Herringbone

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I am learning very much about things I never wanted to know. I am thinking very much about things I didn’t want to think about. And some of this is fruitful, I know. Maybe most of it. It is changing me.

Funny, when I first found out I had cancer I was devastated. Michael and I wept and wept. And as the news seemed to get worse (not a lumpectomy but a mastectomy, not just a mastectomy but chemo), we have had pockets of devastation each time. But it is in the research of this disease, finding helpful and hopeful nuances, that perhaps the most powerful idea comes creeping in: I might be right now looking at the thing that kills me. And it might kill me much sooner than I had expected to die.

Breast cancer, as you all know, is getting more and more survivable. Almost 100% of the people who write to me write about a friend they have who has “beaten” the disease, who is 3 or 5 or 10 years out and thriving. That is awesome. I am delighted for them and I am hoping and assuming that someday I will be that person who is 3 or 5 or 10 years out and thriving. But the more I read about it, the more I understand that there is no beating this disease. Some cancers are gone if they don’t reappear somewhere else in 5 or 10 years; breast cancer is not on this list. It can spring up in your liver or your bones or your lungs at any point from now until forever. You don’t beat it, you just treat the hell out of it and then hope it doesn’t come back. As Peggy Orinstine writes in the New York Times: “I won’t know for sure whether I am cured until I die of something else — hopefully many decades from now, in my sleep, holding my husband’s hand, after a nice dinner with the grandchildren.”

All fresh from our garden

Research has come really far in making it so that it doesn’t come back soon. And my cancer has some really positive traits: it’s very estrogen receptive and there were no positive lymph nodes. This is fantastic—the more I learn about these two factors, the more I feel almost dizzy with delight about them. The odds of me living 15 years from now are very high. I celebrate and delight in that. The odds of my living 15 years from now, however, are unmistakably lower than I thought they were five weeks ago. And the odds of living 30 years from now are lower still.

This leads me to I am also wonder if I should be thinking about the envelope of my life in a different way than I did in December. My grandmothers lived into their 80s—and they chain smoked for a long portion of their long lives. I’ve been sort of imagining a life that stretches that far, a life I’m roughly half way through. I’m wondering—and I’m really really trying not to wonder in a morbid way but in an open and engaged way—what it would mean to think of the envelope of my life as stretching more securely to 60 rather than 80. What if I’m roughly 2/3s of the way through right now? How would that change the way I think about my work, my parenting, my loving, my legacy? I am not sure, but I’m tentatively dipping my toes in this thought experiment to see where it takes me, to see what I can learn about living a full and rich life with different imagined boundaries.

You see, I think we each have a kind of imagined timeline. You have one, right? There are some things it’s worth doing if you think you have 15 years left on the planet that you’d never do if you had 15 days left. There’s cool research about the way we think about what will make us happy in the future and how we plan (or don’t) for that future self (try Stumbling on Happiness—spectacular book). You probably have, somewhere in your mind, a use-by date that you’re imagining. You probably have a sense of how many chapters you think your story has and where you are in the book.

You could be totally wrong. Life happens most unexpectedly. I have a dear friend who was given 6 months to live nearly 30 years ago. I have a cousin who died in her sleep at 19 who would have been in her 40s now. We don’t know. Ever.

But we do sort of guess, right? We do have a sense of what might be and what might not be. And we make our plans as though that guess is right. I have long wanted to live a life that I would consider full and rich no matter how long it lasts. Rachel Garlin’s “One hell of a life” has been my theme song and I play it at top volume in the house and hope it’s played at my funeral. Or at least I used to play it at top volume. Now Michael hits skip the moment the first chords start. Talking about death when we imagined we were halfway through is one thing; talking about death while looking at chemo options is another.

This week has been about healing for me. I am so much stronger, in so much less pain. Thursday I picked tomatoes in the garden and made a salad. Yesterday I cooked a little. Today I have the craving to bake. This is a marked improvement.

I’m getting used to my new body. I went to the doctor yesterday to change the dressings and the nurse was so funny. She looked at me and said, “Wow, just pump that thing up a little and add a nipple and those boobs are going to be beautiful!” We talked about the vast merits of having a breast surgeon who is a perfectionist (and she mused a little at the difficulties of being that breast surgeon’s wife).

Aidan, ready for high school

I’m getting used to the chemo idea. I’ve been reading about the circumstances under which I might not need chemo (because my cancer is so highly estrogen receptive) and have been back and forth with my top cancer researcher (my mom) and my favourite oncologist (a friend of a dear friend who is devoting unexpected, loving, and compassionate time to my case). The nurse yesterday also guessed that I would be able to pull off bald better than most. I laughed all the way through the dressing change. I scheduled an appointment to have my hair coloured darker. I’ve been so curious about what that would be like, but I haven’t found a good enough temporary dye in case I hate it. I think right now I have temporary hair which is another way to go.

I am tingling with delight at what it means to be alive, what it means to see the stars and watch the sky turn pink in the morning and then again at night. I am working again, loving the feel of planning programs, taking on new coaching clients, supporting people to lead fuller and happier lives. I am watching time pass with my kids—celebrating Naomi’s superb results on her end-of-year exams, admiring Aidan in his new high school uniform (high school begins for him Monday).  And I’m wondering about this new envelope of mine and what it would mean to hold my life differently and to take anything after 60 as a bonus. I watch as things go from black and white to grey to black and white again, like a herringbone pattern. Distance matters. Perspective matters. And it’s all true, the black and white and the grey. We never know the shape of our lives or our futures; we only pretend to know. I write about creating new boundaries and seeing how those change what seems possible or impossible. Maybe I should live into that too.

For those of you who want to know more about breast cancer, I now have a bunch of articles. This one was so compelling to me when I read it a year ago, though, that it’s been in my mind this whole time.
Oooh, and read this too--it's so beautiful.  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/25/opinion/sunday/how-long-have-i-got-left.html