fight club

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Emily

It’s no accident that I haven’t written since my ovarian sister Sarah Feather passed away last month.  I see now how she served as some kind of reference point for me, as if every time I sent my words out to the world, I was waiting for her response as a kind of echo of my own thoughts.

My words and Sarah’s words often crossed in virtual space, in a kind of linguistic ping-pong.  As I wrote, I wanted to believe that somehow, the life force within me could be transferred to her, could help her heal, that maybe a miracle would germinate out of this evil disease we shared, and the way we both sought solace in writing about our battles with it.

Magical thinking rears its ugly head once again.  Sarah is gone, her family bereft, and the young adult cancer community is left with a gaping hole where her wisdom once dwelled.  As a survivor and a writer, I now struggle with how to express the continuing story of my life after near death.  Death, you won your round with Sarah, and so I pledge anew, you heartless bastard, to shout even louder, to live even bigger, for her, for all of us.

Last month, I was touched and surprised to be asked to read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 at Sarah’s memorial service in Pennsylvania.  The week before the service, I spoke with her dear husband for almost 45 minutes on the phone, my heart clenching in my chest the entire time.  At the memorial, meeting and hugging Sarah’s beautiful mother, I found myself suddenly gripped by sobs that felt as old as time, borne of a primal sadness.  Reading Shakespeare’s words before a church filled with strangers who had loved Sarah, I felt my heart floating somewhere outside my body.  As a cancer survivor and a virtual friend, I felt lost on some kind of alternate trajectory of pain and loss – embraced by Sarah’s family and friends, but distinctly alone in knowing, from the inside out, the havoc that cancer wreaks, and the powerful connections it engenders in those who have been forced to fight it.

Sarah’s was the first memorial I have attended for a fellow young adult warrior.  It surely won’t be the last.  This phenomenon, then, is something I’d best get used to:  the peculiar tension of grieving for a friend while simultaneously recognizing my own near head-on collision with death.

At the finish line at the Vermont City Marathon

So the balancing act will continue, and so it actually felt perfectly right to run my first half-marathon two weeks after Sarah’s memorial.  I ran hard, and I ran for Sarah.  This weird dream of mine had finally come true – I achieved this previously incomprehensible goal, and reclaimed my battered body and soul in the process.

The journey from the first time I stepped onto a treadmill after treatment – my feet painful and buzzing with neuropathy, when I could barely run a mile – to crossing the finish line in Vermont, has been epic.  But I have been fortunate enough to choose my battle, to take on a challenge and see it through, and strengthen and better myself along the way.  Sarah and so many others never had that choice.  Her course was set by the cruel hand of fate.  She could claim victory only by choosing when the fight would end.

Today, I visited my oncologist for the first time in six months, and was greeted with hugs and smiles as I regaled her and my favorite nurse with tales of my athletic triumphs and impending parenthood.  After my exam, as I hopped off the table, I said to my doctor, “It seems like forever since I’ve been here.”

“That’s good!,”  she beamed.  “You’re a healthy person now!”

So I am.

So I will saddle up for the next challenge, always carrying with me the wisdom of those who have left us, grateful to have been spared and left to soldier on.  And I will shout so that an angel in heaven can hear me, as I rage in her memory.  Perhaps in that way, our conversation  – and our fight – will never end.

Posted in Death, fellow fighters, running, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

dear sarah

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Emily

Dear Sarah,

You have taught me so many things over the years – years that have unfolded with laughter and tears, with shared emotions, with rocks climbed.  Now, you are teaching me how to say goodbye to someone I have never met.

How do you feel so connected to someone you have never met?  It isn’t just the “magic” of the internet, or the coincidence of our shared diagnosis, or the fact that we grew up just down the street from each other in the Philadelphia suburbs.  There has to be something more.  Something ineffable.  I can’t wait to meet you on the other side, where we can laugh and talk endlessly, and together untangle the mystery of what drew us together all that time ago, on a Planet called Cancer.

