Waiting

From Letters to a Young Poet:

... and I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.  Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is, to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilka
(courtesy of Jane Murphy)

So we are waiting. On Tuesday, Roger and I will be going to my new surgeon to talk about options.  We will get the results of the MRI.  We will learn about what surgery she recommends.  We will make a plan.

In the meantime, we don't know.  I am greeting the not-knowingness with a little bit of relief.  Last weekend, I was between the biopsy on Friday and the results on Monday.  The spectrum of possibilities was very wide at that point.  80% of biopsies result in a negative test for cancer, so most of the time I fixed on that statistic and told myself everything would be OK.  But the range of options in that remaining 20% was pretty extreme.  The far end of the extreme was unthinkable.  So when my brain went to that side of the chart, I was pretty freaked out.

So this weekend we have another set of options to not know about.  I am convinced that we are a much safer distance away from the Abyss at this point.  That, as uncomfortable and weird and life changing as this whole this is going to be, it will ultimately result in my living a long time into the future. So the waiting is now about wondering how long this will take, when it will start, how much pain will be involved, how much the pain killers will work, what I will look and feel like when it's all over, whether I will be permanently appalled by or resigned to or even happy with my new body, and (at the edge) whether there's something we don't know about that will become a new indelible game-changing fact on Tuesday.

All in all, it's a better weekend.  Even though we know what's going on, these are a better set of options to worry about.

In the meantime... man, there's a lot going on.  This is all not happening in a void.  Remember my life?  The life I had eight days ago?  The life in which I was two weeks behind on a project due in three weeks, doing two people's work because the writer I used to split the work with quit a few weeks ago?  Remember the stuff about the opera company, and all its trials and tribulations and petty squabbles and financial troubles?  And the part where I have a family I never am able to spend enough time with?  And the part where there's always a good story brewing about some new drama or another that keeps me OH so busy? 

Well, that life did not apparently get the memo that this cancer thing is going on.  The release schedule has not changed, the writing has not written itself, our new writer has not magically gotten immediately up to speed (although she's assimilated more in the first week than many have in the first two months), the opera company did not suddenly get functional, the bills are not paying themselves, and (yeah, by the way) the tax figures are not automatically populating the worksheet for our accountant.

Can't it all just STOP?  I mean, you know, not permanently.  But there's so much more going on now on top of the usual -- telling people this news takes time, seeing doctors and making schedules takes time, figuring out what to do takes time.  AND eating better takes time, and exercising more takes time, and taking care of myself takes time.  Somehow I'm being forced to learn the next level of time management skills: how to say no to things I really want to do, with people I really want to see, and make some time to NOT do anything, and to just turn it off.  I'm not good at this at ALL.

These, ultimately, are good problems to have.  I am greeting even things like taxes with a new affection because it means that I'm still alive and still planning on being alive.  Taking care of myself feels really good.  I am also able, sort of, to look at the tsunami of work that is bearing down on me and consider the possibility that it won't get done, it can't get done, and that somehow something will work out that will make it OK for my business to get a release out the door.  I guess maybe I'm being forced to let some of it go.  Maybe.

So today I'm going to take care of my mom's condo in the morning and then make time to go take a walk around Descanso.  I am then going into work and trying to shut down all electronic inroads (and outroads) so I can make some order out of my massive to do list and start actually doing some of it.  It will be quiet.  I will have my music on.  I will try to do just that, and not talk, and not deal with emotional stuff, and just be present with the concrete and technical aspects of my job.  And let the rest go.  And continue to learn some of these hard new lessons this thing is teaching me.