Black Bile

Thanks to my friend, Carol, I've been introduced to a fabulous book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee.  Now, you'd think this would be kind of a dry, bummer type of read, but ... seriously... I've put aside my Easy Rawlins detective book (which is super fun and diverting), and just can't stop reading this cancer book.  (It did win the Puliztzer, so it's not just me being morbid.)

I'm less than 100 pages in, but there are some passages that have just stopped me cold.  Let me share:

"...Cancer, we now know, is a disease caused by the uncontrolled growth of a single cell. This growth is unleashed by mutations--changes in DNA that specifically affect genes that incite unlimited cell growth. In a normal cell, powerful genetic circuits regulate cell division and cell death. In a cancer cell, these circuits have been broken, unleashing a cell that cannot stop growing.

That this seemingly simple mechanism--cell growth without barriers-- can lie at the heart of this grotesque and multifaceted illness is a testament to the unfathomable power of cell growth. Cell division allows us as organisms to grow, to adapt, to recover, to repair--to live. And distorted and unleashed, it allows cancer cells to grow, to flourish, to adapt, to recover, and to repair--to live at the cost of our living. Cancer cells can grow faster, adapt better. They are more perfect versions of ourselves."

 And...

"Cancer...is riddled with...contemporary images. The cancer cell is a desperate individualist, "in every possible sense, a nonconformist," as the surgeon-writer Sherwin Nuland wrote. The word metastisis used to describe the migration of caner from one site to another is a curious mix of meta and statis--"beyond stillness" in Latin--an unmoored, partially unstable state that captures the peculiar instability of modernity. If consumption once killed its victims by pathological evisceration (the tuberculosis bacillus gradually hollows out the lung), then cancer asphyxiates us by filling bodies with too many cells; it is consumption in its alternate meaning--the pathology of excess. Cancer is an expansionist disease; it invades through tissues, sets up colonies in hostile landscapes, seeking "sanctuary" in one organ, and then immigrating to another. It lives desperately, inventively, fiercely, territorially, cannily, and defensively--at times, as if teaching us how to survive. To confront cancer is to encounter a parallel species, one perhaps more adapted to survival than even we are.

This image--of cancer as our desperate, malevolent, contemporary, doppelganger--is so haunting because it is at least partly true. A cancer cell is an astonishing perversion of the normal cell. Cancer is a phenomenally successful invader and colonizer in part because it exploits the very features that make us successful as a species or an organism."

It's like the Mad Max we all secretly want to be. The Rambo. The Incredible Hulk. It's like we've invited this thing into our society because, in so many ways, we desperately want to be like it.

Look at our lives: obsessed with growth, with 24/7, with bigger and better, with more is more, with input coming at us in more ways every day.  Where does it all go?  How can we keep up?  Like our friends the cancer cells, we multitask as much as possible.  And we, like the cancer cells, are eating up our host planet faster than it can replenish itself.

He goes on to the beginning of the history of cancer.  He talks about how the curious thing about the early history of cancer (which goes back many millenia BC) is that it's so uncommon. There were so many things that used to kill us (tuberculosis, influenza, etc) that cancer never had a chance to be all that prevalent.  But we've gotten so civilized, we've killed all the other enemies, it's like we're finally faced with our Balrog in the depths, the deepest, darkest, most sophisticated version of ourselves... the shadow that we both want to seduce and destroy.

Hippocrates imagined the world of disease in the metaphor of humors: red, yellow, white, and black bile, rivers of fluid that coursed through our bodies. A Greek doctor named Claudius Galen, took this notion a further and theorized that while the red humors were assigned the diseases of the blood, the yellow humors of the liver, the white humors of tuberculosis and pus, the black bile was saved only for two things: cancer and depression.  (Melancholia actually derives from the Greek Melas, or black, and khoule, or bile.)  Diseases of these humors, especially the black bile, arose from the accumulation and stagnation in one part of the body of the fluids.  For a long time, surgery was considered an absurd way to treat cancer, because it seemed ridiculous to cut out one part of the stagnation, when, in fact, the entire body was suffused with the black bile itself.