It’s been only a few short days since you shared the news that you have ended your treatment, and have chosen to spend your remaining days embracing your friends and family with a clear mind and a full head of hair.  Since hearing your news, you’ve been in my mind and heart every moment.  I have felt myself being pulled toward you, wanting to hold your hands and look you in the eye and let you know just how much your fierce intelligence, gallows humor and unrelenting honesty have meant to me.  All I can hope is that by the time these words reach you, they will hold some meaning for you.  I just wish I could offer something that will help ease your transition out of this life and into the next.

When we survive cancer, we become obsessed with the power of living.  We count our blessings every day, looking back at the abyss that almost swallowed us whole.  We do everything in the extreme.  We cannot believe how lucky we are to still be here.

Over the years, I have written about trying to live after cancer.  You, without flinching, have taken us all on a journey toward your end, to a place none of us can really imagine – even those of us who faced death in that first moment of diagnosis.  For that, we owe you absolutely everything.

This evening, I cried for you – tears that had been building since listening to your podcast interview with Mel Majoros yesterday evening.  It felt good and right to let them out.  I can’t understand why your days are ending, and mine continue.  It breaks my heart.  I wanted so much to see our journeys unfold and intersect well into our twilight years.

After I dried my tears, I went to the yard, and worked on my garden.  I am building a garden from old, neglected beds, planting perennials.  Learning about patience and care and tenderness for living things.  From now on, every time I retreat to my garden, I will think of you.

forget me not

Sarah, my dear, I wish you warm days and cool evenings, as spring swells and summer beckons.  May every moment be precious.

You have made beautiful memories for someone you have never even met.

I thank you for everything, and love you dearly.

Posted in Death, fellow fighters | Tagged | 3 Comments

opening; anniversaries

Posted on April 11, 2011 by Emily

It’s fast becoming clear that Sunday evening’s Yin yoga class is in large part about clearing the mind.  So, on the drive home, it begins to fill up.  After an hour and a half of stretching and expanding and opening up, there seems to be more space for meaningful reflection.

Last evening, heading toward home, with Anders Osborne on the stereo, I found myself wrapped in the warm embrace of thoughts of New Orleans.  NOLA is never far from my mind, but lately its aura has been hanging more closely to my skin than usual.  Maybe it’s the approach of Jazzfest, and my mind turning back to the fantastic visit we had a year ago.  Maybe it’s that my sister is there right now, for a conference, and had dinner at Coop’s at my urging, and even sent me a picture of her meal this evening.

Dinner in New Orleans

Just the sounds of Anders’ music, and I am back there, and see with such clarity the significance of that time in my life, the year that I spent there at the dawn of my adulthood, and how it changed me.

New Orleans liberated me from so many constraints I put on myself at such a young age. I learned to loosen up, open up, drink in my surroundings, to understand that there is so much energy that we cannot touch or see that shapes our lives, and how we connect with other human beings.

I’m blessed to have had other moments like this.  It’s been one year exactly since I spent a week climbing in Moab with First Descents.  As I write this, members of my FD family are there again, enjoying a repeat performance, sending me photos of the sunrise and their beautiful faces as they scale the rock faces of Wall Street.  First Descents resurrected me, forever changed my Life After Cancer, and opened me up to the possibilities which my young life still held, even after the brutality of cancer.

Sunrise in Moab

It’s been one year in our new house, and I am amazed at how far we have come in twelve months.  I am starting to make the gardens that I dreamed of when we moved in.  These are small steps.  But my vision is growing and coming to life.  We are making this place our own.  We have readied it for our family, which we have wanted for so long, and we are making happen, in spite of everything.

In two short weeks, Yin yoga has brought my awareness to this phenomenon of “opening.”  In the extended moments of stillness, opening joints and muscles, hidden places within us that we cannot see, there is a kind of serenity.  Over the past few months, I have opened myself up to the possibility that yoga might help me continue to heal, even three years after my illness.  This resurrection is continuous.  I can always be stronger, more clear-headed, more open to the world around me.

I hope this wonder never ends, and that each day holds some microcosmic version of these epochal moments.

Posted in adoption, fellow fighters, First Descents, Life After Cancer, New Orleans, yoga | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

stillness

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Emily

Stillness is invaluable.  Quiet feeds the soul.

