Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Like a lot of people, I’m not really into football of any kind but as a recovering American, I always check to see who’s playing in the Super Bowl. I also check the score from time to time while the game is in progress and on Monday morning, I check to see who won before I even look at my email. In honour of the winners of Super Bowl 2015, then, this minor story from my misspent youth.

The summer after my freshman year at UMass-Amherst, I worked in the dining commons serving food to the New England Patriots, who had their summer camp on campus. It was the same summer that the Mahesh Maharishi Yogi brought a Transcendental Meditation conference to campus. In fact, before I served food to the Pats, I worked at the conference registration desk, checking in meditators from all over the world. One of them was Mike Love of the Beach Boys; nice, friendly man, lovely manners. (That summer, I took to judging people by how they treated anyone they didn’t have to be nice to. I still do. I’m a bitch that way. But I digress.)

The two groups, the meditators and the football players, kept colliding, possibly because the university was using the same building as function space for both: the Pats took their meals on one side, the meditators took classes (or something) on the other. Some of the meditators, all of them guys, kept sneaking over to the Pats� side to meditate.

At first, I thought they were just trying to meet the players. But they would wait till the team left, then sneak into the dining area, sit on a chair in a corner facing the wall, take off their shoes, and close their eyes for twenty minutes. Maybe it was a dare.

Sometimes I ran into some of the players at the campus centre after work and I’d have coffee with them. All the ones I talked to were well-educated and articulate, about a million miles away from the stereotype you see in movies or on TV of big, stupid man-boys named Tank or Bruiser. Nice people; the judge gave them all a thumbs-up. And, as the other student working with me learned to her dismay, they were also all married. She usually found out while she was on a date with one of them.

She said nothing ever happened and I had no doubt she was telling the truth. As near as I could tell, she was looking for someone good-looking, wealthy, with a bright future but fresh off the show-room floor, definitely not a pre-owned model.

This made me think that at least some of these guys just wanted a break from the unrelenting testosterone of football camp. I think they had a burning desire to sit at a table where they weren’t shoulder to shoulder with a whole lot of other guys, where they could look up and not see another guy pounding down protein and worrying about surviving the next round of cuts.

In fact, the only people I ever had to actively fend off that summer were a couple of reporters here and there, and not because they knew where I worked. They all seemed to be looking for hippie coeds on the Pill who had dope and knew how to roll a joint.

Summer of 1971. Crazy days.

Had my first night out since I got the Diagnosis of Doom (Ha! I laugh in your face, Diagnosis of Doom! Like this: Ha! And ha! Ha, ha, HA! I say). Amanda and Jo/Mutha Hydra and I went to my local, the Salisbury last night. Got in early, at six, and beat the rush. I stuck to diet Coke until I saw the list of single malts on the menu and remembered that all my chemo lit has said that if I imbibe, I should stick to really good red wines and really good single malts.

I am happy to report that good single malt Scotch defeats sour-metal chemo-mouth, and tastes as good as it should. I can’t remember the name of what I had––started with a K and sounded more Japanese than Scottish. Twelve years old; good stuff. Too much would have given me heartburn but I had just enough.

Emboldened by this, I have decided Chris and I should take a bus ride to the Borough Market, where I am going to walk on the wild side with a chorizo sandwich. I’ve been dreaming about chorizo sandwiches. I’m also going to look into whatever fruits and/or vegetables that peel or need to be cut open––I can have those, too.

I didn’t realise that I was hiding in the house but the truth is, I have been. After my first experience with chemo, where I got so violently sick that I had to go to A&E, followed by two more stays in hospital when my temperature went up, I got gun-shy, I guess.

But you can’t conquer anything by sitting still. Not that I really sit still. I turned down the blood-thinning injections when I was in hospital because I never really sit completely still––years ago, I got into the habit of flexing my leg muscles to keep them warmed up for dance and now I do it without even thinking. No matter where I am or what I’m doing, if I’m sitting down, lying down, I’m flexing. I do it in my sleep. It feels good and I’ve noticed that despite my excess weight, my lower body is still fairly toned. But I digress.