Over time, a form of these humors were actually found to have physical corollaries in the body, except for the black bile.  It simply didn't exist. And of course we moved on from the notion of humors themselves.

But what struck me about the humors, is that they so closely resemble the idea of qi, the meridians of energy that need to be balanced and harmonious in traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture.  Cancer, in that tradition, is thought to be the ultimate qi stagnation, with various other types of stagnation leading up to it (such as phlegm and other benign masses and pre-masses.)

I'm no medical expert, obviously, but I do love a good metaphor.  And this idea of cancer being the over-achiever inside of us, the thing that wants to best us and beat us at our own game, at our own expense, just puts me in awe.  Here we are, a society that is increasingly without boundaries, increasingly on the move, seeking out brave new worlds to colonize and explore, and what we are doing is manifesting all of those very same characteristics inside ourselves.

We do not know how to stop.

We do not understand that unlimited growth literally is killing us.

And yet we stagnate at our peril.

Somehow, we need to find that balance.  The balance between a sharklike constant movement, ingestion, and predatory hunger... and keeping a flow that prevents stagnation and buildup.  I don't know what the difference is, precisely, but it feels to me that it has something to do with heart, and soul, and wisdom.  That there is a fine tuning that needs to take place in our lives that stops us when stopping is healthy and good for regeneration and takes care of the organism's need to replenish itself, and yet keeps moving enough to avoid couch potato stagnation, that accumulation of the black bile of depression and lassitude.

Consumption that does not eradicate the bounty of the host.

Movement that listens to its own inner rhythms.

A yin and yang balance.

Between growth and rest.

Between excess and flow.

What I've Done Right

Sometimes it seems like I'm doing everything wrong.  Remember, like, forever ago?  When I wrote these little rules to live by?  At the end of the day yesterday I thought back on those and realized I have totally been ignoring every last one of them.  I have been working too hard, pedal to metal, running late to everything, spending time with too many people who vex my spirit.  I was dispirited, anxious, tired, pissed off at myself, and utterly exhausted.

It took me feeling like that for two days and one really bad night before I realized what the problem was: I was listening to my head saying "Hey, it's the end of the round, so you must be back to normal," rather than listening to my body which was getting progressively more and more ground down and pissed off.  I was making and keeping social appointments, booking myself to work long full days, going to all the meetings, working my brain and body overtime, and packing everything in like -- yes, like a truck -- before I go back into for my fifth (and last) chemo tomorrow morning.

By the end of yesterday, I was fully aware, with vibrant clarity, that I am still in chemo therapy, I am still suffused with poisons, I am still tired and beleaguered ... and I was was failing, totally, miserably, in my quest to listen to myself and take care of myself first.  I basically had reverted my ass back to square one in terms of wisdom, enlightenment, and healthy living.

Which is ironic, since I started this blog, like, Tuesday morning and titled it "what I've done right." It seems like ages ago.  But, at the time, I guess I was just so tickled and proud of myself for having weathered all this chemo with the grace of a dancer, the nobility of an eagle, and the BAMF-ness of, well, a BAMF.

Hubris is a bitch.

AND.... I do think I've done some things right.  Considering all the horrible things that sometimes happen to people going through chemo therapy, I think I must have done something right mainly because of all the horrible side effects and miseries I do not seem to be suffering too much (except for when I stop listening and just assume I'm 25 years old again and have the stamina of a train locomotive). 

During the first four rounds (knock on wood), I have had no mouth sores, no lymphedema, no weight gain and my skin is clear and toned.  Except for the bad moment the very first weekend (with the migraine and the ibuprofen and the nausea meds that caused headaches), I have never once seriously considered vomiting.  I really love (really) being bald, although I am very interested to see what having hair will be like again.  (Knowing me, I'll get it first back in all the wrong places and then, when the follicular health has nowhere left to go, it will deign to sprout a few tendrils up top.)  I've no neuropathy (yet, knock on wood, again.) And I've avoided any kind of sickness or infection, so far.  I don't want to jinx all this.  But, in the big spectrum, I've come out very lucky overall.

