Thoughts on the New Year

I almost forgot how to start a new post. At the Canoe Club on a beautiful day back in the summer, Donna said don’t stop the blog. I have to do what she says, as in “yours” in tennis, but I am only kidding about that and am giving it a try. 

Funny how things work out. 

I started this way back when Delta got worse, school for Nell was going to start, and Ben understandably didn’t want to take a chance with Cape trip #2. Joe also couldn’t come. So although we missed them, Diane, David, Katie and I had a lovely weekend. We went on the boat, which we might not have done if the whole crew was there. 

 My nose continues to be a pain. I had a skin cancer removed from the top of my head, and while I was lying there, at the Mohs Surgery Center in Jamaica Plain, the doctor said it (my nose) could use some dermabrasion and went after it with a sand papery thing. Now I am dealing with THAT healing. To finish it off, I apparently need laser. At 7 a.m. in Boston. At least I can get a little something out of these things. I wrote about how hard it is to bandage your nose, like so: Nose bandaging not my speciality.

It's funny, not ha ha funny, just strange, that as a blood cancer survivor I deal mostly with skin cancer, which I write about here.

It was also hard to bandage a wound on my head, as you can imagine. Boyfriend rigged something up with gauze, tape, and three hair clips. Donna and I made it to the US Open. That seems like so long ago. There was no bus, so I drove. Highlight of the drive might have been the pit stop on a sloping bank alongside the river just before we hit the Whitestone Bridge. Only kidding, I think. We navigated the grounds like pros, unlike in our first year, and saw women’s doubles up close, as well as men’s singles and a short trip to our nosebleed seats in Ashe, all the while juggling our Honey Deuce cocktail in the souvenir glass with the winners on it.

I did the Hot Chocolate Run for Safe Passage with my friend Amy Willard. We chatted most of the way and didn't do it for time. It was great to be with a group of runners again. Since it was outside, I wasn't worried about the virus. We kept our masks on except for the photo. It is so fun and festive and for a great cause.

I waited so long to finish this that now we are dealing with Omicron. I won't go backwards on some things, such as playing tennis indoors, which I wouldn't do last year when unvaccinated. Though I have to say that after having no problems playing all summer on the clay, my feet and to some little extent my right knee, are speaking to me with all of this playing on hard courts in Enfield and (still outside the other day in the cold) on the hard courts at the Canoe Club. 

On New Year's Day it is hard to know what to make of things. Someone I know asked on Twitter how it was possible to be optimistic about the coming year, what with climate change, the virus, and the anti-vaxxers giving the plague new ways of spreading. I agree that it is hard and infuriating. It is hard not to get my blood pressure up, when they parade around with signs along the lines of "don't tell me what to do with my body" yet will turn around and tell a woman what to do with her body. Big sigh.

But as for the positive: This time last year, we didn't have the vaccine. I couldn't let anyone in my house, and even when walking outside with Katie, I had to be careful not to wander into her pathway, as I am wont to do. This time last year, the grandkids couldn't have visited as they did the other day. We wouldn't have been able to play with the toys that I held onto from when my kids were young. We couldn't have had lunch. We might still have been able to take the "nature walk" that we took over at the college, but then we wouldn't have been able to come in and have hot chocolate and cookies.

In the old days back at the paper (s), I might not have interviewed my friends, but my sister/friend Margaret fit so will into the theme of pandemic pivots, which I wrote about for PBS's Next Avenue, that I had to feature her. I was honored that she used the photo on her Christmas card. 

Maddie is almost 15.  I remember when our dog Sam was this old and would be sleeping in the pool of light beneath the living room window, on the blue carpet, and we would check to see if he was breathing. Now I check her that way. She has mostly stopped playing with her toys but she really likes this snowman that Jane gave her for Christmas. As always, she seems annoyed when I take her photo. 

Worried about virus, happy that my kitchen is coming along

Hey, I have my kitchen back... sort of, that is. 

The barrier separating the dining area from the kitchen came down today. It looks strange with no furniture in it! Also it echos. The walls are primed and ready for paint. Some people volunteered to help me (thanks Jen and Mimi) but when I went into the paint store, I gravitated to the color that I think I want, natural linen. I thought of going back to get some other samples but sometimes the first thing you choose is the one that you end up liking the most, and also, the virus. (As in, not spending too much time shopping, but I went to the Big Y to pick up a prescription today and ended up there for an hour because it was mobbed with people preparing for what they seem to think is the apocalypse. And no hand sanitizer...)

Lower down in my last post you can see what it looked like just a week ago. 

Today I have a story up about the uncertainty facing "older people" who are most at risk. It is featured on Next Avenue, the PBS-affiliated website for people 50 and older. The editor wanted it in two days, and I am pleased to say that I have not forgotten how to write on deadline, thanks to my training in the daily news biz. 

The story started like so: The other night I was so worried about the coronavirus that I took five milligrams of Ativan, but all it did was make me feel hung over. The next day, I ran four miles and walked another two. Neither helped.

“I shall die of eating an unwashed grape,” I said to my dog in my best Blanche DuBois impression.

I survived relapsed leukemia — with an apparent record of four stem cell transplants — and am worried that after all I’ve been through, COVID-19 will be the end of me. None of the available information has allayed my confusion and concern over who exactly is at the highest risk. You hear that the high-risk group is people over 60, then, people 70 and older. Or those with high blood pressure. I concluded that I was going to skip everything but tennis, but, after I went to tennis (where there were many people including the doctor who diagnosed me), I felt that I shouldn't have done it, and I think I'm going to have to look for subs.

You can read the story here. 

On to other topics, because although it seems like there are no other topics besides the virus, there are. 

That redhead in the trippy Celebrity Cruises commercial is sure getting a lot of sun. I thought it might be a commercial for skin cancer. I wrote about some of the weird qualities of the commercial   this post  . Until I had so much trouble with skin cancer, I didn't see so many things through its lens.

For the same website, I also wrote about the ways in which I've been lucky. I didn't write about this, but today, Friday the 13th, is lucky for me, because Ben, my first born, was born on a Friday the 13th. I wrote, "Nobody should say you’re lucky to get cancer, but luck is a matter of degree. For example, an acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patient like myself is lucky compared to one who got the blood cancer before stem cell transplants became common practice. In great part, we owe our survival to the so-called Father of Bone Marrow Transplantation, Harvard-trained researcher E. Donnall Thomas, who I wrote about in a piece on what it’s like to be a chimera, a person with two types of DNA. In 1957, Thomas published a report of a new approach to blood cancer treatment: radiation and chemotherapy followed by the intravenous infusion of bone marrow.