Dear friends,

I keep thinking I should write an update, but I feel like I’ll let you down.

Chemo is over. I feel like I should write that with lots of balloons and exclamation points, like: I made it through!!! But that doesn’t feel like it encapsulates how I feel. I still can’t believe I’m here. That I have/had cancer. I didn’t want to be here in the first place, so it doesn’t feel celebratory like running a marathon or winning at bingo.

But yes. On January 9 when they took the PICC line out of my arm (an intense, straight to the heart sort of IV) and said I was cleared to go home from the hospital’s infusion unit, I was definitely happy to know I wasn’t coming back there. I was happy-ish to know I had just one more chemo-low to make it through that weekend.

But also, I had a terrible cough that was keeping me up at night. I’m learning that with cancer I don’t know what things should worry me (or will worry my doctor). So I report everything to the oncologists, which seems to make them worry. The cough, for instance. They sent me in for chest x-rays, which somehow were unclear, and so they just treated me for pneumonia. I spent the weekend, once again, taking more drugs than I have ever taken at once, maybe even taken over the course of my life. For dramatic effect (or maybe just so I can look back and think, phew, I’m done with that), here’s some of what I took just that post-chemo weekend.

Annie Dillard wrote, “only the newborn in this world are whole, that as adults we are expected to be, and necessarily, somewhat nibbled. It’s par for the course.” (Thanks to Sulieka Jaouad and The Isolation Journal for sharing this quote.) I had to look up the verb “nibbled” used this way. It’s like eroded. I know this is true on a theoretical level. Our bodies are inevitably eroded by the fact of moving through the world, bumping into things, having all of life’s experiences, which includes illness and injury. But somehow I always thought that when these bumps came along, I’d age gracefully. (Short pause so we can all laugh with me/at me. It is so easy to say — “I’ll age gracefully.” It is another thing to look at the liver spots on my hands and love them. To spend so much time when I travel talking to friends about our bowel regimens. To cough a little and be cool with needing a chest x-ray. I moan and complain every time.)

I know it shouldn’t be a surprise to mourn losses in my body, or changes, or adjustments. But man. They’re coming so fast that some days. I think I expected “aging” to come at me a little more gracefully, not so all-at-once. Especially at my lowest during chemo, sometimes I would look at myself in the mirror and not recognize myself. I don’t mean my loss of hair. It’s more that the changes came at such a dizzying pace that sometimes I feel like I don’t even know who I am in this body. It is strange, to look in the mirror and not know the person looking back at you.

I think that intense rate of changes in my body has passed, and for that I am grateful. Now I get a couple more weeks of post-chemo recovery, and then I start a 5-10 year course of more drugs that also aim to prevent recurrence. I want to stomp my feet and say no. I really don’t want any more. But as I say that, I feel like a giant, belligerent toddler refusing to take medicine because it doesn’t taste good. These medicines (tamoxifen, among others) are part of what makes breast cancer so survivable for so many people. I do and don’t want them. I’m lucky to have them.

As I come up for air, I am also feeling so much gratitude for so many things. Among them:

Good, nourishing food, especially soup and sourdough bread this time of year
Our cat, who has snuggled close to me on my hardest days
Our two amazing, goofy kids
All the water, that feels like life, around me in Seattle
And the water birds: the mergansers and the coots and the mallards and the cormorants
Physical therapists, mine and Lucas’s
Burke’s wildly unwavering care, for me and Lucas and Ida
Valley and Mountain (our church) where the music and the people are so amazing
Brave protesters who I hope to join
Instagram live, so I can support or at least watch the civil disobedience as it happens
Zoom and all the people it keeps me close to
Writers and readers and my book club
Having our family and their support, especially time with our kids, nearby
Coffee, especially Lisa’s amazing home-roasted coffee
Seattle’s beautiful and well-stocked public libraries
My body, its resilience, its willingness to keep going despite the poisons
My friends… you all who adapt and hang out and stick with me, with us, and make room and time for us despite/because of our family’s unique needs

A few more pictures, in celebration of some of these great beings…

(One more gratitude/celebration — I was accepted into a writer’s program through the Seattle Public Library, and so I get to use a shared office on the gorgeous 9th floor of the SPL downtown library. Check out my selfie from my new office!)