The View From the Street

 I needed to walk 11 miles on Monday.. I decided to get up early and “run my errands” on foot. I walked from my house in Live Oak to my local video store to return a couple of movies, took the long way downtown, through the harbor and Frederick Street park and around the Boardwalk and back to Front Street, to mail a package to Lizzy at the post office. Lizzy is at sleep-away camp and I’m trying to send her a package for each of the three weeks she’s there. This one had some friendship bracelets Karyn had brought back from India with instructions on how to use them and a novel to read. I put the goodies in a brown mailing envelope and carried it the 7 miles it took me to get to the post office. By the time I got there, the envelope had grease stains all over it from sunscreen and sweat. The woman at the counter said she wasn’t sure she could mail it because it looked like something toxic was leaking out of it. I explained that I was training for a breast cancer walk and that my daughter was at camp and really needed this package. The clerk took pity on me and plastered the envelope with Priority Mail stickers to cover the grease spots and threw it in the big canvas cart to be mailed.

Being in Training Feels Like This

Being in training feels like this. I put on my no-sweat socks, my wicking underwear, my easy-dry shirt, my breast-cancer-3-day-walk visor, and my $90 walking shoes. I strap my double-bottled fanny pack around my waist, filling one bottle with plain water, the other, water and an electrolyte pill fizzing happily away inside. In the front pocket of my pack, I carry a Lara bar with chocolate and peanuts, moleskin in case of blisters, chap stick, a tube of Glide to prevent chafing injuries, and a bright red cotton bandana to wipe snot and sweat. My iPhone is clipped on the front of my fanny pack, headphones wrap around my ears. A pedometer is clipped on to my waistband. Sunscreen shines on my arms and chest. I open the front door and walk out into the day.

Laura's Old Friends: Ambition & Momentum

Here are a couple of pieces I wrote one day in class about two of my oldest friends, who fortunately have not been visiting me of late...

Ambition

Ambition is a short man with a small penis. He wears designer suits and has his own personal tailor. His $400 Italian loafers gleam as they did the first day he bought them. Ambition is personable and knows how to get people to like him. But he loses friends as quickly as he makes them. People feel they can't really trust him, and soon realize that he's not really listening when they talk to him. He's always looking around the room, his eyes shifting, as if his mind is elsewhere or he's looking for someone more important to impress.

The Relay for Life

One of the best things cancer has brought me is my post-treatment support group that meets every other week at Womencare. When I walk into that room and sink down into those worn, cosy couches, see the hat rack in the corner full of free hats, the body cast of a woman with a mastectomy, and the bulletin board full of flyers for complementary treatment and art groups for survivors, I feel more at home than I do anywhere else.

In the six months that we have been meeting, the eight of us who gather in that room have gotten to know each other in ways other people don’t know us. We talk about things that are largely left unsaid. The people we are closest to in our lives-- our families, lovers and friends--are happy we are alive, thrilled we are no longer sick; our cancer, if no longer acute, is in the past for them, where they hope it will remain. But for those of us who had cancer invade our cells, the long-term impact continues to radiate out into our lives. We see the world through different eyes; none of us are the same as we were before the world cracked and cancer entered our bodies.  When we are together in that sacred room, it is one of the few places we can explore what our lives are really like. Freely, we discuss the limbo we live in: the terrain of no longer being sick, but walking on unstable ground. Each of us knows viscerally how thin the line is between health and illness. We no longer feel impervious. No one outside that room “gets it” the way we do. All of us sigh a breath of relief when we walk into that room.