Dance with the Reaper

This is not an advice blog.

I am not a doctor, nor am I a therapist, nor am I a life coach. If you want advice, there is plenty of it out there, so don’t ask me for it. I can only speak to my own experience.

That being said, a lot of people do ask me for advice, specifically, advice on what I did after cancer to stop looking like a corpse, because a lot of cancer patients keep that distinctive grey pallor for years.

I am, in popular parlance, not down with that.

The makeup industry thinks that you can fix the problem with cosmetics. That doesn’t work for me. I might look good, but it does not make me feel better. It makes me feel as though I had come out the loser in a run-in with a professional in the field of mortuary science.

When I was in treatment, I chose the route of brutal honesty: I wore sunglasses and a ski cap. This had as much to do with comfort as anything, but there was a certain amount of passive-aggressiveness involved in my look: if I was going to endure having cancer, the people who looked at me would have to endure knowing that I had cancer. My family had it particularly bad: at home,  did not always wear a hat (it depended on whether my head was cold), and all my hair had fallen out except the greys, so at home, I looked like Gollum.

For a year or so after I finished treatment, I continued to look like a zombie, and I knew it, but I didn’t care, because I also knew there was not much I could do about it. I gradually began to care, sort of, and so I gradually began to figure out what works for me, as well as what does not work so well.

Here is a list of the resources and practices that I do in order not to look like an escaped extra from Dawn of the Dead, along with a layman’s explanation of why chemotherapy made me look so extremely … dead, and what I have done to fix it. This is going to be a long post, and one full of too much information. Stop reading now if you don’t want to get grossed out.

You should talk to your doctor and do your own research and do what works for you. Here is what works for me.

Skin Care

Chemotherapy, at least the kind that I had, attacks all of the rapidly-dividing cells in your body. It kills cancer cells, and it kills a lot of healthy cells as well, including hair follicles, fingernails, skin, and mucous membranes. Oh, you should know, mucous membranes include the entire lining of your digestive system including mouth and lips, the insides of your eyelids, all of your lady parts, and the area around your anus. By “attack” I mean that the cells in all of these parts of your body will die, and will continue to die with each round of chemotherapy. You never think, what happens to the dead cells? At least, you never think that until you go through it.

With the hair, it’s obvious: it falls off. Shaving your head is a ritual that every cancer patient goes through, and it’s a mawkish and poignant chapter in most of the cancer stories that you read in those moving books, the ones I never read, the ones that my friends all sent me, that I brought straight from the mailbox to the recycle bin, because no one’s cancer was quite like my cancer, and besides, hair is the least of it.

Here is what happens to the dead cells: you shed them. Your skin leaves a powdery residue wherever you go; it sinks into your sheets, and it settles on the floor around the chair where you sit, and if you are like me and play Warcraft all the time, it leaves a dust of death all over your laptop and your mouse and mouse pad. It smells. Those cans of compressed air? I needed to keep one next to my computer and spray it off every hour or two.  I still do. Chemotherapy also attacks the collagen layer of your skin so it gets dry and thin, like the skin of a very old lady. It’s a one-two punch: your skin needs help exfoliating, because the normal processes aren’t able to keep up with the massive amounts of dead skin you need to slough, but your skin also gets thin and delicate so you can’t exfoliate it as vigorously as you normally would.

The chemotherapy books address this, but they don’t give it justice.

My situation was further complicated by the fact that I’m the point at the end of the nausea spectrum, so the least little thing would make me feel like throwing up. The nausea associated with chemotherapy has a lot of factors causing it.  The disintegration of the mucous membranes lining your intestines is certainly up on the list, but in my case, nausea triggers included the smell and feel of a lot of things, especially most lotions.