Surviving cancer, all I wanted was to move.  Run, ride, climb, dance, walk, create – anything to be in motion.  I wanted to reclaim all of the lost months, the days and weeks when – sliced, diced and filled with poison – my body insisted on withdrawal, inertia.

Almost three years on, moving still seem likes an imperative.  As if the only way to be truly alive is to constantly push and challenge my body – and soul – through being in motion.  As if the definition of living is forever moving toward something, an uncertain future beyond our control.  But in the push toward tomorrow, what happens to the now?

Shoelace pose

Last night, I sat still – in various peculiar poses – for an hour and a half of yin yoga – a far cry from my previous experience with more aerobic forms of vinyasa yoga.

Quiet, stillness, focus on the present moment:  so essential, but so easily over-looked.  It was a blessing indeed to be brought to that place of clear-mindedness, of being centered on the now.

Pose, and counter-pose.  I have no plans to stop moving.  Running feeds my soul.  A vigorous pre-dawn vinyasa workout provides a vital boost.  But last night, I found a way to be still that didn’t feel like a betrayal of my survivorship, or leave me restless, itching for movement.

In the stillness, perfection.

Posted in Life After Cancer, yoga | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

flat as a pancake

Posted on April 2, 2011 by Emily

Hard truth:  even after weathering a cancer diagnosis, treatment and recovery – after achieving the kind of semi-permanent euphoria that comes with embracing life after almost dying – it’s possible to find yourself drained, beat-down and discouraged.  Nay, depressed.  It’s real.  It happens.  Contrary to how I feel most days, surviving cancer has not made me invincible.

The shit-storm that was the past week began with a full-bore, no-holds-barred intestinal virus; reached a high-point of crappiness when I was turned down for a position in my office that I believe I truly deserved; and wrapped up yesterday with some unpleasant realizations about what my impending parental leave will look like and, more hurtfully, how the fact that I am entering parenthood through adoption rather than childbirth leaves me in a different (and discriminated against) category in the eyes of my employer.

All delicious stuff.  Really.

Does it go without saying that being struck with an intestinal virus triggers automatic cancer PTSD?  Will I ever find myself face-down in the toilet bowl without recalling the time when, after my initial round of chemo, I first stared into the porcelain morass and confronted the hard reality of my illness?  Will I ever experience the paralyzing grip of incessant diarrhea – lying down, drained, only to rush back to the bathroom five minutes later (repeating this cycle for hours on end) – without being reminded of the way those evil drugs ravaged and wrung me out for so many months?

Probably not.

But fortunately, a virus is short-lived, and after three days in seclusion and misery, I slowly emerged, ready to go on living.  Yes, I ended up missing a week of half-marathon training, and two yoga classes, but I have enough confidence in my baseline strength at this point to know that when I return to yoga tomorrow evening, and get back on track with running this coming week, it won’t take long to pick up where I left off.

But lucky me, being knocked down a few pegs on the physical invincibility scale wasn’t quite enough this week.  Someone, somewhere, had another lesson in mind for me, and when the dust settled, I was left with one over-arching thought:  I have no bloody clue what I am doing with my life.

Not only have my husband and I signed on for this insane adoption process, and set ourselves up for any number of berserk scenarios that are completely and utterly out of control (and for which we are totally unprepared), but I have also come to the conclusion that my professional life has reached a complete dead-end, and it’s time for me to shake up that fairly large area of my life in a major way.

What an absolutely perfect one-two punch.

So while just a few short weeks ago I was basking in the glow of my first-ever head-stand, feeling about ten feet tall and utterly unstoppable – running my little heart out, generally ass-kicking my way through each day, the end of this week found me deflated and poured out, weak and confused, lost in haze of uncertainty and insecurity.  All of my post-cancer triumphs seemed to have been steam-rolled, leaving me – once indomitable – flat as a pancake.  And scared  – though not quite “to death.”

