The Club to which No One Wants to Belong

They directed me to her room with eyebrows raised and questions trapped behind pursed lips. Flipping through the charts again in search of information that will not materialize, they ask for the third time if I am family. Their highly-trained eyes dart up and down my body taking in my bald head, frumpy cardigan, prosthetic leg peeking out the bottom of floral pajama pants, and the IV pole linked to the PIC line sprouting from underneath the skin of my upper left arm. Clearly, I am a patient asking to see the patient two doors down from my room. I can see the question in their eyes: is she delusional or does she actually know the woman in room 315? I cut them a little slack, since my chemo is known to cause paranoid hallucinations. I'm a former student, I explain, She was my sixth grade teacher. We have the same doctor. He told me to visit her. It's all true. Our doctor, with his boyish charms, high-water slacks, and unconventional frankness (he says “holy buckets,” once did a hillbilly jig in response to a good scan, and acknowledges that many things are beyond his control), told me to visit her when I checked in. The coincidences are too much for the skeptical nurses and they let me pass as long as I scrub my hands in the hallway sink.

I am in the room and there she is lying in the hospital bed, her daughter stroking her sock-clad foot and her husband acting the part of doorman and welcoming committee. Tears roll uncontrollably down her cheeks; her brain tumor is pressing on the area that controls emotion. The red hair I remember admiring – when I was a mousy, awkward middle schooler – as the epitome of feminine sophistication and spunk (it has a rebellious and unique nature, just like its owner) is splayed over the pillow, a large chunk missing. Wheeling my IV pole behind me, I walk to her bedside and take her trembling hand. She looks up at me, blue eyes searching for a second before placing me (the chatty creative writer who couldn't spell to save her life, who insisted on writing political poems that weren't allowed into the school's writing contest, who dramatized a fantastically narcissistic Pandora in the greek play, and who accidentally drew an alien that resembled male genitalia and was too innocent to figure out what all the boys were laughing at). We hold hands, teacher to student, patient to patient.

It is here, when she asks with fear in her voice what chemotherapy is really like, that I remember the older man in the supermarket who greeted my fifteen-year-old bald, self with a welcome to the club to which no one wants to belong. He presented his colon cancer story like a membership card or secret handshake. I never saw him again but years later his dark sarcasm seems fitting. There are bonds now that my former teacher and I will share that no one else can quite understand and a secret language full of horrifying medical terminology that we will throw around like jaded war veterans. We will gossip about our oncologist, trading notes and impressions like infatuated school girls. After all, we want to know this man to whom we entrust our lives in the same way that other people want to know what brand of cereal their favorite celebrity eats. Sure, the hazing is hell (my own has included an amputation, four lung surgeries, over twelve months of chemotherapy, anaphylactic shock, and more pills, needles, and scans than I care to recall) but it comes with a new knowledge and perspective. Like unwilling daredevils, we have been to the edge of mortal and back, not for a few insane seconds of hang time, but for months of uncertainty about if and when we will land safely back on earth. We share a kinship, one that I believe is spiritual as well as physical and psychological, forged by our fight for our lives in the sterilized halls of modern medicine.

So, what have we, the enlisted adventurers of the isolated plains of illness, learned? Our main lesson is that security and stability are illusions. In other words, we are all mortal and liable to be crushed by falling rocks, contract diseases, clog our arteries with grease, and step into the street just once without looking both ways. The bad news is that you can live as vanilla as possible, watching your step along the way and avoiding all the potholes, and taking all your multivitamins and still be slammed by some unforeseen cosmic blow. The good news is, knowing this, you are now free to live as your heart (and the universe) directs (or maybe that is also bad news to you because, frankly, it is as scary as all hell).

