Didn’t Expect to See That

Front page story in a newspaper the other week:

In America the average life expectancy is going down, while in other first world countries people are living longer.

Actual causes of earlier deaths in the United States: opioid overdoses, suicide, illnesses brought on by lack of self-care, or bad diet, or bad diet because a good diet is unaffordable or unavailable, or illness left untreated because medical care is unaffordable or unavailable.

The person speaking in the article said that what this trend toward early death came down to was despair and hopelessness, not being able to see a future in which life could be improved with a job, a home, reliable food availability, reliable healthcare.

It was a grim assessment of how tough it is for so many American people now, and how many of them cannot find the resources to prevail against the odds.

On page three of the same newspaper was an article about our President pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey. He joked about impeachment and finished up by saying he was so happy about the new prosperity in the country and the new spirit blowing across the land.

After reading these two pieces, one after the other, I thought, there it is in a nutshell, the dichotomy between what we see - people dying from despair - and what we’re told to see – prosperity! A new spirit!

You know, there have been a lot of things I did not expect to see in my lifetime. I did not expect to see the Berlin Wall come down, and the Soviet Union to collapse. I did not expect to see marijuana become legal. I did not expect to see us have a black president. I did not expect to see us have a woman president.

Oh, wait.

Seriously, folks, I did not expect to see my country go down the road that Germany went down in the twentieth century. I grew up being taught, and believing, that we were better than that. We were the good guys who fought to defeat that.

In 2007, the last year of George W. Bush’s second term, I read that Germans who had fled Germany in the 1930s and 40s were saying that it was already too late to flee the United States. They saw what was coming. They had seen it before.

A young population has grown up without knowing survivors of World War II, or survivors of the death camps, or people whose families in Europe were wiped out. Young people have not grown up hearing those stories, or stories from their fathers or uncles or grandfathers, the vets who liberated the camps – not that those vets wanted to talk about it. They wanted their nightmares to go away: the sights, the smells, the discovery of what one group of human beings did to other human beings.

So now we have a country where we have people who think Hitler was a pretty cool guy, and white racial purity is a thing much to be desired, and they cheer for a guy who is incapable of putting together a simple declarative sentence.

Now we have thugs in the military who have no respect for the rules of engagement. Oh, there has always been rape and murder and torture and pillage in war, but there hasn’t always been a President who gave it his blessing.

Don’t forget, though, Donald Trump is not the cause of what is happening. He is an end stage symptom of a disease which has been building in this country for a long time. Since the founding of the nation, really, but in this virulent form since the nineteen-seventies.

Millions of Americans think he is ducking peachy, and that the Republicans are doing a great job of running the country, channeling all the wealth to a few people and not caring much about the rest of us.

One could despair, and many people do.

And yet – I see our native people rising and speaking out, demanding to be recognized as human beings with rights and dignity, more than ever before.

I see our children saying they are fed up with being gunned down in their classrooms, and it must stop.

I see people responding to hate crimes with grace and righteousness, and people surrounding them with love and support.

I see people devoting their lives working to prevent mass extinction on our planet from climate change, even if they suspect their work might be hopeless because it is too late.

Yeah, climate change might make everything else fade into irrelevance. Didn’t expect to see that in my lifetime, either.

Sometimes it takes something like that to make everyone realize we’re all in this together.

Or not.

We’ll see.

Radiation and Hallmark Movies

Radiation treatments are done. Four weeks, five days a week.

I got off easy, as far as cancer treatment goes. Still, stuff happens.

My radiation therapist, Angus, told me that skin damage from the radiation would become worse after the radiation stopped. He did not lie.

Radiation has left me fatigued, and with “radiation brain,” like I needed more brain fog.

The burns look like sunburn, angry red, but they are coming from within, not without. A nurse told me that the burns might heal in four weeks.

So. Fatigued, burned, and a little radiation brained. A person could feel a little less than fully functional.

Here is how bad it gets sometimes: last Sunday I watched movies on the Hallmark Channel.

In case you don’t know, Hallmark movies are pure romantic escapism.

I say movies, but there is basically one Hallmark movie: girl meets boy, conflict arises, conflict resolves, and at the last possible minute girl and boy realize that he/she was The One all along.

Happy ending.

The protagonists are always youngish – thirties, say – and always white, and always model attractive.

