day 42: transitions

transitions – moving through, going across; passages from one position or condition to another. They have no fixed position, to answer or resolution. They are uncomfortable for those of us who yearn for control, meaning and destination.

prepositions – words placed before nouns to indicate time, space or means. They are in, at, on, and under. They are along, soon, after and within. They bring certainty to uncomfortable unknowns, and clarity to shadowy in-between places. In language, prepositions fix answers in time and space, like the coordinates of newly discovered stars.

****

Lovers, employers and teachers have always said that what I lack in technique and skill I make up for in enthusiasm, passion and determination. When I experience regular and ongoing failures, I tend to have at it again and again like cat determined to break through a bedroom door. This attitude is also a testament to the luck and support I’ve had in life because I believe, like the cat purring, scratching and whaling bodily against the door, that it will open to a soft warm bed with cuddles and scratches. It’s also a reflection of nature’s innate capacity to move on, move through and transform.

The first in a series of transitions is the return to work. R- drives me to Lismore, hands me my lunch bag and smiles through my teary anticipation,

“Don’t let the big kids steal your lunch…and if it doesn’t work out, I’m in Lismore for a couple of hours, I can come and get you.”

“It will be fine…I’m bringing a car home … I’ll only be a few hours,” I say pushing the car door open with my right hand, the left arm is still too weak and the wound too sore.

Even though I’ve been anticipating this for two weeks, a part of me wants to run back to the car and hide in R-‘s lounge room forever. There is absolutely no rational explanation for this desire; so on the way up the stairs I talk myself through it:

• No one expects you to be back at work yet. That’s why you’re here; so that if you fail it’s ok.
• Everyone at work is friendly and caring, no one is going to pressure you today.
• You’re only here for a couple of hours. Catch up with projects, the boss and the team, get the lap top and the car and run back to the couch as fast as you can.

Except that I haven’t driven yet and have no idea how much that’s going to hurt. And I’m wearing the biggest shirt in the world to cover my wonky body. And I think I need a nap already.

I get inside and they are simply wonderful. They don’t bombard me, I am welcomed, and within ten minutes I’m sitting at my desk with a cuppa catching up on grant applications and project dramas. I have a workplan within an hour and a brand new shiny red laptop to use at home. It turns out my team has donated $100 towards naturopathic remedies and I’m asked to provide a list.

Over the next few days a large hole appears in my wound, about the size of a pencil, just where you imagine your pectoral muscle to connect with breast tissue. It’s oozing away and I can actually see a little way inside it into my chest, although the infection is starting to clear. Hippy Nurse D- grounds me on Thursday until I can see the surgeon in the afternoon, and I plan to spend the day lying flat and delving into the novel I am working into like a new bed of fresh compost, full of possibilities, rich characters and – most importantly – distraction.

Around noon there’s a knock at the door and standing there is M-, a kind of clown character wearing an orange t-shirt, yellow pants and cap who plays the flute at the local farmers’ market. He often visits R- with flowers for a tea and a chat about life, so I invite him in, thinking this is the polite thing to do.

I guess it’s the pain, exhaustion and panic about the hole in my chest that mask my fairly strong intuition, leaving me at the mercy of pretty poor boundaries on my part and some ISSUES on the part of Mr. Clown. He has tarot cards in his hand and offers a reading, to which my dissociated brain consents, and over the next two hours I try every tool in my arsenal to get rid of him, while he tells me about how evil the world is, how stupid 98% of people are, and how significantly evolved people like ourselves must not concern ourselves with anyone who is wealthy, fat, poor, homeless, or ill.

I have Hitler in my face and I just want to scream until he shatters into a thousand pieces.

“Look I really need to rest today, I’m not really up for this…”

But he continues on his rant, louder and louder as I walk to my phone and send an SOS message to R- for help. But she’s at work downstairs and doesn’t see the message. He’s on a roll now, there’s no stopping him. I try to surrender to it but the rubbish coming out of his mouth is so offensive I have to say something.

“Frankly I don’t agree with you either. From my perspective we are all equal, and there is so much to share and learn from each other, that’s why we’re here…”

His retort is so confusing I just lay back on the couch and wish he would leave. But he doesn’t. He goes on, twitching and hands flying in my face as he describes his violent father, his chronic pain and his demanding girlfriend. I wonder why he doesn’t start a blog, an appropriate space for all this venting.

My frustration and anxiety builds until I have tears streaming down my face. I even give him an apple to try to gift him out the door. When he finally leaves I feel so violated, I cry for hours, until R- runs out of patience because she thinks it’s her fault I spent two and a half hours with a mad clown and ‘sorry’ doesn’t stop the tears.