My solution during chemotherapy was to use a a combination of the following products on my skin to combat dryness: Desert Essence Organic Bulgarian Lavender Hand and Body Lotion with a shout-out to my friend Heather who first sent it to me, olive oil, coconut oil, a product called Egyptian Magic that is extremely expensive, and worth it, and, on my face, diaper rash ointment.  I prefer to use Weleeda Calendula Diaper Care but I also like the Desitin Creamy Diaper Ointment with Aloe.  I also can tolerate Earthscience Almond-Aloe Moisturizer without feeling queasy, even the one with sunscreen. My favorite moisturizer, Nature’s Gate Everyday Moisturizer with Vitamin E, seems to have been discontinued; at any rate, I can’t find it and if an alert reader would point me to a web site that stocks it, I would be grateful.

During radiation, they told me not to put anything on my skin, so I didn’t. My skin in the radiation fields pretty much fell off: I had huge swaths of raw areas that oozed, like a bad sunburn. They gave me stick-on bandages that  helped hugely, and as I healed, I found the best treatment was Egyptian Magic, or coconut oil. I was given a lot of radiation gels, but they did not work as well for me as they do for other people.

Also, someone, and I am not even sure who, but I think it was a friend of my mom’s, sent me a box of beauty supplies that included a salt-and-oil exfoliating body scrub with a heavenly smell that cut through any nausea to clear my head and make me feel better. It came in a little dark glass tub. I’d love to know what it was so that I can say “Thank you” and also buy some more.

After chemotherapy, I continued to moisturize, and as my skin healed, I began to exfoliate more deliberately. I quickly learned the hard way that the wonderful Japanese washcloth I had been used to using was too rough for my newly delicate skin; it gave me a rash that got infected. Unable to find the wonderful salt scrub, I concocted my own: Morton’s salt stirred into a mixture of either honey or olive oil, or both. I used this instead of soap for over a year because my skin was too sensitive to tolerate soap. As my body began rebuilding itself, exfoliation became more of an issue as the live cells pushed aside the dead ones. There is a peculiar smell associated with this process; in addition to shedding dead cells through my skin, I also shed them from the inside which has an interesting effect on my digestion, and my interesting I mean “OMG THAT IS DISGUSTING.” I use a lot of essential oils, mixed into the olive oil I put on my skin after a shower, or just in the bath. The smells I like are lavender, grapefruit, ylang ylang, orange, bergamot, and nutmeg.

I sometimes would take four or five showers a day, just to get rid of the smell, or the feeling of ick, washing myself with just honey on a washcloth. It’s a great cleanser and I still use it about half the time.

My lips continued to shed for two and a half years. I would leave a mark on every glass I drank from, not a lipstick mark, but a skin-colored lipstick-shaped mark that was actually a deposit of a thin layer of lip mixed with saliva and whatever I was drinking. If you think it sounds disgusting, you are right, but not as disgusting as having it happen to you. “Wear lipstick,” people kept advising me, but they did not understand what it feels like to smear greasy thick lipstick onto disintegrating lips, how the pigment in the lipstick mixes with the dead skin cells and makes pinkish clumps of goo all over my lips. It’s vile. The one product that worked for me was Badger Orange and Lavender Lip Balm, which is one of my favorite things. I learned to exfoliate my lips with a washcloth and also with Mary Kay lip scrub and a shout-out to my friend Sara who first gave me some. Now I can wear lipstick if I am careful to stay hydrated.

It wasn’t just my lips. The insides of my mouth also disintegrated into a goo that gave me too much insight into the process used to manufacture glue. I counteract this by continuously drinking water with a splash of POM pomegranate juice which my mother first bought for me. I don’t know why it works, but it does.

A lot of chemotherapy patients lose their nails. I never did, and I credit the fact that I rubbed Nature’s Gate Vitamin E Oil into my nail beds all the time.

