oooh, jealousssss

there was a mountain bike race this weekend.

i was sitting on my couch, reading "complications" by atul gawande. i recommend the read as an interesting insight into the world of medicine, more specifically surgery. i have always had a general interest in basic medicine. my wfr is going to expire in four days, when my cpr cert goes defunct. with my coughing i'm not sure i could actually pass a practical cpr exam right now, but i need to add it to the list of things to do in may. anyway. a general interest in medicine and a cancer diagnosis do not a doctor make, but i hope to be a good patient. a learned one, asking educated questions (and the ones that come in the middle of the night, almost always the day AFTER seeing a doctor, the ones that most certainly evaporate from my head as i am sitting in the office, running my hand through my hair, maybe i'll find the question THERE...) and doing the best i can do maximize the benefits of my treatment. i trust my doctors, but why? i have, at times quite literally, put my life in their hands, and the hands of their anesthesiologist compatriots, residents, and nurses. i have known some for longer than others. a man i had known for a week told me i had cancer. in the course of a week, he went from telling me a number of possibilities to telling me definitively what was going on. i lay unconcious at his hands and he found the cancer; months later i would find myself there again, for him to remove a lot of the cancer. somewhere along the way, in the nanoseconds between "i have asthma" and "i might have to remove part of your lung" i found a whole lot of trust. i wanted to be told what was going to happen, what i would feel and what would transpire. i guess there was part of me that really believed my surgeon would be where it stopped. he's the only one i would have to let in, he would find the problem and fix me.

but now, months on, i have two other doctors, a nurse practicioner, chemo nurses, residents, technicians and social workers in my life. and aong the way i have not realized the exact moments when i decided to trust any of them. i just did. and it is the strangest thing, in some ways, that these new people hold such a high spot in my life. typically it takes time. i wouldn't meet someone on the street and decide over lunch that it was time to get married (or so i think)... but it is a big commitment i have made, and they too. to face my disease, to treat me as an individual patient among so many others, to trust that i will do whatever i can in order to get better, that i will demand the best from them, and to give support to, basically, a stranger, through the most difficult time in her young life.

i am fortunate to have this trust. i know it could have been much more difficult than it has been (and it hasn't been all that difficult, it is what it is and i see little option other than doing it, you know? no one said chemo would be a picnic - it is POISON). we're marching along a road in hopes that the accepted treatments for my stage and type of cancer will respond positively and go the hell away. it seems like so much and so little to take on at once. it is so complex and so simple. and in some ways, i think that is why i can see the good through it all. it has boiled life down to something that can be suddenly so easy to handle. each day can be so startingly simple. why wasn't it this way before? i have no idea. but it certainly will be afterward.

"complications". pick it up the next time you need a book for an airplane or the next time you're stuck on the couch while everyone else is racing their bicycles. it'll distract you. just enough.

ps - airing out, i want stickers!