Yesterday, I got with the digital age. After some time of
researching, drooling, and envying, I bought a smart phone. Thanks to those
generous folk who donated to my Holiday Wish List, I got a new toy.

In addition, I feel that my decision to reach out and let my
dad know how I was feeling about things between us was part of a new behavior.
I haven’t heard from him yet; don’t know if I will. But, the significant thing
to me is that I was honest about how I was feeling, and specifically stated what
I wanted and needed. Coming from a woman who is usually circuitous about asking
for what I need (this way I won’t be “really” disappointed when or if it
doesn’t happen), this is a new and advanced thing.

Letting myself have a new toy is a new thing. Allowing
myself to believe that there is “enough” in the world, that I’m allowed to have
nice things. That I’m allowed to have fun, just for the sake of fun.

The same night I wrote the last blog, and wrote to my dad, I
called up my friend who’d offered me flight miles to Hawaii. I told him that,
damnit, I was going to Hawaii, even if it meant postponing my January chemo
treatment by 10 days. … My friend was not thrilled to hear that my doctor
wasn’t totally on board with this, and it made me pause long enough to talk it
out.

Although I was feeling all “New Molly; New Behavior” about
the trip (allowing myself to have nice things), … it really falls into the same
behavior I’ve always had around money. Constrict, constrict, constrict, then
blow a big wad of cash because I can’t stand constriction anymore. Then I feel
bad, and constrict again. Rinse, repeat.

Because the reason I’d want to go to Hawaii NOW is not as a
reward or a treat, it’s out of scarcity mind. The belief that I can and will
never let myself have nice things at an appropriate and planned out time, so I
better DO IT NOW, because I can’t guarantee that I’ll ever let myself later.

I can’t guarantee that when my chemo treatment is done in
February that I’ll allow myself to go on vacation. After all, I will have to
return to work when this is all done – won’t I?, asks my brain. After all, I’ve
been off work, but certainly not on vacation for the past 3 months. I simply can’t afford to let myself have a
vacation when this is done – I owe
my employer. I owe somebody something first, before I can let myself have what
I really need.

I wrote a poem once that most people in my class didn’t get,
but when I repeated it to my mom a few months ago, she got it perfectly.

Otherwise, who would
eat the blackened one?

That’s it. The perfect sentiment of a martyr. The mindset.
The set, and stance, of my mind.

As I spoke to my friend on Wednesday night, I started to cry
as I talked through why I needed to go
to Hawaii now – the realization that I still do what I’ve always done – the
realization of how stingy I am with myself, and too, that I don’t believe that
it will change.

Luckily, I don’t live in a vacuum, and was able to talk
myself calm with my friend, and accept the possibility that when this process,
when these treatments are done, I might actually let myself have.

This all came up yesterday too, when I had “Tea and Tarot”
with a girlfriend of mine. The idea that by reaching out for help, I will be
able to hold abundance. That in reaching out for help on how to organize myself
differently, things will work out beyond my wildest dreams.

My wildest dreams right now are pretty stingy. What would it
be like to perceive or conceive of something different? But, again, I can’t do
this alone – if I try to “figure it out” on my own, I will end up creating the
same structure of scarcity that I’ve always had for myself.

So, my friend with the cards yesterday suggested I have an
Action Group. An action group is a tool whereby you meet with two people, and …
create an action plan. I had one of these meetings with two women over the
summer when I was looking for work, and it was very helpful. Far from it being,
“check this job board,” we came up with actions like, Play the piano every day.
Start blogging again. Ask my friends to give me an asset to add to a list about
myself. Things that seemingly have
nothing to do with how to get a job.

It was uncomfortable to listen to these women tell
me that I would or could find work or joy by doing these hippie things. And
where I have discomfort is usually where I need to work the most. It’s not
comfortable to allow myself daily time for fun. It’s not comfortable to ask
others to help me form actions that might take me to a new level of a
profession or career. It’s not comfortable to start to believe that I deserve
more than I’ve ever given myself. But this is where the work is.

Over and over, I am told, by cards, friends, teachers,
meditations, to allow myself to receive. To receive help, to receive love. To
be open to new ideas about how to hold myself and the world. I believe that
allowing myself to use the funds that friends donated to buy myself a phone is
part of this allowing – I’m still
uncomfortable with it – I still feel that old “hoard”/constrict mentality (Don’t
spend this money! You will need it later because of your low income!) The belief that comes along with this mentality is
that there is not enough and there will never be enough.

