I am glad to report that I will return to the air on Monday, June 23^rd, at 9:00 a.m. Hope you can join me then.

     Although still a little tender, I am recovering from surgery that I had on June 5^th.  In the days since then, I’ve felt a little like the renamed seven dwarves—Groggy, Woozy, Itchy, Bleary, Fuzzy, Goofy and Doc. I left out Bitchy, you’ll note. I truly have nothing to complain about. I was lucky to receive the kind of excellent care and support that leaves me with only gratitude in my heart.

    I’ve been too intellectually sluggish to think about trying to add Bloggy to my dwarf-represented repertoire.  However, it seems that making sense in the blogosphere is not exactly mandatory…so here I go…and I’m in fine company if I ramble a bit!

     Last year, I had surgery at this exact same time, so there is a symmetry to my home bound healing, but this experience is remarkably different than before, when I was so fearful of all that was still ahead for me. Everything that I feared then is behind me now. Sometimes all of it seems like a bad dream and I’m awake again in my lovely reality. This year, I can relax and focus on feeling good. I breathe in the sweet fragrance of early summer with appreciation. The darkness has lifted. 

     I asked for my friends, family and listeners to offer prayers or healing words on my behalf on the morning of surgery.  I was thinking about that request as I enetered the operating room. I was already on an IV and they might have put a little somethin-somethin in there to make me all nice and relaxed, because I felt, well, all nice and relaxed. I looked around the OR and it felt filled with scores and scads of medical personnel—doctors, nurses, technicians, assistants, all identically attired in their blue scrubs. In a daze, I wondered, why so many people here? From all corners of the room, they turned in unison to look at me. All of their faces were covered with blue masks. 

     And suddenly, I thought I could recognize those faces, although they were hidden from the eyes down. Face after face, they transformed. The faces of these strangers, these masked men and women of medicine, turned into the familiar faces that I love best. It seemed as if I was surrounded by my very own army of angels—family, friends, my dearest ones. Maybe you were in there with me too.  Maybe you came to stand by me and lift me up.

     Ordinarily, this might have caused panic, because I do not come from a family of skilled medical professionals and few in my circle of friends majored in anything science related. Love them, but wouldn’t necessarily want most of them anywhere near the scalpel, dontcha know.

     But that somethin-somethin in the IV kept me from thinking logically. Instead, I felt a blessed calmness and an eagerness to let go and get on with it. A feeling that all was well and that I was free to float. It was like that serene feeling you had as a child, when you fell asleep in the back seat of the station wagon, confident that the powerful people in the front seat knew how to get you home and would settle you into your own bed without even waking you up.    

     I was on my back and a face bent over me. It was my surgeon, who was with me last year and who has given me kind and tender care in the past year. His eyes behind his mask crinkled and I could tell he was smiling.

     “We’re all here for you,” I heard him say.

     In the past when I’ve had surgery, there’s that dramatic moment when they put the mask over your face and the anaesthesia pumps in and you are quickly whisked away into that dreamless place. When the mask lowers, it feels like a point-of-view shot in a movie. I vaguely recall being asked to count backwards from ten, and never getting to the number seven.

     But this time, one of you in the room with me told me to say my children’s names. I smiled as I recited them…son, daughter, daughter, oldest, middle, youngest. By the time I got to my baby, I had gone over or under.

     And when I woke, my husband was there and told me I was fine.

     And I am!

     You blessed me and I bless you back. Thanks to so many of you, for being there for me and with me. I’ll thank you again when we get together on Monday morning.

When presented with the same set of facts, we arrive at many different conclusions. This is what makes the world contentious. This is what makes the world interesting.

Fact: it is springtime.

Fact: many people enjoy the sight of blooming flowers at this time of year.

Fact: I am one of them. I visited my neighborhood garden center yesterday; the last time I saw that level of retail frenzy was during a regrettable visit to Toys R Us on Christmas Eve. Our long-drawn-out winter and anemic spring apparently led to pent up demand in the floral consumer. Collectively, we are starved for blossom, new growth, tender shoots of green.