Mostly, on the good days -- I feel really great.  I'm moving better, my body feels (at times) like it's kind of exploding with health.  I do have several annoyances, like a lingering raw throat and constant eye twitches that make me feel somewhat feral.  It could be that just not feeling like shit now feels like feeling great... but... I'll take it.  Sometimes I really feel like I feel great.  I biked four miles the other day with Spencer (not a marathon, but it's double what I was able to do three weeks ago).

And the bad days are bad.  I don't want to underestimate how truly awful I feel on the bad days.  There will be a time in the next 48 hours when I feel my life force drain away, and I'll descend back down into the underworld.  If anyone wants, I'll be happy to describe exactly how that feels, although I probably have in these blogs, more times than I can remember.  So, it's not a walk in the park.  It's brutal as hell.  And it makes the good days really really good.

So, to whatever extent I've ducked the bullet, besides just being lucky, and to whatever extent a list like this is worth writing down... here's what I've been doing to keep body and soul together.

1. First and foremost: I've kept moving.  Two 15-minute walks a day with the dog.  Nothing radical.  Just getting out in the world has made a HUGE difference.  When I can move more, I do. I bike at least once a round, towards the end, and it reminds me of that indescribable freedom of riding, and how healthy you can feel after just a few minutes of pedaling, and it's like being momentarily transported to another plane.  Movement has, really, what's been keeping me feeling so good.
2. Yoga.  Once a week for awhile, and now up to twice a week.  Another huge difference.  No crazy hot classes... but two good gentle therapeutic restorative sessions a week has made my body feel like it's young again.  I'm moving better than I did before I was diagnosed.  Go figure.
3. Diet.  No sugar.  Very limited dairy.  Lots of veggies, can't get enough of them.  More fruit than usual.  Protein -- including red meat.  Lots of salmon and fish.  No alcohol.  Some carbs but not as many as before.  Mostly, it's the no sugar.  That changes everything.  
4. Supplements.  Every day: Probiotics (I think this has helped immensely with keeping my digestive tract in pretty good shape), 5000 IU of Vitamin D, a Vitamin B Complex, an Alive multi-vitamin, an Omega 3 fish oil capsule, Imunsano (an herbal blend for the immune system, made of mushrooms, available online).  (My oncologist nixed any other type of TCM herbal remedy and... in the big picture... I'm glad I complied with his wishes.  I certainly don't want to have anything inadvertently subvert the treatment.)
5. During the Taxotere infusion of chemo: I hold ice in my hands packed in baggies, and have two baggies of ice on my toes.  It could be totally bogus... but the idea is that the ice keeps the chemo from infiltrating my fingers and toes.  My nails are fine (sometimes, apparently, they get brown and/or fall off), and I've had no tingling or pain that could indicate neuropathy.  I also chew on ice chips, which may be why my mouth has avoided sores.  (Full disclosure: there are days when it feels like my mouth has been rubbed into a weird roughness with sandpaper... so, it's definitely not perfect... but no sores or any of that.  So far.)
6. When I can, I swish and gargle with a baking soda/salt/water solution.  I did that in my earlier days, pretty religiously, and I think it helped a lot.  I have had more of a raw throat since I got lazy and stopped doing that.  Hopefully I can do some more of it this round and feel better faster.
7. Moisturize, moisturize, moisturize.  I've turned into a proper girl now, and slather large amounts of lotion and other unguents after bathing.  It helps.  My skin is looking better than ever, and there are some really cool lotions out there that really nourish and tone and smooth and all that good stuff that I never really paid attention to before.
8. Working in moderation.  Working has been very diverting.  And -- thanks to disability (which you can do in conjunction with partial wages, as long as you don't exceed your regular full time income) -- I have been able to work part time.  For the most part, I'm very glad I continued to work through all of this.  It keeps me feeling like I'm not a full citizen of the underworld.  And (OK, I am glossing over a lot of annoying shit, but overall) it's pleasant and good to be out in the world a little bit.
9. Writing.  Giving myself permission to write again, and being encouraged to continue from so many of the readers of this blog has been one of the biggest lifesavers of them all.  More profound than I can find words to express at the moment.  Facing my own mortality put a lot of things into perspective.  Writing can no longer be optional.  I have a lot of words left in me and it's high time I start letting them come out.