My mom offered to send me some make-up for the holidays. She,
being a once-certified make-up artist, gets a discount on MAC products (the
beauty line, not the Apple product!). I told her that I’d rather she save the
money she’d spend on make-up for me to help fund her next trip out to visit me,
or to fund our imagined/hoped-for trip to Paris. She said something startling.

“Why can’t I do both?”

What can’t she do
both? Send me some make-up AND visit me? Why can’t I do both? Buy a new phone with GIFTED MONEY and be in the reality of my situation?

So, I did. It wasn’t the “blowing a wad of cash” that my
brain wants to tell me I did (It wasn’t my money!!! It was a GIFT, stupid stubborn brain!!). I am having to sit,
today, in the discomfort of letting myself have. To have needs, to ask for them
to be met, and to meet them. To allow my needs to be met.

It’s time for an upgrade. 

For the second time in a week, a certified medical professional has asked me about anger, seemingly out of thin air.

Last week, my therapist asked me how my anger was. We’d been
talking about other things, and she asked it without anything that felt to me
like a segue. I laughed, Well, if you want to talk about my dad, then I’m sure
we could talk about anger. And then we didn’t.

Today, at my chiropractor visit, he said to me, Tell me
about anger. He’d been poking and prodding various things, checking and making
adjustments, talking about nothing emotional whatsoever. I replied, well,
there’s stuff up with my dad not showing up during this time. My doctor said he asked because “it is showing up.”

Even though emotionally, I’m not conscious of feeling it, my
body is.

Like a good girl, I replied to my dad’s text from the other
day with a short email update about my treatment. Very short. Very, what I
would interpret as, curt. His text message said that he and his fiancé were so
busy with their move to Florida, they’d been up past midnight unpacking. His voicemail
to me last week, a call that once again came after dark, after a time I’ve
told him I would be unavailable, reported that his whole weekend was a hellish moving process.

I listened to this voicemail … while I sat in a hospital room
receiving cancer treatment.

I’m just so sorry
that your move to your retirement house in Florida isn’t going according to
your plan. It really must be so fucking hard to have boxes to unpack. Asshole. Insensitive. Inert. Asshole.

So, yes. I’m angry. I’ve been “doing my best.” Trying to
“let go of it,” to “work through it,” to remind myself that it’s not about me
or a reflection of my self worth. And finally, today, after this question from my
doctor, I had it.

This evening, I was listening to a book on tape my friend
gave me by Dr. Bernie Siegel, Love, Medicine, and Miracles. In it, he speaks mainly about cancer patients. What
links them, what qualities they have in common, and what events or
circumstances typically precedes cancer.

I was listening to this tape as I was finally gluing together my teal project.

For many weeks during the summer, I began cutting out chunks
of teal from magazines. All shades of Mediterranean and Bahaman. I had a
project concept to collage them all together, not sure on or of what, but
together, a wall of teal.

Eventually, absent of inspiration of where or how to glue
them, I put all these snips and scrolls of teal in a drawer.

Today, I took them out. I dug in my closet, looking for
perhaps a wooden board to glue them on, and instead found this large
rectangular picture frame I’d found on the street a year ago. I popped the Ikea format out of it, and began to
collage on the frame’s inner matting (see photo, it’s hard to explain, and I
assure you, the teal comes out better in real life).

The point is, I was engaged in finally doing something that
I’d wanted to do for a very long time.

The point is, I heard Bernie Siegel say, “If a person deals
with anger or resentment when they first appear, then illness need not occur.
When we don’t deal with our emotional needs, we set ourselves up for physical
illness.”

I paused the tape and rewound. I wrote the rest down:
“Depression is a partial surrender to death and it seems that cancer is despair
experienced at the cellular level.”

Fuck. That.

I went to my email, and brought back up the draft I’d
composed to my dad when we got into our fight on the phone almost a month ago
(the “conversation” when I’d again asked him to call me earlier in the day, and he told me plainly,
“This is how it works.”) We’ve had one phone call since then, maybe
a minute long. I’ve sent one short email in response to his “moving dilemma.”
That’s been all, till today, when I sent him off that second short, curt email.

So, I brought back up the draft, the one where I tell him
that my asking to speak to him earlier in the day is not about the time we speak, but rather, I’m asking that we speak at a
time when we can have more quality conversations, ones that don’t have to be cut
short, because he’s calling me a few minutes before he has to leave to eat dinner, or after dark, when
I get the most tired and can’t talk.

The draft says that I want to have more of a relationship
with him, if he wants it. If he’s available for it, “I look forward to the
opportunity to enhance our relationship.”

