Happy Anniversary to Me

T.S. Eliot starts out his poem The Waste Land this way:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.


Personally, I like April. That's about when baseball season starts up again. And if you've ever read Dinosaur Bob, you know that baseball makes everything A-Ok.


It's January that I think kind of sucks.


Today is the one-year anniversary of my diagnosis. Like all emotionally complicated anniversaries, it seems like the one year mark is both way too short a time and way too long a time, simultaneously, like I've been living with it forever and like it just happened yesterday.


For a couple of weeks now, I've been trying to sort out how I feel about the day. I'm still not sure.


I'll let you in on a little bit of a confession: when I got the news, I pretty much knew already. Not just because of the clumsy way the doctor handled telling me the news (calling me and asking me to come in and refusing to tell me the news over the phone, then keeping me waiting for a half hour, and then delaying the news for a couple of minutes after she did come to see me, asking me if I was "strssed"). No, it wasn't that.


It was the previous October, when I was feeling the strange feelings in my chest that were eventually diagnosed as acid reflux. I saw a lung specialist then, who ordered a CT scan, which showed a spot on my lung (left over pneumonia from the summer before) and a swollen node in my chest (still cleaning up from the pneumonia), and he said they meant maybe a 5-10% chance of cancer at most. After that, I felt better, but looked up "Swollen Lymph Nodes" on WebMD anyway, and it said swollen nodes could possibly be lymphoma, especially if they appear in more than one part of the body. I kept that in mind, so when the node near my hip bone popped up a month or two later, I suspected the worst.


I kind of did my grieving and "Why Me?-ing" then, before I was even officially diagnosed. I remember actually being in church, probably in November, suspecting the worst, and seeing a very old man walking down the aisle, bent over, and thinking, "Why me? Why not him?" Part of me just knew.


Of course, I'd never actually wish cancer on someone. I was thinking more about why things happen to some people and not to others. It's a question I haven't really spent much time on in the last year, because, really, what's the point? I can get just as philosophical as the next professor, but I'm more about plans than questions. At some point, you stop asking "why" questions and you get down to solving the problem.


Which leads me to this: I can't really say that I've experienced some Big Change as a result of the diagnosis. I don't see the world in a new way. I haven't quit my job to persue some dream, realizing now how short life is and how precious time is. That's just not me. The whole guitar lessons thing might seem like one of those "bucket list" items, but it isn't -- I had planned on taking lessons long ago, and I was just waiting for my term as department chair to be finished, so I had more time to practice. (Sorry if that ruined some inspirational role modeling for you.)


The one small change I can see in myself is much more subtle, and nobody else but me would even notice it: I get less stressed about confronting problems head on.

Now, here I've identified myself as a problem solver, and I'm telling you I used to be stressed about solving problems. I've always been a problem solver, and I've always done well when I've had a little time to mull the options and then come to a solution. But I've always gotten a small jolt of nervousness when I was hit with a problem without warning and needed to come up with a solution immediately. Like being called on unexpectedly by a teacher. Nerves would sometimes take over and I'd fumble around for a response. But not anymore. Smooth as silk, cool as a cuke. It happened to me within the last week -- in a high pressure sitaution, I was asked a question unexpectedly, in front of a bunch of people I didn't know very well. No fumbling. I knew just what to say. Very strange. I'm suddenly unflappable.


I guess I haven't had the Big Change because my life, really, hasn't changed all that much in a year. Obviously, there's the whole cancer thing hanging over my head, and that clouds everything in big and small ways. But mostly small, at least for now. My day-to-day life hasn't really changed all that much.


And I'm very grateful for that. Even if the doctor told me tomorrow that I needed to start treatment, I'd feel pretty damn lucky. I've had a whole year to prepare myself emotionally, to find out everything I could about this disease and my options for treatment, and to gather up my support network. A while ago, in a Nodes of Gold segment, I wrote about Joe Andruzzi, a fomer New England Patriot and Southern Connecticut State grad. He was diagnosed with a very rare, and extremely aggressive form of NHL -- so aggressive that the tumors can double in size in 24 hours. His doctor told him his treatment options, then gave him 4 hours to make a decision about what to do. Four hours. I've had roughly eight thousand, eight hundred and eleven hours. And counting. How can that be anything but lucky? And even better -- if I make the wrong choice, I'll probably still have plenty of time to decide how to fix it.


I guess that's why watching and waiting has worked for me. I'm a watcher. Even my dissertation involved watching -- a sociocognitive, ethnographic study of organizational writing. Watching and waiting comes naturally to me. It would probably drive most people nuts (I know just watching me watching and waiting is driving some of you nuts). But it works for me.


So I guess I haven't changed much. I'm just so much more of what I already was. Which (my Mom says) is a good thing.


I'm open to changing, and I'm sure I will at some point. But I'm feeling happy -- and fortunate -- that I can stay pretty much the same for now.

So today is a celebration, not of what happened on January 15, 2008, but what has happened in the year since then. I've had a year of normalcy. There were certainly days early on when I doubted that would ever happen.

Thanks for all of your support for the past year. As I said at Thanksgiving, this blog has really helped me a lot. I appreciate your being a part of it all.