Death

I'd say that I'm feeling better every day, even still. I don't know what it's taking me so long to recover from but I do not feel yet that I'm at 100% - which is okay, because the progress continues to be steady. I'm not down about it, I am grateful that I have a body that likes healing.

The next thing I need to do is get blood work done so that I can see what my thyroid levels are, calcium and Vitamin D while I'm at it. I'm starting to struggle with the daily routine of taking pills- I'm definitely at that point where the novelty of a new routine wears off and the old habits start to show themselves. I need to keep my medication out where I walk past it/see it, otherwise I never even think about it. I missed one dose so far, and was late on another, but I can feel the disconnect and I know that I'm likely to keep forgetting if I don't take some measures to make sure that I'm reminded daily.

I feel like my levels are good for the most part. I am still pretty tired but I think if I can start going to bed at a decent hour every now and then it might really help. I want to start integrating some kind of regular, low impact exercise without making a big fuss about it- just start doing something and see where it goes. No goals, just having it actually happen will be enough of a success. It feels like it's really important to make this happen and I hope that I am relaxed enough to let myself do it and enjoy it, but on top of it enough to stick it out. I guess I need to make some daily-routine changes all around.

I've said many times that this cancer is energetic- I do believe this, that it wasn't here to kill me necessarily, but more serve as a warning system that I need to open up, pay attention, speak up and make some changes.

It's just been such an intense few months and the last couple of days I've felt the culmination of all of that intense outpouring of energy, of being cornered by circumstances into receiving generous love from others in ways I never would have allowed myself otherwise - and the energetic transition is just starting to wear me down or something. Today I dont' want to be touched and I'm prickly, a little sad and disconnected, but at the same time feeling really positive and I actually got a LOT of work done today. It's a weird place to be, all conflicted and turned upside down, but it's just where I'm at.

Today Randy and I were listening to NPR and the Tobolowsky Files were on, and Stephen Tobolowsky was talking about his experience with his heart surgery. He painted the exact picture in his story of what it felt like to be me, going through cancer and surgery and healing and everything that we have so far. It was a profound thing to listen to, that other people do go about this journey in many of the same ways that I do- in consciousness that this changes us, that it changes our bodies profoundly, forever, that it changes how we love ourselves and others, and what we say about that love. My friend Kelli had a laparoscopy and it was also profoundly life changing for her- a 'little' surgery, but it cuts us each to the meat and bones of who we really are and makes us naked in ways we'd never expect (because we are willing to be naked).

I felt like I was holding Stephen's hand as he told his story, getting obviously emotional as he described his wife and her support of him, much in the same way that Randy has unwaveringly supported me. "We'll do whatever we have to do. We'll get through this." It's true. We will.

He talked about a story in the Talmud about how Death visits us many times in our lives and we don't notice until He's finally staring us in the face- and then we realize that we've done this dance before, in some moment when we might have lost our lives to that car accident, or illness.

What I think we as a culture don't know is that Death is with us in other ways too- when we change, never to go back to who we were. When I moved out of my mother's crazy house and in with my Aunt. When I moved to Germany, when I came home. When I had my first child. When I had my cesarean, when I had cancer- all of these, they are all deaths- because I died in each of those moments, shed that molty flaky skin of who I was, and I birthed myself again, new and shiny and pink, and in that, also delicate and easily bruised for a while.

I feel like I am still in the 'death' phase of this, that parts of me are still shedding away and peeling back. I feel like I am still between the lines, between the veils of life and Spirit. I don't feel like my feet are on the ground yet and I'm not sure I'll know they are when I finally land.

It's frustrating, and delicious, and perfect.