Almost exactly two years ago, on Record Store Day, I had a liver ablation to get rid of what they thought could be my last neuroendocrine tumor. (It wasn’t.) My ex went out that day to a beer event and to a show, and he took my beloved Kraken Rum umbrella, complete with tentacle handle, that I got at a media event. Only one of them came back that night.
It wasn’t my umbrella.
I called the bar and music venue. Friends offered to look. The umbrella was gone. My ex said the umbrella was hard to hold anyway.
My friend gave me her Kraken umbrella as a replacement. Another friend sent me an octopus tentacle pen.
Then, a few weeks ago, a friend who sometimes works at the music/event venue texted me a photo and asked, “Hey, is this your umbrella?”
There it was, in coat check.
It was as if it sensed it was time to return to me.
These past couple of years have been rough. I was told I would always have cancer. I had a traumatic 40th birthday. I almost died and for five months, until the new PRRT treatment, I watched myself deteriorate with no relief in sight. A 12-year-relationship ended. Something I had hung hopes on for six years evaporated in the course of 48 hours, and it hurt so much that the weight would pin me into bed some mornings.
Yet, I’m happy. It seems like every time something knocks me down—hard—I have to pick myself up, dust myself off and keep going, even if I am wounded or limping. (Sometimes, as was the case this week, literally.) “I don’t have time to be sad,” I explained to my friend who let me stay with her after my breakup and first PRRT treatment, when I was radioactive. I just don’t have much time. Months. Maybe years. I feel sick today and whenever I feel sick, I’m worried it’s forever.
A lot of things have been outside my control, from disease to other people’s behavior. I was telling someone last week that bad things seem to have happened to me, while I’ve had to actively make the good things happen.
A few weeks ago, I went to a talk about neuroendocrine tumors. When it came to the part about ki markers, I just remember that mine aren’t good. After PRRT, the average is 40 months of wellness. I was given six. My rare VIPoma tumors produce hormones that have terrible effects. I’m younger than most people who have this cancer. Most people think I am a caregiver, a daughter, not the patient. When they realize I am the patient, something in their faces shifts.
Sometimes it all catches up to me, and I cry out of exhaustion. Last week, I was the lady with the black eye crying on the train, my favorite place to cry. (As I have mentioned before, I don’t feel alone but I also don’t feel so vulnerable or like I have to explain anything.)
Oh, I gave myself a black eye last week. The black eye is a symbol of something. I’m still not sure what. I had gotten my chipped front teeth fixed and was ready to take on the world. Then my sick cat had to go to the vet, and as I ran to catch him to put him in his carrier, I tripped on cat-urine-soaked bedding and fell face-first into a trunk. The top of my eye socket hit the trunk lid so hard, I saw stars. It was like a cartoon: as I lay on the floor bleeding, the animated stars circling my head, the cat sauntered away.
I arrived at the emergency vet, bruised and bloody. “Is he hard to handle?” asked the vet tech, visibly worried, as her eyes moved from my swelling purple eye to the big tabby cat in his carrier.
My sweet cat Ziggy has been leaking since he had a bladder obstruction. On Friday, the vet said that maybe his bladder had stretched out and might not go back, and if that were the case, I’d have to put him down. He’s only three. He’s so smart and sweet that when I give him pills and they fall out of his mouth, he’ll try to dutifully eat the pill from the floor. He’s an exceptional cat, and I love him so much. Are you kidding me? I mentally railed. You can’t leave me this one thing?
Luckily, it seems as if the medication is working. I woke up last night to thunder and to three cats that had set themselves up diagonally across the bed. Ziggy, who was (and always is) snuggled closest to me, is drier and less groggy.
Saturday marked two years since my umbrella loss, but it was also another anniversary, according to Facebook: Five years earlier, I’d gone into the hospital for a monthlong stay for my stem cell transplant to treat my refractory Hodgkin’s lymphoma. That also brought up some complicated feelings: the hope I’d had then, when I didn’t know I had a second type of cancer.
The past several years in particular seem like they’ve been full of high highs and low lows, with very little in between. Not everything lasts. Often I’m preoccupied with good not lasting or wondering when good things will be taken away. It’s a particular type of suffering, I learned at a dharma talk this summer. But the bad doesn’t always last forever either. I’ve been trying to become comfortable with the fleeting nature of happiness. I’ve been trying to learn to be happy with what I have instead of what I want or what I think will make me happy.
While worried about Ziggy on Saturday, I went to yoga. It wasn’t the class I’d planned to go to, but I’d mixed up the times. Often when that happens, it ends up being fortuitous. After class, the teacher read an excerpt from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, about the balance between joy and sorrow.
“When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Some of you say, ‘Joy is greater than sorrow,’ and others say, ‘Nay, sorrow is the greater.’
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.”
It was exactly what I needed to hear.
Sometimes, when I realize I’m feeling OK, I’m so joyful. It’s nice when I’m well and not sick. (Conversely, when I am sick, I freak out it’s forever.)
I don’t know what to do with the rest of my short life. Who does? I live life intensely, but I always have. Sometimes I feel like I have to justify what I do, but I know that’s not specific to me. A friend pointed out that some people might always question my choices. Why am I still working? Why am I traveling? Why do I work out? (The last one is easy—if your time on earth might be limited and you want to stretch it out, 30 seconds of squat-jumps, burpees, or mountain-climbers seem like an eternity.) I don’t know what to do except march forward.
I’m afraid. I’m afraid I’ll get sick again soon.
But tonight, Ziggy was purring and playing a game on the iPad. He sits curled up with me as I type. Right now, we have this moment and are happy.