I made a bold decision for the planters on my patio and the pots of my front porch. Instead of going with a color scheme, I made a narrow botanical selection. This spring, it’s all pansies. Different colors, different sizes, but all pansies. Although the word ‘pansy’ is an insulting slur meaning weak, the velvety faced pansy is actually one of the toughest flowers available.

I like the idea of a tough flower.

Early this morning, I got on my bike and pedaled my favorite lake loop, encircling Harriet, Calhoun and Isles. Cool and crisp, it was a splendid time to ride. The path was all but vacant, leaving me to my solitary self as I admired the slant of the sun and the shadows falling across the lawns. The lakes mirrored back the azure hue of the polished sky. Perfection.

It smells of spring outside. It is a fresh smell that combines the loamy richness of earth/dirt with the tang of newly cut grass. As I whizzed along I also caught breaths of the extravagant perfume of flowering trees, sprinkling their pink and white petals like floral confetti.

The pleasure of the experience is the feel of my body pumping along in the great outdoors. But I also enjoy the ride because of the homes that face the path. I am particularly entranced by the mansions that ring Lake of the Isles. Many of them are stately structures, classic in style and impeccably maintained. I have my favorites that I admire on every trip: the darling faux English cottage, the massive Tudor, the shuttered Dutch Colonial. I have ridden this path often enough to note not just the structures themselves but their architectural features—the pitch of a roof, the graciousness of a front door, the pillars on a porch.

After spending time with my hands in the dirt, I took special note of the flowers in many of the yards. I have never been much good at managing a garden so that hue and height, texture and timing of floral growth coordinate into a unified plan. Lacking this skill myself, I particularly admire it in others. Many homes that I passed had showcase gardens, cleanly mapped and executed, offering a pleasing mix of bud and blossom. Taking in the beds of technicolor tulips, I felt grateful to live nearby, to be on a public path where I could be exposed to such splendor.

Yeah, I can’t pull off the garden thang, but I can put plants in pots. Container gardening, they call it. Pretty much every mansion I pedaled past has a few grand planters out in front, usually flanking the front door or front step. Terra cotta, stone, ceramic, selected to match the manse. Checking out a particularly lovely pair of pots on the doorstep of a baronial timber-crossed residence, I idly wondered how easy it might be to steal them. Not that I would attempt such a thing, of course. It’s just the sort of thing that crosses your mind when you’re on an early morning bike ride.

There were many pots that I admired--for their floral design, their blend of color and texture, for the sweetness of the posy potpourri.

Then there was the pot that made me chuckle.

This pot of flowers sits at a jaunty angle on the porch of one of those modern Lake of the Isles mansions, the kind that's all angles and attitude. The architect of this house made no attempt to build a structure to fit in with its century old neighbors.

Check it out: phoney flowers.

They are bold flowers, gaudy and oversized. I had an idea that the residents of this house decided to have some fun with their fakery. Perhaps these flowers were chosen by someone who quite literally doesn’t like getting his/her hands dirty but didn’t want to miss out on accessorizing with that popular porch planter. So: a splash of color without the muss and fuss. No watering or weeding necessary!

Those flowers are fake, but they’re cheerful about it. They don't even try to look real. You have admire the cheekiness, the self mockery that the owner took in putting those bright flowers out on tthe doorstep. They’re playing the game, but not by the neighborhood rules. ("Flowers, huh? I gotcher stinkin flowers right here!")

Riding along with a grin on my fact, I suddenly reflected that I know a thing or three about fake flowers.