The movies are set in a small town, which the girl left in order to go to college and then to the big city to have her busy, shiny, career. She has a city boyfriend who is Mr. Wrong. She also has a female bff, or business partner, or personal assistant, who is sometimes not white. This is Hallmark’s nod to diversity.

This female sidekick is either telling Our Heroine to dump the chucklehead she’s dating, or at least bff knows the guy’s a chucklehead and hopes Our Heroine will come to her senses.

One day Our Heroine gets a call from home: someone has died or needs her help, or some darn thing.

She drops everything and goes back to her hometown.

Once there, she runs into The Guy.

Maybe her old high school boyfriend. Maybe a new guy in town.

The Guy is a bachelor who has taken over raising his sister’s children because she and her husband died in a plane crash. Or he’s a widower raising his own child alone. Or maybe he has a stick up his butt which he loses over the course of the movie as he falls for Our Heroine, or maybe he’s just gosh darn shucks country decent and has been helping her folks in her absence.

Whatever. By the end of the movie she has broken up with the city boyfriend and realized that her city life was a sham and delusion. She opens a cupcake store, or takes over running the ranch, or starts giving napkin folding lessons. Whatever she decides to do will provide her with a good living, because this is Hallmark land. Oh, and she finds true love with the Guy.

Sometimes one of the characters is a prince or princess. Sometimes Our Heroine is the one in the small town, and it’s The Guy who realizes his city life is all wrong. Slightly different conflicts, same ending.

On Sunday I was looking for something completely undemanding on television. It doesn’t get much less demanding than a Hallmark movie.

I watched two movies, and both movies annoyed me.

In the first one, Our Heroine’s job was to give violin lessons, and at night she and her sister played violin and piano duets as background music at a restaurant. At the end when the Guy realized he loved her, he ran to the restaurant where she was playing and took her in his arms to make his declaration. She set her violin down – where? Stage right out of sight. Then after the big kiss and embrace the two of them joined hands and ran out of the restaurant together, and I’m yelling, “The violin! The violin! What about the violin?” No musician would set their instrument down and run off without it. So I’m ready to write Hallmark a scorching letter about that.

Then the next movie began. First scene begins with a big title telling us the location: Bainbridge Island, Washington.

Hah.

It was a snowy Midwest movie set if anything – five inches of snow on the ground the whole movie, quaint little gingerbread trimmed houses with not a Craftsman or a Victorian or Northwest modern in sight, and flat, straight streets. No hills, no forest, no curving roads.

Bainbridge Island, my left hind leg.

Oh well. At least while watching Hallmark movies I wasn’t thinking about physical pain or impeachment hearings or how the heck I’m going to get the house together for Thanksgiving. So those movies took me out of myself for a few hours.

By the way, I laugh, but if you think it would be easy to write a formulaic screenplay, or any screenplay, that would make it to production, I’d like to see you try it.

Regrets - I’ve Had a Few

Don’t you hate it when you wake up for the usual reason in the middle of the night, and having completed your duty you go back to bed and you lie there in the dark while your brain starts bringing up things you regret? Things that make you cringe, and even writhe, with the memory?

Peg Bracken, an American humorist of the twentieth century (she wrote The I Hate to Cookbook, a big bestseller) called these memories “spinners,” because they could spin you right out of bed.

It seems unfair to me that at my age I still have regrets. Shouldn’t all that mortification have drained out of my system, whether because I have faced it, or simply because of the passage of time?

If you think I am going to tell you any of my regrets, you are correct, but only a few old ones that aren’t spinning me out of bed anymore.

One day when I was in the fourth grade, we were all sitting at our desks, coats on, hands folded, silently waiting to be dismissed. Our teacher, Mrs. Dawson, an intimidating woman, called my name. I got up and began to skip down the aisle, assuming I was privileged to be the first one called to leave.

The look on Mrs. Dawson’s face and the horrified faces of my classmates told me I had read this all wrong.

I stopped short. Tried to save the situation by bending over, placing both hands on my knees, summoning every ounce of cute in my nine-year-old body, and saying cheerfully, “What?”

“Don’t talk in class tomorrow,” Mrs. Dawson said.

The class laughed. Mrs. Dawson did not.

I went back to my desk and sat down, burning with shame, and the class went through its regular dismissal routine.

