I saw my surgeon on the morning of Christmas Eve, which somehow made everything feel far more official. It’s not like I thought she had misled me over the phone or that the oncologist had lied about the prognosis. Instead, it felt more like the end of college, when I knew intellectually that I had enough credit hours to graduate, but emotionally it hit me only when I donned cap and gown.

Figuring that wearing a mortarboard to an appointment with an oncology surgeon would trigger a psychiatric evaluation, I wore instead yoga pants and my intestinal fortitude shirt, along with a necklace I had knitted. I will say this for cancer: It has upped my knitting skills immensely, skyrocketing me from a middling beginner to a strong intermediate. I have had nothing but time — and plenty of yarn — on my hands, so I feel a little like the Oprah of the textile world, throwing my hands up gleefully and exclaiming You get a scarf! And you get a scarf! And so do you!

While a scarf seemed like a very small way to say thank you for saving my life, it was the best that I could do. Perhaps a scarf is like the word “Aloha” — which can mean hello, good-bye, and I love you — for in the past 14 days, I have made scarves not just to thank my surgeon,

but to welcome my son’s new girlfriend

and to make myself look like a lorikeet, a small rainbow-colored parrot.

My surgeon either really liked her scarf or is a strong contender for an Academy Award in February, and I was pleased to have done something nice for her. The appointment ended with a short meeting of the Mutual Admiration Society, with my thanking her profusely for her compassion, care, and tremendous skill, and her telling me that I was a rock star patient, for in the midst of being so terribly ill, I was so wonderfully healthy.

It has dawned on me during this entire ordeal that taking care of one’s health is a lot like roof repairs. As a homeowner, roof repairs stink: No one ever says, That is a terrific new roof! No wonder you spent all that time and money! Instead, roof repairs often come at an inconvenient time and carry more cost than you care to bear. There are flashier, more notable, and more fun ways to take care of your home. A new sofa is inviting. Landscaping makes you happy. An additional closet fills you with glee. And instead, you’re writing that #$%& check for the roof.

And so it has been at times for me with working out and eating right. There is TV to be viewed and chocolate cake to be had. There is the temptation of taking two weeks off and quitting. There is the comparative deliciousness of sweet tea over unsweet tea. There is the hardness of the pavement over the softness of the bed, the tastelessness of water over the sweetness of bourbon, the discomfort of yoga over the comfort of lounging in yoga pants. But embracing all inconveniences, shouldering the discomforts, and making certain complaints, I kept going, even when it dawned on me that I was not going to be a shorter Scot-Irish-Dutch version of Gisele and that it was going to take more than I ever wanted to do to look buff.

You may not need that new roof when it’s a sunny 75 degree day. But man, it’s nice when the skies open wide and the rains start to come.

And so it was after a major surgery and cancer.

After actively wishing to die in the first 12 hours following surgery, I pulled myself up out of the hospital bed and started walking slowly. I was out of the hospital in 48 hours, not five days. Sixteen days out, I am walking a few miles a day. I went to the gym at lunch today and very carefully lifted five pound weights. And while one of us downed four brownies at a sitting (hey, it was Christmas!), fruits, vegetables, and lean meats have become the coins of my personal realm.

If you are looking for a New Year’s resolution, perhaps you walk for 30 minutes and eat some leafy greens every single day. If you’re feeling bold, maybe you throw in some weights and some flexibility training. As you do it — and I speak from experience on this one — don’t do it because you hate how you look. Do it because you love yourself.

I think for New Year’s that I will have to resolve to quit crying. It continues, and my family has instituted a subtle, barely perceivable system of whose-turn-it-is-to-comfort-mom. I had expected a big epiphany from the cancer diagnosis, and because I like to force the issue, I had prepared myself for a major life change. I thought that the epiphany would propel me into a new job — would I become a polar explorer? — or a bout of do-goodedness that would rival Mother Teresa.

And then I started crying while running the vacuum cleaner on Saturday, five stolen minutes while armed with a Dyson stick. With no one to mother my house, it had fallen into a state of benign neglect, and either the dirt on the floor had to go or I did. The dirt came up, and the tears came down, for I realized how much I loved my home and how grateful I was to have it.

