It’s been over two months since my last post (and 21 weeks since I started treatment). Nearly every week since May, I’ve had the thought that there was something new I needed to put in a blog post update (first time sleeping back in the bed, having my feeding tube removed, etc.). Maybe I should take it as a good thing that I haven’t had time to update the blog because I’ve been having so much growth and because regular life is resuming. At this same time, this is a story that I want to put a conclusion on, and I’m working toward that here.
Last week my partner had minor surgery to her arm to remove a couple of benign growths — a change of pace to the caregiving cycle in our relationship this year, for sure (I got to drive her to the hospital! I got to keep up with her pain med schedule!). The night before the procedure, she had some nervous energy and wanted to go for a run. We drove up to Glenwood Park (at the south end of the Eastside Beltline); I grabbed a bench with my new book and waited for her while she worked out her stress on the trail.
While I was sitting there, I remembered that we had walked this same path back in January, a couple of weeks before my treatment started, when there was an uncharacteristic blizzard (or, to be honest, the Atlanta version of this which equates to an hour or two of blowing snow). We had gone out for a particularly long walk to meet a friend for coffee and had been overcome on the way home by the weather.
And here I was, sitting on a bunch in June in Atlanta, sweating through every pore, on the same walking path, five months later, after having been through this massive life change. The road, the view, the people, the shops — they were pretty unchanged. I was not.
Reflections on place like this are profound. It was a powerful moment of presence for me, sitting still and feeling forward momentum at the same time. I’m not often aware of having come through a dangerous experience; it rarely felt “dangerous” to me. But it was, and I did, and there I was sitting on this bench, different but mostly returned to health after the efforts and support of a huge amount of people. Doctors, nurses, lab techs, family, friends, colleagues — probably hundreds of people that casually or very intentionally played a part in my treatment; the movement of my body through my time back to this exact same spot where it stood in the snow less than half a year ago.
My reflection owed some to the book I’ve just started, V13: Chronicle of a Trial, another one by Emmanuel Carrere. It’s an accounting of the trial of the 2015 Paris bombers, and it includes frequent reflections on place and the horrible and joyous things that can happen on the same corner separated by days or weeks.
Another moment that sticks out for me happened last weekend when I hosted my first social gathering for friends at my house since treatment. We had another meeting of our Book-ish Club to discuss Playground: A Novel, and I got to hangout with a dozen-ish of my favorite people (including my partner, my daughter, my son-in-law, and my mom) to talk about the ocean, artificial intelligence, and the value of massive plot twists. I have tended to hold monthly (or nearly monthly) gatherings at my house for the last several years, and it felt good to get back in the habit of one of my favorite things.
All of these are noodling digressions. In the center of them is my cancer treatment and recovery narrative, a thing that I don’t often think about but which I try to keep coming back to in the writing of these posts.
I can approach the narrative a variety of ways. It’s a story of the consumption of a ton of media! Since February, I have read and watched a lot of shows, movies, and books. It’s a story about change, primarily things I had to stop doing and the resumption of some of those things. It’s a story about learning and how being “sick” and out of work made me look at the world differently, lessons that, hopefully, I carry with me in the return to “normal life.”
Maybe I’ll be working all those narratives out in my head and on the page or the screen for a while, but for now I like leaving things where I started them today, as a meditation on place and how places accumulate layers of experience and history. My living room arm chair is another good example. Last fall, on my bike commutes home, I kept noticing this weird and awesome chair someone had dragged out to the street as a freebie. After three days of passing it, I thought: it’s time for that chair to belong to me. It’s got a strange pattern to it, someone’s cat went to town on one of its arms, and it’s heavy as hell. But: it’s really comfortable. So, my partner helped me scoop it that night, and it became part of my living room.
Flash-forward to February, when radiation started to weigh on me: I was already spending most of the day sitting in that chair and eventually had to transition to sleeping there (because laying down wasn’t working for me anymore). From that point on, I probably spent 90-ish-% of the next two months there: waking up coughing, squinting through pain meds, watching movies, reading books, sleeping for an hour at a time (maybe), pouring formula into my feeding tube, trying to entertain guests when they came by the house, crushing up pills (weirdly, I didn’t listen to that much music while I was sick, though). Basically, I was either in that chair or getting up to go to the bathroom or take a shower.
A month ago, as I started to feel better, it felt like a massive victory to move the ottoman and the bench I was using as a tray table elsewhere in the house. I wanted to make the chair a slightly comfortable place to install myself for hours at a time. That chair, though, has so much history layered on top of it now. It was a safe, comfortable place for me to be sick and then heal.
This weekend, when I had everyone over for Book-ish Club, I made a conscious choice not to sit in that chair. My friend Leanne did, and I enjoyed watching someone else enjoy it. It was a symmetric turn of events, given that Leanne was the first one of us that read the book we were meeting to discuss. I don’t believe in ghosts (or even, really much anymore, god), but when I look at that chair, I feel the sensitive history that rests inside of it (or around it?). Thinking about the value of place, in several different definitions (geometry, architecture, geography, psychology), has been valuable thought-frame for me this week. I might return to one of the other ones another time.
Switching gears a little . . .
Emory University’s Winship Cancer Institute (where I have received all of my treatment) is holding its annual 5k/10k fundraiser in October, and we’ve put a team together to attend the event and help in the fundraising. Our team name is “All Cures, No Kings.”
If you’d be interested in either running/walking with us on Saturday, October 4, or contributing to our team’s fundraising goal of $500, you can do either from our team’s page at Winship.