My Phils, rejoicing after their dramatic Opening Day victory

These are the times, however, when a steadfast partner, a killer therapist and a spunky baseball team come in wicked handy.  There are, indeed, small things, like a thrilling Opening Day, ninth-inning come-from-behind win from my beloved Phillies, that take some of the sting out, and lighten my heart.  And then there are the essentials, the love and compassion of my dear husband, and the patience and insight of our wonderful therapist, without which I would never be able to peel myself off the sidewalk after the steam-roller has passed by.  Those things, those essentials, give me the courage and strength I need, and allow me to take a breath and see that really, in spite of it all – all of the disappointment and frustration and unpleasantness that seemed to trail me at every turn these past seven days – my triumphs are still my own, and amazing things await me.

Control is illusory.  We know this – we remind ourselves all the time.  Nevertheless, it made a huge difference today, finally bringing home a car seat and a pack and play.  We are doing this, and we are going to do it amazingly well.  Planning time off from work, financial contortions – all of it will get worked out.  The main thing is that we are going to be up to our eyeballs in love, and our child is going to be one lucky little bugger.

Today, daffodils

In the mean time, while the existential questions keep knocking around my brain, as I try to envision the next chapter of my life – as a mother, yes, but also as a person with gifts that I need and want to share with the world, and as someone who is seeking and will some day find true, deep fulfillment in my work, whatever it may be – as the days roll by, there is dirt in which to dig, and there are moments of bliss and insight to be found on the running trail and in the yoga studio.

Bring it all on.  I am ready.

Tomorrow, pansies

Posted in adoption, Baseball, Life After Cancer, Work | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

over my head: a yoga/cancer miracle

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Emily

Today’s extraordinary lesson was about coincidence, unspoken connections, the unexpected and letting go.

And all of that before 7 AM.

Since January, I have been attending a weekly 6 AM core-strengthening yoga class.  It’s been revelatory.  It’s helped my running; it’s helped my state of mind.  I have been unlearning all of the bad habits from my pre-cancer yoga practice, and discovering new-found strength and durability in my post-cancer body.

This morning, for the first time, I over-slept.  Rain pounded outside our bedroom window; the muffled sounds of my clock radio were, at 5 AM, too cruel to be believed.  The next thing I knew, I popped up in bed while the clock screamed 5:46 (I do set my clock about 12 minutes fast, for reasons I can’t entirely explain, but still, I had only 20 minutes to get ready and out the door, when I usually like to allow myself at least 40-45 minutes.)

I threw on my clothes and rushed to turn on the coffee pot.  I struggled with my new contact lenses for five minutes before giving up.  I texted Coach Joe (who I usually pick up on my way to class) and apologized for running late; compulsively punctual, he eventually headed out on his own.  It was 5:45 AM and the day was off to a royally bad start.

I scarfed down a banana and chugged coffee as I drove in the rain the lonely mile to the yoga studio.  All this rushing, I told myself, and it isn’t even our usual teacher.  The sub, I told myself (caught up with those grade-school stereotypes), will probably be kind of lame.  Subs are, by definition, kind of lame.  I should have stayed in bed.

I ran across the small parking lot, soaked in a matter of seconds, and into the soft, low light of the studio.  I made it just under the wire, not even technically late, but feeling a bit harried about the hour which lay ahead.  I hadn’t even had time for my beloved morning bowel movement.  (You read a cancer blog, you are going to hear about poop.  Deal with it.)  Doubt and insecurity hung over me like a shroud.  Still, I greeted the sub, Erik, with a smile and a firm handshake.  Might as well give it a go.

Class began slowly, uneventfully, my mind fixated on trivial things like the fact that Erik started things off without music, and the tone and speed of his verbal instructions.  For the first few moments, I was busy beating back my own fatigue and distractibility, just going through the motions.

Soon enough, the flow picked up, and I found myself moving through vinyasas with even greater speed than I am used to, eventually stumbling on my weak wrists in side plank, and generally feeling a bit over-matched.  Perhaps it was my punishment for assuming that Erik, who was quickly emerging as a bad-ass yogi, would be “lame.”

As always with yoga, I eventually shut off my mind and began to trust my body a bit more.  By the time Erik had us working on crow pose (a posture I am determined to master), calm and confidence began to overtake my self-consciousness and ego.

Then it came:  the inversion.  Since I first encountered yoga years ago, most inversions have always been well out of my reach.  I can rock a shoulder stand no problem, but as far as I can tell that’s pretty basic stuff that doesn’t require much in the way of upper-body strength or sheer ballsiness.