I deleted the several and many paragraphs I’d added today
which told him how unacceptable it was that his moving is a priority over my
having cancer. That he can’t talk any other time during the day. Unacceptable that his time table is a priority
when his daughter is facing a life-threatening illness. I took out all the
parts that said how hurt I was. That I felt like I wasn’t a priority. Because I will not be that vulnerable to him.

I am so terribly hurt. I am. So, I’m giving him the chance to
make it up to me.

Advice from friends had been to let it go, to accept what is.
To not go to the empty well again. But I’m not going to the empty well with
this one, I think. I’m saying, Look dude, this is what I want. You can show up,
or you can’t. I feel like I am giving an ultimatum, and maybe if it doesn’t work, I can or will wash my hands forever, or for a while at least. Tell him to stop giving me his pittance. To stop contacting me right now. To stop telling me about his vile, vomituous new wonderful life. Because, do you know how
painful it is to have a father who can’t — No, Won’t — make time for his ill child?

?

It might backfire. I might be setting myself up for
disappointment again. But, I’m taking what Dr. Bernie says to heart, what my therapist
and my chiro are telling me – Anger is burning me up inside, and I can’t have
that anymore. “Accepting” it, isn’t working right now. Being in contact with him like this isn’t working right now. 

Better that I should tell him? Better that I should give him the chance? Better that I should be the “good daughter” one more goddamned time??…. 

Maybe it’s not the “right
thing,” the “enlightened” thing. Maybe it’s not the “recovered” goddamned thing. But right now I don’t care. Choosing to swallow my anger isn’t working.

The most common character, says Bernie, of a cancer
patient is the compulsive giver. The person who puts others’ needs before their
own.

Fuck That. I’m not going to be part of the statistic. !!!!

I’m not going to be part of the statistic. 

Do you ever decide to make a change, like deciding, okay,
now I’m going to eat well and be healthy, and as a show of a last hurrah or a
good-bye to your former ways, then binge eat something terrible?

No? Yes? Well, that’s precisely what I did yesterday, and I
find it mildly amusing. A friend brought me by a juicer; I’ve been reading this
Kick Cancer in the Kitchen book; I’ve
been contemplating cooking again. And so yesterday, I did indeed cook. I went
to the store and bought organic quinoa and broccoli and an avocado, some happy
chicken breasts, and peanut sauce that didn’t have things I couldn’t pronounce
in it. I brought it home, and delighted in making something that I hoped would
work, but wasn’t sure. (I mean, put peanut sauce on anything, and I’m pretty
sure it’s golden.)

I ate this wonderful, and surprisingly fabulous meal. It was
really quite good. Then I went out … and bought three slices of chocolate cake.
Three. I came home and ate them all.

Once, I’d decided to go vegetarian, and so the day before I
was “to begin,” I went and bought some steak. It’s as if I have to get in my
last taste of this thing, as if it’ll be off limits forever, or I need to
ingest enough to carry me through the rest of my lifetime. I kind of think it’s
hilarious and ridiculous at this point. But, it happens.

And, luckily, there’s a chapter in the cancer book called,
“It’s Okay to Eat Chocolate and Cry.” We could call that the title of
yesterday.

I felt really off yesterday, knowing how wonderful it was
outside, but having met a friend at my house in the morning, I hadn’t left it,
despite the near *70* degree temperatures outside. So, it was nearing noon,
nearing one, and I still hadn’t left, and I was starting to almost panic. There
was something fiendish in the way I wanted to leave the house, but didn’t know
where to go, or how long I could be out, and didn’t have anyone to play with,
and I sat at my computer cursing that there were no zipcars available, and
almost started to cry.

That somehow having a car would give me a direction or a
purpose for where to go with the rest of my day. I’m in such this limbo right
now. I don’t have the energy of a normal person, but I certainly have energy,
and CAN’T keep myself cooped up at home.
That said, I’m all immuno-suppressed right now, and shouldn’t really be in
public too much – but then WHAT THE HELL am I supposed to do all day. I didn’t
just want to “go for a walk,” I go for walks all the time – I wanted to do
something fun and different, and just couldn’t manage to get out.

Finally, I did. I got myself out of the house despite having
no idea where I was going or what I was doing, and my mom called, and I ended
up in a heap on someone’s stairs crying about how anchorless and lost I feel
and how aimless and lonely and purposeless right now.

I knew how over the top it all was, but that’s how I felt,
and I didn’t know how to change it, because I didn’t really know what was
wrong, except that I felt off, and not right, and lost.

She started to suggest something about taking a bus to a
different part of town, and my brain got in the way with, but I have to be at
the doctor at 3pm, and I shouldn’t be taking the public bus, and I don’t know
how long it’ll take, and where will I go anyway. …

And a bus crested the hill, and with tears still leaking out
my eyes, I ran down the street and caught the bus. I told my mom I’m taking
this bus, and I didn’t know where I’d go on it, but I was going.