I cry all the way to my visit with Dr S- the surgeon. She tells me the hole in my chest is small compared to other patients, it will heal in time. She is gentle and dresses the wound with strips that will hold the hole together, supporting the skin to heal. She asks me to keep an open mind about chemotherapy when I meet the oncologist, Dr J-.

Then there’s nothing left to say, no reason to make another appointment, and I realise that I won’t see her again for months. I want to throw my arms around her and thank her, but I’m too busy crying again. I cry all the way home. I cry through mugs of cocoa, through visits to the bathroom, through the adventures of knights and magical wolves in my novel, and into sleep. I dream about running rivulets and time running out, clocks all over the world pointing to cosmic collapse.

But in the morning I wake up and have found myself again. At some point in the night, solid ground appeared under my feet and I wonder why I wasn’t strong enough to just tell the mad clown to leave. I arrive at work feeling strong again.

****

I had planned months ago to move from my house in Corndale to Phyllis St South Lismore. For those of you who are unfortunate enough to live elsewhere, picture Armistead Maupin and Tales of the City, but replace San Francisco with South Lismore and swap Phyllis Street for Fillimore, minus the uber-efficient public transport system. With Phyllis Street at its epicentre, Lesville boasts an overrepresentation of unshaven armpits, feminist comics, vegetarian and gluten free pantries, white minivans and a higher than average concentration of hand tools in clumps of three or four houses.

That night I find out the house I’m meant to be moving to in a week or so isn’t going to be ready. Unfortunately asbestos turned up in the sunroom of my new flatmate’s renovations and threw a little spanner in the construction schedule. But the removalists are booked and we’ve already extended the moving date once, so there’s no room to move.

I talk to R- about staying on a bit longer at the castle in Bangalow. She seems fine about it and I am full of joy as our eyes meet over conversation with a next door neighbour and messages of love pass between us. We are so close at this moment; I never even dreamed we could have this kind of beautiful soulful connection. She has cared for me so well these last weeks, doing my washing, preparing food, shopping and loving deeply. I am indebted to her forever.

But the next day I notice she’s looking wilted and spends about 14 hours in the workshop hammering away on shoes, boots, bags and belts. I potter and rest, disciplining myself to read all day despite the drive to work, clean, walk, shop and interact. R- goes out alone to a party that night and I stay at home on the couch for the first time in our relationship, my stomach festering with self doubt.

By Monday R- looks like a peace lilly that hasn’t been watered in weeks. I realise she has run out of steam and it’s time to move on. She says she just needs some time and space to herself. Over the next two days I arrange to house sit for my yoga guru, and other temporary accommodation arrangement after that, until the permanent home in South Lismore is ready.

I cry again in the shower – will this crying EVER stop? – and watch a fly buzz into a web above the dusty window sill. Within seconds a tiny little spider that looks more like a speck of dust with legs is onto the fly, wrapping it round, round and round in its thread. The fly keeps fighting and nearly breaks free, but that spider is determined and within about a minute the fly stops moving, resigned to its fate, or suffocated by the webbing.

Most of my possessions are already in boxes, so I pack the car with my travel bag and pillow and relocate to yoga guru’s wooden house with Billy the Yoga Cat. Billy has shiny black fur and a purr that sounds like she’s powered by diesel.

I try not to panic, to ride out the waves of distress and self pity, but there is such a huge sense of loss and sadness inside, like a black hole that sucks all light and hope into itself. R- has been an incredible support; I can’t imagine getting through the day without her gentle movements around the flat, her warm body to snuggle into at night. She has given me the strength to keep going through this experience when I was overwhelmed. She has laundered, shopped, cooked and cuddled, transported, loved and dried tears.

But the reality is that for nearly four years we have negotiated a relationship with wildly different views on what a relationship means. It was never going sustain the intense partnership connection that has grown in the past few weeks and which I have come to rely on.

I sit that first night in the wooden house with Billy the Yoga Cat and howl my grief into the night, masked by the grinding, cluncking and pneumatic farting of machines that run 24/7 to create the boxes, lids, caps and crates of our packaging industry.

One day I will invent an emotional band aid so people like me can just peel off the sticky label, apply the dressing, and be on their way. One thing I have learned though, is that my feelings are nobody’s fault and there’s no point in judging anyone for being who they are.

Billy and I spend a week together, working, reading and hanging out. I eat curry and enjoy the airy beauty of a wooden house surrounded by industrial warehouses. It’s quiet and isolated in an Alexandria-24/7-factory kind of way. On the last night Billy the Yoga cat sleeps on the bed with me and when I wake in the night she comforts me with her diesel purr in the darkness.

