a radio was on.

that line of poetry has been flickering in my mind of late, like fireflies in the gloam of an Ohio evening, or the dark embers of a finished fire, pushed to the side with the fireplace brush and ah! those embers are still burning, those orange bits of fire that will likely die out of their own accord, but worried mothers can take those tiny bits of fire and make of them conflagrations of entire households after we all go to bed. The line of poetry is from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which I first read in college, when poetry meant everything, when I thought language would save me.  So bear with me, lovers of the declarative sentence. I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. Some of you know that my afternoon naps, which I need, I need that stolen sleep in order to be awake and present with the boys when they come home from school, falling over themselves to tell me their days, to squabble about toothpaste and pajamas, to tuck into my body to hear Captain Underpants, an unfor...

that line of poetry has been flickering in my mind of late, like fireflies in the gloam of an Ohio evening, or the dark embers of a finished fire, pushed to the side with the fireplace brush and ah! those embers are still burning, those orange bits of fire that will likely die out of their own accord, but worried mothers can take those tiny bits of fire and make of them conflagrations of entire households after we all go to bed. The line of poetry is from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which I first read in college, when poetry meant everything, when I thought language would save me.  So bear with me, lovers of the declarative sentence. I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. Some of you know that my afternoon naps, which I need, I need that stolen sleep in order to be awake and present with the boys when they come home from school, falling over themselves to tell me their days, to squabble about toothpaste and pajamas, to tuck into my body to hear Captain Underpants, an...

I get emails in my inbox from Inspire, which is an online forum for people with lung cancer sponsored by the American Lung Association, and I try not to click on them.  But I do. I'm a sucker for postings like: "Three years on Tarceva and going strong." But I sometimes click on the sad ones too, postings with titles like "Seven years and bad news" or "Fatigue and weakness--is this normal?" Those were actual postings this morning.  You would think I have enough of my own rabbit holes to burrow into without seeking out the stories of my fellow travelers. But sometimes it feels like a test I need to take, this reading of other peoples' stories to find myself in them, or, perhaps to see the ways I am not in them.  I tell myself it's important to know what happens to other people on Tarceva, and inevitably I grieve.  (But I do get great tips from these forums.  I learned to rub tea tree oil into my nail beds to help with the cracked, dry-to-the-poin...

I get emails in my inbox from Inspire, which is an online forum for people with lung cancer sponsored by the American Lung Association, and I try not to click on them.  But I do. I'm a sucker for postings like: "Three years on Tarceva and going strong." But I sometimes click on the sad ones too, postings with titles like "Seven years and bad news" or "Fatigue and weakness--is this normal?" Those were actual postings this morning.  You would think I have enough of my own rabbit holes to burrow into without seeking out the stories of my fellow travelers. But sometimes it feels like a test I need to take, this reading of other peoples' stories to find myself in them, or, perhaps to see the ways I am not in them.  I tell myself it's important to know what happens to other people on Tarceva, and inevitably I grieve.  (But I do get great tips from these forums.  I learned to rub tea tree oil into my nail beds to help with the cracked, dry-to-the-poin...

I have been sorting through some old poems, and here is a fragment from a poem I wrote in 2011, when I believed I would easily live into my nineties, when the idea that I would get lung cancer was as preposterous to me as it was on the day before I got the ER dismissal sheet this summer (because my anemia had spiraled out of control and I popped over to the ER for a transfusion (and I thought I would just skip over back to work after the transfusion (a sweet thought from someone who was confused about the pace of things in the ER where, although I did need the transfusion (and desperately needed to be diagnosed with lung cancer), I was not an”emergency,” as compared to the guy who fell off a ladder at work and needed surgery or the drug addict who was overdosing (and I never would have believed that within six months I myself would be calling 911 to report my own possible overdose (see earlier blog posting (spoiler alert: I lived)))--the report that quietly told me to follow up because...

I have been sorting through some old poems, and here is a fragment from a poem I wrote in 2011, when I believed I would easily live into my nineties, when the idea that I would get lung cancer was as preposterous to me as it was on the day before I got the ER dismissal sheet this summer (because my anemia had spiraled out of control and I popped over to the ER for a transfusion (and I thought I would just skip over back to work after the transfusion (a sweet thought from someone who was confused about the pace of things in the ER where, although I did need the transfusion (and desperately needed to be diagnosed with lung cancer), I was not an”emergency,” as compared to the guy who fell off a ladder at work and needed surgery or the drug addict who was overdosing (and I never would have believed that within six months I myself would be calling 911 to report my own possible overdose (see earlier blog posting (spoiler alert: I lived)))--the report that quietly told me to follow up becaus...

Kyle is working round-the-clock right now, so I wanted to let you all know that I had a set of scans last week that showed nothing. As in the cancer had neither increased nor decreased. This is good news. I have these scans every three months to see if the cancer has managed to mutate in a way that the medicine no longer treats, and now I am good for another three months. I had a great talk with my therapist--if you are close to me, you know I love my therapist in a way that makes it confusing to me that I can't just have her over for seder--and she helped me understand my grief at hearing the news that the scans were fine. What I really wanted to hear, in the world of fantastic miracles, the land where you open a wardrobe door and tumble into Narnia, is that I don't have cancer anymore. So I had to muddle my way to gratitude over the last couple of days. In the next three months I hope to write more, read more, eat meals with friends and families more, and spend some real time...