I ended up where I actually really wanted to go yesterday
anyway, before my brain got a hold of me – at the arts reuse depot. It’s a junk
shop basically, with everything you can imagine to use as art supplies. I’d
been wanting to go to buy a wooden frame that I want to paint a la these frames
a friend has in her house.

And, voila. I ended up at the depot, and actually found a
frame. I bought a veggie sandwich and some coffee, and caught the bus back to
the doctor’s in time.

It all worked out as I’d wanted it to – with the crazy
intermission of my brain eating itself.

I simply need to get up and out when I need to. Not hem and
haw about where or what. Maybe I’ll end up somewhere stupid, or somewhere
bored, but it’s got to be better than staying at home feeling like a
self-imposed prisoner. It’s enough to feel caged when I’m in the hospital; it’s
unacceptable to cage myself when I’m at home.

With that, I’ll leave you. I have to go meet some folks now –
outside. 

In one of my cancer books, it suggests that perhaps we
write a letter to the parts of us that have physically changed as a result of
cancer and its treatment. Thus, I bring you…

Dear Flat Tush,

I suppose it’s taken me so long to face you, because I can’t keep on turning around and around to try and see you in the
full-length mirror. However, now that I have the chance to speak with you more
formally, I wanted to tell you I’m sorry.

For so many years, I have put you down, making fun of you
for being so flat that you’re like a straight line from my back to my thighs. Telling others I can’t sit on inflatable rafts for fear of puncturing them with my protuberant butt bones. The times that I’ve rolled my eyes at how uncomfortable you make it to sit on metal or wooden furniture, wishing, oh wishing, you’d be different. For years I have assumed that you would just go on taking my derision, and put up with being the butt end of my jokes.

But sadly, this has not been the case. Since my developing
cancer and becoming, if possible, even more sedentary, you have become … concave.

The scooped-out innards of an ice-cream container, the weird thing a foam pillow does when you press your fist in it, that desperate vision of a bounce-house deflating. 

Oh, Flat Tush, Flat TUSH!

You are now but a former shadow of the
flatness that you once were, it seems almost a dream how you were before – I swear,
you were actually pert… or pert-like. I promise I only incessantly poked at that
crease out of love. That tense/release thing I used to do to pretend you were
something more than you were… oh, how insensitive of me!

I see now how lucky I was with you before, and how much
we’ll need to firm up a new relationship of trust. I
shouldn’t have taken you for granted, Flat Tush. With all that cancer
has taken from you, I promise to build you back up to your (only-mildly-flat!) former glory. 

On my honor,

Molly

Home. I am home after spending the week in the hospital. I
sat this morning at my breakfast table with the morning light slanting in, the
cypress trees I watch build and shed their leaves for these past two years, my
peets coffee in a new mug, my morning pages, a metal fork and an actual
plate, my space heater licking my calves.

Yesterday evening, I lounged on the couch with my cat curled on the
chenille blanket across my lap, and I said something to her that I’ve asked her
often and many times: “How did I get so lucky?” How did I get so lucky to have
and find you, I have intoned to her over the two years I’ve had her, and lived
here in this apartment.

And that line, that question struck me, and I began to cry.
Not out of sadness, but out of cognitive dissonance with everything that is, I am still lucky to have her, and to have found her. To
sit with my bald head, unemployment, uncertain mortality, and to ask her how I
got to be so lucky? … It was a moment, to be sure.

Because, all in all, I’m moving through this. I am not where I was when this all began. In the immediate
terror and incredulity. I have more of a sense of what to expect now, and I am
not as scared of the times in the hospital, or the times after when I my
“counts” get all low. I can pack for the hospital differently now – in fact, I
can pack at all. All of this is different than it was in the beginning. I am in
a different phase of this – I can feel it, and it feels good, or a million
times better at least.

There are still a lot of places I want change and comfort
through this. I want to contact the young adult cancer support group. I want to
stop eating as much crap because “I deserve it.” But, for today, that’s all
I’ll say about what I want to change about me and my situation. Because I’m tired
of haranguing myself, honestly.

I’ve put up a whole new set of dates people can sign up on
the online calendar to bring me meals daily, but I’ve realized that another
part of how I have cared for and nurtured myself has been through cooking. I
like to cook. Sure, perhaps I can’t get to the store the same way and spend all
that time with you germ-infested folks(!), but I can still do some. And,
although asking folks to bring me food daily was important last time I was
home, this time, I want the chance to start making food for myself again, if
only every other day.