I’ve been hiding in the house but no more.

I’m going to put on my lovely red hat with the stars and I’m going for a ride on the bus with Chris, my one true love in all the world, and I’m going to remind myself of all the things I want to live for. If my white cell count is going to fall, it won’t do so for another six or seven days. Therefore, I’m pretty sure I can handle the Borough Market long enough to have a chorizo sandwich. If my resistance is still up, I might as well take advantage of it. And I’m certain it is. Both Chris and Amanda have been suffering with colds for the past few weeks and I didn’t catch anything from either one (my elevated temperature was something else, knocked out by IV antibiotics). Both are better now and I’ve decided: time to live like I’m still alive.

As Robert Heinlein said in Glory Road: Dum vivimus, vivamus! While we live, let us live!

Sometime in the near future, I’ll talk about my friendship with Mr. Heinlein, a man who had an appetite for vivamus!, so to speak, but whose health put limitations on him. Nonetheless, he lived as much as he could; he tried, he pushed, and he never gave up. I have thought of him so often in the close to thirty years since he left the building. He encouraged me even when he was breathless from emphysema (the only thing he ever actually ordered me to do was quit smoking). It’s not a coincidence that my son is named Robert. The Patricia in the dedication to Friday stands for me and at least one other Patricia, possibly two (we all knew it at the time). I miss him…enough that I guess I’ve made quite a start on talking about him already.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about him because he’d be the first one to tell me that I should get out of the house whether I could walk out on my own or whether I had to use a wheelchair…or crawl on my hands and knees to keep myself alive.

There’s so much I want to do. So I guess I’ll just start doing it, with an eye to building up enough momentum that it will keep me going, and going, and going.

I’m seeing real progress on the novel now––the sushi novel. Working title: See You When You Get There. I have also written a substantial portion of the next novel, working title: Truth and Bone, a completely different type of book taking off from a story that appeared in Ellen Datlow’s Poe anthology, also called “Truth and Bone.� I want you to read it. You might like it.

In fact, I want you to read all my work. Fortunately, all my books are in print, electronically and/or in hard copy. Any uncollected stories, you might have to search for. But this will help:

The ISFDB is good for looking up work from all your favourite genre writers, not just me. I don’t know who maintains it but all of us should buy them dinner and candy and flowers for keeping it up to date. Even I didn’t have a lot of this information on my work.

Yeah, pardon the commercial. I have tried not to give in to the urge to advertise and tell everyone how wonderful I am. On the other hand, I’m a freakinâ€� writer. I do this for a living, for other people to read, not just for my own amusement. I want people to read my books. If you read them and don’t like them, you can slag them off. If, however, you do like them, leave a review on Amazon or Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ or some other place.

I was going to say, “Consider leaving a review on Amazon, etc.� but I changed my mind. I’m past sixty; the hour was already growing late before it acquired new urgency. Cancer can make you understand the power of love, the world in a grain of sand, and eternity in an hour; it can also make you honest. So, honestly: I want you to read my work.

PS: The appearance of this blog will change every so often. Change is life.

There are always a few things no one thinks to tell you. So here’s one for future cancer survivors who may have to cope with hair loss: it hurts. I mean physically. Your scalp will be sore.

It’s not unbearable agony. It’s more along the lines of the discomfort you’d feel if you had been combing your hair in one direction for a very long time and then suddenly decided to comb it in a different direction. The follicles protest.

I guess the follicles protest when they have to let go altogether, too.

As of right now, I’m not completely bald but the loss is very visible. I was going to say dramatic but really, it’s the hair follicles that are the drama queens. With the small amount of hair I have left, I could wear a wig easily now but my scalp would rather not. My scalp says, go for the lovely soft hats Eileen had Kate make.