That incident had me waking up spinning for years, and for all those years it rated as the Worst Moment of My Life.

Well, the worst moment I could attribute to my own behavior.

Then in high school came the Spanish reading incident.

In high school I took Spanish for three years, for all the good it did me.

One day I was reading out loud, and came to the word, “diarias,” which is pronounced “dee-AH-ree-us,” and means “daily.” In my fierce concentration as I read out loud, I pronounced it, “diarrheas.”

The whole class, and probably Mr. Sanchez, the teacher, fell on the floor laughing, while I sat there blinking, because I did not realize what I’d done, only that they were laughing at me.

So that burned for years.

Here’s the kicker: it was not until about thirty years later that the shame lifted enough that the incident replayed in my mind and I finally “heard” what I’d said.

Oh. Now I get it.

No wonder they laughed.

In my twenties, out of school and into the world, I came to regret falling for the totally wrong person. This is not a funny story. Everyone has flings that don’t go well, but this was a jail sentence, a train wreck, a mine cave-in.

For people who grew up in families that looked okay on the outside but were hellholes on the inside, and there are so many of us, it was easy to slip into such relationships. They felt so familiar.

Getting out was the second-best thing I ever did for myself. Marrying Rick was the first.

Meanwhile, back in the wee hours of the night, lying in bed, tossing and turning, I try to decide what the odds are that I’ll go back to sleep, or if I should turn the light on, pick up my book, and read.

Reading puts me to sleep. I tend to go to sleep reading every night. When Rick was still around, sometimes I would wake up as he gently lifted the book from my hands. Now the book either drops on my chest, or the bed, or the floor.

Those middle of the night soul searching sessions don’t happen often anymore, thank heavens. Maybe I do fewer dumb things, although I wouldn’t bet on it, but I am older and don’t embarrass as easily as I used to do when I do something idiotic. Seventy-one has a much thicker hide than fifteen, or nine. A lifetime teaches you what is the small stuff you don’t need to sweat.

Turns out it’s not all small stuff, but most of it is.

Good to know.

Oh – and Peg Bracken’s I Hate to Cookbook recipes were 1950s classics and looking them over now (of course I have a copy), they’re not bad. A little heavy on meats, salts, and canned soups for current tastes, but Peg Bracken’s narration is healthy and delicious.

Radiation Therapy Ha Ha

This morning I had two treats in my hand to give my dog, Marley.

I made her sit and gave her one. Good dog. But then she saw that the second treat was bigger, and she spat the first one out. She looked at me soulfully, begging for the bigger treat.

Which I gave to her.

That’s why I am lousy at training dogs. I’m a squish.

She does a lot for me, though. Mostly she keeps me company.

She kept me company after Rick died, and she’s keeping me company now as I go through radiation therapy following surgery for breast cancer.

I was feeling fine until my cancer was found. Then I had surgery, and wasn’t feeling so fine, and was given painkillers, which sent my brain on vacation.

When I recovered from surgery and the effects of the painkillers, I was feeling fine again. Now I have started radiation therapy, which requires driving into Seattle. Marley comes with me when I drive.

I have completed one week of radiation therapy, and I’m feeling okay. I have been told that as time goes on, I will become fatigued, and my skin might become burned. Or not. Some people don’t get the burn.

My doctor’s office gave me a list of things to get to preserve my skin. Calendula cream, avocado oil, and aloe vera gel. The calendula cream is supposed to be applied three times a day. The avocado oil is supposed to be applied at bedtime. The aloe vera gel is in case my skin does suffer burns.

So many women have been through this drill and are passing along what worked for them. One says to use the aloe vera gel right after treatment. One survivor says a nurse told her to use Noxema, and that worked for her. Another woman emailed that her doctor told her to use Bag Balm.

Well, of course. Good old Bag Balm.

As for Noxema, I’ll try it, but I know I’m going to smell like my aunt’s house.

I can already picture my Aunt Della and Uncle Mike in my mind, as well as the interior of that tiny house, and the incredible red roses that grew in profusion all along the backyard fence. So many associations set off by thinking about Noxema. But I digress.

“Radiation therapy” is a euphemism. What it means is that a part of your body is zapped with radiation to kill off any stray cancer cells that might be lurking in the neighborhood, i.e., breast, where your tumor(s) grew. There will be damage to your healthy cells and skin as well as the cancer cells.

