Garbage Days
When EVERYTHING Stinks
Garbage days…ugh.
I have cancer.
I have cancer that will never, ever go away.
I have cancer that is so pernicious that I never experience times of ringing the gold bell, signaling my last day of treatment, so I have had to learn to hold gratitude for what I can do rather than mourn the loss for what I cannot.
I have cancer that has become a constant companion. It awakens me each morning, holds me tightly all day long, and accompanies me to bed each night. Sometimes its voice carries no more than a whisper, while others its volume booms, rages and demands - nonetheless, a nagging, constant tenor.
I have cancer that has me respond to the oft repeated question, “Are you almost done with your treatment?”
with a long intake of breath and a trying-but-patient response, “I have metastatic cancer which means I will never, ever be done,
until I am.”
Yea, I have that type of cancer.
Borderless.
Heavy.
Hard.
Oftentimes my treatment makes me feel glued to the bottom of a trash can, stuck and glazed over, peering out from behind a rotten, blackened banana peel, the stench weighty and overwhelming. Sometimes it feels like too much. The endless frequency and duration of the whole deadly, chronic illness “thing” swallows me, slowly cutting off my oxygen.
Suffocating.
The day-after chemo is the reason why I avoid getting the COVID booster. I have received 7 COVID shots, and each and every time, 12 hours after the shot, I feel so sick and so sore that even my teeth feel like they will fall from my mouth if I breath too heavily. So, while I feel the mounting pressure as COVID numbers go up, coupled with having contracted COVID last February, I have yet to find the courage to go in and voluntarily bare my arm and take another round. I do not want to add another Garbage day to my month for the day after my infusions most assuredly brings weakness, discomfort, exhaustion, a low-grade fever, and an all-over body ache much like the experience of spending a day nestled with COVID or the flu.
Most everyone knows that feeling…
when everything feels overwhelming,
when everything IS overwheming,
when everything just plain sucks.
Garbage days.
Yesterday WAS garbage day.
Everything stunk, and the cans were completely overstuffed. Long, lonely and full of despair. These days I live with heavy sadness, and I feel sorry for myself. My body so tired and shredded, it takes a concerted effort to remember, to believe that what I am experiencing is temporary and that somehow, in someway, I shed my sorrow, my weakness, my soft, squishy vulnerability, and find the capacity to bolster myself upright again. That I can go from despondency to hopefulness all within a 24 hour time period, and that I can keep doing it over, and over and over again, for coming up on 8 years, gives even me pause.
How in the world can the body do that?
Yesterday all the rotten peels, broken egg shells, and scraps of soggy, moldy things that we disposed of last week were collected and taken somewhere off campus, somewhere out of sight.
Good riddance.
Today, I am back on track, and I am slowly filling the emptied cans once again.
As I read this describption your garbage days, I can smell them.
Alex Honnold chooses to climb without a rope because he can't not try it. His photographer friend said, “If you had a superpower and you could fly, you would probably do it, right? The drive and ambition to do something that pushes you, that you love – it’s hard to put that away and not use it.”
Climbers say they do it because they love that feeling of being alive. But what do we say about you? A climber reaches for the highs while you endure the greatest lows...and not to "feel alive" but to just freaking stay alive. People say he has the superpower to suppress his nerves...but you submit every nerve to be on fire during treatment, over and over.
So who loves Life more? I can't answer that, but I do know you have entered back into my consciousness with the rhythm of your trash can pickup. This morning was a hard one for my wife and by extension me; the sorrow came out all of a sudden and she held me for a long time. I needed something to help me and when I remembered/felt your rhythm, I texted Jamie; she told me you posted today. When you say you're back on track, you pick up others. I wanted to tell you that. Keep climbing.