That's a short  list of what I've done for myself, but the list of what other people have done for me is inexhaustible.   I have been so well supported by so many people -- family, friends, co-workers, nurses, doctors -- I mean, it's ridiculous.  I will have to repay, somehow, some way, all this love that's come my way.  Or at least write a 40-page blog listing everyone and everything they've done.  It's been... staggering.  From the weekly cards I get from my friend Gail in the UK, to the cheery good mornings I get at Spencer's Starbucks when I pick up my oatmeal on my way to work or a doctor's appt; from the fist bumps I get from Kevin, my oncologist's assistant, to a co-worker stopping me in the hallway the other day, telling me she had run one of those "kick cancer's ass" type of race and had thought of me as she sweated through the course... I mean, the support has been amazing.  I have been surrounded with friends, and love, and offers to take me to chemo, and gifts of amazing food, and rides when I'm feeling bad.  My kids and Roger have been absolutely there for me, in ways that defy enumeration or description.  From the daily smoothies that Roger made me for months upon awakening, to the bike rides that I take with Spencer on the days I feel up to it, to the cooking and nutrition tips that I get from Taylor... along with some damn good movie watching at times... they're there.  For me.  The love is indelible and will be tattooed on my heart forever.

So.  It hasn't all been about me being good.  Or consistent.  Or paying attention to my own goals for how I'm going to change who I am and how I go about my life overnight.  It's been a whole avalanche of support and a deep and important sea change, a change that has started with me but that ripples out to touch my whole world and then that bounces back and comes back to touch me.  It's everything. 

What I've done right, when I am able to do it right, is to give myself space and time to listen and actually hear ... pause and actually feel ... breathe and actually relax ... take care of myself and actually be nourished.  It doesn't happen constantly, but it's happening far more than it used to.  I am deeply grateful, in many ways, that I am learning these things.. and in debt to so many people who are here with me on this quest.

Take a Sad Song...

Sitting in the middle of 50,000 people last night at Dodger Stadium, I started to understand why Paul McCartney is not just your everyday iconic musical legend.  For almost three hours straight, I watched him give us a kick ass, totally committed, thoroughly entertaining performance. By the time he was rocking out Back in the USSR, I had forgotten his age and forgotten all caveats, and realized that he was purely and simply doing a terrific job at holding a sold out crowd totally in the palm of his hand. And executing absolute mastery over his art form with deep wells of energy and an utterly charming grace.

He sang all the old favorites, and some new songs, and the production values were incredible.  His band was amazing, world class.  And he was humble, and funny, and open.  A great show.

I of course enjoyed it immensely, even though I could not ignore how my fatigued body resisted the stairs of the stadium, and my senses were on overload with the hordes of people and lights and sound.  It was a rare thing for me to be out in the world attending a rock concert, and every time my body or energy levels came up short, I was reminded of the world I had temporarily escaped in order to be there.  But the underworld doesn't disappear, just because you've managed to escape it.  It is there, and it was present in the music... which touched me extremely deeply at times.

The underworld is the shadow side to any good art, and loss, and death, and broken friendships  informed many parts of the music we heard last night. And much of it was created during some of the most turbulent decades in our recent history.  Assassinations, riots, Kent State, civil rights, Vietnam -- the soundtrack for my growing up in the 60's was punctuated with the oddly whimsical Sgt Pepper and spacy acid flavored Magical Mystery Tour.  I don't believe that's a coincidence.  I don't believe that the brutal events I grew up with were at all separate from the incredibly creative music that flourished concurrently.  With the Beatles leading the way, my youth was explosively rich with creative and trailblazing music.

