Hello from a sweltering Olney,
where the dew point is 76 degrees and we are wondering if storms expected this
afternoon are going to knock the power out again. It’s hard to get excited
about going to the grocery store, not knowing whether there is going to be
refrigeration here this afternoon. The Internet has been playing hide-and-seek
since before the big derecho on June 29, so I will be transmitting this blog
update from one of our Olney Starbuckses, God willing.
It has been a few weeks of marathon
travel. Since I last updated this blog, we have traveled through much of South
Africa, and I have been to Montana and to Boston and Cape Cod. My kids have been
in South African townships and West Virginian rivers and on the Appalachian
Trail. As miles and hours and weeks
pass, life grows less about cancer and more about living. Each day,
chemotherapy is farther behind me. So, I’ve had less to say in a cancer blog. (I’ve
been saying plenty about other things, I admit, in other forums, and you
shouldn’t get me started on the topic of assault weapons, or the Methodist
church’s treatment of gay persons, or Comcast repairmen who waste my precious time.)
From a breast cancer perspective,
the travel went just fine. The bionic boob did set off some alarms, resulting
in extra pat-downs, most recently in Boston, where they couldn’t figure out
immediately why I had metal parts in there.
They worked it out pretty quickly, no harm done. And the TSA in Boston
also relieved me of my pink breast-cancer-awareness knife, which I always carry
but forgot to take out of my purse. Doh! Can I blame it on chemo brain? Or
turning 50? Or am I just a ditz? When I explained to the nice TSA lady that the
knife had sentimental value, she let me mail it home to myself. I am still waiting for it to show up in my mailbox.
My arm never did swell up, not even
in that last marathon day of flying from Cape Town to London, London to
Washington, Washington to Minneapolis, and Minneapolis to Missoula. I was in a
stupor by the time I got to Missoula, and did not even notice that my Mom and
friends had dressed up in goofy vests to welcome me at midnight at the Missoula
airport! But my arm was normal-sized.
I had done everything right, from a
lymphedema-prevention point of view. I was a very good girl and did not eat
salty things for a couple of days before my return trip. (We skipped an excellent
Chinese meal, on that account!) I did not drink much wine. I drank gallons of
water. I did some of my little exercises, and I walked around on the planes, to
keep the circulation going, but I confess I did not follow my trainer’s advice
and bring my elastic training bands on the planes; that was one notch too weird
for me.
Everything went very well, except
for one thing: the compression glove
totally did not fit. I wore it on the way down to South Africa. But I took it
off after just a couple hours on the way back; it hurt too much. One of the
seams dug into my hand, between my thumb and my forefinger, and I developed a
nasty blister that got infected and got in my way for more than a week. The
compression sleeve was fine; I wore that on all the flights. My advice to
anyone out there who is considering compression attire: have a trained professional help you fit your
compression glove! I was under doctors’ orders to not hurt my right hand or arm—they
won’t even let me get my blood pressure taken on my right arm—but I managed to
hurt my hand anyway. Live and learn.
The other thing that could have
gone wrong was that Matthew could have gone off the rails on a crazy train. He
never did! He suffers from a serious anxiety disorder, which is generally
controlled well these days by medication and talk therapy. I was frankly
terrified that we would mess him up by dragging him across eight time zones and
turning his routine upside-down. We had seriously considered canceling the
trip, at one point, for this very reason. But it turned out fine. We tried hard
to make sure he was fed regularly, and with the right amount of protein and so
forth. We kept the meds as regular as we could. And we had no problems at all.
Amazing.
Emotionally,
this trip was complicated. It involved major highs and lows. In involved a
memorial service, in Missoula, for a dear friend’s mom. It involved visiting
two very poor South African townships, and working with absolutely poor
children, some malnourished, and many orphaned by AIDS. It involved several
most excellent reunions with friends and relatives.
I think some people had gotten the
idea that this massive trip was my farewell tour. Well, thankfully, it wasn’t.