I am now days away from reconstructive surgery to make my right breast more comfortable and more, well, lifelike. Last year when I had the mastectomy, I had what they call a ‘lat flap.’ My plastic surgeon removed my latissmus muscle in my back, tunneled it under my arm and pulled it across my chest, where it anchors a saline implant. The implant fills the pound and a half of breast tissue used to be there, including the cancerous tumor and surrounding tissue. This area was radiated 29 times, an effort to make sure any stubborn cancerous cells that may have remained in the area were good and killed. The side effects of radiation is that my skin feels tight and tender, while the flesh beneath created a hard shell over the implant. This was all expected. Last year they told me I would need another operation. This surgery will replace the saline implant with a silicone one and reduce the amount of tension and uncomfortable sensitivity that I feel in my chest, shoulder, upper arm and back.

And they say it will look better too. Better, as in, more natural. I will look more like I once did, back before it occurred to me that an intact body was something to be grateful for. After surgery my breasts will be symmetrical again. I will no longer have to wear special undergarments to keep them aligned and even. I will be not have to make wardrobe concessions and compensations. My form will be more like it formerly was.

My plastic surgeon (ha! that still cracks me up! I have a plastic surgeon!) tells me this is part of the healing process. Looking good, like feeling good, lets you move on past the diagnosis. You carry a scar because something that happened to you. You've dealt with it and moved on. My plastic surgeon reminds me the reconstruction is further proof that I’m cured. Doctors wouldn’t go to all this time and trouble, he says pointedly, wouldn’t bother with symmetry and aesthetics for a woman who was doomed. More to the point, insurance wouldn't pay for it.

But let’s not kid ourselves. I have fake flowers out front.

I have the shape and form of the real thing. Last June right after surgery, still groggy from the anesethesia, I was afraid to look when they took off the bandage for the first time. When I saw what the surgeons had fashioned for me, there was no drama after all. Not bad, I thought. Weird, of course. Not the one I wanted, of course. But not bad.

After surgery I presume I will be Better Than Not Bad.

I I keep thinking about those Lake of the Isles fake flowers. In their own way, they are perfect. They won't grow, or produce aroma, but neither will they wilt or fade when the summer does. They don't need dirt or sunshine or water. They will be as they are: Genuine Real Fakes, authentic in their own way. Chosen for what they are and what they are not.

Because I'm still Me all of me is mine. Because I'm real all of me is Real. Even the fake parts.

Sometimes when I'm on my bike, I could be a danger to myself and others. When gulping in the fragrant breath of spring, I find it almost impossible not to close my eyes with the sweetness of the scent. There are plenty of flowers to smell, I conclude. I don't have to smell them all.

photos by Rebecca Yates

THE PINK SHIRT


Someone put the plastic bag on my desk. It's the same bag that everyone on our Lo-J team got. A coupon, a ticket, a token. A shower hanger with instructions for breast self exams. A race number and four safety pins thoughtfully included for attaching it to the race shirts. And the shirts. Two of them. One the Lo-J shirt for those on the FM107.1 team, one the Komen for the Cure shirt that all registered race participants received.
Mine is pink.
That's what the Survivors wear.
I don't know why, exactly, but I don't want to wear it. And, to tell the truth, I am writing this blog to try to understand why.
I truly feel that I have accepted the fact--and it is a fact--that I am a breast cancer survivor.
I have heard from other women with the same diagnosis who tell me that they can't even utter the two words "breast' and 'cancer' for the longest time. Just hurts too much? Strong desire for denial? Beats me. When I found out I had it, I was shocked, stunned, unable to quite believe that it was my life that had taken this turn.
Like everyone, I am so many different selves, some that I picked and some that picked me. I am a wife, mother, daughter, sister. I am a radio host and a Libra. A carnivore. A coffee fiend. A college drop out. A collection of what I do and what I believe.
I'm unique--just like everyone.
I like to pick what I am--or at least have some say-so.
I don't necessarily want to be defined by what has picked me.
Is that it?
I brought this up briefly on the radio show on Friday and got a lot of e mails from listeners who heard me express my inarticulate reluctance to wear the pink shirt. Do I not think I'm cured, one asked. Wear the shirt for all those women who can't, because they're no longer here, another advised. Be proud of your journey, said a third.
The survivors is what the day is really all about. Making sure that there are both ,more and fewer of them--make that, us--in the future. More of us because detection and medical breakthroughs means we'll live long lives after diagnosis. Fewer of us because science may inform us of what gives us the disease to begin with, so it can be prevented; so women in the future can be, I don't know, vaccinated against it or something.
It's up to me. No one is trying to make me wear the pink shirt. I could wear the FM 107 shirt instead, no doubt.
I've been writing about this, thinking about this...I am still unresolved.
What will my heart tell me to do tomorrow morning? And why is this a big deal to me, anyway?

