Cancer.

About a month ago, I was diagnosed with Leukemia. And my whole life changed.

I don’t know what this change is, was, will be, but I know that I am in several ways entirely different than I was. The way, at least right now, that I see things are entirely new. And profoundly grateful. I almost died. And yet, I didn’t.

We each get this each day – I got this each day, prior to this happening. I got the chance to understand that life was precious, but I didn’t, really. I understood it, but to really feel it? Well, it’s different now,

and it brings up a host of other questions. Am I allowed to still watch Ben Stiller movies? Am I allowed to spend a day on the couch? Will I now stop stopping myself short on all my varied art projects, and allow myself to follow through on anything that I’ve started? I have no idea.

I’d like to think that part of this “change” – for lack of a better term for “life altering sudden tragic happening” – will indeed move me toward being more in my art, more in my life. I’d like to believe that part of this whole thing is a very nasty kick-upside-the-head lesson in not living for tomorrow. That I’m being given the chance to very acutely see that life is short and tenuous, and so I ought to embrace the talents that I have, and finally let myself explore them fully so that I might share them with you.

I’d like to believe that there are lessons here. Otherwise, what the fuck.

I’d like to believe that the Universe or my Higher Power couldn’t -- for some reason completely unknown to me – send me a postcard, or a dream, or a message on Facebook. That for some reason this lesson had to be learned hard, and fast, and therefore more gentle methods of smoothing a rock down to its shiny parts were not available to this massive Power.

I’ve been out of the hospital for a week now, and I will go back in next Monday for another round of chemo. This will be the 2^nd in a series of, likely, 5 treatments. The words that I’ve had to learn over this month scare the crap out of me. I don’t want to use words like chemo, nausea, pain meds, pneumonia. I don’t want to hear “How bad is the pain on a scale of 1 to 10,” or, “It’s time for your shot,” or “Well, we expect this.”

I’ve oscillated since I’ve been out of the hospital between those few stages of grief – anger, grief, acceptance. Often within the same minute. When I was in the hospital, there wasn’t time for anything except acceptance. This is happening. Period. Go with it. And, despite what you may think, it’s really f’ing busy in the hospital with people coming in and out at all hours of the day and night, throwing information or medication at you. There’s not really time to process, space to absorb and consolidate what has been happening to me.

And so, being home now, I’m getting the chance to experience what I couldn’t while basically holding my breath for 3 weeks. I’m getting to realize the enormity of what happened. The slow, marinating, seeping reality – I almost died. The nurse told me that I had 49% leukemic cells in my blood when I came into the hospital – WITH STREP THROAT – and that if I hadn’t come in, I would have died within two weeks. I would have gotten a bleed, likely in my brain, and I would have just died. No one would have known – no one would have known why. Relapse? Suicide? Understanding this fact has begun to lead me to know that I need help in holding the space for all this – and yesterday I contacted a cancer support group.

AND, I have to tell you, I don’t want to be someone who needs a cancer support group – I shouldn’t have motherfucking cancer in order to need such a group. A month ago, this was unfathomable.

This morning, I read my last Morning Pages entry from the week before I went into the hospital. I haven’t written morning pages since then, I was too sick, and then too hospitalized. And so I read them, and I see myself talking about how my throat really is starting to hurt. About how I went to the art store Flax and got new pens and a notebook and talked to the woman in the back about different types of pressed paper – hot press versus cold, what would be good for the art I want to do. About the café I’d emailed with the month before about putting up a show in their space, and how he wanted to do November, but I simply wasn’t ready, as it was the end of September at the time.

I’d written about the clothing I’d bought for cheap at good thrift shops, and the flying lesson I was scheduled for, which ended up being the day I went into the ER. I wrote about being excited, about art that I would make. About missing my family, and wanting to go home for Thanksgiving to see them.

In some ways, it feels like reading a journal from junior high, it feels so long ago. And yet, it’s all still me. And that’s something that I want to take away from this too. This process is going to be HARD, challenging, painful, difficult, and yet, I’m still me. As I was writing my first Morning Pages this morning since that last entry, I was inwardly elated to see my handwriting hadn’t changed. That major facts of who I am have not changed. That things that were important to me then, “before cancer,” are still things that are important to me now. – art, family, adventure.

I’ve been blasted with some of the nastiest chemicals, shorn down to the barest slices of my body ... but my handwriting is still the same.

I could go into the ways in which gratitude has become this sort of well of tears behind my eyes at all times. I could talk about how just waking up this morning feels like a gift. But I don’t want to today, really. I could list the thanks and the inundation of love and support and care, but that’s not what this blog is about this morning, at least. It’s not a love fest, it’s just a truth fest. About where I am this very day, at this very time, arguing and stamping and shaking a fist at the sky with WHY in the m’f’in hell couldn’t you have made this a little bit of a gentler lesson? About how I feel like I’m some sort of icon now, with people telling me all the time what an inspiration you are, when I’ve had diarrhea for 3 out of the last 4 weeks. I’ve asked people what on earth that even means, an inspiration to what? What have I inspired in you? What am I inspiring you to do? I haven't done anything except lived.

I get to be bitter about it. And I get to be amazingly thankful to get to be bitter about it – to be alive enough to have emotions enough to get to scorn about it.

It is surely true, the love and support I’ve gotten. And yet, there’s a part of me that feels angry that I even have a situation in which to receive such love and support. I know people love me. Couldn’t I have had my 31^st birthday at a restaurant with them, instead of in a hospital bed? Couldn’t I have learned to get out of the way of my own creativity and drive and lust for life in a different, gentler way? Couldn’t I have gotten to see my family by flying East for Thanksgiving, instead of them flying West to hold my hand while my hair falls out?

I’m grateful for this blog – this tempestuous blog that gives me the chance to be honest in every way. Which I want to use to springboard to something else, to write in another venue, maybe one that’s paid. I’m glad that I get to write here, as someone told me, as I speak – that if I write the way I talk, they said, I’m surely a great writer. I don’t know how much that is true, but somehow the cancer lets me see it a little more clearly. And perhaps begin to accept it. I want to explore my talent more – because there simply is more there. I want to push into it, and I want to share it.

I swear I would have gotten there without this whole cancer thing, but I guess I really didn’t have a choice in this one.