It’s amazing what ecstasy a simple vaccine can bring.
After a year of hiding in my cave I am now able to visualize that moment when I can carefully climb back out again. In fact I have the exact date circled in my calendar. March 20th, two weeks after my second shot. At that point my anxiety can go down so many notches and better yet, I shall be able to spend time in the company of a select few (those who are also two weeks or more out from their second vaccination). People!
After such extreme deprivation (remember, I am an extrovert), this feels like an utter banquet. A wealth, if you will.
Yesterday someone complimented me (via zoom meeting) on my hair cut. Later I realized that if I had been clever, I would have responded that it was not a hair cut, it was a hair grow. Same with my eyebrows. They delight me. I simply cannot stop touching them. And two days ago, one of my eyelashes bumped into the rim of a water glass.
I was alopecic (hairless) for one straight year this time. Got old, it did. Of course my newly boosted self esteem (I like hair) is challenged by the pustular acne and eczema that are secondary to treatment with binimetinib. I never go halfway when it comes to side effects. Fortunately, my team takes these every bit as seriously as I do, and has worked with me to find solutions. As long as insurance doesn’t keep me from filling my prescription for minocycline again, I should be able to get this under control.
Soon I shall be almost as pretty as I once was. That’s a joke. Ode to my brother in law Greg, who will say to my sister Bink, ‘You’re as pretty as you’ll ever be.’ Also a joke. Which reminds me of how my father Ollie once told me that peak intelligence was reached around age eleven. This was erroneous but I was highly anxious. And twelve. So of course I worried.
Anyway, I digress. Happily. After a trying year my life feels a comparative splendor. And about that trying year. I have been doing a lot of middle of the night thinking (insomnia), and recently I was pondering the concept of practice. Both in the Buddhist sense but also totally pragmatic (which Buddhism, after all, really is). Repetition is the essence of practice. If you do something again and again (good and bad habits), it shall manifest.
This past year represented a lot of hard work–emotionally. At times it sucked but, as my son August’s colleague so pithily implored him–’embrace the suck.’ August does. I have. And we’ve both grown.
Now it’s time to bloom.
xo
life and breath: outliving lung cancer 