Buoyed by that success, I utterly lost it at noon on Christmas morning, as Chris cooked brunch, the kids hassled one another in the kitchen, Emmet hatched plans to counter-surf, and I unloaded the dishwasher. Mariah Carey came on the playlist. As she belted out, All I want for Christmas is YOU!, I tried to, too. Hitting those notes is hard on a good day, and impossible while completely choked up.

Expecting an epiphany that would require everything to change, I confronted the realization of how much I love the small, quiet life I have. Early on in the diagnosis, when I had no idea what I was facing, I never thought about how much money I was making or how to get more clients or how to get ahead. I thought about the next time I would hug my children. I hoped to be well enough to go to London with Chris. I wanted to be around to raise a puppy. I thought about the new dining room table I had gotten because it could sit three times as many people as our old one, and how I hoped to see it full. I wanted to be happy enough to paint again. I hoped to be focused enough to sew. I wished with every fiber of muscle to do those stupid battle ropes in the gym again, even though it would be really hard. I wanted to write more, and less about cancer.

I have been struck by how 2018 has been a terrible and wonderful year. My nest is empty. My very good dog died. I had cancer. My hair finally transformed from red to grey. But even accounting for these things, it has been wonderful. I will be allowed to grow older. To walk, to dance, to sing. To force my family to take turns hugging me. To make mistakes. To live this small, precious life.

ALC

P.S. — One other epiphany I had concerned hats (because you know how I feel about accessories). After seeing some of the chemo caps offered to oncology patients, and hearing my surgeon’s story about seeing a cancer patient who appeared to be wearing a knitted breast on her head, I will be using my newly upped knitting skills to make hats for chemo patients. While I will deliver some to my oncologist at my March follow-up, if you, or anyone you know, needs a chemo cap, please email me. It would be honor for me to do that act of kindness.

I started crying last night around 8 o’clock, and as much as I tried to stop, I kept crying. It wasn’t a dainty display of tears. It was a choking torrent of emotion. Yesterday was filled with good news, although you would have had no idea looking at me. You would have seen instead a 50 year-old woman who had run full-speed into a brick wall, and who was now reeling with cartoon bluebirds and stars wreathing her head. That is how yesterday felt.

First, the good news. I do not need chemotherapy. My surgeon and my oncologist agree. The surgery removed the tumor. Of the 15 lymph nodes harvested from the surgery, none of them was cancerous. Not even one. My abdominal CT scan was clear, and while my chest CT scan showed multiple nodules, there is a non-cancerous likely explanation for those nodules. I have Stage IIA colon cancer.

Until this experience, I did not know exactly what staging meant, only that the higher the stage, the worse the expected outcome. What it reflects in colon cancer cases is both how far the tumor has penetrated the intestinal wall and how far it has spread, whether to lymph nodes or distant organs. The tumor’s penetration is measured on a scale of one to four, with one being the least and four being the most. I scored T-3, meaning that the tumor had grown into the outermost layers of my colon but had not grown through them. While I had a deeper tumor, I had no metastasis. 

The tumor is gone, along with six inches of my colon.

It was a small sacrifice.

The likelihood of the colon cancer’s returning is less than 20%, with the join site being the most vulnerable. For the next three years, my oncologist will monitor me every three to six months. I will have another CT chest scan in March to make certain that the innocent explanation for the chest nodules is, in fact, the right one. I will have what I hope is a full colonoscopy in June. There will be blood (tests). 

And there are things that I can do, many of which I was already doing. Diet plays a huge role, so I will continue eating red meat only rarely and consuming plenty of vegetables and fruits. Being in good physical condition is always helpful. I had stopped drinking alcohol at the time of my diagnosis, figuring that my body had enough going on already. While the oncologist told me that alcohol consumption correlated more with breast cancer, I still intend to drink sparingly. And I will start taking a Vitamin D3 supplement along with 325 mg of aspirin a day, both of which have been shown to reduce the recurrence of colon cancer. 