The literature says that the cancer cells will die, but your healthy cells will repair themselves, although my radiation oncologist did mention in passing that sometimes radiation therapy causes cancer. She said that with a casual shrug of her shoulders.

Radiation poisoning is what it is.

When we boomers were children and living in the constant fear of nuclear war, we thought of radiation as a bad thing. We heard about and saw pictures of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and were horrified.

Now I’m supposed to think of radiation as my friend as I go in for “therapy.”

Because I have a frozen right shoulder, I cannot extend my right arm straight over my head. Instead I get my upper arm up as far as I can and placed into an arm stirrup at the head of the table, then bend my elbow and put my hand over my face. This is tolerable for a few minutes.

About the third day I noticed that when radiation was being beamed into my breast, a blue light came through my hand and arm.

When I closed my eyes, it looked purple. The eye that is not covered by my hand and arm does not see any blue light in the room. I need to ask about that.

I was originally told I would have six weeks of radiation. For some reason my radiation oncologist decided to let me off with four weeks. I am happy about this, mostly because I am commuting to Seattle five days a week to be irradiated, and it takes five or six hours, round trip, for a treatment that lasts seconds.

A few wonderful people have volunteered to drive me in to my treatments, and that has been grand. I come home to Marley, and we settle in for the evening. It’s becoming a routine.

This morning I tried giving Marley one of those treats again. She spit it four feet across the kitchen floor. I’m beginning to think she might not like them.

I have never had a dog with such a talent for spitting. I admire it.

Eat Less, Lose Weight: Right

Last July I went in for an annual checkup and was given a thumbs up. I was perfectly healthy for my age and condition.

A month later I was diagnosed with breast cancer, but that’s another story.

Because the local clinic has been going through providers like someone with allergies goes through Kleenex, when I went in for this exam, I saw a person I’d never seen before.

She looked me over, approved of my various test scores, listened to my lungs and heart, and was about to tell me I was fine, but she could not let me go without doing her duty as a medical person.

She felt compelled to speak to me about my weight.

“It’s about portion control,” she said, holding up both hands as if about to catch a volleyball and then drawing them closer together to catch a softball, to indicate smaller portions of food. “You need to use portion control.”

Don’t eat so much and lose some weight. Simple.

She was so nice, and I really liked her. So I didn’t laugh in her face.

I could have, and I could have said something like:

“I am seventy-one years old. I have been on more diets than I can remember. I have lost hundreds of pounds. You are looking at the result of successful diets.”

But like I said, she was nice, and I liked her, so I didn’t laugh at her or tell her what it’s like being a fat person in a thin-obsessed world.

I was put on diet pills by my family doctor when I was a teenager. That did not turn out well. When I ran out of pills sometime later, I did not realize I was addicted. I had mood swings, I fell asleep at my desk at work, I alienated a friend or two. Lost that job, had to move out of my shared apartment because I could not pay my rent, and ended up couch surfing in San Francisco.

Eat less and lose some weight: I have counted calories; used Weight Watcher points; attended other weight loss groups (every diet works for a while); gone to Overeaters Anonymous (3 meals a day, nothing in between, 1 day at a time); became a vegetarian and lost weight (but my hair died); often lived on skinless chicken breast and steamed broccoli and little else; choked down a plain rice cake while everyone else had mashed potatoes with gravy; had two cups of popcorn with nothing on it as a special snack; carefully measured and weighed my food, and measured lo-cal mayo and lo-cal margarine in teaspoons. Fun fact: when you spread lo-cal margarine on toast little water droplets come out of it.

I looked up calories and carbs in books until the pages were tattered and worn, and kept food journals to track everything I ate, how many calories and carbs it had, and what my totals were at the end of each day. Filled notebooks with these numbers.

Stopped eating all dairy on the advice of a naturopath. He said that would cure my migraines. Lost sixty pounds. Still had the migraines.

Every single time I controlled my portions – my meals – my calories - I would grow weary after months of eating obsessively – putting what food I consumed and how much food I consumed above everything else in my life – and then I would lose control.

Soon I would be eating any old way and living my life for other things: music, friends, family, books. I would gain back all the weight I’d lost, and usually a little more, because losing weight freaked my body out, apparently, and it wanted a bit more of a cushion if another famine struck.