I stopped posting blogs here for many months, but I did not stop writing. I didn't like what was coming out. During the last phase of treatment, I was often to distracted and physically exhausted to put together my thoughts in a way that felt both accurate and complete.
While I was thinking about this whole pink shirt thing, I thought about something that I wrote a few months ago. It follows in this post:

THE IMMIGRANT

     It's the good girls who keep the diaries," pronounced the inimitable Tallulah Bankhead. "The bad girls never have the time."
     I have not kept a diary throughout my life. Perhaps that tells you what kind of girl Tallulah would consider me.
     Sometimes I very much wish that I would have had the discipline and desire to journal regularly. For me, life has always been either too busy to allow for the time for self-recording or, it seems, too boring to hold up under the self scrutiny. I have friends who have kept an ongoing record of their lives and I have come to envy them. It would be fascinating to look back at the What-I-Thought-Then of my past with the overlay of the What-I-Know-Now of the present. Moreover, it would be a chance to turn my journalistic instincts on the story of my self.      I wish I had a journal for what was going on in my life exactly one year ago, the week before Mother's Day. It was the last week of my old life.
*****

*****

    The week ahead is going to be a week like none I have experienced.
     My first instinct is to acknowledge that I am facing it with feelings of apprehension, fear and dread.
     But if I have learned anything in this past year, it is this: the one thing--the only thing, really--that I can control is my feelings. I can choose apprehension, fear and dread.  Darkness is very seductive.
     Or.
     Or I can choose to approach this week with an attitude of renewed gratitude. Of hope. Of strength.
     I can take the well lit path instead.
*****

*****


     The week before Mother's Day, one year ago. For the most part, I believe it was a normal week in the life of my family. My husband and I went to work. My youngest daughter was probably working on mastering her skateboard.  I recall being preoccupied with my two older children. My son was just returning home from college after completing his second year away. My daughter was weeks away from graduating from high school. As summer loomed, we were busy settling him back into a few months at home and planning for her exit a few months later.
     Was the weather fine or foul? What was annoying me? What occupied my dreams?
     Can't say.
     I wish the particulars would come into finer focus. Instead, when I think about my life one year ago, I am left with a nostalgic feeling and any number of overwrought metaphors.
     One year ago, I was living on a fault line that I didn't know about . I was dancing toward a cliff and had no idea about the steep drop off.  I was perched on the side of a volcano, unaware that a river of fire was about to burst through the surface.
     I was a cartoon character goofing off under the big black anvil that was about to fall and flatten me.
*****

*****

     When I was an English major, I learned how to identify the literary technique known as foreshadowing. It's how an author, the god of the imaginary universe created in the narrative, subtly warns the reader of how the story is to unfold. This allows the reader to be somewhat prepared when the plot makes a dramatic pivot.
     Perhaps you've noticed that real life does not unfold like book life.
     Most times, we get no foreshadowing to prepare us for the earthquakes or cliffs or volcanoes in our lives. Or we're simply too ignorant or myopic to read our own scripts and see the telltale shadow of the anvil.
*****

