So, over this holiday, it’s become clear to me just how weird my life has become, psychologically and physically. I spend part of my days waiting to die, and part of them hoping for the miracle that will give me back the decades I’m going to lose. Physically, I wake up nearly every day battling intense nausea. If I can fight it long enough to get antinauseal wonder drug Zofran into my gut, my mornings are a lot easier and more pleasant. Now it’s been a while since my last chemotherapy infusion. To my surprise, my breathing is sometimes strong and clear (although the home nurse can hear congestion in my right lung, which worries her). This makes me think I should get some sort of exercise routine going, but this is very, very difficult. Just standing up and walking around, or going up and down one flight of stairs, puts me in a heavy oxygen debt and leaves me bent over and wheezing. About half the time, I can’t breathe comfortably in any case. Then I get claustrophobia and panic, just like in the old asthma days… . 

Sigh. Nobody said, as my Mom used to tell me, that life (or death) was going to be easy. So I control what I can—I do a lot of reading, some writing, some music, some drawing, some photography. And I live with what I can’t. I do find myself daydreaming about my life, especially when somebody triggers some specific memory.

For example. When I was in the hospital last time, one of nurses was a bantamweight Chinese woman named Ruby. Her English was good, but she retained plenty of accent indicating she didn’t grow up here. So I asked her where she was from. After “China” I asked her where in China. She said “someplace you’ve never heard of. It’s a nothing city called Hefei in a nothing province called Anhui”. 

Well, this was a bit of a shock for me. Both my trips to China in the 90s were specifically to Hefei City in Anhui Province. Which are indeed very obscure and impoverished places. So it was a shock for her as well. When I was there, there was only one western-style hotel in Hefei. Turns out she lived in the neighborhood just across the street from said hotel. She worked in the hospital in Hefei for 13 years, and has been in the U.S. for 7. I told her I had the best stir-fried snake of all the places I visited in Hefei. She said she wouldn’t touch it. She did start to miss her family’s home cooking, though. I explained to her that on my first trip, we were a state-sponsored and politically valued group. So we got to eat the very high-end of available banquet food. Turtle soup, for example, an incredibly rare and expensive delicacy. Here in the U.S., turtle soup is akin to a vegetable or creamy stew with turtle meat. In China, turtle soup is an intact dead turtle in a bowl of clear broth. You pull the turtle apart with chopsticks, and the senior woman at the table (this usually turned out to be our translator, who we brought in with us so as not to have to rely on local resources) got the shell, from which she nibbled the edges. Oh, and frogs. Frogs we DID get in a red-sauced stew. At one restaurant they assured us the frogs we were eating were exceedingly rare, almost extinct. This was by way of honoring us. I just glared at our team leader for the rest of dinner, to no effect. 

Our big showcase meeting on my first trip was at an environmental research institute about a mile away from our hotel. Rather than travel in the big black car motorcade, I decided to walk. I got the hotel staff to write the address for me on a card, point me in the general direction, and off I hiked. Whenever I got lost, I’d be scratching my head and trying to match my paper up with any street signs. At that point, a crowd of laughing women would invariably come to my rescue. They would read my card, re-orient me in the proper direction, and push me gently on my way. I got to the place at the precise moment the black car motorcade pulled in through the gates.

The point is, I certainly can’t complain that I didn’t make the most of the life I was given. I have plenty to think about when I’m brooding, and plenty to chuckle over when I’m in a lighter mood. I can only commend to you the lesson I’ve taken from my late-in-life terminal cancer. And that is, of course, to live ‘em while you got ‘em, because they are NOT forever. 

So have a good week, everybody. I hope your holidays were happy and you’re looking at a good winter ahead. Later this week I go see my oncologist. I’ll have news, presumably, at that point. Likely I’ll have to get ready to survive more rounds of chemotherapy. I’ll just have to hope I have the strength to get through it…I just have to live with the things I can’t control!