Loss and death; the flip side to falling in love on a dance floor, living in a yellow submarine, being the walrus.   Looking around the stadium, it suddenly became clear to me how everyone I could see was going to die someday.  That we were all corpses.  And that the death of each of us would break so many hearts. And those hearts would stop beating as well, causing further ripples of pain and sadness.  So intertwined.  So much sadness in this world.  So many tears.  So much pain.

And then suddenly we're singing Hey Jude together.  All 50,001 of us.  We are singing the "La la la's" with the person who wrote the song, and it's acapella, and suddenly it's just so wonderful.  Amidst the pain, there are transcendent moments that emerge, simple moments, like singing a song.  This particular song has survived history and transcended several generations.  It's a relatively simple little work of art, that has nonetheless touched millions of people.  And here we were, holding up our cell phones, singing the lalalalas in unison, a whole bunch of very different people united in this single place and time.

The act of creating art changes things. Perhaps the rock and roll of the '60s and '70s affected the course of our turbulent history, at least a little bit.  It for sure gave it a backdrop.  It for sure gave us a way to stick it to the man, with its anger and its visions of our generation's unique utopia.  It for sure gave us an emotional breather, with the kooky Mr. Kite and Lovely Rita.  And it gave us the empathic loneliness of Eleanor Rigby, and the hope that we would find a simple love someday in the unthinkably distant future, when we're sixty-four.

Holding up my cell phone with the flashlight on, tears started rolling down my cheeks.  I was overcome by the power of an artistic endeavor to change us, to get into the heart, to open it up and break it just a little bit... but only to heal it back up again.

The act of making music changes the pain, alchemizes it.  I can think of no other magic as powerful.  It doesn't change the reality that the price of admission to this life is ridiculously steep, even for rich songwriters who lose their wives to bad diseases.  It doesn't change the entangled ripple of pain that the loss of each one of us will cause so many people.  But it softens our souls.  It expresses it all in a way that is not exactly precise, but is true beyond words.

So that's the point, of all our creative endeavors, of all the things we do that imparts our touch to the wounded psyche of our fellow creatures.  We can't change the pain of being born into this world.  We can't erase disease and wars and corruption.  But we can take that whole sad song, and make it better.

La, la, la, lalala.  Lalala.  Hey Jude.

Training Wheels

The chemo treatment I received last week may be my last.  Or, it may not be.  We don't know.

The problem is the we don't know part.  We obviously want to do this thing as thoroughly as possible, but we also would prefer not to kill me in the process.  Apparently, there aren't many studies out there that can tell us the answer.  And no one has a crystal ball.

I told my oncologist I am psychologically game to go the whole six treatments.  That was a bit easier to say before treatment #4 kicked in.  This last one had a whole new aspect to it: nastier, deeper, more determined to find those deep seated hold-outs, and take the rest of me with it in the process.  Kind of hellacious.  Kind of not fun. 

But still, I'm game to go the distance, if that's what it takes.

And -- I have to be honest -- there's a part of me that is a little reluctant to not go the distance.  There's a part of me that is now so acclimated to being fairly consistently physically uncomfortable that this is the new normal, and moving on means a whole new set of questions, assessments, and challenges.  It's not that I don't want to feel and be healthy again ... I do, desperately...  I just don't want to delve back into that cold dark deep end of uncertainty again.  Not quite yet.

I have a mental timeline for how long I will be going through this.  That timeline includes having plenty of time to learn all my lessons, assimilate all the wisdom, grow internally as fully and strongly as I need to so that when I do emerge -- like a goddamn Phoenix -- at the end of this, that I'll be strong both outside and in.  That I'll be able to talk the talk and walk the walk.  So we won't have to do this again.  So I won't go into the world being afraid of myself and my life any more.

