They keep calling me

I met my new oncologist today. She seems very kind.
There is nothing scary going on with my general health, and I will have a nice Autumnal PET scan in a few weeks to see what’s going on inside.
Doesn’t that sound cozy? A cup of hot cider, a blankie, a PET scan on a crisp autumn morn. Reminds me of my youth: apple picking, pumpkin carving, PET scans.

Anyway. I am pleased that “at a gander,” I seem okay. I feel okay. More than that, actually: I feel good.

Every morning, not even on mornings when I have scary appointments, I begin my day with a kind of prayer. A chant in a foreign language. I know what it means. One day a friend asked me, “Not ‘what do the words mean’ ?; what do the words mean for you?”
I did not understand this question.

This morning, I said my chant. Over and over. Sometimes fast. Sometimes slow. I kept my chant going all through my shower, my getting dressed, until I was halfway out the door and in tears, and then I understood my friend’s question.

“God, help me.”

For me, this chant means God, help me.

Not “God give me whatever I want.”
Not “God hurry up and give me a favor.”
Not “God, give me.” Just “God, help me.”

Over and over, all morning until I pulled into the cancer center lot,
“God help me” in a language that is not my own.

And then I did something I have never done in a medical setting before: today, I told an-honest-to-god doctor my whole story, my entire truth — just the parts that were essential for her to know. We began in 1989. I shook from weeping. I apologized when I could not accurately recall dates, doses, procedures.
I confessed. All of it. The parts I am responsible for, the parts the people I was paying and/or trusting to care for me were also responsible for.

This doctor listened to me for an hour BEFORE performing the exam. She listened to me — the whole fucking story, not just the dribs and drabs that fill in data points on a graph. She asked FOLLOW UP QUESTIONS.

All this to say: my truth is in the hands of a doctor and system I hope I can trust. “Please don’t ever tell me to get my affairs in order,” I asked the good doctor. She laughed a bit under her mask. Kind eyes, attentive eyes. I only know her whole face from the website. Isn’t that so odd still? I miss people’s faces. And sometimes, as in the case of the anti-maskers/anti-vaxxers who harass my already traumatized kids on the regular, I would rather not see people’s faces at all. Takes a big person to scream at little kids and the teachers who are taking care of them during a pandemic. This is a scary time, politically, reader. Very scary.

When I start going on about the risk adults are posing to children who are not yet vaccinated, I become absolutely apoplectic. So I’ll just shut my yapper.

When I was done “confessing” to my new oncologist and her student assistant (I swear that poor young woman took like 400 pages of notes with the gripping, shocking, gnarly medical tale spewing forth from my mouth.) When I was done telling my story, my truth, every inch I could muster, the room was very quiet. I felt like I needed a cigarette and a stiff drink. Alas, here I am, damn near 160 days (as of tomorrow) sober.

I have hope, reader. Tentative hope. For myself, for you, for us. Very tentative hope, but hope nonetheless.

An educated woman who has extensive knowledge about breast cancer, listened to me, in a medical setting in America, for an hour and a half. (There was an exam and all that jazz, but mostly talking. Just talking. And listening. Listening in all directions.)

“Barf it back,” my friend Sal and I have named this “truth telling” shit we’re both on about these days. This is how a BIB (Barf It Back) works: someone fucks you up with all their bullshit that had nothing to do with you and then you barf it right back on them.

All the fucked up ways the American Healthcare System has failed me, broken my trust, fucked me up? Well, I barfed a bunch of that trauma back into the American Healthcare System that created a lot of it in the first fucking place.

Accountability. God knows I am trying to hold myself accountable these days. God knows, and that’s what matters. I do my best every day of my life, and not incidentally so: deliberately.

I make mistakes all the damn time. I fuck myself up all the damn time. I am astonished by how badly I can still fuck up even without alcohol in my life. I am a spectacular fucker upper. I am the Chunk of my own life.

But I’m trying to be less clumsy with myself, and with people who I love and who love me in kind. I am trying not to break anyone’s hearts, especially my own. I have let myself down many times, and I want to be better about not doing that anymore. Part of this is realizing I am one person who does not control all things on the planet. I am one person who cannot do all of the things that are in need of doing. I am a fundamentally powerless “little one” who can’t do much more than try to show up fully for her own life.

Shortly before my Grandma Jean died, we spoke on the phone. I was lucky to have her in my life until I was forty-three. And she was present in my life. She was a huge part of my life. I loved her very much, and I will miss her always. In any case, during one of our last phone calls, she said to me, “Enjoy your life.” Simple. Brief. “Enjoy your life” from the lips of a dying woman who loved me more than most can or do.

So I’m sitting here in the yard of The Spaceship. And I’m trying to remain present with this post, the chair I am in, the sky tufted with monsoon clouds.

The desert is so alive right now. I know all this rain is surely a sad symptom of climate change, but you should see the green of the Sonoran Desert right now. We live near downtown and even our street is almost jungly.

Amazing. Everything is so alive. High on rainstorms.

Also, the title of this piece is in reference to the fact that when you’re a cancer patient you get phone calls constantly. Today, overwhelmed by the phone calls coming in from all directions, I turned my phone off and started singing “Dead Souls” a la Ian Curtis (I would never want to be seen as doing something in a Trent Reznor fashion — nothing wrong with Mr. Reznor, but I always just really liked Curtis’ “thing” a lot more. A little more authentic? Youthful? I don’t know.) Song here for the uninitiated & initiated (because it’s always a jam):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhEm4S-4v_

And Brittany Spears is free. And I’m actually really happy about this because I think the way she was abused by those who were supposed to care for her as a child is an abomination. And how she was treated as a grown woman? In the 21st century? In an allegedly “free” country? What the fuck was that? So I’m really genuinely happy for Brittany Spears. I’ve been worried about her since she first appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. Even though I was still a kid, of a sort, when Spears hit the music scene, I was old enough to notice that something was — at best — untoward about the whole situation. So I’m really glad for her.

And tonight I’m glad for me, too. I did something that scared me today. I did something that was hard. I did something that was true.

With a measure of relief, comfort, and perhaps a glimmer of hope,
Gruber