The Deathly Pallor

Chemotherapy, in addition to knocking out your cancer, skin, hair, nails, and mucous membranes, knocks out your bone marrow, where you rapidly produce blood cells. That’s why it compromises your immune system, because you do not manufacture white blood cells, and causes anemia, because you do not manufacture red blood cells. When you don’t have enough red blood cells, you get tired all the time because your whole body doesn’t get quite enough oxygen, and you also loose the rosy glow that is the result of plenty of healthy red blood coursing through the capillaries under your skin. The lack of red blood cells, coupled with the fact that your skin is literally dying produces a look that is unmistakable, and if you happen to spend a lot of time in the embalming room, you will recognize it.

For the longest time, makeup just didn’t work for me. It sat on top of my skin and mixed with the thin layer of dead cells that ought to be exfoliated, plus the feel and smell of it makes me queasy. Now I can use Channel foundation, but it’s a recent development, and it only works if my skin is well-moisturized and exfoliated, so skin care is a priority for me even now, and by priority I mean that I spend almost an hour every day messing with my skin.

I fixed the deathly pallor the old fashioned way: with diet and exercise. My dietician told me to never eat red meat again, but I do, because I need the iron. It makes a difference for me. Huge. I tried to give it up recently and within two weeks I had once again begun to resemble something from 28 Days Later. I also get less tired if I eat a steak once a week or so. One of my doctors told me that my red blood cells are still a little funky, which perhaps explains a lot.

I don’t tan, and I try to wear sunscreen every day, assuming that the smell and feel of my sunscreen doesn’t make me queasy. Skin cancer is the last thing I need.

Beady Red Eyes

I have beady red eyes with bags and dark circles around them. Not bad ones, but they are there and it makes me unhappy to see them. Part of it is aging, and by aging I specifically mean the kind of “steals years from your life torture machine from the Princess Bride effect” that is a side effect of chemotherapy. I aged 20 years in six months, and the only consolation is that  I think of worse things.

I have tried every eye cream I can find and the one that works best for me is Preparation H. I also use concealer with my makeup when I wear makeup and it does make a difference. I’d like to get my eyelashes tinted again but my eyes are still super-sensitive from chemotherapy  — it’s the mucous membrane thing. They get irritated at the drop of a hat. Sometimes I soak cotton pads in Witch Hazel for a comforting eye soak, or I put tea bags on them, or I just wet my fingertip with tea and rub it on my eyelids when they burn.

Hair

I have hair, which is not something I take for granted, and I also have good hair. I wash it and condition it and ignore it, and Art, who is a genius, cuts it and colors it for me. I use Pert shampoo and Pantene conditioner because it’s the one thing in my routine that has not changed for 30 years. I know there are better products out there but I just don’t want to change.

Feet

My feet. It’s just a horror show, or at least it was. I don’t even want to get into the details, but what finally did the trick was washing them, putting lotion on them, and wrapping them in plastic bags for an hour while the lotion soaks in. Every day.

There are worse things to discuss, but, frankly, writing this post has made me sad so I am going to sign off and go mess with my skin for an hour before bed.

I hope someone somewhere gets something useful from all this. I used to feel confident in my looks, and now it is all I can manage to not feel ugly. My mom says everyone goes through that as they age, but it’s supposed to be a gradual process.

My advice is to wash your face and floss and brush your teeth every night before you go to bed, moisturize if you need to, wear sunscreen, and be happy.

Until now, I’ve always lived in international cities: Miami, New York, Tokyo; even our years in New Hampshire had an international flair because a third of Chris’s business school class hailed from abroad. Here in Dallas, the closest thing to an international community I’ve found is the line at the cashier at Costco up in East Plano. It’s always a highlight of our trips to Costco: the visual reminder that we live in a world where people are different from one another, and yet all shop at Costco. It’s where Chris and I go when we get twitchy at the same-same-sameness of our regularly scheduled lives.

