When the Universe Delivers a Swift Shift in Perspective
I’ve been absent here due to a bit of a health crisis. The scary kind that catches you unaware, even me, seasoned health-problem pro that I am!
I was feeling crunched, worrying about finishing an essay for the upcoming Horror Writers Association newsletter, an article for Poet’s Market, edits for my PR for Poets book and trying to find blurbs for my upcoming poetry book, Field Guide to the End of the World. I was a little stressed, a little under the weather, trying to balance my writing life and everything else. Ironically, perhaps, I was also working on a talk I was supposed to give this Monday at UW Tacoma on overcoming discouragement and rejection.
But life likes to throw a little curve ball at us once in a while, and that’s what happened this week. Not only was I in the hospital by Wednesday, but I was given unexpected news due to some of the tests.
I know a lot of my friends in their forties, and even thirties, have already been through cancer scares, and I’ve even been though a couple myself. (I remember one doctor telling me when I was twenty: “It’s AIDS, lupus, or cancer. We’ll know on Monday. Have a good weekend!” PS: It was none of those things.) But in doing some tests for some terrible abdominal pain, they found something that might or might not be a serious kind of cancer. Only, they left me waiting in bed, not giving me any of my test results, for hours, which is unusual – in the same hospital a couple of months ago, they’d cheerfully come in to let us know the results of the same tests they’d run on me for Glenn within minutes of getting the tests. The nurse, when I inquired, said the ER doc would come in and give me the test results “after he talked to my doctor on the phone” – and the ER doc wouldn’t look me in the eyes as he gave me my diagnosis and check out information, telling me to follow up with my doctor as soon as possible. When they gave me my printed reports, there were the words from both the doctor and the radiology report: “concerning for metastasis.” I was on both painkillers, allergy and nausea medicines when I received the news, but woke up the next day thinking: Oh my God. What? It made all the things I’d been stressing out about seem puny and unimportant in comparison. I had to cancel a bunch of things as I rested up, barely able to eat or sleep for two days from the continued nausea and pain, intermittently looking up things like “Tumor Marker blood tests” and “what else could explain x (what they saw on the CT scan) besides cancer?”
One of the benefits – yes, benefits – of these kinds of health scares, the kind I’m going through now, is a kind of flipped switch of perspective. I’d been agonizing over rejections and no’s from people I’d asked for blurbs one day, and then the next I was thinking: Have I accomplished what I wanted to with my life? What would I regret not doing? How could I approach the end – if I had to – with grace and verve, like one of my role models who is going through liver cancer right now, still traveling and living like she has all the time in the world. She has not let herself become anything anyone would call a “victim.” But boy, it’s scary stuff, this life. All of us have an expiration date, though it’s easy to forget that. It’s easy not tell people we love them, easy to get mired down in the details of tax receipts and chores and minor complaints. I feel very lucky to have had the good breaks that I’ve had – happy to have some family living around me now, a great supportive husband, happy to have my fifth poetry book coming out this year.
If you had told me at thirteen the good and bad things that were coming, I don’t think I would have done anything differently. My body has certainly been an uncertain vessel, from the time I was in my early twenties – thwarting my attempt at a technology management career that perhaps wasn’t my best destiny anyway – keeping my from traveling to some of the places I’d still like to see – though I’ve made it to Paris three times, I’d still like to see England, Ireland, maybe the South Pacific. But mostly I’ve done the things I wanted to do, with the people I wanted to do them with. If I don’t get to accomplish everything else I had planned, well, I still think I’d be happy with what I’ve done.
Hey, maybe this is nothing, another incidental finding, another scare and nothing more. I hope so. In the meantime, maybe I won’t sweat the rejections, the bill paying, the continual grating annoyances of being alive, as much. Maybe I’ll be moved to be braver with my energy, my heart, and my writing. This feels pretty brave, right now – talking about this in public – and hopefully it might help someone else going through something similar, because, isn’t that why we write in the first place?
