Browsing Tag

cancer

Guest Posts, The Body

Topography of a Scar

March 15, 2017
biopsy

By Krista Varela Posell

For four years, I’ve had a wound that won’t heal. A lesion is the technical term, according to Google.

It’s a dark spot on my right forearm, smaller than a dime. It could be just a mole. That’s what it looks like anyway.

But every few months, the skin around the spot will get dry and bubble up, almost like a blister. I try not to pick at it, but I can’t help it. Each time I do, I hope that there will finally be a pale white scar underneath so that I can just forget about it and go on with my life. Instead, picking at it just opens up another wound, like a door that leads to another door in some kind of eternal dream. There’s no bleeding, but the new skin underneath is sensitive, a deep rose color, and the spot scabs over. Then eventually the thin scab falls off, but the small dark spot is still there. Moles don’t do that, do they?

I don’t remember exactly when it started. I just remember looking down at my arm one day, perhaps it was in the car or in the shower, and I thought, that spot has been there a while. Weeks? Months maybe?

***

Soon after, I went to a dermatologist. Dr. Google had scared me enough into getting checked out. The doctor told me to stop picking at it and gave me a steroid cream to put on it. Come back if it doesn’t work, he said.

It didn’t work. The small dark spot still lingered, and the skin kept blistering. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, cancer

Marked

February 24, 2017
tattoo

By Jude Walsh

I was nine when I saw my first tattoo. It was July in northeastern Pennsylvania and the first week of Saint Aloysius’ annual two-week church summer bazar. I was with my dad in the beer garden, a lattice work section decorated with swags of plastic greenery and potted plastic plants, located just a few steps away from the food tent. It was sheltered by a large tarp and had long counters set much higher than normal booths because their sole purpose was a place to rest your elbows while you stood while having a beer or two or three or ten.  This section was for drinkers but in the early 1960’s there was no problem with a little girl being there with her dad.

The art I spied was on a man who in my memory had big arms, what I now might call bulging biceps but then just thought of as big arms. It was deep blue and in the shape of an anchor. I could not stop looking at it.  Dad noticed me staring and said, “That’s a navy anchor.” I knew it was an anchor and now I knew it was a navy anchor. What I did not know was how it got on his skin.

“Who drew it there?”

My dad laughed out loud, “It’s not drawn on his arm, that’s a tattoo.” Continue Reading…

Grief, Guest Posts

Still Talking

November 21, 2016
death

By Susan Barr-Toman

A few months after my husband died, Patti Smith was coming to the Philadelphia Library to talk about her second memoir M Train, a collection of essays. I called Missy right away. Patti was our thing. I was actually excited about something. We had to go together. Missy had given me Just Kids a few years ago. I’d never been a follower of Patti’s music, but I loved her memoir about a lifelong friendship founded on love and art. The two of us had a mini-pilgrimage to NYC. We’d traveled to the Hotel Chelsea, which unfortunately was under renovations at the time, and drank a cocktail next door at the El Quijote, where Patti had hung out with Janis Joplin.

The library would be my first outing since Pete died. At this point, everything was hard—eating, shopping, watching TV, making phone calls, getting out of bed. I needed to look forward to something that didn’t require much of me. But even with this event that required nothing of me, I needed someone to be with me in public, among strangers.  The day before the event, Missy said she couldn’t make it.

When my husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer, people—those who’d experienced the death of a close loved one and the therapist I’d started seeing—warned me that death would change my relationships. Those who I expected to be there for me might not be. Others, unexpected, would be. Death affects people profoundly. Some people can’t be around it for an array of reasons. They’re afraid or they’ve just been through it themselves. And it turned out to be true. People I barely knew showed up and people I thought would be my core support did not.

Missy was one of those people. I’d imagined when Pete died that she’d practically move in with me and the kids. Instead, a few months before he died, she abruptly moved to D.C. for a new job. Of course, she hadn’t expected that she’d move in with me, and over the last few years, she’d taken care of her parents until they both passed on. She needed a new start; she’d had enough of death.

