From cancer nightmares to flowers and writing

Inside the Smith College bulb show

Over the past few weeks I have gone to more than my usual number of Survivor Journeys blood cancer support group meetings in Enfield and Agawam. It was because I wrote a profile for Dana-Farber on the physician who started the groups. Like me, Jay Burton had AML and is a Dana-Farber patient. (I started to write "was" a patient, but changed to the present tense because once a patient, always a patient.)

One discussion topic lodged in my subconscious and came out as a bad dream. Some attendees who had had Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma were talking about the stages at which they were diagnosed and the tumors they had. AML is a different disease that is not staged and that does not come with tumors, but tell that to the voice in my subconscious.

I dreamt that someone looked at the lipoma that you can see through my yoga pants and said that it looked dangerous and should be removed. I said that it had been tested and wasn't harmful. But the person looking at it said it had grown too large and I should really have it rechecked because it might be cancer after all. Blech. Well in reality I'm going for a checkup tomorrow before the light treatment so I might mention my dream.

On Sunday I met Joe in West Hartford, approximately half-way between us. We had lunch/brunch at Effie's Place, a family restaurant that was as good as it looked on the internet. He is not crazy about the idea of me running the Saint Patrick's Race.

"Are you going to make the doctor's appointment before or after the race?" he asked.

As we used to say as kids, "So funny I forgot to laugh."

I don't buy a lot of new equipment, but I decided I should get a new pair of running shoes. (Brooks Cascadia, really a trail-running shoe but a good fit for my orthotics.)

It was that super cold day but when I got home in the late afternoon I got it in my head that I would try them out by running up Cold Hill. I wasn't that cold so I kept going and got committed to finishing a loop of a little less than four miles. By that time it was getting dark and I felt the cold.

With Literacy Project students Chris and Alyea

The next day, and into today, I didn't feel so great. Not too bad but not great...that feeling that you're coming down with something. So I took today off. My exercise consisted of going from The Literacy Project to the Smith College Bulb Show with our class. I had a memory that involved two of my children wanting to be in a photo with my parents and the other child not wanting to. We took a solo photo of the recalcitrant child, and later my mother did her own version of photoshopping: cutting out the photo of the solo child and putting it next to the group.

I missed my mother.

She would have appreciated the fragrances and the colors and the arrangements.

I told Zoe (the teacher) that I like to think she is around.

When we got back, everyone wrote impressions of the day.

I was helping one man whose mind goes faster than his writing. He jotted down some descriptive words not connected by verbs. He told me he gets confused.

"Stop and tell me what you're trying to say, like you're telling your wife," I said. "Keep your sentences short."

And so that's what he did. He seemed happy about it.

A little. Newspaper training. Goes a long. Way.