Good News

What do you do when you get the recall phone call. They want more pictures of your breast and its not because they want to hang the photos up in their lockers.

I wasn’t really sure of the official playbook so my wholly customized reaction process went something like this:

1) My official reaction: Don’t tell (hardly) anyone until I  know this actually IS bad news. If you read my very recent post Bad News you know that medical problems are being handed out in my family like hor’dourves and another cancer diagnosis was not going to help anyone – least of all my (grown) children who are already reeling from receiving that news from their father. I felt this was the right decision at the time but it did lead to a bit of a mess with my stomach. See recent post on worries. Not to mention about a 30% reduction in my work productivity. No wonder I was distracted. I was making contingency plans in my head during most of my waking hours.

2) My official action – as close to a gesture of defiance as I could get: I immediately signed up for a 3 year magazine subscription. I figured the magazines might require my physical presence on this earth for at least a few years more. Silly I know but it felt good at the time.

After playing twister (almost literally) with the mammogram machine this morning I was told the thickness they saw was deemed ok – nothing to worry about. I cannot tell you how I danced out of the clinic into the sunshine . I would have had a glass of champagne but it was a bit early in the day.

Of three of us waiting for news this morning two of us were able to leave with our happy news and able to breath freely for the first time in 10 days or so.

The third had to have an ultrasound.

I can look up the statistics but I know they are somehow nearly that. I have a sister and a best friend an aunt and several former co-workers who had to run that tremendous emotional and physical gauntlet you begin when you are not sent out of the clinic with good news.

If you spin around in a crowd you will hit one or more.

Make it stop.

Feeding Worries to My Stomach. Another Dieting No No. . .

I’ve been feeding worries to my stomach for a while now. It seems to have an insatiable appetite for them, often using its own lining as a condiment.

Truly I know this isn’t the best storage space for them but I’ve never been good at knowing which worries to share, which to keep and which to give away. Sending them to my stomach at least makes it appear they have been disposed of.

For a long time I thought I could continue this way – keep things status quo.

Unfortunately the anti-acids are getting expensive and frankly they don’t work all that well anyway.

I guess its time to take up Yoga. I’m thinking I can hide the worries in the mat instead.

Bad News

When I was a child my friends and I used to play a common “what if” game and ask each other questions such as “Would you rather be cold or hot?.” These would rapidly morph into morbid questions such as “Would you rather die in a fire or by drowning?” I used to choose cold over hot as I reasoned that I could pile on the sweaters and jackets to warm up but there is so much you can take off to get cooler.

At a certain point you risk arrest if you aren’t in the privacy of your own home.

In my 50’s I have decided that I must have anticipated my new internal heating system by a number of decades and haven’t changed my mind.

I remember this game every time I think about receiving bad news about a medical test (for instance) but the questions I ask myself are different. I ask myself “Would I tell anyone about the bad news or keep it a secret?”. Would I be a strong fighter or would I become completely depressed? I know which choice would be healthier but that doesn’t mean I would make that choice.

These important decisions (reactions) are usually made by adrenaline. Adrenaline becomes a very poorly behaved sub brain when called upon to act.

So I honestly don’t know the answer. I know that I would want to be strong and that fighting is healthier.

Bad news of one sort or another has become an epidemic in – I was going to say both sides but I really mean all sides of – my family over the last several months. There have been several serious surgeries which have had us waiting, white knuckled, for news of survival never mind success, broken bones, cancer, lyme disease, as yet undiagnosed alien cell colonies, and thats the short list.

Some of this is the result of our older and much beloved parents beginning, somehow all at once, to suffer from older parent things. The rest of the generations have not, however, been spared.

And really I have to wonder, Is it random? Are we on the wrong side of the statistics? Does God have us in his cross hairs?

This perfect storm began before Thanksgiving and does not appear to want to let up soon as one individuals serious surgery has incremented to two and another’s treatment plan was ratcheted up from not fun at all to downright unfair.

The only way out of this for any of us is up so I am dashing off an official request to adrenaline traffic control.

Send out the fighter jets.

Aim carefully.

Friends and Family

Outside there is a stubborn patch of snow located in an odd spot at the base of the deck stairs. We’ve had several sizable snow storms which have been followed by temperature extremes of unseasonably warm and then unseasonably cold weather. The vast majority of snow has yielded to the rain and warmth but this stubborn pile remains.

On cold days the pile of snow is crusty and loses a little height to evaporation into the dry air – but not much. On warm days the pile softens up a little and shrinks a bit in breadth but still it hangs in. This will eventually disappear but its current stubbornness reminds me of families.

Families don’t always look the same and are not even comprised of the same individuals over time. Marriage, birth, divorce and death change the size, shape and membership but connections of blood and promise keep us family. Though even the nature and the strength of the connection may change it is the fact of connection that matters.
Years and years (and years) ago I wrote the following poem which really was about that idea:

This is an excerpt (the rest was especially bad)

We are not your ordinary family, connected
Word and blood to one another – as if that could
Break us even in this gamble of relations
Call it experiment if you wish to enter, we will
Take you in, no rules, enter, exit as you please,
The substance will remain .
. . .
Lean in to touch it if you can find an edge, amorphous as it is. . .

Changing shape is something we all have in common. What we don’t have in common is how we treat each other or whom we consider full members.

I’ve never understood family rifts and feuds, members not speaking for years for insignificant reasons. The loss, in balance, almost always outweighs the silly cause.

There is, after all, a bit of the practice society to a family. We need to get it right amongst ourselves before letting our members loose on society at large.

Resolutions

This is the day we resolve to be new people. We have been given our annual mulligan and even the most pessimistic among us think that this time we can do better.

Of course those of us who have been through a few cycles of New Years Resolutions know that most of them are doomed to failure. If it was worth doing at all you might just as well have started on a random Thursday back in October.

But there is something more contemplative about the short days of winter. There is something about the tradition of New Years that has us taking stock, weeks in advance, of the shortcomings we’d like to repair before Spring.

Excerpted from my list:
I have not spent enough time with my friends or my family for as long as I can remember. I could write a thousand I’m sorry’s in the dust that has grown thick on the surface of my close relationships. Its mostly my fault. I know this.

There has always been a reason. The reasons have always been good but I’ve decided to make friends and family a priority this year anyway.

I miss you all.

I’ll may actually call and you may actually see me.

You’ve been warned. . .