When we lived in Tokyo, our apartment was around the corner from the Saudi embassy, and there were several women, other mothers, I would see frequently, at the park, and walking on the street wearing their burqas and pushing strollers with babies the same age as mine.  I’m usually good at making small talk with other women, but I never got beyond “Hello” with the wives of the Saudi embassy staff. I tried, and they tried, but it was 2003  and motherhood was not enough of a common bond to overcome the global context that made conversation beyond “Hello” and “Nice day, isn’t it?” unbearably awkward.

Cancer is different.

I’m not a particularly talky person in the waiting room. My first impression of the lounge outside the Breast Center at MD Anderson Cancer Center was that I was in a room full of women in their sixties wearing wigs, and that I didn’t fit in, and I didn’t want to fit in. Pregnancy-related breast cancer is rare enough, or frightening enough, that it doesn’t Google auto-complete, and the most relevant article to link to on my disease is to the Times of India. Finding anyone in the breast cancer waiting room that I had anything in common with was rare. One woman, a woman from California only slightly older than me  with children only a little older than mine, chose to sit with a blanket covering her from the top of her head to her knees, face included, rather than participate in the small talk of the radiation therapy waiting room, small talk that revolved around “we’re almost done, we made it!” That attitude didn’t apply to her, and it didn’t apply to me either, except in retrospect, but back then, the odds of my being here now was less than half, and I knew it. The prognosis of my veiled friend from California was even grimmer: she had inflammatory breast cancer, and it wasn’t responding to radiation.

“They don’t understand what it’s like,” I said to her once in sotto voce, before she retreated beneath her blanket. “When you have small children, it is different, and worse.”

“I know,” she said. “Thank you.”

I often wonder whether my friend made it. I doubt it, but I hope so, and I still pray for her and her family, and I always will.

“I’m not glad you’re here,” I said to her once. “but I’m glad our paths crossed.”

The only other woman with whom I felt any sort of connection during the eight months I was in treatment was a woman with whom I had one conversation in the restroom of the chemotherapy floor at MD Anderson.

I once told my oncologist, who was a hospital administrator 80% of the time and a doctor 20% of the time, that the chemotherapy floor upstairs was like going to a really good spa.

“I’m glad to hear that,” he told me. “We put a lot of resources into that facility.”

I was washing my hands in the restroom in the chemo spa next to a young woman wearing a veil. She smiled at me, so I asked her whether she was here with a relative. “No, it’s me,” she said.

“Me too,” I responded, “But you knew that. Why else wear a ski cap in Texas in July.”

“Is it easier when everyone always covers their hair so you don’t stand out as much?” I asked her.

“Yes and no. I don’t think it’s ever easier,” she said, and she was right. We chatted some more. Her husband was back home in Saudi Arabia with her son, the same age as my son. She was two years younger than me, and had been to college. Like me, she found her own breast cancer, although her symptom was not the tell-tale lump: her breast began to bleed out the nipple. “So of course, I came here right away,” she said.

I think of her whenever some smug person tells me, as smug people often do, that “over there” in the Middle East, mortality rates from breast cancer are much higher because women don’t have equal rights and they are ashamed of their bodies and doctors don’t examine them, and there is a taboo, and aren’t we lucky to be Americans with our enlightened attitudes about women’s health.

When I lived in Japan, word on the street among Western expats was that if you found a lump in your breast you’d better fly home and have it checked out because in Japan, you might go in for a biopsy and wake up with a mastectomy while your doctor discussed your case with your husband, as doctors in the U.S. used to do before Betty Ford stood up for us. Japan also has the lowest mortality rate from breast cancer of any industrialized nation, whereas Denmark, not known for prudery, leads the world in breast cancer deaths.

I don’t know what the relative mortality rate is from breast cancer in the U.S. versus the Arab world. I haven’t been able to locate any reliable information on this rumor, but it seems to me that relative mortality rates from  breast cancer are a lot more complicated than some fictitious link between wearing a body veil versus Daisy Dukes, bikini on top. If I had to wager a guess, I would think a stronger link could be drawn to “Can afford to go to the doctor” versus “Can’t afford to go to the doctor” adjusted for “Is there a doctor around anyway?” than to relative rates of national modesty and attitudes toward women’s bodies.