I’ve begun reading a book called Kicking Cancer in the
Kitchen, and although it too purports the
benefits of vegetarianism, my chiropractor/nutritionist said that especially
right now, I don’t go veggie. It’s so strange – I was vegan – VEGAN(!) – the month before I got cancer. The month of
August and September, the only animal protein I had was eggs in the morning.
(So, yeah, I guess I wasn’t *really* vegan, but for the most part!) So it’s
strange to read this book purporting the merits of a whole food, healthy, leafy
green diet, …. when.i.was.already.doing.that.

But, “whatever,” as they say.

I do know how to eat, and to some extent cook, healthfully,
but there’s a lot to learn, and a lot to branch out from my narrow knowledge of
it all. So, I’m looking forward to experimenting. It’s another form of art –
it’s always been for me, cooking. There are the months when it’s visual art, or
music, and then there are the months it’s cooking. I was marinating and baking
my own organic tofu this summer. I was soaking, cooking, and blending my own
hummus for Christ’s sake! I was experimenting, I was having fun. It’s another
way, I’ve realized that I can have fun within the means and bounds of my body’s
abilities right now.

My friend brought me chard from the farmer’s market when she
came to round me up from the hospital yesterday; this morning, it made itself
into my morning eggs. (I have a thing for eggs.)

Speaking of which, perhaps as TMI as it might be, I don’t know, I got my period again this month. Perhaps that may
seem inconsequential to you, … but it means the world to me. It means that last
month and this month, despite pouring nuclear shit into a port that feeds directly
into my heart, my ovaries are still working. It means that I withstand this
chemo stuff better than most people expect. I don’t get nauseous, or puke, or
get mouth sores, or skin rashes. Like Bella saying she was made to be a
vampire, I was perhaps made to withstand chemo. (and that is the dorkiest reference you may have from me
today)

But, it’s huge, guys. It’s a big deal to me to see that
despite all of this trauma and ruffianism that is happening to my body, there
are systems that are still working. It means that I might not have hot flashes
at 31, or have to shop the feminine lubrication aisle. It means my body still
works.

I am alive. I have heat, water, housing, finances, internet,
food, family, friends, a kitty, clothing, and I live off of one of the best
streets in the area.

I’ve been thrown off the course of where I was (but then
too, I had no idea where that course was going, so perhaps I wasn’t on one at
all), and today, I find myself, Lucky. 

Since my conversation with Renee last week about allowing
myself to receive from others (and thereby interpret from a Higher Power) instead of exhausting myself from my own reserves, I’ve been considering how I
manage resources.

For the most part, I live within very meager means; I always
have. I don’t really live extravagantly, and would go on shopping binges to
make up for the time I kept such a tight lid on everything. My apartment is
perfect for what I need it to be, except for the lack of artist space in it. My
computer is perfect, except that the operating system is so old, I can’t access
the Kaiser email system without refreshing four times. My clothing is perfect,
except that the majority of the clothing is several years and a style old. And
my love life is perfect, except for the aching lack of intimacy and connection.

When I have resources coming toward me, I tend to either
reject them or blow through them quickly, so I can be back at smallness again,
where I’m familiar, if not comfortable. On my blog site, I can see what blogs
have been read recently, and for some reason, someone accessed and read one from 2010 called “too much to ask,” so I went back to read it myself. It’s all about
how to allow myself to receive good things. Hmm. Sounds familiar. I know there’s another blog about a
meditation in which I was supposed to be allowing myself to receive light from
benevolent sources, but I refused to allow that light in and kept my guard up like Wonder Woman’s bracelets –
you’re not getting in here! Pew! Pew! I have been working on how to manage resources for
years, and have been rejecting them for years.

I have a free ticket to; If you want me to put you in
touch with; Sure, you can show your art here …

And I let these connections languish. Those things are for
people who can sustain momentum and movement. As evidenced to myself by myself,
I’m a person who manages resources by rejecting or blowing through them – what
kind of a manager is that – of course I
can’t possibly contact your friend – “I don’t have it in me.”

I’m just becoming more aware right now of how habitual this
process is for me, of keeping myself small and insulated and insular. And of
how exhausting, and ineffectual it is.

The problem is that I don’t want to be small or ineffectual, and that’s where I run against
myself. So, I’m back to the suggestion from Renee last week about allowing my
former, or current, rather, way of doing things dissolve without attempting to figure out how to put them back
together. I know this way isn’t working, but I don’t actually know a different
or better way. So, I have to allow it to resolve itself – which, of course, is
a frightening prospect, but not as frightening as continuing to live in a
shoebox existence.