This is a common thing for dieters – lose ten pounds, put on twenty. Lose fifty, put on sixty-five.

It would be nice not to be fat, but every diet has been a lot of hard work for temporary non-fatness (I have never been thin), and then I ended up fatter.

My husband Rick was the opposite. If he missed a meal, he lost five pounds. He complained about not being able to gain weight, and he complained about women saying, “I hate you,” when he complained about not being able to gain weight. He didn’t think that was nice.

“It’s the same problem!” he ranted.

Well, yeah, maybe, I guess, the same in that he could not control his weight, but he did not have the whole world shaming him for being thin.

Fat people do have people shaming them for being fat.

So, anyway, when this extremely nice well-intentioned woman held up her hands to describe portion control as part of her medical duty, I did not laugh.

She meant well.

Two Things on My Mind

LeAnna and Climate Change 

This week there are two things weighing on me, and I haven’t been able to settle on one for a column. When you write on a computer you don’t throw crumpled up pieces of paper on the floor, but that’s the kind of week it’s been.

Ten years ago, after Rick’s kidneys failed, he had several surgeries within a few months. He complained of brain fog, and we were told that surgery – anesthesia, especially – can do that to a person.

I’ve been thinking about his experience, because I’ve had lingering brain fog since my surgery and especially during and after taking pain pills following the surgery. I have found it hard to think. I have had these two things on my mind and couldn’t decide which to use as a subject. Finally wrote about both.

LeAnna Lyons, wife of Harry,
sister to Karen & Chris,
friend to many, and
crocheter extraordinaire, and
also, blonde bombshell.

 First, my friend LeAnna Lyons died on the sixth of September. I had four days to feel my feelings about her passing, and then I had to go have surgery. During those four days I ended up putting my face in my hands when a wave of grief hit me. Her death seemed to come so out of the blue.

Then I had to have surgery, and after surgery I was on those stupid pills for pain. I could not think or feel much of anything for more than a week. Now the pills have worn off, and I have started feeling those waves of grief again. My funny, bright, talented friend is gone.

LeAnna was mysteriously sick for a few months, cancer was confirmed a week before she died, and then blink, she was gone.

I should know better at my age than to say, “That’s not fair!” but it stinks, and it is so not fair. She had so many good years ahead of her, and she was robbed, and so was her husband Harry, and so were her sisters and so was I and so were all her friends and relatives, everyone who loved her, and there are a lot of us. Now we notice all the times and places she isn’t there anymore, and we miss her. We will always miss her.

So, LeAnna’s untimely passing is on my heart and my mind, and it will continue to be for a long time.

I am tired of writing about people having cancer, and people dying of cancer, and my own experience with cancer.

The second thing on my mind is Greta Thunberg’s speech at the UN. I was so inspired by that small young person. I mean, damn, girl, what you said. What willingness to speak truth to power. What cojones. It’s too late, the house IS on fire. Wake up!

Greta Thunberg schools us

Ms. Thunberg and all the people young and old around the world who are fighting to slow down climate change and turn it around gave me a feeling of hope which I have not felt for a long time. I have felt swamped by the dreary, banal evil that seems to have taken us over the last few years.

Greta Thunberg is not the only young climate change activist, but for the moment she is the most visible. After her speech the right-wing climate change deniers were all over her, vilifying her, calling her a Nazi and comparing her to Hitler, going so far as to dub in a Hitler rant as a soundtrack over video of her speaking.

Hitler again! I ask you. I wonder if Hitler’s ghost ever wants to come back and yell at us, “Stop calling people with whom you don’t agree Hitler! Study your history you morons! I engulfed all of Europe in war and was responsible for the terror, torture, slaughter, starvation, and suffering of millions! I wasn’t someone whom some people didn’t like because of my skin color or my refusal to ignore science. I was one of history’s worst human beings gone wrong. Stop diluting my evil by flinging my name around!”

He might say something like that.

So, those are the two main things swirling around my mind these days, the loss of my friend LeAnna, and the feeling of hope that humanity may save its own butt yet, despite all the heads that are up that butt.

I wish my children and my grandchild could live in good health and enjoy the beauties of the earth and nature. I wish this for everyone, for every creature.

Even slugs, whom I have learned recently have a hand in propagating moss. Nice to find out after all these years of believing slugs were godless creatures with no purpose that I was wrong.

