winning the booby prize

Having cancer is shuffling my cards wrong-side up, and they're all showing. This is not easy. 

I wore a favorite, very fancy pair of earrings to the doctor's office on Tuesday, as a deliberate effort to invite cheer into this otherwise unpleasant experience. Laura wanted me to take them off while I got drained. I protested, but let her put them in her pocket. We can only find one now, and we both feel awful for being mad at each other about it. She feels terrible about having pressured me to take them off, then losing one. I feel awful about how mad I am about it. And I'm pretty sure this is not just about the earring, of course. Ellen thinks it's high time Laura and I started showing signs of stress over the cancer. If it weren't for a lost earring, then something else would come up.

That may be so. But I do have a terrible, terrible "thing" about losing stuff. Always have. For me, the drive to completion is powerfully strong, and a lost item is the worst kind of incompletion. It creates the annoyance of a song without its last note. It makes my mind itch, excruciatingly so. It is like chewing tin foil when you have metal fillings. It is the ultimate form of keeping the turkey in agonizing suspense. If you don't get that last reference, you haven't really been reading the blog.

From the time they were small, the kids went to Laura when they had lost something. On the sly, she'd help them look. If after a day or so they were unsuccessful in their search, I would hear whispering in the next room, increasingly desperate in its tones. Then around the corner would come a trembling child, who would say, "Uh, mom? I have to tell you something. I lost my calculator." It's not my anger they worry about; it's my anxiety. It's that they will have tripped my search switch. They know, I know, that I will ruminate and hunt until it is found. I may not sleep until I have walked through the past two days with them. Did you go to the bathroom before or after math class? Did you have it then?

Three winters ago, Yani lost a very important key at Porter's, loaned to her by an adult who was hoping to facilitate some junior class fundraising effort. It was nighttime, and it had just snowed about two inches. It was early for snow, and the fall leaves hadn't yet been raked or picked up. After helping me for a reasonable length of time, Yani went home to write her paper. I stayed on to do the unreasonable amount of searching. I SWEPT the snowy, leafy sidewalk, holding a flashlight along with the broom -- from the senior dorm all along the length of Main Street back to our house. I swept Main Street's sidewalk, inch by inch, TWICE before giving up. Those of you who can relate (and I know lots of people cannot, you lucky souls) will be glad to know that someone turned in the key, having found it in the area I swept -- before I swept. Would have been nice to know, but for me, that was a story with a happy ending.

My beloved sister Ellen has the same problem. Last month she lost her phone on an 8-mile run and was so troubled by the loss that she ran the 8 miles again the next morning, looking for the phone the whole way. She couldn't do it the same day because she spent that day looking in the house, and only had time to run the first 3 miles a second time. I am sorry to say that I urged her on. Sure, it had poured that night and the phone was useless, but you gotta know what happened to it. I think this comes straight from our dad, who couldn't let go of lost things (and, unlike Ellen and me, both he and mom lost things with alarming frequency). I am sad that I have inherited this strain of neurosis. I worry that one of the kids will develop it, though, to my amazement, this does not (yet) seem to be the case. I think I worry enough about lost things for the whole family.

Ellen says she thinks Heaven is where you go and you find everything you ever lost. 

But I want to keep talking about my need to complete things until I feel done. Sure, it is this same trait that pulled me through a Ph.D. (honestly, I just had to cross it off my list), keeps me organized in my work, and gets me to accomplish most things as soon as they are added to The List. Laura knows, and only occasionally uses this deliberately, that if she says, "Huh. That bulb is a little dim in that corner," I'll have it changed by the next time she steps into that room. This is not industry, though it looks like it to others, I am told. It is actually my own form of laziness; getting things off my list is the only way I can rest. It's like there's a Type 1 Laziness, which shows up as procrastination. But the Type 2 Laziness, which shows up as getting things done, is, to one who is driven toward completion, every bit as much a form of avoidance as Type 1. It is all to save oneself from the torment of having unfinished things on my list. Chime in, anyone who recognizes this trait in themselves. 

How far out am I on this? I am happy when we finish a jar of mayonnaise. I am kind of forlorn when we have to open a new one. A jar of mayo is visibly unfinished for a long time. I am happier when we take down the Christmas tree than when we put it up. I am happier pulling up the spent tomato plants than putting in the new ones. I try to get thank you letters done the same day a gift arrives. I am happier when a party is over than when it is about to start, that's for sure. I like to pay bills the day they arrive. I love garbage day or dropping things off at Goodwill. Bye bye, and don't come back.

Surely this has something to do with how laser-directed I was about the mastectomies. Once I knew I had cancer, I was all about: how soon can we do this? How soon can I check this task off my list?

Today we learned from the radiology oncologist that I'll be doing chemo for sure. The details are beyond her turf, but that much she could say. She says my receptors put me at a higher risk for recurrence, and that my receptor issue might "qualify" me for an extra few months of chemo. Talk about a booby prize. I am newly anxious, because this is a process that 1) will be profoundly unpleasant, and 2) will be difficult to cross off my list. It will be like those giant mayonnaise jars you see at BJs. It will go on a long time.

And we know that my hair will fall out; it's that kind of chemo. I am really bumming about that. I don't look forward to being visibly ill. This week I've been seeing clients, and no one has noticed that I am breastless. That is sort of a good news/bad news thing, emotionally. Again with the ambivalence: I have made a huge sacrifice, and no one can see it. And yet, once that sacrifice is apparent, I will feel vulnerable and painfully exposed.

I won't be able to find something I've lost, and I will be searching for it the whole time.