Things that come to mind like ordering a ‘monologues for
women’ book, but I don’t actually look one up. The flight lesson thing that’s
been on my list of things I want to do for years. The ice skating thing I was
talking about yesterday – a free trip to
the rink to do something fun for myself … well, I’m just so busy over here
being UNfun.

No wonder I feel so tired; this lack of fun. This lack of
flow. My therapist was very astute yesterday when she finally put it in no
uncertain terms: I am ambivalent about intimacy. I both desperately desire it,
and am terrified of it. It’s the same coin as “resources.” I want, but I’m
scared. I want to move forward, or differently, but goddamned, I don’t know
what that’ll look like. She and I have been working on this forever, but it was
the first time I really got to see my hemming and hawing about connection and
relationships, an energetic exchange in its own right.

In the relationships that I have had, they have been an
unequal exchange, again, like with my “stuff,” allowing me to subsist with less
than I actually want, and rejecting those options that look more healthy – like
blowing through a chunk of cash, so I’m back at square one, I will take your
genuine desire to know me better as a threat to my way of life.

My way of life isn’t working.

I want it to work better. I have to trust that if I let go
of what I currently and already know that I will be taken care of.

I hate the maudlin nature of this quote, and I have my
doubts, but it’s been coming to mind over the last few days nevertheless:

When you take a leap of faith, G-d will either catch you, or
you will be given wings to fly.

I know the ultimate
cheesiness of that sentiment, but if I’m at the end of what I know how to do,
there really isn’t anything left
except to leap, and trust that whatever comes, somehow and eventually, it will be
better and healthier for me than what is. 

In contrast with yesterday, today I got to write my morning
pages before the chemo began, and just now, I got to go up to the 12^th
floor and sit with a group of folks for an hour and try not to think about
myself. – I admit it was hard; the self-centered thing is hard to kick, in
this and, certainly other situations. But there was someone there talking
about struggling against themselves, and trying to “get it right,” and I knew
the kind of pain he was going through to stop living in a self-destructive way,
and I felt empathy.

Empathy is a tough thing when you have cancer. Like this
morning, when my nurse told me that she hated to work weekends around the
holidays, because she never gets her Christmas shopping done in time.  – I found it hard to have empathy, even
though, surely, somewhere, I do recognize it must be frustrating once again for
someone to want to do things “right,” and not getting them done that way.

I also, this morning, got to speak with my therapist on the
phone, which was also helpful. I didn’t get to the meditation or the blog until
now, … and to be honest, I haven’t gotten to the
meditation at all. But, at least I’m not as ornery as yesterday. Getting out of
this room for an hour helped.

Knowing, that most likely I will be released tomorrow after
I receive my final dose of chemo Round 3 tonight from 9-midnight, well, that
helps too.

I think I’ve decided that I’d rather do the Hawaii thing
when I can really appreciate it. There is, however, the fear that once this
treatment thing is over, I’ll jump right back into the fray, and will once
again have no time or money for the things that I’d really like to do.

I am scared shitless of doing the same things again and
again. Of going back to a sedentary life.

So, part of this let’s go to Hawaii NOW thing is to preemptively strike against my own
pattern – but… that’s not really a sustainable solution either.

Furthermore, if I push out my treatment instead of taking it
on schedule, this all winds up a longer process, which isn’t what I want
either. So, I think I’m going to aim to go to the retreat in January (in Napa,
not Maui!) after my chemo treatment.
We’ll see – it’ll be my intention. My health does come first, but it’s hard to
know right now what is the primary mode of health I’m meaning when I say that.

Is it my mental health? Treatable (in theory and fantasy) by
a trip to somewhere warm and totally far away from this. Is it my spiritual
health? Treatable (in theory and fantasy) by a trip up to the Napa hills for a
day and a half. Is it my physical health that is “the most important thing” to
me right now? Treatable by maintaining my course of chemotherapy treatments.

I don’t know. All of them are important to me, obviously.
But what are ways that I can support my mental and spiritual health without
compromising my physical health, and all the vice versas?

Well, that’s something that came up on the phone today with
my therapist. What would I do that was
fun? What can I still physically do that is fun? If I weren’t a cancer patient, what would I be doing for fun? ….
Hm, that really stumped me, as the reality was I wasn’t having too much fun
before all this began anyway.

I did come up with something – I’ve taken myself ice skating
a few times over the last year, beginning last holiday season with the most
marvelous date with me and my inner child/little girl, who insisted on Hot Chocolate when the skating was done.