This long stretch of chemo -- 4 1/2 months -- feels like training wheels to that end.  The time where I move in and out of sickness and get to try things out during the times I feel well.  I am working part time so I get to play with how to manage that stress and those time constraints.  In my head, I had these four and a half months to learn all the lessons deeply.  Now that that may be cut down to three months, I'm feeling a little nervous, a little hesitant.  Am I ready to move on?

Well, this all goes back the lessons I'm trying to learn.  How to be the person running my life, rather than the person being run by it.  And, of course, I'm totally game to try to shave six weeks off my chemo rather than learn my lessons by running another two times around the track.  So, while walking the dog the other day, I came up with a short list of rules to live by, as I contemplate moving on to the next step and one huge board game move closer to being back to a full and healthy life.

1. Do only one thing at once.  Have you tried this recently?  Like really?  First of all, it's amazing when I can do it.  It feels great.  Second of all... it's really fucking hard.  I did give myself an exemption when driving... not the permission to text and talk and look up restaurant hours online during stop lights... but the ability to listen to the radio.  That's it.  Drive.  Listen.  That's all.   Doing one thing at once.  This one goal seriously reduced my stress for the, um, maybe, half an hour I was able to do it the other day.  And, no, the world didn't come to an end. 
2. Leave 15 minutes earlier than I have to.  Or plan to at least.  I always add buffers to my schedule but, like edging the clock ahead a few minutes, I am onto my own games.  I think I need to add another buffer to the buffer and see if that helps keep the adrenaline down.
3. Don't spend any more time than strictly necessary with people who vex my spirit. OY, this is hard, especially in the workplace.  But, it's a good thing to keep in mind.  I just need to limit the interactions.  Don't engage with them.  Treat them like the toxic carcinogens they are (not in reality, but to me) and move along.
4. Listen to my body's true messages.  Try to keep breathing and grounded enough to hear when my body is hurting, or happy, or stressed out.  Like #1, this is amazingly hard for me to do.  My natural adrenaline takes over and I am off to the races, like a blood hound on the scent.  Goal is to stop that and listen.  
5. Listen to my brain's true messages.  This one is interesting.  I get all these subtle messages ("Don't let these people down." "You need to do the job right.") and I follow them like they are messages from the fuhrer.  Where are these messages coming from?  Who am I answering to?  Who is setting the standards for me, and does that metric-setter truly have my health and well being in mind?  Somehow I need to differentiate between the messages that are really coming from a place of soul, spirit, and truth... and the messages that are coming down from an ancient and overemphasized need to please, or exceed expectaion, or get so far ahead of the game that I can't possible trip up and be eaten up alive.  This is tricky.  Almost as hard as doing only one thing at a time.

The goal for the practical stuff (time and stress management) is to be able to dial into the the more difficult listening stuff.  How can I hear my body's messages when I'm listening to voice mail while driving to work with three minutes to spare?  It makes it much harder.  How can I do the deep psychological adjustments of revising who it is in this world that I'm trying to please, when I'm spending all my energy bitching about all the people who annoy me?

I think the key attribute that the training wheels afford me is silence and time.  I need to figure out how to build those training wheels in organically, so I don't have to bolt them on externally for any longer than I have to.

Honestly, yes, stopping the chemo after this last round would be heavenly.  I will find out next week what the plan is.  In the meantime... one thing at a time.  Avoid the vexers of spirit.  Buffer the buffers.  And listen.  Listen, listen, listen.

In the Fields

Awhile back, a close friend of mine went through her own version of cancer.  She was 49, it was bad, it came back twice.  I can't tell my story of today without using hers as background, so I hope she forgives me.  It's a good story, and true, I think.

She's 19 days younger than I am.  She runs an organic farm with her husband.  They are fit, active, and spend the day nurturing young shoots of plants and creating food for people who need it.  Theirs could not be a more exemplary, healthy, or precarious lifestyle.

Organic farming is not for the faint-hearted, as it turns out.  It's not all about sitting on the patio at sunset, sipping a local varietal, and surveying the glow of the fields as they effortlessly photosynthesize into profits.  It's more like looking constantly at the weather service sites, setting up endlessly more intricate fencing to keep out critters large and small, battling with water companies, filling out mountains of paperwork for loans and grants, and somehow trying to make a living in between dry lightning strikes, droughts, fires, and windstorms.

