Coming Around, Again

They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds
--Adrienne Rich, "Valediction Forbidding Mourning"

It was always a curious line to me, in a poem that I loved. I couldn't see past the implied reality--why, I asked myself, would anyone do that? How would it be to anyone's advantage to keep a wound open longer than necessary?

Of course reality has nothing to do with poetry, or not normally--this is the stuff of imaginary gardens with real toads, according to Marianne Moore. But I've found this line repeated in my mind the past couple of days, because I've seen that it does, in fact, have reality to it.

There are two timelines that I bet every cancer patient is given, I certainly received both--one is a timeline of a return to normal, the other is a timeline of life expectancy. For the former, I was on a six month timeline at first, which degenerated to maybe next year which changed to never. For the second, I have been on a freak show ride which started with a few months, and changed into hard to tell, which become 15-24 months total, from surgery, which just Thursday got reset to who knows? I now, I think, have the same daily risk of being hit by an errant bus as I do of dying from cancer. Well, maybe not, but let me have my moment.

Survivability is coming around again, and I haven't prepared for it as well as you might suspect. I have tried to talk and walk a good game of fighting and staying positive--and I've done pretty decently at it--but behind all the talking and walking I've kept a narrative of failure, too. I accepted as I beat my chest that the specialists were correct and I was dancing on borrowed time. It wasn't that I needed to get my house in order; I own little of any contention, there's not any money sitting around, my legal claims to community property would die with me.

All the preparation was my own. To be ready for pain, a last breath, the idea that there's nothing more to life versus the idea of reincarnation (or, as I call it, my hope of peanut butter again), versus the idea that string theory offers us of multiple realities coinciding, that I might jump from this one to another as I left my earthly form. I have, in all ways, tried to accept my own advice to be ready to live and die at the same time.

But here I am--and after a small bit of hullaballoo I came home on Thursday and took a nap. My dreams were of living, the scapes of the dream were bright and long, I woke to pee and promptly went back to sleep because these dreams were so interesting, and as it often is, I wasn't wearing a surgical mask, I walked, talked and ate normally.

Even should I survive as long as I often threaten, normal is not happening. Too much function has been lost for me to eat, too much has transpired to allow me to speak clearly, if at all--there's still talk of the voice box going whenever surgery 2 comes around. One timeline is pretty clearly accurate.

I've been trying to decide if I can live another twenty years eating only these liquid nutrition things, but i don't know if that is all that will happen. Might I, at some point, get a larger tube aperture? Might mashed potatoes make it down there more easily? could meatloaf happen again? Maybe. Then too perhaps the food will change--head and neck cancers are on a violent upswing, and there will be more of me, like it or not. A market of survivors who hate having everything taste like vanilla ass crack might encourage some creative thinking on the producer's part. Shepherd's Pie? why not.

I went to the Farmer's Market this morning. I really want to find some asclepias for my garden--butterfly weed or milkweed, but I want the orange colored flowers. In the last two years you couldn't go anywhere but trip over flats of these plants--and this year, so far, forget it. I saw some really horrible and overpriced starts at a greenhouse, but I was certain I would see them downtown.

Walking through the vendors' stands, I was aware of a lot of eyes checking me out, I knew I'd get the stares--but this is not the return to normal, this is the new normal. I barely missed a step. I saw a guy there whom I knew as an undergraduate; he didn't know me. This is not normal, this is the new normal. The air is wet and a bit cool today, I could feel my lungs working harder, and this too is the new normal.

I have gotten older than my actual age because they gave a drug that slowed the healing of wounds--in fact, I'm still getting them. The doses of erbitux and methtrexate that truly lead to a wonderful CT scan result also keep surface wounds harder to close, also encourage what is not fixable to remain unfixable in fissures, the body works a bit harder to do the normal things.

I have to face possibly living longer than I suspected just a couple of weeks ago, and as my thinking adjusts, I now have to wonder about other things--working again, living again, dealing every day with other people again. I've been able to isolate myself and innoculate myself at will against curiousity, blatant staring, hostility to my appearance, I'm often able to not think of myself as disabled when I'm alone.

So it may be now that I have to think of living, and being disabled, and making normal big enough to take in both of those realities. That not every drug heals wounds, and not on a schedule that makes sense.

And this life that is slowly scabbing over these wounds, it will have to be a life I live for myself. Not one predicated around romance, not one where I distract from my need to grow by referring to someone else. Not one where a line of poetry takes the place of conversation and discovery, even if they have to happen with a voice program on Ipad instead of the spontaneity of me blurting out whatever is passing through my head at the moment.

It's coming around again. Life. Messy, bloody, ill-healed and incredible. Anything but normal.