Obviously that's not me, but this is what I did this morning.

This morning, though, Erik invited us to try a headstand.  HA!  I immediately thought.  My mind raced back to my pre-cancer yoga days, when I could no sooner imagine floating my feet over my head with my head and forearms planted on the floor, than I could fly to the moon.  Even as recently as last month, when my new beloved teacher walked us through the steps, it was a painful battle just to bounce my feet off the floor in a donkey kick.

But yoga is all about finding (and then pushing) your limits, so I went to the wall and lined up my forearms, and planted my head on the ground.  Almost as a joke, it seemed, I climbed up onto my toes.  I started bouncing slightly, one foot and then the other.  Erik walked around the room, giving instructions here and there to the other students.  Then he stopped at my side.

“Just try lifting your hips a bit more,” I heard him say as he touched my side.

I mindlessly followed his instruction, and then suddenly, with Erik gently guiding, felt my legs lifting up into the air, over my head, and onto the wall.

I was doing a headstand.  And I had no idea how I’d gotten there.

“Beautiful,” Erik said, as he continued his circuit of the room.  I found myself smiling, breathing slowly and deeply.  I never wanted to come down.  It was completely exhilarating.

After I minute or two, I piped up.  “Um, Erik?  I’ve never done this before.  Can you help me get down?”

He walked over and told me to gently lower one leg, then the other.  I found myself sitting on my knees, facing the wall, completely ecstatic, gripped with an urge to laugh and cry at the same time.

All morning, the triumph of my first-ever headstand buoyed me.  I felt invincible.  I told the world about my achievement on Facebook and Twitter.  And then I heard from Ms. Coach Joe, who practices acupuncture at the studio, and knows Erik.

Responding to my comment about my surgery-scarred belly being exposed during my headstand, she told me, “Erik wouldn’t think twice – he’s a survivor himself!  His oncologist suggested he try yoga.”

At that point, the magic was complete.  Not only had I conquered a physical goal that I had assumed would remain forever unattainable, but I had been led there by a fellow warrior.  I do not doubt for a moment that somehow, in some unconscious way, the battle-tested part of me connected with the fighter in Erik, and the power of that unspoken connection is what lifted my feet into the air, over my head and onto the wall.

The blessings of my illness continue to unfold, miraculously and utterly without warning.

Posted in fellow fighters, Life After Cancer, yoga | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

endurance

Posted on March 14, 2011 by Emily

For months on end, this was the safest place to excavate so much of my life after cancer – the struggles, the triumphs. The strange ambiguity of living after almost dying.  But there are so many enormous things happening now – around me, to me, maybe even because of me – that the legacy of my illness seems to be changing, diminishing perhaps, in one form, but expanding and growing more all-encompassing, in another.

I have allowed too much time to pass; moments have come upon me over the past month when I thought, “There’s something.  Write that.”  But the moments have left me.  Instead, I have gone for a run, or dug up a long-dormant flower bed in front of our house, or taken a yoga class, or talked with my husband about becoming parents.  In short, I have gone on living – in the moment, unencumbered by the burden of reflection, of considering the import of each utterance, gesture, or coincidence.  There was a long period of wanting to tie everything I felt and observed to my illness.  My cancer defined everything.  It framed my experience in an absolute and inescapable way.  Now, it seems, the focus is shifting.

Recently, I have tried to articulate this tectonic shift, this movement from “full-time cancer warrior” to expectant parent.  I need to be clear:  there will never, ever be a way to understand and experience life without reference to my cancer journey.  Those who have been in the fight hopefully know what I mean.  We dust ourselves off, slowly, painfully; we piece our world back together through sheer force of will.  Hopefully, we end up living in a way that is richer, more sublime and full of beauty.  But no matter how far we travel – from our moment of diagnosis, our first surgery, our last treatment – the marks are indelible.  This is what I have almost allowed myself to forget. Shame on me.