You do see a lot of women in burqas walking around MD Anderson, about as frequently as I would see women in burqas walking around Roppongi around the Saudi Embassy.

My take is that the richest people in the world can afford to go to the best place in the world when they get cancer.

On the one hand, there is a lot to say about the global disparity in heath care, as well as the disparity in health care standards between rich people and poor people in the United States, and not enough people are saying it. On the other hand, do I find it comforting to know that the people who could go anywhere to get their cancer treated go to the same place as me? Of course I do. Am I absolutely jazzed that my plastic surgeon was the man picked by the Saudi Royal family to operate on one of their family members, a woman whose case presented exactly like mine? Of course I am. Am I slightly obsessed with curiosity as to whether that member of the Saud family is the same lovely young woman I met in the restroom years ago? Yeah. Am I going to ask my doctor? Not on your life.  But if it is, I’m glad she is doing okay.

“So of course I came here right away,” said the young woman from Saudi Arabia I met in the restroom on the eight floor of the Mays Clinic at MD Anderson Cancer Center three and a half years ago.

The myth that women in Saudi Arabia die of breast cancer because the men in charge allow it to happen seems to be a misguided notion at best, and more accurately described as a filthy hateful lie perpetuated by bigots in an effort to dehumanize and demonize “our enemy.”

Is America the gold standard of healthcare? Yes. Can we do better at spreading the quality of care around? Yes. Do you still occasionally hear horror stories about health care in America?

Yes.

That any woman would have to travel to a filthy charnel house to seek medical care horrifies me; that it happened in the same city where I went to college just makes me even more terrified.

Here’s what scares me the most  — this quote from the Associated Press story by Maryclaire Dale:

Johnson, then 21, had a 3-year-old daughter when she became pregnant again. She said she first went to Planned Parenthood in downtown Philadelphia but was frightened away by protesters.

“The picketers out there, they just scared me half to death,” Johnson, now 30, recalled this week.

Someone sent her to Gosnell’s West Philadelphia clinic, at the Women’s Medical Society, saying anti-abortion protesters wouldn’t be a problem there.

Denial. Fear.

It’s why women don’t get mammograms. They’re afraid of what they might find out.

It’s the belief that if you believe something strong enough, your dreams will come true.

Denial. Fear.

If we make abortions illegal, or difficult, people will stop having them.

Denial. Fear.

If we just turn back the clock, then all of our social problems will go away.

Fifty years ago in the United States, a woman who found a lump in her breast went to the doctor who would operate, knowing that she might wake up with a radical mastectomy while her physician discussed her case with her husband.

Fifty years ago in the United States, a woman who felt that she had no choice but to terminate her pregnancy went to a back alley doctor for an abortion, knowing that the procedure might kill  her or leave her sterile. The horror of back-alley abortions was the driving force behind the movement to legalize this procedure. And here we see the direct result of the movement to stop it.

Rich women will always be able to travel to Europe, or Canada, or New York to obtain an abortion just as rich women are able to travel to Houston, Texas to treat their cancer.

I’m not sure where I want to go from here. I do know one thing: I don’t want to go backward.

We had some friends over a couple of weeks ago. This is no surprise because every time we turn around, friends are coming over. Cut to refrain: My friends are like that — they are wonderful and I do not deserve them.

The friends who came over, J and R, are the first people I called for comfort when I found out I had cancer. J came right over and cleaned my house and made me some food and gave me the following excellent advice:

“People, your friends, and you have a lot of friends, are going to mail you books about cancer. It makes them feel better, because they want to do something. Send a thank you email but don’t even let the books into the house. Take them right around to the trash can and throw them away. Just look at each book and know that your friends love you, and are thinking about you, but don’t read them and don’t let your family read them. By the time they go to press, technology has changed and they are out of date. Plus there is a lot of bad information out there.” She was right on all counts.