Rest in peace, LeAnna. Go get ‘em, climate protesters.

Post Op Notes

There is not much to say. To be honest, I am in no shape to say anything, because I am taking pain medication following my lumpectomy surgery, and writing is difficult to impossible when taking pain meds.

The surgery went well, and when my surgeon gets the lab reports back, she’ll know if she got good margins. She thinks she did. “Good margins” means she got all the cancer, plus a bit more tissue surrounding it. Just making sure.

The surgery itself was a snap, for me, at least. I slept through it and woke up feeling great.

The placement of the wires beforehand to indicate where the tumor was – not a snap. Enough said.

The next step, assuming the margins were good, is radiation therapy.

The women who have been through radiation therapy tell me that it burns you, and one survivor has passed me a jar of a cream especially designed to soothe radiated skin. The brand name is “My Girls.”

Well, duh, did I expect breast cancer to be fun?

One thing has become clear to me. All my life, when I heard someone had cancer, I thought of them from that point on as that poor person with cancer. Now I am one of those people, and I realize that I am, that we are, not defined by our cancer. We are the people we have always been, and we have received a crappy diagnosis. We are not a diagnosis walking around in a person who has become secondary to a disease.

Cancer does not define us. It is not who we are. Good thing to know.

I’d write more, but my latest pain pill has kicked in, and my brain has hung up the closed sign.

This has always been my problem with the opiate painkillers. I miss myself. But I am told that I will heal faster if I am not in pain. So I’ll stop trying to write and go continue watching “The Good Place” on Netflix. While playing a bubble breaking game on my phone. Because that’s how I’m rolling this week.

Blessings to all, and grace and peace, from the land of fuzzy thinking.

Carpe Your Diem

Warning: the subject matter of this piece will be hard for some people.

♫

The reminder letter came at least a year ago. “It’s time for you to make an appointment to get a mammogram,” it said.

Am I the only woman who does not say, “Yippee!” when told to get a mammogram? I think not.

The letter went into a pile of things I meant to get to eventually.

 A few weeks ago, it surfaced, and I decided I might as well get it over with. I called the imaging center and made an appointment.

A mammogram is an x-ray of the inside of the breast with the intent of detecting cancer. We women are encouraged to get mammograms regularly after age forty.

Mammograms have come a long way. Around the year 2000 mammograms went digital and became more accurate, but now there is something called digital breast tomosynthesis, or 3D imaging. This means that mammograms are more accurate than ever.

My appointment day came, I went into town to the clinic, and began my mammogram journey. First, they took a set of 2D pictures, and then I was walked down the hall for some 3D pictures. Then I was walked down another hall, where a chipper radiologist who was about half my age and size introduced herself and proceeded to do an ultrasound of my right breast, then – whoo! that goo is cold! – went up into my right armpit, where, she said, my lymph nodes were all clear, and that was good.

By then I knew where this was going.

She showed me one of my mammogram x-rays and pointed out the jagged edges on this one small object.

“Jagged edges are typical of cancer,” she said.

I thought at the time that she was remarkably perky as she gave me this news. I prefer to believe that she was happy to have caught the little tumor* red-handed.

*Later, during surgery, a second tumor was found hiding behind the first tumor, but I didn't find that out until about a month later.

A mammogram does not a diagnosis make, so the next step was to have a needle biopsy. I won’t describe that, except to say it made me think of the Spanish Inquisition.

The results, as expected, were that the little (7 mm, or approximately 3/8 of an inch) tumor is, indeed, cancer.

The word, cancer, carries such a powerful punch of fear and dread. It punched me. I was dumb with shock. Still, even though that visceral reaction prevails, I know rationally that a cancer diagnosis is not as likely to be a death sentence as it once was. My husband, Rick, had cancer twice (prostate and bladder), and was cured twice. Cancer is not what killed him.

I have gradually been getting used to the diagnosis the past few weeks. What I am having a hard time with right now is the dark silence, or the haunted stare, when I tell someone, because, you know, the word, cancer, carries such a powerful punch.

Don’t cry for me, Vashon Island. My surgeon tells me emphatically that this is curable. I will have a lumpectomy, radiation, and a few years of a cancer discouraging drug. This is standard treatment protocol when breast cancer is caught early and small, and a treatment that has brought through many, many survivors. I’m hearing from a lot of those survivors now, who are giving me empathy and tips on the process.