As for my body, it is healing. I am moving well, and my recovery is going nicely. But I will not be sending Christmas cards of myself in a bikini, let us say, for my midsection is riddled with incisions and garish surgical bruises. I have lost eight pounds since my diagnosis on November 15. My greying hair is noticeably whiter, probably from the stress. A decade ago, I would have looked at myself in the mirror critically, wondering when I could return to the gym and get myself in shape. I look at myself now and think, Oh, you poor sweet body. Kindness is good, especially to one’s self.

Emotionally I am a bit of a wreck. On November 15, I learned that I had cancer. On December 17, I found out that I no longer had cancer. It was 32 days of intense worry, a concentrated dose of anxiety the likes of which I had never swallowed before. I think of my first surgeon, who had scheduled my surgery for February 1, and I genuinely do not think that I could have made it that long. I am grateful that I was able to write about it. Otherwise, I would have gone nuts. I am thankful, too, that I am finally crying about it, for I need the release.

Here I sit, 50 years old, in the prime of life. This was going to be my greatest year ever. Four months after my birthday, I got diagnosed with cancer out of the blue. Thirty-two days later, I was cancer-free. I have been knocked backwards by the diagnosis, by the resiliency of the flesh, by the fragility of my emotions, by the strength of my family, by the love of my friends. I am humbled. I am grateful. 

I made it. And now I have to figure out exactly what that means to me.

Love to all,

ALC

If there is one thing I have learned from having cancer, it is this: Never — I repeat, NEVER — get into a knife fight, even if you are under anesthesia and it is a surgeon wielding a knife.  It was the one thing I almost remembered from having abdominal surgery as a three or four year-old in 1972. There was a Donald Duck puzzle, a red tricycle on the children’s ward, and a soft blue flannel night gown from home. There was also a large bandage and pain that doubled me over, the phantom of which I could recall even 46 years later.

Some of these factors were present on Monday. There was again a blue nightgown, this time from the hospital, and my father, whose auburn hair (like mine) has now turned to grey. But this time, there was Chris and a hope to avoid open surgery and the one question on everyone’s minds: Exactly how bad is it?

If you have not had surgery lately, let me fill you in on some of the details. There is a tremendous push to avoid infection. The night before I had to use antiseptic wet wipes two after a shower; apply them like you would paint, the instructions said, but really I thought about wax on, wax off in my best Mr. Miyagi voice. On the morning of surgery, the wipes made a special guest appearance, as did iodine to swab up my nose and peroxide to brush my teeth, lips, and gums. I also received written instructions to report any hospital employee who did not wash his or her hands. After this prep, the anesthesiologist bumped up the Versed to very pleasing levels, and by the time the nurse rolled me into the operating room, I was blowing kisses to all passers-by. There was a cast of thousands waiting in the OR, all of whom introduced himself or herself to me, and I think I was cracking jokes when the anesthesia kicked in. It was a three hour surgery, and I don’t know exactly when I woke up — I know only that it was dark. As for where, there were so many gurneys occupying defined spaces in a low-ceilinged room that I felt like I was on the basement level of a parking garage.

But when I woke up, a soft-spoken nurse told me that my husband and my son were there waiting for me. This bothered me, for it meant that the nurse either believed Chris or my dad was my son and that my entire skin care regimen needed rethinking. But as it turned out, my son drove from Athens during finals to be there when I woke up.

They had heard the news, but I had not. So in my groggy, half-awake, soft-spoken state, I asked Chris, and I listened. My surgeon removed the cancer. (In case you’re wondering, it was an adenocarcinoma in an apple core lesion.) She biopsied some surrounding lymph nodes, none of which were cancerous. The tumor had not penetrated the intestinal wall. And my CEA score — a blood marker for cancer — was in the normal range even before the tumor was removed. These are all good signs that it hasn’t spread.

I believed Chris, but I still asked my surgeon to repeat it. It sounded even better coming from her.