Recently, a cherished friend experienced a terrible loss.  The details are not mine to share.  But when she came to me and shared her news, and I saw the heartbreak in her eyes, I was reminded, in a way that I was unable to appreciate for so long after my illness, that injustice and cruelty and rotten bad luck come in many, many forms.  For longer than I care to admit, cancer had me trapped in a world where my suffering, my loss, my tragedy, were without parallel.  There’s an inevitable self-absorption that comes with facing your mortality, with being struck down by a force as pernicious as cancer.  All you need do at this moment in time, though, is consider the state of the world to understand that we none of us have a corner on the market.  Horror is universal.  It is everywhere.

Last week, my husband – in a beautiful 180 from sentiments he expressed just a few short years ago – expressed feeling guilty for having such a happy life.  It was in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami – events so monumentally terrifying that they very nearly defy comprehension.

“What are we supposed to do?,”  he asked.  “How are we supposed to live when there is all of this insanity going on in the world?”

“We just have to be grateful for what we have,”  I told him.  “All we can do is take comfort in the embrace of everything that we have – do the things we love, try to nurture a sense of joy.  What else can we do?”

It’s easy to feel powerless in the face of the nightmares unfolding in so many corners of the globe.  Compounding that, here we sit, expectant parents – pregnant for the foreseeable future, wondering when our lives will be turned upside down by the arrival of a brand new human being we will get to love and call our very own.  Everything, it seems, is out of our control.

I look back to the darkest days of my illness, and perhaps find a lesson there.  At a time when my body had completely betrayed me, when I literally had no idea if I was going to live or die, there became a way.  It was a way borne of small things I didn’t even realize were sustaining me at the time.  In watering my garden, or hugging my friends, or exchanging messages with a fellow Crowded House fan in Australia who became an unexpected support during treatment – all of these things enabled me to hang on, to find a will that was threatening to abandon me.

It strikes me as incredible, much of the time, what human beings are asked to endure. But it is in that test of endurance, I believe, that our true greatness is revealed.

Posted in adoption, Life After Cancer | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

anticipation/transformation

Posted on February 23, 2011 by Emily

Life is becoming about so much more than cancer.  Specifically, it has become about building our family.  We first engaged with our adoption agency in the fall, and now, as winter winds down, we are literally just hours away from submitting the final bits of documentation needed to complete our family profile, and officially becoming a “waiting family.”  In other words, we could become parents at any moment.  It still might take months, but it is going to happen, and the prospect of becoming parents, of having our lives capsized once again – this time, for the greatest of all possible reasons – is first and foremost in our minds.

But we cannot live in a state of perpetual anticipation.  The beat goes on.  As our adoption team tells us over and over again:  keep right on doing what you’re doing. Tear up your house.  Plan a vacation.  Live your life.

Two weeks ago, after our social worker asked us to slap together a provisional version of our profile to show to two birth mothers, we found ourselves in Buy Buy Baby, eyeing strollers and car seats – just in case.  We held off on making any purchases, but at that moment – in a cavernous store heated to 80 degrees, elbowing past streams of pregnant women and their furrowed-brow partners – it all became suddenly so real, so immediate. We are doing this.  It’s going to happen.  Not the way we thought it would, but we will be parents nonetheless.

As I moved through the towering aisles of baby crap, I thought back to the afternoon seven years ago when I shopped with my sister in preparation for the arrival of my nephew, and how I imagined doing the same thing one day, showing off my own big belly. Two weeks ago, I maneuvered through the store holding my coat close to my abdomen, subconsciously, I guess, wanting to leave open the possibility that  – in the eyes of a stranger – I, too, might be carrying my own child.  Or perhaps not wanting people to wonder what I, with my noticeably flat belly, was doing shopping for a car seat.  As if such a gesture could somehow mask what my body has been through, or restore what cancer took from me.

After all this time, after the months and years it has taken me to make peace with the fact that I cannot bear my own child, it’s embarrassing to realize how, in a public, anonymous and seemingly insignificant moment, I felt the urge to blend in, be just like everyone else.  It mattered, somehow, that my cancer not distinguish me from any of the other young people who are in the process of building their families.

