An improvised life

As most of you have heard, in April I was diagnosed with choroidal melanoma – eyeball cancer. The diagnosis set off several weeks of travel, treatment, and decisions. And of course, another overwhelming round of generosity and kindness from my friends, family and community. I know many people have questions, so I invite you to peruse the FAQ below. 1.        Eyeball cancer? Seriously? Yeah, who even knew? Ocular melanoma is a rare form of skin cancer diagnosed in approximately 6 in 1 million Americans annually. Risk factors include having fair skin and light eyes, and a history of welding or sun/snow burn. Almost 20 years ago an optometrist found a nevus – basically a freckle – in my right eye. Apparently an estimated 1 in 500 such freckles become cancerous over ten years. [1] 2.        Is it related to your breast cancer? Fortunately this is not a breast metastasis but a whole new cancer. It’s way better to have two unrelated local cancers than one cancer that’s metastasized,

In June 2013, on an uncharacteristically warm night, I was lying in bed wearing a tank top. My right arm over my head, I flung my left arm across my chest, and my fingers landed on a lump. It turned out to be a knot of cancerous lymph nodes. I was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer, and my life quickly turned upside down, with a rapidly executed relocation to the Seattle area for treatment. We moved to Bainbridge Island, which in some ways is less of an island than Juneau. You can drive off it, for one thing – a short bridge on the north end takes you to the Olympic Peninsula. Or you can take a 35-minute boat ride to downtown Seattle. The Washington State  Ferry offers departures about every 50 minutes from 4:45am until 1am. My treatment started with chemotherapy. A typical chemo day began on the second floor of my cancer institute. After the inevitable wait, I’d be called back and a nurse would access my port. A “portacath” is basically a titanium button with a r

Friends, It’s been a year since I last posted, and I’ve missed it. Writing for others seems to help me crystallize my thoughts and stay positive so ultimately, this exercise is for myself. With that, here is today’s offering… I was making pancakes this morning for Alder and his friend, idly breaking an egg when my mind wandered back to a sixth-grade field trip to the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. The tour included the hospital kitchen. I vividly remember a guy standing in front of a vat, or rather, I picture the vat itself – an elongated rectangular trough that was apparently some kind of cooking apparatus. In my mind it was gigantic, and was filled with gallons and gallons of yellowish liquid. A man in a paper hat stood before it, dragging a large metal spatula back and forth through the trough of what turned out to be eggs.   As he sloshed around the yellowy ocean of congealing egg, the cook told us a story. He told us ships’ cooks had to use powdered eggs on long

On July 4, 2004, I watched an only-in-Alaska sporting event called the Mt. Marathon race in Seward. Runners climb 3000 vertical feet in a mile-and-a-half, then turn around and scream down the mountain. The fastest runners average 12 miles per hour on the descent. To borrow from Woody in Toy Story , “That’s not running, that’s falling with style.” The mountain is mostly bare rock, and you can watch much of the action from the streets of Seward, where the race starts and ends. I watched runners stumble across the finish line mud-spattered, bloodied, gasping for air. I had to do the race. I just had to. The giddy thrill of my spectating experience instantly morphed into a delusion that I would run the race the following year. I wandered around Seward babbling my newfound ambition to anyone who would listen. Locals explained that I would literally have to win the lottery to get a race number. I was undaunted. Undaunted, that is, until I hiked the trail the next day. Pa

The past few weeks have been dominated by Stuff. We sent 300 pounds of Legos and other assorted goods to Alaska by barge, mailed three boxes of books and files, and filled five 50-pound suitcases to take advantage of Alaska Airlines’ free checked baggage for Alaskans. We got rid of even more stuff. We gave most of it away but there was one item I had a hard time letting go of – a Kenwood car stereo deck. It’s not that I wanted it, I just wanted money for it. The car stereo (upside down, sorry) Remember Shel Silverstein’s poem, Smart [i] ? I read it to Alder recently as he was learning about money, and I couldn’t help thinking I’d been the fool who turned her dollar into five cents. Yes, this has something to do with a car stereo. It starts last summer, when in my frenzy to leave Juneau I failed to ship my car to Seattle. In August, while driving a borrowed car, I rear-ended someone (a car dealer, it turned out). [ii] I again considered shipping my car down, but it w