Now let's clarify something here: there is a difference between living as your heart directs and living recklessly/self-destructively/lazily. You can usually tell the difference by the results. The first option yields joy, freedom, positive relationships, and the realization of your truest, most secret dreams no matter how unconventional or unprofitable they may be. The second yields dependence, obesity, toxic relationships, self-loathing, shoddy attempts at your true work, and a cheating yourself of your true potential accompanied by bitterness and cynicism. Drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes are perfect examples of the second category. They can be confused with actions of freedom from societal judgement but really never lead anywhere worthwhile. (I will explore this topic further in an upcoming blog titled Drugs, Alcohol, Cigarettes and other Placebos for the Ready-Made and Impotent“Counter-Culture Revolutionary”... yah, yah, I know you can hardly wait). So, if you're covered in Fruit Loops and Lays crumbs and can't remember what you did last night or three nights ago and you can't seem to get away from YouTube long enough to finish your art installment, screenplay, grant application, business plan, fill in the blank here, then you can be pretty sure that you are living scenario two. Now, if you're finally quitting your mind-numbing day job to do that thing that both terrifies and thrills you – your parents'/former teacher/neighbors' conservative advice and country club mortification be damned – congratulations you're in scenario one. As for me, despite my multiple brushes with mortality, I am stuck somewhere on the precipice of scenario one; I know what I need to do but I am too scared to leap. And I can't even blame my parents because they would support me and pay my health insurance even if I joined the traveling circus (not my deepest, innermost desire but a girl has got to have some secrets even if she does author a blog).

That being said, I am officially reclaiming ownership of this club with reluctant members, to which I have had to help induct two former teachers and, very recently, another grandfather. It is now the club of extreme life-embracers (and no we will not have ribbons or bracelets of any color). Its members will be anyone who has walked through the fire – be it cancer, accident, divorce, depression, or what I like to call general malaise brought on by living inauthentically – and emerged scorched and smoldering with the desire to live like death is indeed inevitable. Because it is. And don't give me any of this I'll live when I am dead and safely ensconced in eternal paradise because, darlin', your spirit is here in this awkward flesh-suit to seek a passionate truth. This life is not a waiting room. You don't have to read Golf Digest just because its there or sit staring at people because you have nothing better to do. Nor do you have to pass the time doing what everyone else or the ads on TV tell you is right. You have a mission to fulfill and a lesson to learn. I hate to break it to you, but I highly doubt that lesson is how to find a good job, a good spouse, and raise a nice family in the suburbs. Nor is the lesson on how to discover the next “it” piece of merchandise to cloak yourself in to prove you're better than the next guy. I am pretty sure that the lesson has nothing to do with money at all, unless it is how to give it all away or risk it on some amazing, crazy venture (like building girls' schools in Iraq, not like taking a trip to Vegas, see above paragraph if you are still confused). I am also pretty sure that if you follow your right path, you're probably going to look insane/out-there/foolish/struggling most of the time. Sure, you may have glimmering moments of success but then you will push it to the next level like the extreme life-embracer you are becoming. At times, your life may even be in danger. Although, I have already explained that it already is, every day.

I am not exactly sure what the lesson is or, I swear, I would share it with you. However, I plan on taking some clues from the aforementioned club members. From my sixth grade teacher – who persisted in teaching poetry, acts of kindness, and puppetry even when they stocked her class with the worst behaved boys the school could muster up and called her “an average teacher” when her methods and commitment were anything but – I will learn the art of giving even when my efforts are derided. From my high school philosophy teacher – who threw the textbook across the classroom on the first day, who displayed the devil horns someone sent him in demonstration of their belief that he was the antichrist for asking students to examine their beliefs, and who had several couches in his room for the teens no one wanted to deal with to come sit and be heard – I will learn to speak the truth and ask questions even in the face of persecution. From my Poppy – who builds sailboats from scratch in his garage, who traveled to Israel when he knew he was sick, who learned to play guitar in his sixties, who wakes every morning to pray and ride his bike to his classes, and who wears Birkenstocks despite having some of the funkiest toenails I have ever seen – I will learn to conquer obstacles and ignore convention. These fellow cancer survivors are everyday radicals, who seek to be completely themselves no matter how steep the climb becomes or how powerful and nasty the opposition looks. The refuse to be beaten into a mold. I only hope and pray (because I am too much of a wimp and a people-pleaser to do any of this without divine intervention) that I will be able to count myself amongst their ranks one day. Who knows, maybe now that you know how awesome the members are, you won't be so afraid to join the club. Just remember, no one said it will be all sunshine, lollipops, and new age fuzzes. Yet, learning to live again, after having been on the verge of death in one way or another, is a thrill and reward like no other. Now that I know I will die, I am determined to become daring enough to live.