Strict Joy

Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where the altitude down here at sea level lends itself to heat and humidity and the smell of hot pavement. This Colorado girl is missing the high country. Usually when we spend this long in the low country, we are on vacation, de-stressing, hanging out by pools and bodies of water both large and small. Instead, we have poached parking at a nearby hotel to save ourselves $8 and walked in several blocks in the morning heat, which by now feels many degrees cooler than afternoon heat, cut through a massive parking garage and now sit in Mays Clinic, awaiting yet another test, another scan, another imaging procedure on the tata that is causing all the fuss.

This girl is also missing her Colorado boy. Please don't tell anyone. It could blow my reputation. But the sad truth is, I have grown a bit used to doing things in tandem. I don't especially like boardwalks and beaches and pools and sunsets over water and such things alone, surrounded by happy people who hold hands.

I missed the bike race on Wednesday night, because I was 1,000 miles away by that time. There is now no chance of me getting an overall podium spot, which is certainly not the most important thing at the moment, even though I have invested a lot of hard pedaling and training to that end this summer. But Houston has it's own bit of charm, I am sure, and I am pretty sure it can be found. The next two days are vacation days, no appointments on the weekend, which means that for the next 48 hours, we can stay far away from the concrete hell that is the Houston Medical center.

And now for the report you have all been waiting for- which really is not much. Nobody will know anything beyond conjecture for two weeks yet. There is a tumor, yes, and it may or may not have spread to other systems, lyphovascular or skeletal, but, based only on the pokes and prods and assumptions of doctors, most likely invasion of other systems is minimal. The blessing of a place as large as MD Anderson is also it's curse- the sheer volume of really sick people here. A mere tumor is simply not enough of a priority to merit any sort of rush, but here, it is reassuring that it is merely a tumor. The work of a normal day. We are booked through 9:00 Tuesday morning with diagnostic appointments, after which time we will hit the road for home, wait until all the pathology and scans and imaging have been analyzed, then come back for the first appointment that will involve treatment on the 26th of August.

Mentally, two of us are in high spirits. I have spent the last year in search of that spring of joy that keeps dogs and children from recognizing that life is cruel, the thing that lets them have a two-second rebound from angry or frightened back to joyful. There is one thing dogs and children do that we who are intellectual rather than instinctual do not- they live in the moment. They do not dwell on past mistakes or past bad experiences, nor do they have expectations for the future. In the moment, they are happy, they are loved, they are well fed and secure, and if they do not have one of these things, they are upset until the thing that is broken is fixed, at which point, it is in the past and the sun shines and the sky is blue. It feels like a monumental discovery, monumentally simple. The fact that it is okay to live in the moment is a difficult one to wrap one's mind around. There is no need to judge, no responsibility to prepare one's emotions for the train wreck just around the corner, no need to do anything but live and enjoy the life pulsing through our veins and live among the living and love and accept the living and the alive.

My mom is more annoyed by having cancer than anything. Annoyed that it has decided to root itself where it does not belong, as if it does not recognize that she does not have time for it. It is an unwelcome guest who needs to be evicted so she can get on with all the life she has lined out, all the bulleted to-do lists that do not include "get rid of cancer". It is an unforseen, and it is uneccessary, and it is causing a hiccup in everyone's life, and there is no reason to give it even a bit of satisfaction by falling apart or panicking over it or allowing it to affect her life or attitude. In the end, the way it affects her is by her seeing how it affects others, how it causes bumps in their roads, how they had to rearrange their own busy schedules and lives to accomodate her annoying, unwelcome, uneccessary tumor. The outpouring of support and love has been extremely affirming to her self-worth. I actually wonder if, in her mind, the tumor has feelings, and she is determined to hurt them. She has already paid the (insert insulting adjective here) thing a trip halfway across the U.S., a week's worth of hotel bills, food that comes from restaurant kitchens and the backs of trucks instead of the garden outside her back door. But that's all it can have. She's cutting it off at emotional payment. The day will come, perhaps in two weeks, where it will be literally cut off, but until then, it has fed enough off of stress and depression. She needs a strict diet of joy and living and for all she cares, it can starve to death.

My dad is the one struggling to control his emotions and stay positive and not project into a bleak future. It is not automatic for him to be the natural free spirit that my mom tends to gravitate toward when left to her own devices. I suppose he was the moth to her flame because of this, even though it has caused, to say the least, a bit of conflict. He is trying hard to remember to utilize all the coping mechanisms he has learned over the years to apply in situations that are trying to him- ones that involve lots of public, lots of stress, time management and unsure outcomes. Watch him go when he has directon, but here, there is no direction, just waiting and conjecture, the very things that, to function the best, he needs to stay far away from. His best direction and most effective coping tool is to be indulgent toward my mom, which is why we now sit in the very best cancer center, with the highest success rate, and nary a thought toward any option that might be more convenient but less than the best.

So, my faithful few, thank you for being you. I wish you joy, and I hope that you focus on my mom with all that joy. Send her joy with your prayers and your thoughts and your well-wishes, and in return, I wish you a life full of back-to-back lingering beautiful moments. Thank you for your prayers, hope, and support.