Without her, I didn’t want to go to the event. I was feeling a little devastated. But years ago, I had renounced the Catholic guilt trip. I would not make her feel bad in the hope that she would find a way to come. I said nothing. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, healing, Sexual Assault/Rape

They Can’t Erase Our Voices.

October 10, 2016

By Domi J Shoemaker
I wish I could say that this thing I wrote after waking at 2:30am to take my pain meds and check my blood pressure after a hysterectomy that had only been performed so quickly because I benefit from the Affordable Care Act was an act of true inspiration. But it is more than that. It is also desperation. I have reached maximum capacity. I will tell you why.

After getting my surgery scheduled at the teaching hospital, I rolled across campus to an appointment that confirmed I would need a breast biopsy. The breast clinic did the biopsy two days later, and the .
day before my cancer surgery, a week ago today, and just before their gorgeous offices up on the hill closed for the day, someone giddy-sounding from the clinic called me and said,

“Domi, I am so happy to tell you the calcifications in your breast are benign.”

Now, with one week to go before my post-op appointment to find out the stage of cancer and whether they got all they needed to get, I listen to the presidential debate and hear that man say things like “Obamacare is a disaster. Just a disaster,” and I want to throw up.

This coming from a man who would surely try to shred me for the way I move through the world, the type of man I know all too well.

He is my old conservative “uncle” who put his hands and mouth wherever he wanted, on and IN my four-year-old body. He would zero in on the vacuum of need created in me those times when I saw my father rage at my mother and carry her down the hall by her throat.

He is my teacher when I was eleven, who carried me across the playground by my collar, with my feet kicking inches above the ground, desperate for purchase, just because I was cool-talking and called him Mr. Turkey like I was Vinnie Barbarino.

He is the man who, when I was twelve, called my mom for the hundred bucks we didn’t have to replace the passenger-side windshield of his split-windshield Dodge van aftermy feet had kicked it out, while his buddy tried to convince me not to climb back up the tree.

He is the man’s buddy who, with his hand on my thigh, tried to keep me in the van because I thought I had the power of a FLYING squirrel after he fed me PCP-laced Kool-Aid when I lied and said I was thirteen.

He is that man, when I really was thirteen, who rubbed up against me and said, “You have the most beautiful breasts I have ever seen,” when I was such a tomboy and had begged to wear cut off Levi’s and a T-shirt but got sidled with a swimsuit that pushed my breasts into the next area code.

He is the coach who, that following year, my first in high school, “hired” me to help coach the girls junior varsity basketball team. The coach who picked me up, when I was drunk, and he saw me walking alone at night. I convinced him to drop me off at a friend’s house with the promise of a kiss. He kissed me. With his tongue. I lost all interest in basketball.

He is the hundreds and hundreds of men who feel free to comment on my body whether in praise or in disgust and he is the woman who buys into that message that she deserves what she takes because she has given it for so long.

It isn’t a wonder that we all – at THE HANDS of men (and at the hands of women who follow their lead), who believe they have a right to use us at their will – have had to re-boot and readjust over and over just to be alive on this planet.

And here we all are. Speaking up! However we can.

I wish the piece posted below, which is only the 2nd thing I have written to its completion since starting all the health tests last January after an ambulance ride for what was a-fib likely due to anxiety, a symptom of my well-documented PTSD, PTSD at the hands of repeated early childhood (and beyond) trauma, were only MY story.

I feel fortunate to be alive and to have NOT killed anyone with this rage.

All that said, these words are meant to be a catalyst, not a masterpiece, because my words don’t need to be precious, they are meant to get shit done.

I wish this was just about me and my dearest friend, but it is the story of so many of us. To even pass this heinous man’s behavior off as “locker room talk” is to deny the fact that even locker room talk is designed to minimize the damage these putrid bags of bilious waste inflict upon those they treat as property.