But the reality is, we are different.  I am different –  to my mind, in a way that has strengthened me and made me more ready and enthusiastic about the prospect of raising a child than I ever could have been before my illness.  In promoting ourselves to prospective birth mothers, our agency has gently suggested that we not “lead with cancer” – after a rather uncomfortable conversation, we’ve decided to omit reference to cancer from our introductory letter, and save it for the more detailed exposition of our lives that birth mothers will read if they have an initial interest in us.  I struggled with the notion of not putting cancer front and center, but then realized that in this instance, the goal of optimizing our chances of having a child takes precedence over the goal of educating the world about survivorship.  We have to choose our battles;  we have to know our audience.

As the dust continues to settle, as life grows richer and more complex and becomes about so much more than just putting distance between me and my date of diagnosis, I realize that I love all of the ways that cancer has transformed me – how it has made me laugh more deeply, love more intensely.  How it has pushed me to a place of strength and balance that I otherwise might not have ever attained.  These are incredible gifts, and I cannot wait to share them with my child.

Posted in adoption, Infertility, Life After Cancer | 2 Comments

gut feeling

Posted on January 22, 2011 by Emily

The dead of winter has officially arrived.  If it’s not snowing, it’s raining, sleeting and freezing.  Roads and sidewalks in our wooded suburban enclave have grown treacherous.

Today, though bitter cold, was at least dry, so a few hours ago, Mike and I headed out and logged 4 miles.  Not much, but enough to assure me that I can still do it.  Mentally, it was a big accomplishment after two weeks of idleness.

Happily, I haven’t sunk into the foul mood that often grips me when I don’t exercise regularly.  I’ve somehow managed, perhaps through seeing lots of great movies, reading some fabulous fiction and moving our adoption process briskly along, to remain positive and buoyant, to continue feeling the fullness of my life.  I’ve reached a happy plateau with my efforts to shed my menopausal weight; I know I can survive spells of winter-induced laziness without losing my hard-fought baseline strength and endurance.  Two weeks off from running isn’t going to undo all of the progress I have made over the last two years.

Meanwhile, this past week saw the re-emergence of a long-dormant force from my pre-cancer life, and I have found myself re-invigorated yet again.  In my quest to diversify my on-going rehabilitation, as well as train for a half-marathon at the end of May, I have returned to yoga.  And I am hooked all over again.

My friend Joe (or, “Coach,” as I now call him) is a tremendous runner.  As in marathons. As in a level of athleticism that I can’t quite imagine, but to which I certainly aspire.  I’ve asked for his guidance as I train for my first half-marathon, and he has repeatedly insisted on one thing:  yoga.  Yoga was a big part of my life for years, but even before my illness, I had gotten away from it.  Stupid.  Like a dear friend you fall out of touch with for no good reason, and then always wonder what happened to your connection.

Two weeks ago, after endless procrastinating, I signed up for a series of early morning (try 6 AM) core-strengthening yoga classes at the local studio where Coach Joe attends.  In an ironic twist, the first class I signed up for was cancelled due to snow.  (You know things are bleak when you can’t even do yoga because of inclement weather.)  This past week, though, I was pumped up and ready to rock.

I called Joe on Tuesday night to confirm he’d be joining me.  In a further bit of cosmic cruelty, he informed me he couldn’t make it this week because of an early work commitment.  Bugger!  He’s supposed to be my coach, and he’s leaving me in lurch to get up at 5 AM in the dead of winter and walk into my first legitimate yoga class in years. We’re off to a great start.

But on Wednesday morning, I popped out of bed, strangely excited.  It felt great to be up when it was still pitch black outside, making a pot of coffee, slipping into my soft, stretchy clothes.  I was really doing this.  I headed to the studio, and when I walked in, was immediately enveloped in that familiar, yoga-inspired warmth.  Back in the old days, I always loved the quiet moments before a class begins, limbering up on the mat, settling in with my breath, looking around and smiling at my fellow practitioners.