“You will get very tired of lasagna,” said my friend J, who had brought a lasagna, saying “But mine is the best.” I did get tired of lasagna, but a couple of them stand out as extraordinary.

“Always love on your children,” she told me. “No matter how sick you feel.”

“You are doing G.R.E.A.T. I mean, look at you. You’re not curled up in the corner with a vodka bottle.” At the time, I was just surprised, but J has been through cancer, and now I know how right she was.

Here is the kicker, though. She called me up early the next day. The conversation went like this:

J: “Today is the day.”

Me: ?

J: “It’s the day.”

Me: ?

J: “Today is the day. It’s the day you take charge of your own cancer.”

That was the day I called my awesome friend Lacey who is a radiologist specializing in breast cancer, and asked her what to do, and she helped me figure out how to make an appointment at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston which started the ball rolling in the process that left me not dead.

She’s a good friend.

I let two years go by without seeing her. Two years.

Granted, she has been getting a business off the ground, her house was struck by lightening and burned up so she had to oversee the remodel, and I’ve had surgery three or four times.

Still.

Two years without seeing one of my best friends.

That’s pretty horrible,  no matter how you look at it. That kind of nonsense is the reason I say my friends are wonderful and I do not deserve them.

They came over between Christmas and New Year’s. In the course of my making dinner, the subject of cast iron skillets came up. It turns out that my friend did not own a cast iron skillet.

Plenty of people don’t have cast iron skillets, but my friend is a great cook.

It turns out that she had been discouraged by the seasoning process. J is a get-it-done-now person, and the bumpiness of new cast iron was unacceptable to her. What she wanted was an old, seasoned, smooth cast iron skillet with clear provenance, because she fussy is like me and therefore put off by the idea of using someone else’s skillet.

I washed mine out and gave it to her.

Chris said to  our friends, “I hope you know much love goes into that gift.”

I think she knows how much love went into that gift.

I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions (I do it eight weeks earlier on my birthday) but I do a certain amount of blessings-counting, and the new year provides an impetus.

Ten Things I Love About My Kids’ School

10. The school respects family time and therefore keeps homework to a reasonable amount.

9. The teachers are terrific.

8. The enrichment opportunities like art and music and after-school programs are actually enriching.

7. It’s seven minutes from my house unless I hit a string of red lights.

6. The reasonable tuition means that I don’t feel guilty about sending them there.

5. The girl’s uniforms look like Eloise.

4. The staff are people I would be friends with anyway, if they would have me.

3. It’s clean, even according to my OCD standards.

2. The curriculum and materials are perfectly tuned to the way, and pace, my kids learn.

1. The peer group, for my kids and for me. It’s peerless.

With the New Year comes the third anniversary of my having been declared free of cancer.

Chris says, “Not being dead kind of trumps anything else we might plan for the day.” Last night I was Crankypants McGee, and the designated driver, so I pretty much stayed that way while Chris got smashed on Fish House Punch and our kids ran wild at the party we all went to.

I’m not thinking about it much. At some point, I’m going to be ready to move on.

I’d like to spend the day navel gazing, but my family keeps clamoring for my attention. Perhaps that’s a good thing.

I usually ignore coupons. In part, I am channelling my inner hipster kitty. In part, I don’t like to keep track of stuff. In part, I can’t keep track of stuff.

Nevertheless, a coupon popped up on my facebook page this morning, “$10 will buy you a $25 coupon to Desta Ethiopian Restaurant.” Or, more succinctly, “$10 will buy you happiness” because facebook knows I love Ethiopian food so very very much.

It’s my favorite.

