Lessons from a hugely pregnant robin
I've been in a dark place for the last few days. Oh, if you saw me...you wouldn't know. We cancer fighters are pretty good at subterfuge. You learn early that if you are having a bad day and tell someone, they do one of three things:
1) Try to cheer you up by telling you funny stories. This puts you in the position of adding more subterfuge to subterfuge. Pretending that it worked! LOL!!
2) Tell you how lucky you are. It could be so much worse. This makes a sad person feel even worse. Like...hey...stop acting like such a fucking baby. So you are dying of cancer. You could have been in a disfiguring car accident today, be hospitalized, AND have terminal cancer.
3) They try to get you to share your feelings. I am not adverse to sharing my feelings. About politics. I don't really want to share my feelings when I am sad, though. Unless I am with my "tribe" of other people who have to take chemo, deal with mouth sores, exhaustion, aching bones, and chemo brain.
So, I've been diving into my books, listening to my music (thank you, Lee DeWyze, Kathleen Edwards, and Vance Joy....) and sitting outside, watching the birds.
These, I have found, work. At least for me. I could call someone in my support group, but I have found that while I do get a lot out of going to group each week, I seldom talk unless the group leader asks me a direct question, cajoling me to share. I am like most of my family, we don't do well sharing our feelings in groups.
T knows almost all that is in my heart, but even she doesn't really know how dark it gets in there some days. How I once scared myself silly by looking up all these blogs of women with metastatic breast cancer and found that over three fourths of them had already died. How sometimes, I just sit and rock back and forth and think that I will do just about anything if I can die with dignity. I do not want to be shitting my pants or bedridden. I know that the odds are good that I will, at some point be one or the other, or both. I have already told T that I want to be in hospice if that happens. I used to swear that I wanted to die at home, but now I worry about her quitting her job and sitting at my bedside, changing my diapers.
NO.
I think about how when I was hospitalized with leukemia (yes...I had leukemia before I was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer and beat it....eleven months later I went on to the next cancer...) I think about how much I hated being in the hospital. That smell. There was one PA who I trusted. She was the only one who I really shared much with. I told her that I felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. That I felt that I had met some really different people but that I really just wanted to go home. A few hours later, the psychologist that they had assigned to me came in. He was an older man who didn't push. But, he came in and told me that I was to be released a week early from the hospital, even though the head doctor on my case didn't really agree. I remember his eyes, not really kind, but candid. I remember what he said.
In the end, it is all most people really want. Just to go home. And 9 times out of 10, no matter how sick they are, they do better. You will do better at home, I think.
I did. I was cautioned not to be around people, if possible. I couldn't risk catching a cold. But, just being home made all the difference. I still had to go to the clinic every day for arsenic and chemo treatments, but I slept in my own bed at night.
I would very much like to die at home, but not at the expense of wearing out the person whom I love most in the world. I am lucky. I have a sister, a niece, two cousins, several friends, a child, who would come to help me if I asked. But, I would never ask.
Still, I hope to just die in my sleep before it gets too bad. I have hope.
So, today I was outside reading by the bird bath. The birds are used to me now and pay me no mind, even though I am barely two feet away from them. Our bird bath is popular. And, surprisingly, there is little pecking order behavior. Cardinals, bluejays, bluebirds (only here for a few weeks before they go south), woodpeckers, grackles, sparrows, chickadees, dark eyed junces, red winged blackbirds, robins, nuthatches...even a few mourning doves show up for baths and drinks. Much splashing ensues. And they share and take turns. Well, usually. The crows are not particularly good at sharing or taking turns. But, in our backyard, we seem to have achieved some sort of equilibrium. Even the squirrels are allowed their time.
Today, I watched a hugely pregnant robin sitting squarely in the center of the bird bath, simply soaking. She would flutter her wings now and then or take a sip, but you could tell that she was just....resting. That she was getting tired of lugging around her cache of eggs and would soon be ready to let them go and then go on to the even harder task of keeping them all fed and safe.
I thought about last week's bad news. The labs that didn't go my way. The beginning of the end, I thought. I listen in group. Limbo only lasts for so long. I will probably have to try a new set of drugs soon. And then another. And then there will be nothing more to try. My oncologist made it clear from the start. This was not a battle that we would be winning. This was a battle where we were holding the door. Eventually, the wolf would get in. But, in the meantime, I was given the gift of time.
I watched the robin. I thought, she doesn't worry about whether she'll be around to feed her brood....she just....lives. And for now, she is enjoying her respite in the water.
You can learn a lot from a hugely pregnant robin.
I think I'll go out and get a honey vanilla soy latte, extra hot and with three good shakes of nutmeg and cinnamon. Buy the latest Esquire with Kit Harington on the cover.