#DedicateYourNoTrumpVote

INDELIBLE

By the time I was 6, I was at least 3 people.
I don’t know how it happened, to me instead of you.
How I split and split again and you, you had to swallow the rage.
While I grew big, then bigger, then bigger again,
You withdrew and went inside yourself.
I found safety is loudness, in bigness, and in bright!
You found solace in smallness and silence.
Our strength is born in sameness.
You at the hands of your father and me at the hands of uncle,
THE HANDS who grabbed us and groped us as though we were owned and grown to be consumed.
It is not just us, my love, it’s her, and her and him, and them,
THE HANDS, they they tried to erase us.
BUT WE ARE INDELIBLE.

#DedicateYourNoTrumpVote

And to honor the protector of those parts of me who helped me survive, I give you this-

p.s. “Listen, fucknuts, if you don’t want your rich white boys to pay for healthcare, stop creating the problem by taking whatever you want. That’s a goddamn coward’s way. Come talk to me about your excuses. See if you can earn it. I dare you.” ~Harley
And from the new me you see today-

p.p.s. Our bodies always move toward healing and homeostasis. As a species, this is how we have survived. This go-around with cancer and it’s friends, I have been using my body to create images and clips when I cannot find the words. All of the heart-shaped images are my own blood found on and in various pieces of clothing and furniture. That’s what endometrial cancer does. So I wanted to conquer my fear by calling the cancer out with images and representations of love.

October 10, 2016

#DedicateYourNoTrumpVote

Domi J Shoemaker is the founder the Burnt Tongue Quarterly reading series and they have been published in Pank Magazine, Unshod Quills, Nailed Magazine, Gobshite Quarterly, and in the Forest Avenue Press Anthology, The Night and The Rain and The River. You can hear Domi on KBOO radio’s Bread and Roses archives with Leigh Anne Kranz. Domi worries about being a name-dropping attention whore who did a scene with Fred Armisen in Portlandia. Just Google Pedicabs Are Douchebags, and it will come up. Domi’s grandest achievement aside from completing an MFA at Pacific University, is working with Lidia Yuknavitch since 2012, and is currently co-facilitating the seasonal face to face workshop series, Corporeal Writing with Lidia Yuknavitch.
Join Lidia Yuknavitch and Jen Pastiloff for their signature “Writing & The Body” Retreat in Portland March 17-19 by clicking photo.

Join Lidia Yuknavitch and Jen Pastiloff for their signature “Writing & The Body” Retreat in Portland March 17-19 by clicking photo.

 

Click photo to read People Magazine.

Click photo to read People Magazine.

Guest Posts, cancer

Uterus Of My Discontent

July 10, 2016
cancer

By Lillian McTernan

The first night in a new apartment is almost always weird for me: leftover adrenaline, my fanatical desire to get unpacked, and the disorientation of being in an unfamiliar environment usually join forces to give me serious insomnia. Given this long-standing trend, my first night in the apartment I moved into in 2010 with my then-boyfriend — the man who quickly became my fiancé and is now my husband — stands out as a huge anomaly.

That night, I quickly fell into a deep sleep. I dreamed that I was walking into the kitchen of our new apartment to get some water, only to run into a little boy. Startled, I asked who he was. “I’m your son!” He said happily.

“Oh,” I replied in bewilderment. “What’s your name?” (I felt like a jerk for not recognizing my own kid, but I also wondered where, exactly, he came from.) Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, cancer

The Shape of Legs and Love

March 30, 2016
cancer

By Isabel Abbott

This is what we do now. It is late, and I am in bed, and the lights have long been flicked off along with the day’s clothes which pile in the chair or a trail from front door to white sheets. I am in bed, and I am listening to the sounds outside, locating each one and giving it a name.  (Feral cat, two cars passing, a back screen door banging, a low hum of talking while a cigarette is smoked.)

I am listening and I am naming.
I am wanting to sleep.
I am hurting.

