Breathe

Thank you to everyone who has donated to the gofundme online campaign to help fund my treatment in fighting this disease. The campaign can be found here http://www.gofundme.com/teamallison and please let me know if you have any questions!

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The chemo treatment has reduced my world to a series of static images. Red, still frames of consciousness flip gently through the days as they progress. I live life through long moments in the morning when everything is clear and still and bright. I try to lie just as still as that moment in time in hopes that the slow tide carries away aching white walls of pain that crash against my shores. My energy comes in bursts these days: one moment I am ready to take over the world and the next I rest my head for but a moment and I find i've lost time; my consciousness careens off down some pain-addled rabbit hole and soon all you can see is the drifting trail of bubbles as they rise, pop, and disappear into air.

The main source of my pain is my right side. It starts in high on my hip and deep in my central spine and arches up around my right hip, careful to dip its fingers in between my ribs and hook its claws in deep. When I turn or inhale that fist clenches and the soft core organs beneath protest and spasm in sharp resentment.

When i curl myself up carefully, just so,  i can feel some of the muscles relax and the much needed breath and healing begin. I like to spend as much time as I can outside on these days. A breeze reminds me that nothing is constant and movement in my peripheral, the world around me is comforting in that it goes on without me, in spite of my distress. More maddening then the pain, more frightening than the fact that it does not pass, is the unapologetic fact that the suffering does not necessarily demarcate any positive progress. I could be in pain like this indefinitely and it could have no outcome on my end game. Doesn't answer any of my questions, abate any of my fears. I don't know how to make sense of logic like this. The pain frightens me and clouds my judgement.

It isn't fun or entertaining to talk about pain. It makes people uncomfortable, alienates them and drives them away. Talking about pain always implies some unequal circumstances between people; the onlooker cannot truly sympathize with the sufferer and from the dim recesses of those dismal lows the cares and concerns of the well wishers seem to echo as if off the walls of a long forgotten dry well. In these times it is good to have familiar faces to grasp towards as you drift through that long suffering river Styx which bears you half-way alive to a grey twilight at dawn where you stand judgement again before the hordes that lust for blood and life. They bang their swords and roar at the skies. They will have their day in the sun and leave their footprints in blood on the ground. These hordes are the pain. They cannot be stopped. They are fickle and strike without warning or strategy. They promise me nothing.

What I remember most of my first serious cancer surgery is the surprise I felt when I discovered that the surgery was merely the first step of a process that would require to completely readjust my paradigm. Like the chime of a clock, cancer changed the lenses in front of my eyes; a quick, efficient change, no more than a "ding" to denote the passage yet there it was. I felt great strength in sharing this self-awareness with the people that surrounded me, that loved and supported me. I felt I could let them into places inside of me that resonated with truths that could be felt and clasped hands and shoulders from states and cities away. But as I completed my treatment protocol my body grew weak and my condition did not abate. I felt I had discovered a hideous fallacy, somebody's idiot mistake: the surgery was completed, the radiation treatment completed, the implant removed, but the pain had not abated. This made me bitter and reluctant to continue to share. At first my words had come easily, springs of doubt, fountains of regret, mountains of poetry were mine for the waxing. But how was I to share repeated frustration or doubt? How could I ask people to indulge my lists of things I feared would go wrong? I had stood fast through great trial with a fair amount of grace, how to reconcile that person with the trials still ahead, and how to burn at the center of the fire so hot and so fast without changing who I was and burning all that I loved and cared for?

This time around I am sadly more familiar with the bitter taste left in your mouth when part of your life burns away through illness. I know which spots to check for. I wish a were a more still person by nature. My mind always strays to active and stillness is not a native habitat for me. Stillness is important because it brings acceptance in the door with it. I hate the bruises up and down my arms and on my hands. I hate needles really. It is always a passing nuisance to wonder how skilled the flobotamist will be with her poking and I can never quite look at the needle as it passes through my skin, drawing blood beneath. The port they gave me for the chemo left a bruise the size and shape of an eggplant in the softest part of my upper thigh. It is royally, unapologetically purple and is tender to the touch. The whole area feels sore and there are deep cords of pain that run underneath the superficial pass of purple flesh. Sometimes these cords ache and draw me back and forth against my own bones as I seek to inhale through the spasms until they pass. Sometimes they are drawn tight and I gasp to turn to the side or sit up; they have no give and are stiffer than corduroy.

I had a massage today and highly enjoyed the experience: I had not worked with her before at Pearson/Pollard Chiropractic but was as communicative as possible regarding the tenderness in my right side and back, my obvious difficulty laying myself flat on her table gave her an acute picture of the gravity of the situation. She used hot stones to a wonderfully soothing effect to in-essence press the pains out of my lower back and flank. Once my back had loosened a bit I felt some measure of relief and she gave the affected area a rubdown that fully incorporated the warmth and healing of the stones followed by a gentler hand massage that made it possible to rise from the table several minutes thereafter, unassisted.

I have an ever aggregating appreciation for the power of human touch in healing. In my darkest moments, it is a forehead massage, not a powerful painkiller, that makes all the difference where it counts. Perhaps this is why massage appeals so much to me. Even now i can feel long thin knives sticking just between my ribs on the right side. They are the thinnest of needles but I can feel their metal edges cutting into me. Massage reminds me to keep breathing anyway. It is a third option. Not a yes, not a no, a third option. Can't make it stop, can't make it go, but breathe anyway while that hand rubs beneath bringing just a little healing, just a little love.

I think about what I will do for the rest of the day for tomorrow or the next and it terrifies me. I don't have plans. Today's plan is to make it to tonight. I have some visitors coming at 6, they'll bring some food; people and food tend to be events in my life right now. But I have no lasting plans and certainly no comitments because who knows? In 2 hours I could be over the moon crazy or set the world on fire. I could live or die, make a million different decisions, and change my life five times over by tomorrow.

But I won't.

I want to shake a fist at the world because it seems like the classy thing to do. I want to roll down the window of my vintage limousine and tip the driver to hold the car still while I yell "goddamn you all to hell" at the gentlemen and baby dolls of broadway: those lost, champagne-dampened wanderers of F Scott Fitzgerald dreams that all just need a little love.

But it would be lost on them.

So instead you just take a breath instead. This is a good place to start. If you look around your mind's eye you can focus that intention if only for just this inhale. Somewhere good. Somewhere deep and decent. If you can build these roots, keep hydrated and eat your prunes you've got a shot at sanity in this post pill-addled fever dream. Like the Anna Nalick song "Can you help me unravel my latest mistake, I don't love him, winter just wasn't my season"

And Breathe. Just Breathe.
It's cliche. and tired and worn thin around the edges like some vocal velveteen rabbit. But the familiar threadbare folds feel right and heal somehow like the memory of an old forgotten blessing.
Rain beats down in a sodden springtime homage to weather. I spend many of my passing moments on the rocking chair on our porch, listening to that rain as it beats down against the protective eaves of the house.  But there is something comforting about the drum of the water against the roof as I write warm inside. A million moments touch a million lives as those raindrops fall and as my little world continues to turn here. My steady breath says "not yet" and the water runs in paths like tear tracks down the glass in the windowpane. Tomorrow the sun will rise again and it will bring struggle. Each sunrise sheds light on the pre-dawn still pain that stirs deep in the bones after the night has flown its bounds. But it all passes. If you just breathe.