Because I have told some people and the cat is out of the bag, I thought I’d write about the experience as a form of rumor control, and so that I, and you, all of us, know we’re not alone.

Boy, are we not alone. I have learned that there are a lot of people in this community being treated for various forms of cancer, and I did not know that until I said I had cancer, and that brought out the stories. My cancer looks no big deal compared to what some people are experiencing. I am a cancer rookie. I have not started treatment and I feel fine. Once I have surgery, I will not feel fine, and I always remember that life has no guarantees.

Here comes the sermon: I am glad I did not decide to put off my mammogram for another year. Yes, mammograms can be painful, and having a mammogram is one of the most vulnerable moments in a woman’s (and sometimes a man’s) life. I’m always thinking, please, Jesus, don’t let there be an earthquake while I’m clamped into this machine.

Now you will be thinking that, too. Sorry.

Stop putting off your mammogram, and go find out you are healthy, or get saved by early detection.

And seize the day, starting now.

Funny how a cancer diagnosis sharpens your focus on what is important.

Requiescat in pace, Hugh Jones

Hugh Jones, the husband of Bruce Blakemore, has died.

Bruce is the sister of an old friend, John Blakemore. John has lived in Australia for many years now with his Australian wife Julie. Before that John and Julie lived on the island for many years. Julie played and taught violin (still does), and John got his degrees to become a drug counselor after working in theater during his early adulthood.

  John was a dear friend of my husband Rick. They met when John was stage managing at the Seattle Rep in 1971 and Rick was repairing and refinishing furniture used in plays there. They hit it off, and John and his family have always been like family for us.

John and his sister Bruce (named for her Great Aunt Bruce) both worked in theater. Bruce's husband, Hugh Jones, also worked in theater, as well as television and movies.

Bruce and Hugh live in Nova Scotia. John lived there with them for a while, in a brief attempt to immigrate to Canada back in the 70s. In 1978, he bought a house here on the island. Soon after that, while visiting England, he met Julie on a train. They began to talk, hit it off, and the rest is history, as they say.

They married the next year. After living on the island for seventeen years, they and their daughter Clare moved to Australia so Julie could be near her family and get warm again. They now live in a beach town north of Sydney. Even though they are across the Pacific Ocean they still feel like close friends to me and other people on the island.

  Bruce and Hugh came to visit John here right after John bought his house in 1978. They and some other old friends had a rather riotous few days reuniting and getting to know John’s house and the island.

In 2002 Bruce and Hugh were in Vancouver, B.C., because Bruce had a job stage managing a play there.

As it happened, Clare was here on a stopover between New York and Sydney. I drove her up to Vancouver to visit with Bruce and Hugh. We arrived literally at the exact moment Canada defeated the United States in the Olympic ice hockey competition. People were going wild, throwing their windows open and yelling, waving flags, literally dancing in the street. It was a giddy atmosphere.

We spent a lovely couple of days with Bruce and Hugh, exploring downtown Vancouver and Grenville Island and seeing the play Bruce was working on.

Then last Sunday this email arrived from Bruce. She apologized for it being a group email, but she did not think she was up to contacting everyone individually.

She said Hugh died on Saturday. He was killed by a fast-moving and extremely aggressive brain cancer. They were having a normal summer, she said, biking and gardening. No sign that he might be ill. On Friday, August 2, he got a headache, and instead of going away it got worse. On Thursday, the 8th, they called an ambulance for him; by Friday night he was in the ICU; Saturday evening he died.

I could not possibly be as blindsided as Bruce is, but I felt stunned by this news. I wrote my condolences to Bruce and the rest of the family.

John Blakemore has written to me, “I had known brother Hugh for nearly 50 years—always there and now he’s not, at least not in the physical form we knew him—a delightful man of many skills, a man who delighted in both the ancient and the novel. Like Rick, nothing delighted him more than a healthy puzzle as a challenge that lead to an insight, an ah ha moment, a reward of a more spiritual nature as he understood a bit better not only how the object of the challenge worked but also how the universe was functioning at that moment and then the smile would come upon his face.”

Hugh Jones.