There is the slight adjustment, the shift from one side to the next, my left hip a glaring road sign pointing toward the placement of origin for pain. And so this is what we, me and my legs, do now. We lay here, in bed, and at night, unable to sleep, I begin to envision the bones inside, the lock and socket, the strong and soft, the words I imagine are engraved on them, transcribed from all the years I’ve spent walking through the world and street and unmarked alley. All the skin and muscle and bone, the extension and the wrapping around her, the running and running through the woods and the cuts into skin that bled out poison and suffering, the tethering to this earth and the curve of calf when feet slip inside shoes that take me home. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Grief

The Art Of Missing

March 11, 2016
grief

By Eve Phillips

“I’m not sure we should date, but regardless, I want to be friends.  Honestly though, I miss you when we don’t talk,” he rambles uncomfortably, after I press him to consider what he really wants.

I’m 32; I’m a widow who is dating again. As a result, I frequently want to escape the agony of another awkward dinner with a man who has yet to understand that when you meet the right person, “You know.”

There is no Well, maybe… or Perhaps if something better doesn’t come along… You just know, and you see your future life unfolding with that person supporting you.

In this conversation, I desperately want to unleash that honesty to an unfiltered degree by saying, “Please just go fuck yourself. You have no concept of missing a person. I know because I own that feeling.”

However, he is a good man, and we have both been hypnotized by the political correctness that permeates white-collar professions. So, my contributions to the conversation are punctuated by “I understand.” and “I know where you’re coming from.”

I avoid conflict in the feminine fashion, and internalize resentment. As kind as this man is, the bottom line is that he is 45, and his family members are all alive and well. I’m 13 years his junior and feel lost in a world of missing those who have left me behind.

I once believed that my emotions would develop their own olfactory system and become immune to the feelings of longing and loss. Missing was my birthright—growing up as a child longing for a mother who died of cancer in her thirties.

In fact, I owned tragedy—losing my husband in a pointless war eighteen months after our marriage. Continue Reading…

death, Guest Posts, Young Voices

On Saying Goodbye And Eating Chips

March 9, 2016
death

Note from Jen Pastiloff, founder of The Manifest-Station. This is part of our Young Voices Series for Girl Power: You Are Enough. We are always looking for more writing from YOU! Make sure you follow us on instagram at @GirlPowerYouAreEnough and on Facebook here.

By Haley Jakobson

On the day your grandmother is dying you will eat a bagel with cream cheese and salmon and the guy behind the counter will misunderstand your impatience for rudeness. He doesn’t know you have to go home and kiss her cheek. You cry in the bodega and you take an Uber all the way to Westchester because your Dad says you should.

You get there and you climb into bed with her and all the fear you had before is gone because you need to take care of the woman that is the reason you exist. You hold her and press your face into her back and you put a cold wash cloth on her forehead and you don’t hide from her dying anymore. You cry into her pajamas and you feel how warm her body is, like a child, and you just keep pressing your hands into her. Every time she opens her eyes, wide and blue and scared, you tell her that you are there and when you listen to your own voice it sounds so strong and resilient and there is no fear.

You love her and she loves you and this will not go away even when she is not there. Her eyes are so blue, like this cleansing force of beauty, a color of simple beginnings and quiet endings and still water in between. Every time she realizes it’s you she says hi and you say “I love you” and she says it back. It’s all love. And when she cries out in pain you don’t deny it, you affirm it, you affirm her and everything she is going through. This is real, and it has been so elusive, this cancer, for so long.

She asks to put her head on your leg and you let her, and you help her sit up and stand up even though you know she’ll want to lay down straight away. Put the blankets on, take them off. The nurse says the pain is internal, it won’t go away from switching from her left to her right. You know she’s speaking your language now. The sickness has turned to violence inside her, like demons and monsters and bad, bad energy. The medicine is poison and life is leaving her. Continue Reading…

cancer, Compassion, courage, Guest Posts, Surviving

Sailing the Waves of Cancer: Living with a Disease That Won’t Let Go

December 4, 2015

By Betsy Hnath

It’s been four years since my diagnosis with stage II breast cancer: One and a half of them I spent in treatment, the other two and a half I spent dealing with the aftermath.