I’ve gone since then, just for fun, because I’m terrible,
and I have an amazing time being terrible. I flail, and have to let
10-year-olds pass by me as we all hold on to the guard rail for dear life; I
laugh my bloody ass off is what I do, and have a smile a meter wide. I love
being silly like that – enjoying myself for the pure sense of not caring what
it looks like, how good I am, if it’s cool. I love it. That is joy to me.

I have a friend who works at a skating rink here in Oakland,
and she’s told me several times that I can just text her when I want to go, and
she’ll hook me up. She told me this almost a year ago – but still I haven’t gone. When I get my strength back from this round, I want to do that. I want to laugh. I am so tired of not laughing.

The other “how can Molly have fun” thing that was come up
with (it was a short list) was to go up to visit Sonoma, to take a day trip.
Although I began visiting up there when there was a crew of young, hilarious, create-fun-out-of-anything 20somethings, they’re now a group of 30somethings dispersed
somewhat – but the sense is still there. I feel, and have always felt better,
when I go up there. Like my heart is being poured in, filled in from the bottom
up with this silvery liquid I didn’t know I was dying of thirst for. Every time I go, I feel that “I can breathe bigger up there.”

They know how to laugh up there. I don’t know that
particularly this group of friends will still be up there or available; but I can
try to see if I can’t get a day to make it work – to drive out into those
rolling hills, to arrive to do nothing except be atrociously silly and know how
much fun that is.

So, these are my two fun things. My two intentions right now
to inject some levity into this somber scene that is cancer treatment.

Having set down the whole Am I going to die question, now I
want to know how I’m going to live. 

You sit around and wait to get better enough, so that you
can then get sick enough to get better.

I’m bored with the whole thing. All the time spent waiting,
when I feel I should be all “carpe diem,” but I can’t climb a flight of stairs
without getting winded.

I feel like a self-pitying fool, and quite self-centered to
boot, with all the time and energy that I focus on me, and others focus on me –
the doctors and nurses, and medications and lab results, and blood tests and urine checks … Can’t you focus on someone else for a minute
– can’t I get out of dodge, please?

That’s what part of my mood is. I asked my doctor if I could
push back January’s chemo session in order to go to my annual women’s retreat.
It means starting about 10 days after we normally would, which I don’t think is a big deal, but I’m not a doctor. He
said there’s no study that ethically could test if we push people back 10 days,
so he doesn’t know, but he’s not totally behind my request either.

And so, I feel like when the fuck does anything get to be
fun again? I’ve had two legitimately fun days, when I went to a Halloween
party, and I went to the beach, and it wasn’t about me, or doctors, or cancer,
or hospitals. It was about being a goddamned girl, living a goddamned life.
Where the fuck is that anymore? 

Knowing that I’m probably going to go on the retreat, or
thinking so before I asked my doctor this morning, I started to wonder if I
couldn’t also get farther away from this
all – like Hawaii far – before the retreat then. And I started to put out feelers to people who know
people, and lo, there’s a willing and friendly person in Maui, and a friend
with willing air miles.

But, then the talk with the doctor, and a talk with my mom –
and why would I want to go to one of the most gorgeous places on earth, a place I’ve never been, when I
can’t even walk a half hour on flat ground? Why would I want to carpe if I
can’t enjoy the diem?

I don’t. I just want to not be doing this, this sad, pathetic, self-pity thing. This thing
where I sit around and wait to get sick, and sit around and wait to get healthy,
and then do it all over again.

The good part is that I’m now familiar enough with this to
know what to expect; but the bad part is, I now know what to expect.

I can expect to feel lethargic, and have to append every
single text with, “but text me beforehand, just to check that I’m up to it.” I can
expect to watch t.v. shows on DVD, even though I’m tired of watching them. I
can expect to read spiritual literature every day, and know that it means
something to me, but can’t change how fucking stupid and boring this all is.

I was bored with my job; I got cancer. I’m bored with
cancer; I should get a job.

I don’t really know what
to do. This is where I am, and what I have to do now. The disease and the cure
don’t care that I’m tired of them, I have to do it anyway. I don’t want to die.

But I can’t really call this living. 

(I imagine this is where someone posts that poster of the kitten in a tree, saying Hang In There.) Puke. 

As of noon today, I am halfway through my chemotherapy
treatment. 

As in, I completed 3 of the 6 doses that make up Round 3, and Round
3 is halfway to the total of 5 I will have. 10 weeks, it’s been since I was diagnosed with Leukemia, and
I guess the total of the 20 weeks of my life for a life is not so bad. But, I’m tired today, from the cumulative
effects of it all.