Below is a photo of me sporting one of Kate’s lovely hats after a visit to the oncologist, with my husband Chris backing me up. After taking the hat off to show the oncologist my hair loss, I accidentally put it back on backwards. But you can still see what a thing of beauty it is. I will be bringing it and the other two hats, which are much more whimsical, to my second round of chemo tomorrow, where I will also be showing off my “Secretly hoping chemo will give me SUPERPOWERS� t-shirt. I need one of those in every colour but some colours only come in smaller sizes. I need lots of material to cover the multitude of cancer’s sins.

Which, while I’m on the subject, is another thing you find out the hard way. Most people think of cancer patients as thin and frail. And there’s been a lot of ghoulish humour around our house about the cancer method of losing weight. In fact, I lost over half a stone in the week after my first round of chemo––not that it shows a lot. The form my recurrence of endometrial cancer takes caused me to gain a substantial amount of weight and ballooned my abdominal area, making it hard for me to walk again. If chemo doesn’t take care of the problem, I’ll have to have a drain.

TMI? Sorry, but this is a cancer blog.

Unlike in the movies, real cancer patients don’t acquire a tragic beauty as their treatment and/or disease progresses. Cancer can torque the body out of shape. We lose our hair, revealing lumpy, imperfectly-shaped heads. We lose our eyebrows and eyelashes. We lose the little hairs in the inner ear that help us balance and we become unsteady; if we get up too fast––i.e., stand up the way we always have––we risk falling over. Our fingernails darken and break. Our skin dries out and dulls. Steroids make us moon-faced and cause us to put on weight. Fatigue makes us droop. Chemo-brain makes us slow on the uptake. Some of us have to have PICC lines, which means walking around with a weird-looking plastic connector protruding from an arm.

But hey, if that’s what it takes to live even a little bit longer, I’m game. And I do have some beautiful hats to wear while I’m at it.

This is the part I’ve really been dreading.

It’s not the hair loss, nor the bleeding gums, nor the aches and pains, nor even the inflamed vein in my left arm (superficial phlebitis thanks to a cannula I had for IV antibiotics two weeks ago), but chemo fatigue. The weariness is as heavy and intense as when I was pregnant with my son. I wasn’t tired all the time back then––in fact, when I wasn’t tired, I had a lot of energy. I got the best sleep of my life when I was pregnant, even in the last trimester. I felt healthy and happy most of the time. But I had regular episodes of fatigue throughout the day and they were overwhelming. I was still working at Hallmark then and occasionally I was so weary, I’d go to the nurse’s office and lie down. (This was in the 1980s, when Hallmark Cards was the best employer in the midwest, and had been since J.C. Hall founded it. I don’t know what it’s like now. But I digress.)

Where was I? Oh, yeah: tired. So very, very tired. Gentleman Jynx, my feline supervisor, climbed aboard his lap pillow expecting me to get to work on the novel as always so he could fall asleep listening to music and key clicks. There’s music but not much in the way of key clicks. He gave me a dirty look and decided to have a mid-morning snack, to give me a chance to shape up; now he’s back with the expectation that I have shaken off whatever minor problem was afflicting me and will now get to work on finishing this novel I’ve been working on for two years.

(Actually, it’s more like half that, as I put it aside for a year to fulfil short fiction obligations. But the Gent, as we call him for his impeccable manners––never scratches the furniture(!)––does not give time off for good behaviour or promises to keep. As far as he’s concerned, a year is a year is a year, regardless of how you spend it.)

This novel is fun. Hard; I have to keep consulting experts about the way things work in outer space but still loads of fun. Not my usual kind of thing, which is why it’s so much fun. I’ve been a professional writer for thirty-five years, I’m in my sixties, and I’ve stepped ‘way out of my comfort zone. It’s not just fun, it’s exciting, and the farther out of my comfort zone I go, the more fun and exciting it is.

Hear that, chemo? Fun and exciting! This is no time to nod off!