It was my, “Hey, I’m back” tour. It was more fun than I can express. It’s
really much better to go around making people happy because you look well
again, than it was last year, scaring them because I looked so awful. Compare
these photos: The first one was taken in
April, 2011. I had started chemo; I was only beginning to get really sick. My
friend Steve’s smile is full of worry and his arm is barely touching me, as if
he thinks I’m going to break:
Here is a photo from Missoula,
taken just a couple of weeks ago. Same two people. I have about the same amount
of hair. But the picture is completely different:
So it was a really great trip.
It was interesting how different
cultures respond to cancer differently. In South Africa, people are definitely
not as in-your-face with breast cancer awareness as they are here in the USA.
There are no pink ribbons everywhere. Not one person asked me about my illness,
although I did catch people trying to figure out what was going on with my
hair. In contrast, here at home, total
strangers barrel up to you at the grocery store and ask you how it’s going and
cheer on the hair growth and so on. I have read that, in some African cultures,
cancer is viewed as the result of having been cursed. And to poor South African
women, treatment is certainly not always available, and losing a breast can
totally lower your perceived value as a woman, so it can be a grave thing, not
the business of strangers in grocery stores. I had hoped my illness might give
me common ground to talk with others about their illnesses—including HIV—but this
did not happen once.
One cancer-related phenomenon that
happened over and over was me being struck by the beauty of various sensory
inputs. Last year, I couldn’t taste anything at all. During chemo, my hearing
and visual perception were also messed up. Things didn’t sound right or look
right. I was too sick to dance, even when I got the rare opportunity. And for a
while, I wasn’t even sure I would still be here now. So, pretty often, during
my trip, it would strike me as awesome that I was having a delicious glass of
wine—and it tasted SO good—or I was looking at something SO beautiful, or
dancing is SO much fun, I would just start to laugh. It is a shame you have to
get so sick to enjoy yourself so thoroughly. Probably my family gets tired of
hearing about such things.
From a plain tourist point of view,
this trip could not have been better. If you like animals or birds or
breathtaking scenery, you should visit Kruger National Park some time in your
lifetime. (Stewart, Alice, I’m talking to you!) John and I decided that the most
beautiful places we’ve ever been are Victoria Falls, in Zimbabwe, Lake McDonald
at Apgar, Montana, and the Olifants River in Kruger National Park. Looking down
on the Olifants River from the rest camps at Letaba or Olifants is like peeping
into Eden. Look, here are a bunch of elephants frolicking. Here are twenty
hippos. Here is a fish eagle. Over here is a ginormous lizard. My goodness.
Olifants River
We had an incredible night at
Shingwedzi, next to a small river. We were miles from anywhere. We slept in a
bird hide. We had no electricity. We had an outhouse and a barbecue, and a
river full of hippos. We chased out the bats. We had Murphy beds for all of us.
While making up my bed, I noticed there was something white between the wooden slats.
I thought it was a wasp nest, and I asked John what we should do about it.
Being John, he poked the wasp nest with his finger, whereupon it turned around,
and a long thin reptile tail came out, and I screamed, because I thought it was
a deadly snake. But it was only a big lizard. Wish I’d gotten a decent photo of
the lizard, but all I’ve got is a couple so blurry you can’t tell it is a lizard. Hey, it was dark, and I was
busy freaking out. John eventually got the lizard out of my bed frame and took
it outside. I had difficulty sleeping, because I got to thinking about what
sort of bugs and scorpions and such the lizard must have been eating in there,
under my mattress. So I got up and wandered outside, at about 2 am, and was met
with such an expanse of stars as I have never seen. We were probably a hundred
miles from any city lights, and the air was crisp and dry. Sean and Julia and
John joined me out there. The depth of the star fields was amazing. By morning,
it had clouded up. I think God wanted us to see the stars.
The little hut you can barely see
is Shingwedzi, the bird blind we slept in. The water is full of hippos.
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