They've been doing this for years, by themselves.  They get some volunteer help occasionally, but mainly it's the two of them, out in the fields, picking, planting, building, hoeing.  Season after season, year after year.

In the middle of this, she gets cancer.  And even though it was bad, and even though it came back, and even though she had to deal with even more paperwork and insurance claims and all the rest of the stuff , throughout it all she kept working.  What was she going to do?, she asked me.  The plants don't care.  The seasons don't change.  The markets won't wait.  What's she going to do?  Go inside and lie on her fainting couch while the whole precarious enterprise literally withers and dies out there?

So she didn't do that.  She kept going out into the fields.  Day after day.  Once, she told me the nausea got bad.  She took a pill, waited a half an hour, and went back out.

So, today, in my version of this story, Opera A La Carte, the beloved and beleagured opera company I've been technical director for for three decades, and now president of for four years, is putting on a fundraiser.  As usual, the preplanning has been hectic, chaotic, annoying, and fraught.  As usual, we desperately need the money we hope to raise.  (Come join us!  Mention this blog and I'll give you a very small discount. Hahaha.)  As usual, tempers are frayed, and a clear plan is, well, unclear.
 As they say in Shakespeare in Love:

Philip Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.

Hugh Fennyman: So what do we do?

Philip Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.

Hugh Fennyman: How?

Philip Henslowe: I don't know. It's a mystery.

That's it in a nutshell.  The mystery.  The imminent disaster.  And we're still trying, and today is a show.  I've been up since 6, dragging myself out to pick up the rental truck, supervising the umpteen millionth load in, and smelling the dust of props and costumes and set pieces that I have been washing off my hands for over half my life.  Meanwhile, up at the venue, everyone is pitching in, putting together flowers and food and set decorations.  It's a lot like "hey kids, let's put on a show," but we've been doing this together for absolute years, and we're kind of more like "Fuck us, I can't believe we're doing this fucking thing again."  But we do, and we laugh, and we give each other shit, and... in a very wonderful and life enhancing way, we are happy.

We don't know how we're going to actually survive as a company.  We have our own internal storms and predators, and the craziest random weirdness you've ever seen, besetting us on all sides.  I have had more therapists and parents and well meaning friends and husbands and children and random strangers on the street asking me, over and over, why do I do this stupid thing?  Why the stress?  Why the long hours?  Why the aggravation?  And even myself, I have been threatening to quit for years, and then always say "But it's the best goddamn reality show I've ever seen."

It's what I do. Even though I'm not saving the world, or feeding it, or even doing much beside enhancing it a little tiny bit with an obscure art form...it's what I do. I go out into the fields. And I wonder how I got myself into this mess.  And I curse my fate and wonder why I have to do this while I have cancer, and then I keep doing it.

Maybe it's not noble, and maybe it's not creative.  As glamorous as it may sound from the outside, I'm guessing my friend spends a lot of time in her fields cursing her life, missing things like steady paychecks and art and a life without bowel consuming stress.  I look at the hours I spend on budgets and board meeting documents and think, yeah... there's time I'll never see again.  But it's what we do, for better or worse.

Most importantly it's what healthy people do.  It's what she and I do when we're healthy, and it's what she continued to do when she was sick, and it's what I'm continuing to try to do now that I'm going through the same thing.  Because what are the options?  Sit around and catalog my woes all day?  Let them rent the truck and get the dust on their hands while I take another pill and watch some Sponge Bob?  Fuck no.  I won't be stupid, I won't be crazy and lug all that shit up and down the ramp... but I'm going to show up.  I'm going to lend my support, and my years of experience, and some gas money, and buy them all sandwiches.. and I'm going to do what healthy people do who are not defined by cancer.

Gonna go out into the fields.  Gonna put on a show.  Gonna do the thing that healthy people do, whether they like it or not.