Chris knows this, so he takes me out for Ethiopian food whenever we get the chance. We’ve had it in Washington, DC, New York, New Hampshire, Boston (technically Cambridge), St. Louis, MO, Tokyo, Houston, and now Dallas. As I have said, it is my favorite. I like the lentils, I like the raw spiced beef, I like the spongey sourdough pancake things, and I love eating with my hands. Tonight’s dinner was as good as any Ethiopian food I have ever eaten. We’re definitely going to go back, and if you live in Dallas, I recommend that you go there at least once.

I thought about Ethiopian food a lot when I had cancer, not least because I couldn’t eat it, but also because I had the excellent luck to be living in Houston a block from the Houston Museum of Natural Science during the time when the Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia exhibit was there. It became part of my routine: get up, eat breakfast, take the train in to the hospital, get radiation, take the train to the museum, go stare at Lucy for a while, go home, eat, sleep, play some Warcraft, sleep some more.

I wonder what the guards thought. They saw me nearly every day for weeks. I was an obvious cancer patient, at least to me, but my hair had begun to grow out, except where half my head was in a radiation field.  The guards never mentioned it, or gave more acknowledgement of my presence than a simple nod, or wave. Once, when I was walking into the museum, one of a group of hipsters, presumably from nearby Rice University, asked me about my “rad” haircut; whether I liked it, and whether he should get one. I didn’t even think, I just gave him my raised eyebrow and said “I have cancer” and then apologized profusely for my bluntness as he apologized over and over and over again for what must have been one of the worst moments of his life, but I thought then, as I do now, that it was funny, and kind, the comment continued to make my day until my hair grew out of the Annie Lennox look into the Your Grandmother look and I began to hate it.

I never thought about my hair when I was looking at  Lucy.

I thought about the immensity of time. I thought about the chance of her skeleton remaining intact, of it being discovered, and I thought of her humanity, of whether she had any, and of respect for the life she and her family lived, so many millions of years ago.  I wondered how she had lived, and how she had died, and I wondered if her soul was in heaven looking down at me looking at her.

Lucy was the highlight of the Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia exhibit, but there was plenty of other good stuff to look at: ancient Christian texts, armor, weapons, and a small piece of wall text next to a photograph of a church in Axum, informing me that it was said that the Ark of the Covenant was housed in the depths of the church.

Do I believe it?

I know it is an important part of Ethiopian Christianity. Certainly the story is plausible, and even if it’s not, it’s a compelling story. I’m neither an archaeologist, nor a historian; I don’t have the tools to determine whether or not I believe that the Ark of the Covenant is in Ethiopia. I choose to believe it, and I think it says something about the depth of faith in that nation that the Ethiopian government would send out the bones of Lucy as a gesture of international good will, but not let our scientists and skeptics examine the Ark to determine whether it passes muster according to our rigid scientific methods and standards.

The same set of scientific methods and standards that were daily saving my life as I underwent the world’s most advanced methods of radiation therapy for a cancer that, were it not for the research of the doctor who was overseeing my treatment, would have killed me.

Did science save me, or did God?

Does it matter?

I choose to believe that it was God who saved my life, even though I think that the more compelling story is that of my radiation oncologist, Dr George Perkins, who also saved my life, and every year when the Nobel Prize in medicine passes him by, I think he was robbed. I also think that if I had been allowed to go into the Holy of Holies down in the depths of the Church at Axum and allowed the light of the Ark of the Covenant to shine on me and heal me, it would have been no less God’s handiwork than the the work of the good people at MD Anderson.

Miracles are everywhere. We just need to know where to look.

I’ve edited this post because it keeps popping up in search engines for unrelated things.

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It started a few weeks ago. I made a joke that involved a reference to The Blues Brothers and Erica, our awesome housemate, gave me a blank stare.

“You’ve never seen The Blues Brothers?”

Blank stare.

“How on earth can you have never seen The Blues Brothers?”

Silence. Then, “You know I don’t much like religious stuff.”

I tracked down a DVD and gave it to her for Christmas, and last night, we all curled up in front of the TV to watch it, including our initially reluctant children.