*****
 
     I remember that last year, Mother's Day dawned clear and warm. As I had for the past few years, I joined FM107.1 listeners to Walk For The Cure. As always, I was moved by the river of pink, the sheer number of people touched by breast cancer. As always, as I marched along in the pink pack I made a point to think about my connection to the disease: my beloved grandmother. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer back in the Bad Old Days, before chemotherapy and support groups and reconstruction surgery. They cut off her breast, radiated her chest and wished her luck. Her diagnosis came from the era when women with breast cancer were called victims, not survivors. But survive she did. She lived almost 40 years after her initial diagnosis, dying at age 93. Not of cancer.
     Then, last year, after the walk I know we went out for brunch. (Where? What did I eat? Was it good?) And surely I got presents from the kids and my husband. (What? Was I touched? Were they thoughtful? Surely the good moms remember this stuff.)
     It's all gone. Did what happened next obliterate the details of the time immediately preceding it? I so wish I could retrieve those minor memories and build them into a mosaic to see what it was like to be the person who inhabited that Sunday, that week, that life.
     Because then it was Monday, the day after Mother's Day and after work I blithely showed up for my routine mammogram.
     And that was the beginning of my new life.
     
 *****

*****
     And now I realize that, sometimes when I'm sad, it's because I miss Her.
     I miss that person who I was one year ago this week. The person who had no idea that she was going to have to take a test she was so completely unprepared for.
     Why was she so petty? So unappreciative of what she had? Worried about such silly stuff?
     I look back on Her as if she was a child. You know how children get anxious and worried about the little kid problems in their life and, while trying not to patronize them, you want to tell them to relax and enjoy the carefree nature of their lives. You have to hold yourself back from dismissively murmuring that these aren't problems at all. That someday you will wish for the troubles that worry you today.
     I am the grown up version  of the childlike me of a year ago.
     When I think about who I was, I can only call me She, because she's not really Me any more. 
*****

*****

     Now almost a year has passed and it's all behind me. The surgery and the chemotherapy and the radiation. I don't have cancer any more. The scars have healed. The pain is mostly gone. My hair and, blessedly, my eyebrows have grown back in.
     But I am different. I can never leave my diagnosis behind. For the rest of my life, there will be medicine and checkups and scans. I will be under a doctor's care to make sure that what got me once won't get me again--and if it does, that we find it early, before it has a chance to get me good. Or bad. I am what I have never been before--vulnerable. Twice shy, because of the once burned.
     I am wise where I was once innocent.
     However. In some ways, I am so much happier. I appreciate the sweetness of life so much that it is sometimes almost unbearable. That appreciation gives small moments a deeper pleasure and gives my days a new zest. I have realized how much I love life and don't take it for granted in the way I once did. I love it so much that the thought of losing it is more threatening than it ever would have been before. 

     I'm thinner, grayer, stronger. I am still making friends with this new version of my old friend.

MARKED

Thanksgiving morning found me loitering outside the sanctuary at church, killing time as I waited for the service to begin. I had arrived early to deliver my youngest. Washed, combed, and robed, she would join the other members of the youth choir as they raised their warbly, wobbly voices in a carol of gratitude.

An associate pastor with whom I am not yet acquainted moved through the area, greeting people arriving for the service.

"Nice hat!" he said as he shook my hand.

"Thanks," I replied.

He leaned in and spoke in a tone that was both sincere and concerned. "How're you doing?" he asked, his eyes searching my face.

"Pretty darn good," I answered.

My reply was both cheerful and honest but this brief exchange left me feeling a bit uncomfortable. I was puzzled because I wondered if:

a) the pastor knew me, Kevyn Burger, and the details of my cancer case--Lord knows I've talked about myself enough so that plenty o' people are clued in
b) he had access to some sort of Pastor Master List of Prayerworthy Parishoners
or
c) he was relating to An Anonymous Bald Woman Battling The Big C.

I should be used to this. I've been Marked since midsummer.

When you walk around without hair, people draw their logical conclusions. No middle aged heterosexual woman in her right mind intentionally mutilates herself by shaving her head. Everyone knows that hair loss is a side effect of chemotherapy. Being bald provides quick shorthand to let everyone in the world in on confidential diagnostic information that ordinarily covered by the physician-patient privilege.

