority of winter over here, my mind is cast back, over and over this week to spring. Specifically, late May, when five friends and I decamped to the woods of Michigan for a long weekend before my wedding. At that joyous event before the other joyous event, one friend was processing her own recent breast cancer diagnosis and her looming surgery. While we were there one woman’s father landed in the emergency room and another’s mother, long in memory care, suddenly seemed in mortal peril. It was a lot!
We shook our heads at the drama of it all. How was this possible? And then we knit ourselves together into a blanket of mutual care. This long-planned celebration was not going to be ruined by the unavoidable facts of middle age.
Robin had brought gifts: vintage rubber swim caps, black adorned with hot pink and yellow flowers. We put on Esther Williams lipstick and posed in the hot tub, taking ridiculous photos and doing awkward water ballet. We went to the beach in the rain and bought veggies, hard candy, and ice cream from a roadside stand. We went for walks, alone and in groups, and one one of them I finally fessed up to my own fear of the mammogram that awaited when we got back to the city. “I have a lump!” I cried, shaking my head in disbelief.
Now, five months later, one friend has fallen and shattered her kneecap, and is bedridden for the foreseeable future. Another just had her second breast surgery. A third is in testing for a mysterious ailment. I am … see above. And while everyone’s parents are still holding on, it’s anyone’s guess how long that will last. It’s hurricane season, but while we batten down th hatches and hunker down in our homes we continue to knit – text chains of care, love notes sent through the mail, bagels delivered, and flowers. It fills me with wonder, that such relationships, braided together over 20 or 30 years are possible. Such a thing would have been incomprehensible to 20-year-old me, oblivious to the potentiality of time, wound up in insecurity and confusion, judging myself as harshly, or harsher, as I did others.
Someone, somewhere, talked recently about the importance of being gentle with your idiot younger self. I do try hard to show her compassion, even as I marvel at her self absorption. It helps a lot that some of these same hurricane-buffeted friends have been riding with me for so long. We show each other the compassion that’s so hard to grant ourselves, and we trace our intersecting arcs of relationships, jobs, children, art, absurdity, and joy. I don’t know what I would do without them.
Your past few essays have left me in tears. Thank you for articulating the tenderness of painful times. Sending you lots of warm thoughts, always. <3
It's good to give yourself a hug sometimes.