thumb down

Lest you think I am becoming an anesthesia junkie, let me be clear that I had intended to have this latest operation in the spring, back before the whole genetic kerfuffle and scramble to get rid of my reproductive innards. Cancer has the right of way at almost all medical intersections, so the thumb operation waited until I was completely healed from the other stuff. I hate saying the words "hysterectomy" and "oophorectomies" -- they just sound so gross and make your mouth pinch to read them. Don't lie.

I had asked the hand surgeon and the onco-gyno surgeon back in April if they didn't want to collaborate, do it all in one fell swoop while I was out like a light anyway. This seemed not to appeal to either of them, which shows you just how wasteful we Americans are, and how turfy at that. Sure, you need to be upside-down for the robotic gyno operation (this is true), and that might have made it awkward for my hand surgeon, but a couple of "excuse me, pardon me"s ought to have made it possible, and then I would have been fully recovered from both by now, and we would have saved on an assortment of medications.

But no. Right of way it was. While discussing the hand surgery, though, my undaunted Laura asked if both thumbs could be done at once, since both thumbs need repair. The surgeon paused for a moment, batted his eyes while searching for the right response, and said, "In my profession, we consider that akin to waterboarding." We took that as a no.

The picture at the top is fuzzy, which is exactly how I felt when it was taken. By the end of the day, I was more in focus. Since I have to keep my hand elevated above my heart, I decided to draw a face on the bandage. Though no artist, I will accept props that I drew this friendly face with my non-dominant hand.

All well and good, until I realized that I have two sessions with depressed clients today. I don't think this smiling face is quite the right empathic touch. I now wish I had put a concerned, loving expression on the bandage. Maybe with a little furrow in the brow.

Laura, ever stalwart and devoted Laura, had to floss for me last night. It turns out she has kind of a talent for it, a good thing to keep in mind in case this high school principal job is a bust.

Lastly, here we are, my new arm puppet (whom I have named Kale, which I predict is going to be a hot baby name in the future) and I shopping at Whole Foods. Doesn't Kale look excited about those mangos?

Gail MacMillan

When I was diagnosed back in 2009, Gail was working at an international school in Thailand. Her career had long been as a global nomad, moving from one international school to another on planet Earth. There's a whole tribe of people who do that, and they all know each other and share an allergy to being back here for too long. They get itchy if they stay in any one country too long, but especially itchy back here.

"We overlapped at the school in Bangkok, but then they moved onto Kuala Lumpur and I went to Shanghai. We kept in touch when I was in Helsinki and they were in Oman, but we didn't meet up again until we were both in Vienna." That's how their conversations go.

Gail told tales of the Shangri-La, while we're squishing the globe, that can be found on the coast of Morocco, and you'd feel like you were really missing out. She and her teacher friends lived in villas on the pristine Moroccan beach, eating sliced papaya and reading the book section of the New York Times. Why aren't we living in Morocco? I'd think. 

A deeply empathic person, Gail was shocked when I got cancer. Laura and I both recall her alarm, and the umbrage she felt on my behalf. So deep was her empathy that when she was diagnosed with breast cancer a month later, I felt like she really shouldn't have. She took her own diagnosis in smoother stride, and felt confident that a single mastectomy, chemo, and radiation would beat back the cancer. She moved ahead with plans to go back to a school she loved in Vienna, and for weeks did radiation treatments there before the school day began. 

Back during chemo, Gail and I skyped a lot. She was in excellent hands in Thailand (where her principal and friends would spend the night in the hospital with her; it's much more of a it-takes-a-village-to-have-surgery-and-chemo affair there), and I was sitting at the kitchen table in Farmington. We went bald together, and we'd both go up close to the camera to show just how far gone our eyelashes were. She was the person I could talk to about symptoms that are so unsavory I didn't even put them on the blog. And that's saying something.

Gail developed a cough last summer, not yet a year past radiation. Just a little cough, just a little sound, like "heh" sprinkled between her words. But it wouldn't go away. She left her beloved school in Vienna and went back into immediate treatment at Dana Farber. But a cellular stampede was trampling her body, and they couldn't stop it. The cough, a growing rumble from the stampede, broke her increasingly fragile ribs. 

