Dance with the Reaper

Where are the moderates? The rational thinkers? The earnest people who seek to improve themselves and the world around by engaging in dialogue with the people with whom they disagree, to learn, and to grow.

I know where they aren’t.

Haven’t we been down this road before?

It’s raining.

Stella has been sitting at the door looking out all day so I finally let her out into it. Now she is sitting at the door looking in.

I’d let her in but she would just want to go back out.

What she really wants is for me to go out there with her.

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Fast forward an hour or three: Erica, our awesome housemate, offers to bathe the dog. In the shower.

I wish I were a good enough writer to encapsulate the humor in this, and I think I need a Dogloo.

I got a phone call recently. It went like this:

Very Nice Republican Lady: “Hi, I’m calling on behalf of Pete Sessions, your representative in Congress. Do you have a minute?”

Not Very Nice Me: “Sure!”

VNRL: “What do you think is the most important issue facing Texas today?”

NVNM: “The more than a million Texans who can’t vote in the upcoming election because, even they’ve lived here for decades, there is no viable path to citizenship for them, so they don’t have any say in the government of the city, state, and country that is their home, where they live and work and go to church and pay taxes. I think I remember something about taxation without representation from high school history.”

VNRL: ” . . . and can we count on your vote?”

NVNM: “Well, no, but thanks for calling and I hope your next call goes better.”

In 1993, I  had the privilege to work with a guy from South Africa on the day that he cast his absentee ballot, for the first time, in an election in his home country.

The right to vote is not something I will ever take for granted.

Congratulations, San Francisco Giants. You earned it.

I love the internet. Here’s why.

Here’s Johnny Carson making fun of politics in 1982

and

a political ad I happen to agree with from this current election cycle

and

this.

I found this video when my brother sent us the Muppets on DVD as a Christmas present for my daughter, then not quite two.

I love the line Harry Belafonte tells Fozzie during the song’s opening dialogue, “All of us, we’re here for a very very short time, and in that time we’re here, there really isn’t any difference in any of us, IF we take time out to understand each other. The question is, do I know who you are? Do you know who I am? Do we care about each other? Because if we do, we can turn the world around.”

It’s a double challenge — to be open to getting to know other people, and also to allow ourselves to be known.

We’re not equipped to handle large numbers. Ask a kid to estimate how many strands of spaghetti there are in the box and you’ll hear “a million.” Somewhere along the line, we learn to get better at guessing, but we’re still faking it.

We don’t get it. That’s why the lottery works, and why what happens in Vegas goes into someone else’s bank account.

Epidemiologists and oncologists do a lot of work by the numbers.  If you are a woman, they say you have a 1:8 chance of being diagnosed with breast cancer sometime in your life. You get cancer. You have, they say, a 10% chance of getting better spontaneously. If you have the kind of cancer I had, you have a 10% chance of being alive in two years. When you start talking about treatment options, a lot of doctors will use numbers and percentages to communicate with you.

“I know how to treat this cancer. Of my patients like you, 25% have what they call a complete response, where after they finish chemotherapy, there is no trace of the tumor. Those patients do very well indeed,” one doctor said.

“What happens to the other 75%,” asked Chris.

“Let’s focus on the 25%.”

I’d gone from a 10% to a 25%. Still fail. I moved on.

“Do you have any other questions?” asked Dr Walters, the oncologist at MD Anderson who I eventually chose to be the man who would treat my disease.

“How serious is my disease?”

“Serious.”

Chris asked about percentages.

“It’s hard to say,” said Dr Walters. “No one has a crystal ball. Maybe 40%? It depends on how you respond to the chemotherapy. Your odds might be closer to 60% just by virtue of your being treated here. It’s hard to pull numbers on a case by case basis.”

“What about the ten percent figure I read about?”

“Stay off the internet, and that has more to do with disparity of health care. Your being here, at this stage of your disease, puts you of that category.”

“I really don’t have a choice, do I?”

“It’s up to you. You can do nothing and hope your cancer will spontaneously go away. That happens sometimes, and we have patients who choose to hope for that. But it’s very rare, and your disease is already quite advanced. Or you can do our regimen and hope that you’re in the group of patients for whom it works.”

40%. I was still failing, but within spitting distance of a D minus, a passing grade. Maybe already there if life graded me on a curve.

After I finished chemotherapy and had surgery, my lymph nodes, which had been chock full of cancer, came up clean. That shot my odds up to 78%. I’d pulled my grade up to a C, and when you compare my case just to women whose cancer was exactly like mine, the numbers looked even better.

“The longer you go without a recurrence, the greater your odds that one won’t happen,” Dr Walters told me the last time I saw him. I don’t see him any more. I see Kathy, a nurse-practitioner in his practice, and we don’t talk about my odds of not dying. We talk about the things I need to do to cope with the lasting side effects of chemotherapy.

In a few weeks, I’ll pass the three year mark for being cancer-free. They’ll move me to the long-term survivor category and only make me come back for checkups every year.

I’m getting an A!

Except I think it’s still pass-fail.

The writer of Chinese Grandma, a blog on food, family, and thoughtful living, left a lovely comment. Thank you!

What a serendipity! I love food and cooking and health, and I’m tickled pink to have found such a great resource. It also makes my day that I got good props from someone who is patently so good at doing this online journal thing.

Even more, I’m happy to know of yet another link in this growing circle of community, of mothers, writers, cooks, daughters who are all making the world a better place, for our families at  home and our larger family all around us by seeking always to improve our own knowledge base and then sharing that wisdom.

My awesome friend Moxie of askmoxie.org posted another guest post I wrote for her fantastic blog.

Thanks, Moxie. You rock, as always.