“Oh come on,” I coaxed them. “It has car chases and explosions.” It wasn’t long before they were hooked.

“Is that a real church? Church can be like that? How come our church isn’t like that? Why can’t we go to a church like that?” said my children. I didn’t think it would be a good time to talk about how, and why, 11:00 on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America. I just told them that every church is different, and as long as there is love, and people love God and Jesus, it’s all good, and for goodness sakes to please stop talking and just watch the movie.

This morning, I woke them up. “We’re going to a different church, and we have to leave in fifteen minutes.”

This requires explanation. As I have mentioned on this blog, we are Episcopalians, and it takes something like wild horses, or an ugly international schism, to drag me to a church of a different ilk. Lately, we’ve been visiting the local Presbyterian church, which is similar enough to what we’re used to, plus it is within walking distance of our house, and is 100% free of schism. But not this morning.

This morning we went to a different church, where a friend of mine was preaching.

I enjoyed seeing my friend preach, but what intrigued me the most about the church we visited was that it is truly diverse. A large proportion of the congregation arrives at church at the same time because they ride a van up from the homeless shelters in downtown Dallas, and a lot of the congregation not from homeless shelters is West African.

In (designer) jeans, a (cashmere) sweater, and a (cashmere) shawl I felt both underdressed and overdressed, but then I stopped caring.

We arrived to coffee, good coffee, and good donuts, which were offered to us by people who, I suspect, were homeless. We’d barely woken up in time to get dressed, and none of us, especially not my children, had eaten.

Homeless people fed us breakfast, and we were grateful for it.

Then the band started up. A rock band is not usually a style of worship I find personally compelling, but it was clear that a great many of the congregation did find it compelling, because they raised their arms in praise, and danced, and for once my children behaved in church.

The sermon was on Christmas, on the nativity, and the final point of his sermon was that Christ had come to bring good news to all people, not just people who believed in him.  Not just to the aristocracy, the ruling class, the rich merchants, but to the shepherds, the yard men, the office cleaners. The survivors of genocide hiding as civil unrest. The homeless.

People who know what it means to say, “Life is hard.” People whose problems are much more intractable than a slight case of not-quite-terminal cancer in someone who has the will, knowledge, and means to seek out the best medical care available.

During the service, the pastor asked for us to hold in prayer a member of the church whose daughter-in-law had died that weekend, of a drug overdose, at 29, who left four young children whose father is doing time. Ouch. The church laid hands on another man who is suffering from “a variety of health problems.” I know what a dying person looks like, because I’ve seen it in the mirror, and I also know what it looks like to lay hands on that person and cry out for God’s healing mercies, because it’s been done to me, most memorably by a furniture delivery man who rang the doorbell, again, after having delivered some furniture for my daughter’s room, and humbly asked my permission to pray for me, and then did so. Cancer is an obvious need for a miracle, but some needs are greater, and more subtle.

Are we going to start attending this “different kind of church?” I don’t know. I’d like to start attending our home church again, but fear that someone might say something schismatic, or allude to it, robs me of my motivation to get out of bed on Sunday morning.  We might start going to the lovely church that has the added feature of being walking distance from our house.

We’ll probably visit again, to see what the church is like on a Sunday when the regular pastor preaches. I’d like to bring Erica. I know she doesn’t like religious stuff, but she might find this one intriguing. It’s a good church, and I’m glad to know it is there.

Everything I was planning to buy for Christmas is bought, and mailed, and wrapped. Well, most of it is wrapped, and the rest will be done when the kids are asleep.

Some of it got mailed without being wrapped.

Some of it will not arrive until just after Christmas,  but I don’t care.

I find that I put a much bigger priority on unstructured down time with my family than anyone else I know, and I’m so past sweating the small stuff that it doesn’t even register. Or, I notice that it’s not done, and I’m proud of myself for not driving myself nuts.

The gift of grace.

Merry Christmas.