Still, she felt sure she had another couple of years with her body, and was resigned enough about being permanently bald to have invested, just a couple of weeks ago, in a wig. Scarves are fine for a few months, but they are a short-term situation, like when you slip on a bathrobe to get the paper on the driveway. The wig was Gail's way of saying, "Might as well get dressed."

Not much more than a week ago, Gail was out and about, driving around, eating around, laughing around, hanging around with friends. Though weakened from chemo, she'd usually bounce back after a few days and her life went on. Then, this past infusion, she didn't bounce. 

We got a call from a friend of hers once Gail was settled in the hospital. No need to visit; Gail just wanted you to know she's kind of having a hard time, this friend said. Should we go see her? we wondered. Or should we wait until she's up for a visit. 

We called the next morning to see how the night had gone. But there had been no night for Gail, and there would be no more days.

I don't believe in a heaven, but I wish I did. I would picture Gail there, and she would be forever well and whole and free of pain. There would be papaya, deep blue waves crashing on a pristine beach, and the book section of the New York Times.

may you find your mojo

When I told Laura I was going to try to blog, she said, "May you find your mojo."

Friends, Romans, country bumpkins: I have alibis for my absence. They are not good ones, but they are alibis. I've been here, I've been there. I've been like Sam I Am. I do not just sit peacefully often enough, except for my daily meditation period, which is on my To Do list. This fact -- that meditating is on my list -- should somehow take away meditation points, I think. There are points, right?

I healed pretty quickly from the surgery last month, and except for feeling like my birthday suit's zipper is stuck in a few places, I feel pretty good. But I'm still looking for my mojo. I've found bits and pieces of it scattered here and there, but that's the thing. It's scattered, like bits of string. I think mojo is a whole thing, like a ball or a clothespin. You don't want part of those.

I went to a gigantic writer's conference in Boston a couple of weeks ago. No, wise guy, it was not only for gigantic writers. I met with an agent who had read 20 pages of my manuscript for Flat 'n' Happy ahead of time. Oh! She loved my writing. She guffawed or snorted in several places, she swore. She wrote in her notes that she would "love to read anything by this author other than a cancer memoir." Cancer, it seems, does not sell. Unless you are really famous, or unless you have a near-death experience where you walk toward a bright light and then get pulled back toward the humdrum of life only now you are One With The Universe and So Are We All So Don't Be Afraid; unless you are these things, people don't want to read about cancer. "People want to be transported," she says, this seasoned agent, "but not to downer places."

I've heard this from several agents by now, only this time I heard it. I believed her. I sobbed my pathetic way down Boylston Street, soaking in the news that Flat 'n' Happy is actually flat 'n' dead. I did. I sobbed, as both Laura and Ellen will attest, who had to listen with cell phone at arm's length, I imagine, so that my tears didn't drip through.

I have sobbed a couple times in the past two weeks, now that I think of it. Maybe I am not as emotionally stable as I think I am. The other time was a few nights ago when Yani and I were dog-sitting for Ting's dog, Pip, who, while ostensibly out on a peeing mission, jumped through our fence and escaped into the dark night. There is actually no darker place than our neighborhood on a moonless night when you are searching for a dog who, unless there is raw hamburger attached to the request, does not care a whit for "Pip, come!"

Losing someone else's dog is worse than losing your own. Take it from me. I've had both things happen now. When your own dog disappears, you're just worried about the dog. When someone else's is missing, you're worried about the dog (because you are a Good Person who worries about the Poor Dog), but the real problem is that you could be in the doghouse for decades. You are actually just worried about that.

When Animal Control brought Pip -- cheerful, clueless Pip, going for another happy ride in a stranger's car -- back from the dumpster area at the Farmington Inn, Yani and I clung to each other and sobbed like we had just survived the sinking of the Titanic.

Afterwards, flossing, as I do, because it's on my list, I shook my head at myself. I must really be on edge, only most of the time I don't know it.