As time passes, and my emotional ship sails in relative equilibrium for longer stretches, I try to spend more time on the deck, taking in my surroundings, living in the moment. Then cancer sends up a flare in the distance and my attention is shifted: A random pain, tightness in my chest, or some extra fatigue. These bright, red burning lights remind me it is always there, hovering, perhaps waiting to attack again.

Sometimes cancer is a cannon, launching its missile close enough to graze my bow, as it has recently. When I hear that close friends, young friends, healthy friends have been diagnosed, I begin to sway. I know they will soon begin building their own ship and join the growing fleet that surrounds me of loving, faithful, undeserving patients. I mourn for their loss of the “old normal.” I know what it does to you.

I have to sit back and powerlessly watch during the excruciating 2-3 weeks it takes to learn everything they can about their enemy through scans and tests, and formulate their plan of attack. Nothing can be done to slow down or speed up that time.

I can tell them what I know from experience: that this is the worst of it, this first part. Shifting uncomfortably in scratchy, paper gowns as you wait in sterile, silent exam rooms; the inability to get the smell of hand sanitizer out of your nose; shaking hands with one doctor after another as he or she flips through your life, which has been neatly assembled onto a clipboard. How you can go from feeling normal to completely despondent, sometimes within the same ten-minute span. That ache, burning in your chest, as you inhale yesterday’s Suave when you bend down and kiss your children’s heads as they sleep, wondering how many more nights you’ll get to do it. I can prepare them and reassure them, but in the end they will sail through it on their own just as we all do. Continue Reading…

cancer, courage, Fear, Guest Posts, Surviving

WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU WEREN’T EXPECTING BREAST CANCER: THE STAGES OF MOURNING A DIAGNOSIS

November 19, 2015

By Judith Basya

DENIAL

Though Denial may present gradually depending on how and when you discover your lump, it begins in earnest when the radiologist reading your mammogram looks at you funny. Nah, it’s nothing, I’m fine, you think while waiting three-to-five business days for the biopsy results. Your aunt, two great-aunts and three cousins have all had breast cancer, but they’re not immediate family. The lump must be Cheerios that went down your bra the wrong way or something—the kids really need to start pouring their own cereal.

SHOCK

Denial is aided by distraction: Your phone dies—I mean breaks, sorry—a bird poops on your arm (when you can’t shower for forty more hours after the biopsy), your daughter gets bitten by a dog, and you get a ticket for that illegal left turn you’ve been making daily. You’ve practically forgotten about the lump when you scramble to your follow-up and the word malignant hits your eardrum, followed by other scary words such as invasive, surgery and chemotherapy—honestly, though, why are you surprised? Because tomorrow’s your birthday?

BEWILDERMENT

While the news tries to sink in, you’re busy making appointments for tests and with specialists, which isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. The surgeon won’t see you until you’ve had an MRI, but you can’t schedule an MRI until your insurance company OK’s it. Though nobody doubts they will OK it, that’s how these places work and offering to pay upfront won’t help. It’s byzantine. It’s insulting. Welcome to cancer.

RAGE

Seriously? Four hours and thirteen phone calls to schedule one goddamn MRI? And the earliest available slot is in three weeks? You want to know if the cancer has spread beyond your breast, and it’s like they’re waiting for it to spread so they can be certain. If in the midst of all this your partner isn’t responding pitch-perfectly to your ranting texts, remember s/he isn’t to blame for our abysmal medical system.

FREAKOUT

If you’re lucky—statistics are on your side, at least—when you know more about your particular cancer this low point will pass. But for now you have to live with it—live with the idea of death, ha, ha, the human condition. This isn’t the everyday version. Think Thelma and Louise going over the cliff, except it’s dark, raining and the cliff is indeterminate.

WHY ME?

Why you? Because you should have eaten better. Because you should have taken more vitamin D. Because you enjoy a glass of wine. Because you smoked in college. Because you were one of those Moms who pulled her shirt down from the top when breastfeeding in public, shame on you. Because you don’t always buy organic. Because after a religious upbringing you became an atheist. Because you are riddled with guilt. Continue Reading…