I have not worn a wig, but I understand why so many of my fellow survivors do. Being bald is a way of being naked before strangers: it reveals a private part. While I have become fairly comfortable walking around with my nude scalp, I recognize that this expanse of usually-covered skin makes others feel awkward.

This adds a layer of complexity to a million simple exchanges. The teller at the bank, my child's dentist, that pastor at the church on Thanksgiving--people don't know quite what to say when confronted with the be-hatted woman before them, who is clearly in that chapeau because chemotherapy has robbed her of her crowning glory. What are they to do? Ask how she's doing? Ignore the obvious? Tell a quick anecdote about their great aunt's triumph over breast cancer?

It reminds me of being in the final trimester of pregnancy, when everyone you encounter must first inquire about The Baby before the conversation can get down to business. I remember being weary of it by the time I lumbered into the ninth month. Sometimes, I just wanted to be me again. A woman with a womb, not a womb with a woman.

Being the obvious manifestation of my disease makes ME uncomfortable, too, if that's any consolation. I can't tell you what to say to me, because I don't know. Sometimes I like it when people acknowledge my cranial nudity--and the reason for it--and sometimes I don't. It has to do with how I'm feeling at that instant and with how much finesse the person I encounter uses.

I've been this way for months, and I am not yet used to these awkward social exchanges. I'm still all muddled up about it.

But Minnesota's legendary Longest Season may give me some respite from this visual dilemma.

That Thanksgiving church service left me feeling uplifted and energized. After it ended, my three children met up with their father and my husband was up to his elbows in pastry, busily making his Traditional Annual Pie--apple, a post-turkey treat. I had the day off and an empty hour so I set out on a solitary walk around the lake.

The gray day sucked the color out of the landscape, leaving the sky and lake and trees part of a black and white landscape. The first snow snow sifted down like cake flour, adding a layer of loveliness to what would have been a dreary afternoon.

I was well outfitted for the chill--when you don't have hair, bundling is a necessity, not a fashion statement. I was snug in a hat that my friend Kate bought for me. Black, with a velvet crown and a rim of matching fake fur, it not only provides cover, but gives me kind of a funky Doctor Zhivago vibe. I wore it pulled down low on my forehead, where my eyebrows used to be. Over it I wore my cute corduroy coat; hood up and buttoned under my chin.

Walking briskly, I did what I always do. Naturally curious and a promiscuous people-watcher, I looked at the others on the path.

And I realized that some were looking back at me.

Some men.

Age, gravity and motherhood are the co-conspirators in The Case Of The Vanishing Look. In recent decades, I've noticed that I have become invisible to an increasing number of men. The ones in their twenties and thirties don't look my way--and why should they, I'm old enough to be their mother and I've never been--nor wanted to be--the MILFtype. But I have still turned an occasional head when it comes to men born within a decade or more of me. It's that wordless, harmless look that goes nowhere but is faintly flirtatious. It's flattering, that frank flicker of appreciation from a man you don't know and never will.

That's something else that goes when your hair does. Men don't look at me. I haven't felt so much as a lukewarm sidelong glance in months. My pheromones went pfft.

But that day, on the path, I was not a Woman Wearing A Hat Because She Has Cancer. I was a woman wearing a hat because it was snowing. I was simply appropriately attired, and that disguised me and my story.

When I'm headnaked, they look away or look through me. Hidden under layers of outerwear, I was visible again.

The path was filled with ruddy-faced folks taking their pre-feast exercise. I noted an unusual number of intergeneration walkers, with obvious familiar connections. Most on the path were in pairs or bunches, chatting away as they charged along.

And some of them--guys, men, fellas, dudes--checked me out, bless their hearts. Some nodded. A particularly bold one said, "Hi."

There was no pity in his eyes. None at all.

Turns out winter may be better than a wig. Cold is my camouflage. Bundled up, I'm not marked; I'm just like everyone else. And that makes me feel warm.