A couple of you will want to comfort me about the book. I appreciate that. I am okay. I am not at square one. I am at square two or three. I am just going to sit quietly here for awhile. There is a nice bench, and from here I can see bits of string that I hope to roll into a ball.

15 minutes of fame, one click at a time

With the new-fangled upgrade of this blog platform, one can see how many people have been reading each post. Turns out that for taotechu you are generally around 45 people these days, give or take. Thanks for hanging in there with me. I'm not sure where we are going, but I'm glad to have your company.

There's one exception to the statistics showing the number of people who have viewed each entry. It's the Uncle Fester post from April 22, 2010.

3,249 people have found their way to that entry on taotechu since that day -- 13 of them just this week. Some of them are in Jordan, for God's sake.

"What the...?" I ask aloud as Laura and I work side by side in the kitchen on our respective computers. Then we google Uncle Fester. There are 16 long pages of images of Uncle Fester in various poses, and you can ask for more pages if that doesn't satisfy your appetite.

I appear on page 2. Page TWO. With Google, you have to earn your way to page 2.

Still, it feels a dubious honor.

Coming out as Fasian

     When Yani was in high school, she was part of a group of students who called themselves Fasians. They were of various Asian stripes, either second or third generation, raised in this country. Each of them felt strongly about their Asian heritage, as does Yani, but also felt a bit sheepish about it. Like they were claiming Asian roots, enjoying that identity, but also felt a bit like fakes. Hence Fasian.
     If you were to show me ten paintings -- landscape or still life -- of different cultural origins, and asked me which most soothes my heart, which belongs on my walls, I would pick the Chinese one without hesitation. I grew up learning that those inky watercolor strokes defined beauty, just as another child grew up learning that Mozart's  music is sublime. Or that mashed potatoes (my dad always thought it was "smashed potatoes") is comfort food. Or for someone else, that whale blubber was a delicacy. Or for someone else, that bagpipes sound pretty. This last one is merely a hypothetical possibility.
     I carry that Chinese sensibility within me, that sense of what is lovely. And I feel a connection to my Chinese ancestors that I cannot articulate, but feel deep in my bones.
     However, I cannot speak Chinese, save for a few phrases here and there, a few body parts, some social howdy-dos (hau di du, maybe), and extremely colorful curses. I have always felt bad about that. "Come eat," "tastes great," "want some more?" and "no, thanks, I'm full" can only carry you in a pretty fixed conversational context.

     I also am not a great Chinese cook. Though my dad was a fabulous cook, I have come to see that, save for the simplest of sous chef tasks (rinse the jiotsai, for example), he wasn't really interested in our "help." He could make a paper-thin dumpling skin in about 4 seconds. For me, it took ten times as long and came out the texture and thickness of an earlobe. When Pop died, I took his bright red apron and edited it as you see here.
    So when Laura, who is delusional and wildly optimistic enough to think that maybe I can cook, volunteered to offer a "Chinese meal for 6" to the Fieldston School parent auction, the Fasian in me freaked out. Though she retracted the offer with an apologetic phone call to the school right away, that message got lost (or auctioned off, maybe) and the school offered a home-cooked Chinese meal for 6 with the new Principal. 
     Imagine our surprise when, at a recent reception, a delighted parent chirped to Laura, "I'm the one who bought your Chinese meal for 6!"
     I have been unreasonably freaked out about this, and I think it is a complicated thing about Laura and me on one level (more on this later), and about my sense of identity on another. Blog followers of color may understand this the best, I am thinking. Though I appreciate that being "white" in our culture has its own complexity, I think most white people don't worry about demonstrating that they are adequately white.
     Fortunately, we have in our lives a fabulous "white" ex-sister-in-law, Holly, who is an amazing "Chinese" chef. I called her first to rant, then to cry, and then to plead. "Help me, Obi-Wan," I said into the phone. "You're my only hope." Holly is going to swoop in, Jedi (jie dai) Chef fashion. I still feel bad, though, and so does Laura.
     Life sometime seem very complicate.