This morning I was writing my morning pages, and just as I wrote
that I was feeling kind of off today, just then, I got a phone call from a
woman I know who’d had cancer and wanted to know if she could drop off some
cancer-fighting affirmation CDs someone had given to her during treatment. At
the exact same time that I was on the phone with her, I got a text from another
friend saying that she wanted to cover the remaining cost of the women’s new
year’s retreat I’ve gone on for the past 4 years. … And that her mother-in-law, a 4-time
cancer survivor, wanted to donate funds to my holiday wish list as well.

Talk about timing.

A friend texted me a few weeks ago, and in her great
empathy, she said that she wished she had a magic power that could make all
this go away. I replied that she does have a magic power: “The same power that saved Harry Potter’s life
over and over again – Love.”

Cheesy and hokey as my reply to her was (and knowing it was
just a good line) 😉 I do believe that to be true. That love can heal; that love
can save.

Sometimes, as we all know, “love” is not enough. It doesn’t
change the person you want to change in the ways you want them to change. It’s
not enough to bridge gaps between lovers that have value mismatches. Love isn’t
always enough to make everything alright … But it doesn’t hurt, does it?

Well, except in that song, “Love Hurts”…

Today, this halfway mark, is a nondescript day with rain
lightly falling and a grey view of the construction site out my window. It’s a
worker-bee kind of day, doing what it’s supposed to be doing, without much pomp
or circumstance. But, it has been dotted by these moments of care and love – a
friend with a coffee; one with a bowl of soup; another, a new book and hat; still others, a donation.

I’ve been trying to actively catalogue these gifts of human kindness as shows of Universal love and kindness, and so I’ve sort of begun keeping
a list of all these things. The list is already very, very long.

(And that’s it for my, “I’m tired, but I wanted to stamp the
occasion and check in with you” blog. Thank you for reading – I hope your reading material picks up
from here) 😉

There was a time, a decade ago, when I was also in a
hospital, when I also was bald, and when I also was frightened of what was
happening to me.

In most aspects, these are entirely different
experiences, but it’s been hard for me at present to not recollect and compare the two.

At the time, at 21, I was committed to a hospital for erratic
behavior that others close to me (though there weren’t very many anymore)
interpreted as apparent manic, perhaps bipolar, behavior: I had shaved my head. I had
torn down posters that belonged to my college roommates and left them strewn about. I had
missed enough classes to not be graduating with my roommates. And I had cursed
out my father before being kicked out.

What these people close to me did not know was that I was
drinking daily, dating a guy who sold psychedelic mushrooms and fed me liberally from his store, and was stoned most of the time.

Therefore, in my addled opinion, all the above “erratic” behavior was justifiable by
me: I was helping, I was expressing myself, I was partying, man. …

Nonetheless, I found myself for two and a half months behind the thick glass of
institutional windows and locked ward doors.

This was not a highlight of my existence. And yet. The first
night I was brought onto the “watch ward,” they wheeled another college student
in on a gurney who, shaking his fist at the sky, bellowed, “DO NOT GO GENTLY INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT!!” And I
thought to myself that all of this nonsense, this adventure, as I saw it at the time, would
make great fodder for the book I would one day write about myself.

Very few people came to visit me in that ward. My family, and my best friend.

And the rabbi from my synagogue who knew me from
Sunday school age.

To contrast this sad sad scene …

This time, I’ve also had rabbis come to visit me. Rabbis who
I now work with, a rabbi who I just happened to befriend almost 5 years ago, and another who sent me a gift card to Whole Foods.

This time, tons of
people have visited me, and tons of people know that I’m here and are sending cards, gifts, thoughts, texts. Prayers. 

This time, I am not huddled over a toilet to retch up pills
that made me dull. Or rooming with a girl who sincerely believed helicopters were following her. Or picking at (the admittedly same) dull food with a man who got drunk and laid down on the train tracks. 

Like last time, my brother has given me books to cheer me
up. Like last time, that same best friend is coming to visit me.

But, the contrast with who I am now and who is showing up for
me now, the vastness of my circle of friends, and the enormity of their (your) heart
and generosity – … the contrast is staggering.

I am still bald, unable to leave the hospital, and dependent
on doctors who prescribe me things I’d rather not take. Like then, I am battling a
life-threatening disease, then called addiction, now called cancer. But, unlike
then – I have a sense of who I am beyond this disease. I have a belief in who I
am and things greater than who I am (like Love, for example) to ground me during my fear. And I have faith that this chaos can be met with
fortitude and with the occasional breath of levity.

Though both, I’d wager, make for pretty interesting writing.