BeWonderNow (54)

round one (check)

Round One of chemo completed (check), and I’m feeling good and strong and ever more optimistic for my future. Today, Sandi and I planted multiple perennials and put down 40 bags of mulch. Flurry was ever-present. We also made a run to the St. Paul Farmer’s Market for an end-of-season haul — sweet corn, eggplant, cukes, apples, greens, beets, baby carrots, garlic, onions, herbs, and some of Earl’s Bourbon Q sauce.

I’m currently making quarts and quarts of red sauce from our enormous tomato harvest and pairing this rustic sauce with lots of yummy, end-of-summer ingredients.

My latest grilling passion is to roast medallions of eggplant with smoky and melted buffalo mozzarella topped with garlic-basil-tomato sauce, more fresh basil, and grated parmesan. Add a charcoal grilled, thick-cut NYStrip with hoisin sauce, and serve with rosemary roasted potatoes, garlic, and cherry tomatoes, then to wash it all down with a hearty Rioja —a perfect way to celebrate with my beloved Sandi, my ever loyal Flurry, and my present experience of HEALTH. These are the good moments I fight for and celebrate— a million, million reasons to live— and a billion, billion reasons to be alive.

Today I went to visit a therapist at the Region’s Cancer Center. Four plus months into this, I now recognize that I might need some specialized help to sort and process, to grieve, to evaluate, to dream, and to plan again. Proximity to death has had a profound impact on all of these things. Over these past months, I experience something like concentric circles of hope. At the time of my initial diagnosis and leading up to my surgery, the circle of hope was cautiously very small. When I woke up post-surgery to test the workings of my fingers, toes, etc., my circle of hope ever so gradually widened.

With each successive treatment and diagnostic test and expert consult with my physicians, my circle grows ever wider as my fears gradually subside. As I become physically and mentally stronger, my circle of hope continues to expand outward from those earliest minutes to hours to days to weeks, and now to months. I scan my horizon, as if in a rowboat on a great body of water, like Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, and I wonder to myself if and when that great beast will again return. This, I am told, is the great conundrum of Cancer.

I’m still very much sorting, processing, grieving, evaluating, attempting to dream, and hoping to navigate my way back home again. I’m giving counseling a try. We’ll see.

Here’s another approach. It’s called a Brain Tumor Support Group, sponsored by Region’s Oncology Department. I just signed up.

As the flyer states, the first talk will feature Dr. Courtney Burnett, a brain tumor survivor and author of the beautiful book Difficult Gifts - A Physician’s Journey to Heal Body and Mind, which I read very early along on my own journey. I hope to soon embrace her philosophy of living with brain cancer.

BeWonderNow