****

By the time I meet Dr J- the oncologist, I’m pretty philosophical. On the day of our appointment the receptionists ring three times to move me later in the day and in the end I walk into his office closer to six o’clock than four.

Dr J- turns out to handsome, dry-humoured and empathetic; no dusty cardigan or horn-rimmed spectacles in sight. The wedding ring says he’s heterosexual, but his snaggy opening spiel about pinot noir suggests he’s also gay-friendly. I wonder if he’s really married – his chiselled chin and blonde ski instructor looks would be very very popular with the boys in town.

Dr J- spends an hour answering all the questions on my list. His answers aren’t definitive, but rich in information. He doesn’t try to sell me chemotherapy but spells out the consequences of various options.

He explains that with Grade 3 cancer, recurrence kills 30% of cases over the next ten years. Chemotherapy can help to ‘wipe up’ any micro-sized cancer cells floating about in the blood stream, preventing recurrence and mortality. But for 70% of women, it makes no difference whatsoever and they would live, cancer-free, anyway.

“What I can’t do anything about,” he says, looking me directly in the eyes, “is the hair loss, the getting sick, or that you just don’t like the chemotherapy.”

“So why can’t we just do the other mastectomy first?” I want this so bad, have been absolutely committed that this will be the outcome from today.

“Basically when this kind of cancer comes back, it’s going to come back in the liver or the bones or your brain, not in your breast. And that’s when we start talking about quitting your job and going to sit on a beach somewhere,” says Dr J- , his diagrams and statistics coming to rest on the desk.

He explains that there’s about a three month window after surgery and this is the best time to have chemo because it can stop or slow down any little cells before a period of rapid cellular reproduction hits. I feel my hold on the certainty of my convictions becoming cold and slippery with fear.

We make another appointment for three weeks’ time, when we will develop a management plan that will either be a 12 week or 18 week program of intravenous chemotherapy, delivered six times in three-week cycles. The steroids will make me fat but will stop me catching something else when my blood is full of poison and the immune response is low. I will feel sick for some or all of the first week in each three weeks cycle. I will need to take more time off work.

****

Eventually I arrive in Lesville central. The removalists are swift and efficient and $400 later my belongings are stowed underneath the renovation house that will soon be my home. The first coat of Princess Bling has been applied thanks to the effort of the many Lesville inhabitants, and the bathroom is nearly complete. There’s a new fan in my room and my soon-to-be-permanent flatmate is laughing at the top of a ladder surrounded by gap filler and paint tins.

R- is still helping out, part of a network of incredibly generous people that I am blessed to know. But I guess now I see myself as being on this journey alone, albeit with the support of many friends and family. I realise at some point that I was always alone, but that for a moment there the construction of interrelatedness in my mind magically made it seem like we were walking the path together.

Once all the furniture and dusty boxes are stowed in the belly of Phyllis the Renovation House, I wander round the corner to my new temporary accommodation. There’s no one home but Forest the Dog is waiting for me with huge loving eyes and Friday the Cat is lounging on the bed with an invitation to share the doona between her tiny gray paws. My new temporary flatmates have left a fresh towel on the end of the bed with a little cake of soap on it. I scratch Forest’s ears and stack my herbal supplements into the fridge.

****

Transitions are processes, journeys in between space and places. Neither chrysalis or butterfly, transitions embody the experience of transformation. The trick is to let go and fly, to ride, sail, coast and surf them without searching for the solid ground of destination. I never seem to notice the transition coming, realising too late that I’ve left the shore and all that’s left is to hang on and hope for the best until a landing is found someplace.

Transitions create fear and discomfort. Transitional thoughts form in questions, hopes, fears and estimations that are too difficult to answer. They fuel anxiety, a reaction to the uncertainty of in-betweenness.

My default position is to strive to understand, to affix a position, find a solution, define form or assign meanings. This position leads to a need for rules in life that constrain behaviour and invite judgement of anyone who doesn’t conform. But we all need to live our truth, and sometimes rules and fixed positions just cause a whole bunch of grief.

In reality, most of our time is spent in transition. We are rarely stationary, fixed or resolved, and even then only as the stars are fixed, triangulated in relation to the world around us. I don’t think I’ll ever be relaxed with constant transition, and the discomfort of having to costantly reconsider things I thought were set, like chemotherapy and the constancy of my relationships.

The learning from these transitions for me is to become acquainted with unknowing, to resist the temptation to determine a path of action, to notice and retreat from black and white thinking. I guess I just have to stop holding on so tight to decisions, places and people. I have to learn to be flexible; to let go of what once mattered; to ride calmly instead with what is. To forgive those who can’t match up to my expectations, especially those closest to my heart.