The surgeon made five incisions — one through the belly button (a factory-installed portal to your abdominal world!) and two on each side — and  it caused monstrous pain. I spent Monday night on Percocet and morphine, actively wishing to die. The blood pressure cuff kicked in every hour or so. Machines beeped. A phlebotomist drew my blood at 2:30 a.m. Residents came it at 5:15 a.m. and 6 a.m. My doctor arrived around 7. As I slept through the day, I would drift out of sleep to find my father patiently reading a book, or Chris snoozing in the chair next to the bed. Kind nurses attended me. And Tuesday night was more of the same.

I came home around 2:30 this afternoon. I did not know that the road between the hospital and our house had so many bumps. But I am here now, and Chris promises not to awake me for blood pressure tests or blood draws. I wanted to bear hug my surgeon on the way out, but that would have hurt my incisions.

My friend Linda told me that after this ordeal, people would seem so much kinder, and the world would seem a better place. This has been my experience. I needed help dealing with the diagnosis. That came only partly from physicians. The other part has come from you: the prayers, the emails, the cards, the texts, the thoughts, the meals, the yarn, the flowers, the dog walking. Whenever I felt like I could not go forward, something would happen: an unexpected text, a bag of dark chocolate-covered popcorn on the front porch, a 3D puzzle of Paris.

Our mothers were right: Life isn’t fair. But even with a cancer diagnosis, it is wonderful.

When I meet my oncologist on Monday, I will find out whether I will need chemotherapy. I am cautiously optimistic that I will not. I will need another colonoscopy in six months so that Dr. Nyce can finish the scope that the tumor so abruptly ended. So life remains a little uncertain, just like usual. I can handle that.

ALC

In my last post, I suggested that even if you sound like a fumbling idiot, you should say something to a friend diagnosed with cancer. The undercurrent of that advice was that there is no wrong thing to say.

Thursday proved me wrong.

I decided to be forthright with my clients and courts about my health condition, lest there be some sort of bias against an attorney who has opted to downsize from a large intestine to a medium intestine. So I told my client about the diagnosis; he wanted me to remain on his case, asked if he could say a prayer for me, and suggested that he would organize a prayer vigil in his cell block for Monday. At the hearing, I then informed the judge of my diagnosis, and he told me how sorry he was.

So far, so good. I think we would all agree that these are appropriate responses.

As I packed up my papers to go, another attorney sidled up to me, gave me a side-hug, introduced himself, offered to cover hearings and help any way he could, and said that he had to have frequent colonoscopies due to his own family’s history of colon cancer.

And then disaster struck, for yet another attorney  — one who had heard the disclosure and this conversation — butted in with this little bon mot: “Y’all like those colonoscopies because you just like having something stuck up your butt.”

In a lifetime of snappy retorts, a big mouth, and thinking on my feet, this attorney did the unthinkable: He left me absolutely speechless.

So I will amend my prior advice: Say something, but for heaven’s sake, don’t say that.

I had included this snippet in a post I wrote yesterday, along with other short stories about how the cancer diagnosis factored in to every part of my life. Indeed, one of cancer’s most maddening and evil superpowers is the ability to insert itself into almost any situation: I swing frantically and frequently from enjoying the moment to worrying about exactly where this whole cancer thing will take me.

One of the biggest surprises — apart from the biggest surprise of all, which is that I have cancer — is just how guilty I feel for having it. Chris has turned an odd pale shade of greenish-grey and has trouble sleeping at night. My daughter needs a lot of hugs, and my son wants constant reassurance that I will be fine. My friends have swung into overdrive, and as I type, I have little doubt that soups are simmering and casseroles are being prepared. I know intellectually that I was not hanging out in the red-light district and cruising for colon cancer. But emotionally I feel terrible that I have inflicted this whole stupid mess on the people I love.

Yesterday was particularly bad. A colon cancer diagnosis carries no mistake and no waiting. In a single room it’s you, a gastroenterologist, a high-tech plumber’s snake, and a screen. It’s not like Dr. Nyce confused my results with someone else’s. But an oncologist’s office called yesterday to schedule an appointment, and that about did me in. An oncologist? I almost said. That’s for people who have cancer!

Then I remembered.