Put on Hockey Skates by Kathleen Edwards.
I think I'll just get out there and live. Enjoy the water.
1) Try to cheer you up by telling you funny stories. This puts you in the position of adding more subterfuge to subterfuge. Pretending that it worked! LOL!!
2) Tell you how lucky you are. It could be so much worse. This makes a sad person feel even worse. Like...hey...stop acting like such a fucking baby. So you are dying of cancer. You could have been in a disfiguring car accident today, be hospitalized, AND have terminal cancer.
3) They try to get you to share your feelings. I am not adverse to sharing my feelings. About politics. I don't really want to share my feelings when I am sad, though. Unless I am with my "tribe" of other people who have to take chemo, deal with mouth sores, exhaustion, aching bones, and chemo brain.
So, I've been diving into my books, listening to my music (thank you, Lee DeWyze, Kathleen Edwards, and Vance Joy....) and sitting outside, watching the birds.
These, I have found, work. At least for me. I could call someone in my support group, but I have found that while I do get a lot out of going to group each week, I seldom talk unless the group leader asks me a direct question, cajoling me to share. I am like most of my family, we don't do well sharing our feelings in groups.
T knows almost all that is in my heart, but even she doesn't really know how dark it gets in there some days. How I once scared myself silly by looking up all these blogs of women with metastatic breast cancer and found that over three fourths of them had already died. How sometimes, I just sit and rock back and forth and think that I will do just about anything if I can die with dignity. I do not want to be shitting my pants or bedridden. I know that the odds are good that I will, at some point be one or the other, or both. I have already told T that I want to be in hospice if that happens. I used to swear that I wanted to die at home, but now I worry about her quitting her job and sitting at my bedside, changing my diapers.
NO.
I think about how when I was hospitalized with leukemia (yes...I had leukemia before I was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer and beat it....eleven months later I went on to the next cancer...) I think about how much I hated being in the hospital. That smell. There was one PA who I trusted. She was the only one who I really shared much with. I told her that I felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. That I felt that I had met some really different people but that I really just wanted to go home. A few hours later, the psychologist that they had assigned to me came in. He was an older man who didn't push. But, he came in and told me that I was to be released a week early from the hospital, even though the head doctor on my case didn't really agree. I remember his eyes, not really kind, but candid. I remember what he said.
In the end, it is all most people really want. Just to go home. And 9 times out of 10, no matter how sick they are, they do better. You will do better at home, I think.
I did. I was cautioned not to be around people, if possible. I couldn't risk catching a cold. But, just being home made all the difference. I still had to go to the clinic every day for arsenic and chemo treatments, but I slept in my own bed at night.
I would very much like to die at home, but not at the expense of wearing out the person whom I love most in the world. I am lucky. I have a sister, a niece, two cousins, several friends, a child, who would come to help me if I asked. But, I would never ask.
Still, I hope to just die in my sleep before it gets too bad. I have hope.
So, today I was outside reading by the bird bath. The birds are used to me now and pay me no mind, even though I am barely two feet away from them. Our bird bath is popular. And, surprisingly, there is little pecking order behavior. Cardinals, bluejays, bluebirds (only here for a few weeks before they go south), woodpeckers, grackles, sparrows, chickadees, dark eyed junces, red winged blackbirds, robins, nuthatches...even a few mourning doves show up for baths and drinks. Much splashing ensues. And they share and take turns. Well, usually. The crows are not particularly good at sharing or taking turns. But, in our backyard, we seem to have achieved some sort of equilibrium. Even the squirrels are allowed their time.
Today, I watched a hugely pregnant robin sitting squarely in the center of the bird bath, simply soaking. She would flutter her wings now and then or take a sip, but you could tell that she was just....resting. That she was getting tired of lugging around her cache of eggs and would soon be ready to let them go and then go on to the even harder task of keeping them all fed and safe.
I thought about last week's bad news. The labs that didn't go my way. The beginning of the end, I thought. I listen in group. Limbo only lasts for so long. I will probably have to try a new set of drugs soon. And then another. And then there will be nothing more to try. My oncologist made it clear from the start. This was not a battle that we would be winning. This was a battle where we were holding the door. Eventually, the wolf would get in. But, in the meantime, I was given the gift of time.
I watched the robin. I thought, she doesn't worry about whether she'll be around to feed her brood....she just....lives. And for now, she is enjoying her respite in the water.
You can learn a lot from a hugely pregnant robin.
I think I'll go out and get a honey vanilla soy latte, extra hot and with three good shakes of nutmeg and cinnamon. Buy the latest Esquire with Kit Harington on the cover.
Put on Hockey Skates by Kathleen Edwards.
I think I'll just get out there and live. Enjoy the water.
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