But this wasn’t just another yoga class.  Not only was it another symbolic step on my journey to reclaim my life from cancer, but it was CORE-STRENGTHENING yoga.  After two years of dedicated running, I have strong, powerful legs.  My abdomen is another story altogether – the site of my disease that was mangled almost beyond recognition by back-to-back surgeries.  Even three years later, it’s a lumpy oddity that has proved completely resistant to my efforts to bring my body back to something akin to its pre-cancer contours.

my lumpy belly

Nevertheless, I approached Wednesday morning with great eagerness.  I had to start somewhere.  I wasn’t going to compare myself to my classmates (always a taboo in yoga, but especially when you suspect you are the loan cancer warrior in a room full of lithe, limber experts.)  Before walking into the studio, I’d imagined approaching the instructor to fill her in on my back-story – the cancer, the toll it has taken on my core.  Once in the room, though, rolling out my mat and preparing to practice, I thought better of it.  Why does it matter?  I’m a strong, healthy woman, and starting now, I am going to re-engage with yoga at the pace that works for me, as the person I am now – not as a damaged version of the person I used to be.

The class was brilliant – like riding the proverbial bike.  Downward dog!  Warrior One! Pigeon!  Plank Pose (well, not so much you) – how I have missed you!!  It was the tearful and joyous reunion with that long-lost friend.

I found myself sweating and struggling within a matter of minutes, and often had to hang back at the easiest level of a series of postures.  But I didn’t care.  Even in the struggle, I felt ecstatic.  The deep soreness in my abdomen and upper body the next day was the most perfect sort of pain.

It’s funny:  the thing which finally drove me back to yoga was a desire to improve and strengthen as a runner.  It hadn’t even occurred to me that it would also help me reclaim the very center of my self.

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who’s that girl?

Posted on January 17, 2011 by Emily

The last few days have been something of an an exercise in time-travel, and measuring the more superficial effects of cancer.

Most of my time here is spent dissecting cancer’s emotional and psychological toll. Really, that’s the important stuff.  But what of the physical changes?  It’s gotten to the point where I can’t even recall my body before cancer; I can think back as far back as the height of my chemo-induced weight loss, when I could feel my hips protruding where there was once an appropriate amount of padding between flesh and bone.  Beyond that, it’s a blank canvas.  I certainly can’t recall the contours of my now-deformed navel and abdomen before the brutality of two consecutive surgeries.  This, scars and all, is who I have become. Whoever I was before seems almost impossible to imagine.

Once in awhile, I will say to Mike, “Do you think my face looks different now?”  He always assures me it does not.  There were moments during treatment when I would look in the mirror and literally not recognize myself.  So how could it be that the person who emerged from that nightmare would be unchanged?  Once they stopped pumping my bloodstream with poison, and my body began to heal, I didn’t just revert to the person I was before.  Someone new had to be born.  It was inevitable.

Last night, gathering pictures for our adoption profile book, I took a quick tour through our wedding photos.  Until not too long ago, even an inadvertent glance at an image from our wedding was like a knife in my heart – it called up all of the happiness and promise of that wonderful day, and the cruel twist of fate which smacked us down just four short years later.  Bitterness, anger, sadness – all of it would get stirred up from seeing those naively joyous frozen moments.

With my cousin Lucy at our wedding reception, May 17, 2003

When I look at those pictures now – now that we are moving toward building some revised version of the future that we always hoped we’d have –  I think more about the changes to my physical rather than my psychic self.  Look at that hair!  Look how skinny my neck was!  Where’s my lumpy abdomen?  What a flat chest I had!

Eight years is a long time, especially when it covers most of your thirties.  I’m not the only one who looks different.  Most of us have expanded, grayed and wrinkled to one degree or another.  But when I look at myself in those old pictures, I see not just the so-called “ravages of time,” but those of my disease as well.  And it isn’t just my bust and waistline that look different to me – even the quality of my smile, and the look in my eyes, strikes me as changed.

But perhaps not in a bad way.  Perhaps things are so much sweeter now.  For while the superficial, critical and even angry part of me looks at pictures of my pre-cancer self and thinks, “Goddamn it, I was so much skinnier then!  I look so fucking wide and middle aged now!,” the truth is, I am so much stronger, physically and emotionally, than I was on our wedding day.  Today, I can run ten miles.  Today, I can savor each moment of every day that I am blessed to wake up surrounded by my husband and animals, and walk into a day filled with people that I love.  Today, I can appreciate all of that in a way that is so much richer and more profound than anything I knew before.

And I have much better hair, to boot.

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