If you are a medical professional who deals with cancer patients, I am convinced that you must attend some Advanced Training in a Very Soothing Voice. The woman on the phone was no exception. How are you feeling? she asked. And do you feel well enough to come in for an office visit?

Well enough? Did this woman expect me to run wind sprints the whole way there?

Then I remembered.

I made an appointment for the Monday after surgery, and I proceeded to cannonball into the warm seas of self-pity party. There was a pathetic text to my father, stepmother, and siblings. There was a whiny call to Chris. There was writing and substantial progress made on a new blog post. I even worked on that blog post while standing in line for a visitation at a funeral home.

Then I remembered. I WAS STANDING IN LINE FOR A VISITATION AT A FUNERAL HOME.

I had absolutely nothing to complain about.

A lovely friend certainly did: Her father had died unexpectedly. Yet as I hugged her and offered how heartbroken I was for her, she asked what she could do for me. She introduced me to her mother, for whom I had done a painting, and her mother, wiping away the tears, made certain to tell me how much she and everyone else loved the work. And then my friend’s husband told me I looked just like myself.

In the face of grief and in the face of adversity, this is how I want to act. Gracious. Kind. Outward looking.

After I hugged the family, I walked through the funeral home and back toward my car. Since this is Savannah, I knew about every tenth person in line. I will say this about having cancer: Everyone seems relieved to see me. There is a corporal form that looks just like it should: the big glasses, the even bigger mouth, the clothes that probably really don’t match — a leopard print top, a red plaid jacket, a bow tie fashioned from a silk scarf. I have started dropping in on friends unexpectedly — my own I’m Still Here! tour — and I have hugged so many people since the date of my diagnosis. There have been polite side hugs, to be sure, but there are far more genuine bear hugs bestowed upon me by the people I love.

I received one of those hugs from my friend Julie in the grocery store on Saturday. We ran through the trifling cancer stuff, and then conversation turned to something far more important: the SEC championship game that afternoon. We were both watching it at home, although I told her that I had thought for a hot minute about playing the cancer card and shaking Chris down for tickets. (Ultimately I concluded that it would be terribly unfair for me to both have cancer and demand that Half-Time Chris arrive early AND sit through an entire college football game.)

I watched the game from the comfort of my couch, with the added bonus of wearing slippers the entire time, surrounded by a college friend, my daughter, and some of her friends, while Chris manufactured the aromatherapy that comes from cooking chili. With a two touchdown lead, I ignored my inner Larry Munson and allowed that the Dawgs could win this thing.

Alas. It was not so. There were concerns about missed calls and bad calls that changed the course of the game. And the Bulldawg Nation continued its streak as the most beleaguered fan base in college football. This was supposed to be the year that the Dawgs won a national championship. Instead, they are ranked in 5th place and headed to the Sugar Bowl, where they will undoubtedly cream Texas.

There is always next year.

I felt the SEC Championship in my gut, for it seemed to parallel my own life. I thought that this would be the year that I would win my own National Championship. I faced a tough spring training schedule. My children left the nest. My dog died. My hair continued its awkward, and often embarrassing, grow out from red to grey. And then, the fall. Oh, the fall! There was a road trip. There was more time. There was more joy. There was a puppy. There was painting again and all sorts of creative pursuits. There I was. Me! Suited up to win it all, baby.

And then I got my own bad call. The replay officials confirmed the ruling on the field.

My dad, sports fan that he is, always instilled in me not to get too excited about bad or missed calls, for they are part of the game.

So here I am, decidedly not headed to the National Championship game. This year, I punched my ticket to the Colon Bowl. I face a formidable opponent, but I will not win if I defeat myself. I am battered, perhaps, but exceedingly grateful not to have a career-ending injury. Just as I woke up the day after the SEC Championship still happy to be a Georgia Bulldog, I woke up today still happy to be me.

And good Lord willing, there is always next year.

ALC

P.S. — A rare benefit of my current situation is that my daughter, usually strenuously opposed to being photographed with me, agreed to this picture tonight. It won’t win any awards, but I like the joy it captures.