It stinks when someone who has been part of your world, of your consciousness of reality as you understood it for the last fifty years, is suddenly gone. I find myself wanting to wrap my arms around Bruce, to hold her and listen to Hugh stories all night long.

But it’s a long drive to Nova Scotia, and I couldn’t hold on to her for months, or years.

So, I shall write to her, and hold her with my words as best I can.

One minute you’re saying to someone, “See you later,” and then later comes, and they are gone.

Rest in peace, Hugh Jones. I hope you know that you made our lives better by your being here.

A Dog, A Cat, and Integration of the New Kid

I have one dog and one cat, both rescues.

The dog, Marley, is an all-white American Staffordshire Terrier with a black nose. She came to us as a foster dog. I was asked if I would take a pit bull. I said I’d give it a whirl. This was about seven years ago, when the bad press for pit bulls was at its height.

Marley was a “foster fail,” which means we ended up adopting her. She was a couch potato, so I knew she was the right dog for me. She is sweet-tempered, not at all like the pit bulls portrayed in the scary stories. You don’t hear those stories so much anymore. I think the more people lived with pit bulls and realized what sweethearts they usually are, the less impact those stories had.

Don’t get me wrong: any dog can bite, and some do. Dogs mauling people is a real thing. Never assume that your sweet pooch would never hurt another dog, chicken, goat, or human being. It happens, especially if Poochy is running with another dog or two.

Marley has been with me for almost seven years and in that time, I have seen her do that dog thing where there is a lot of growling, barking, and snapping of teeth, but no actual contact or bloodshed, twice. First time it happened the other dog was being all alpha dog to her. She wasn’t buying it, and after a quick noisy skirmish, he was sent empty away. I was shocked, but it made me aware that even the sweetest dog needs to be watched. You never know.

My cat, Mellow, is a tuxedo cat – black with white marking. He is an affectionate and independent guy who likes to come in the house and go outside about twenty times a day. He greets visitors by jumping in their laps and settling down for a nice purr and drool session.

Most afternoons he can be found curled up asleep on my bed. During the night he likes to sleep on top of me for short periods of time, then his head comes up like he has suddenly remembered something, and he leaves.

Mellow hunts. This summer I have glanced outside a few times and seen him tormenting some poor rodent he’s caught, and once, a bird. I don’t mind him catching rodents. I don’t like it when he gets a bird, but a cat’s a cat.

He’s a typical cat in many ways. Likes to get up on the keyboard when he sees me at the computer, and if I shoo him off, he’ll come back and lie down on my mouse hand or crawl up on my shoulder and cuddle into my neck. When I’m reading, he likes to head-butt the book. When I’m writing longhand, he likes to head-butt my hand. If I’m doing a puzzle, he lies down on the puzzle. Sometimes he lies in the meat loaf position, sometimes he sticks a hind leg in the air and licks his butt. See? Typical cat.

Marley and Mellow have worked out their relationship over the years and peacefully co-exist most of the time. Sometimes Mellow will hiss and swat at Marley as she walks by. Marley’s been good about not retaliating.

Often, they snuggle up close to each other on my bed, black cat and white dog, an animal yin yang.

Now, good fortune smiled on me a few months ago in the form of a renter named Erin. If you have ever rented out a room in your house, you know how rare it is to find someone with whom you really get along.

After Erin had been here a few months, she decided to bring her cat here. The cat, officially named Chairman Meow but Bunny to his friends, had been living with Erin’s mother while Erin traveled.

Bunny is a big beautiful, sweet-natured kitty, part Maine Coon cat. He tipped the scales at twenty-four pounds when he arrived. He’s large.

Erin and I both figured that Mellow might have problems with another cat moving into his space, so Erin studied videos on how to introduce the cats to each other. “Slowly” seems to be key.

They have their separate territories in the house. Mellow will run if he feels threatened (did I mention that Bunny is large?), but gradually the two cats have been able to spend a little more time in the same room peacefully. So far so good. We have hopes.

I wish I’d had videos about how to introduce a new critter to the family back when I was having babies. But there were no videos, no internet, no youtube. Oh, children, it was hard times.

Post Script a few months on: Hopes are dashed. The cats hate each other. There is hissing and clawing every day, and sometimes Marley gets into the mix.

I consciously divide their territories by closing doors, and there is sweet peace, but being in the same room together? Not on.