April 4 – Keep Looking Through the Windshield

by Cathy Scibelli

Don’t let your rearview mirror be bigger than your windshield.

Anyone attempting to navigate through the rough terrain of a serious or chronic illness will understand that quote in a second. It is so tempting to keep looking in that rearview mirror because the view back there very often is so much more pleasant than what seems to lie ahead. It’s like coming back from a vacation in some tropical resort where everything was sunny, you felt great, and any worries you had in your everyday life were forgotten for a time. You look at the photos of your trip and say, “What I wouldn’t give to be back there again!”

But that quote is right–we can’t let our rearview mirror be bigger than our windshield because that only leads us into a detour where we bump along complaining and pitying ourselves and failing to see some of the great sights that lie ahead and the possibilities that can open up if we focus on the future and stop whining about the life we left behind in that rearview mirror.

In my personal experience, I’ve found the cancer highway is filled with ruts and potholes and dark tunnels. But along the route I’ve also picked up some “hitchhikers” who have turned out to be really fun and inspiring friends. I’ve discovered “new” cousins who I never had the chance to get to know when I was busy speeding along in my life at 100 miles per hour. Now that I’ve slowed down, I see a lot of sights I never noticed.

If I pay attention to what lies ahead, I often discover new avenues for my writing and new opportunities to share my passion for World’s Fair history. I admit that it’s not easy to keep looking ahead and sometimes it’s scary to wonder where the road will end. But it’s still better to keep looking through the windshield than to live regretting what you can never go back to.

Cathy Scibelli is a writer who enjoys exploring new avenues where she can use her experiences of living with metastatic breast cancer to inspire others to continue to “look ahead” with anticipation and not fear.

March 9 – The “Ring” of Death

by Patricia Roop Hollinger

The blinking red light on the answering machine was demanding to be listened to. “Aunt Pat, this is Matt. Call me as soon as possible.”

I knew there was yet another crisis in the life of my younger sister Elaine. In spite of being an American Airlines flight attendant, and LPN, and a Chiropractor she has battled with the demons of mental illness most of her life. In recent years the illness had won; thus leaving her without employment and living in subsidized housing.

As family members, we had each made our attempts to intervene when we feared she could possibly end her life. A semblance of health often restored for brief intervals.

I called Matt. “Aunt Pat, Mom was found dead in her shower today. I feel so guilty. I had taken a break from calling her daily recently.”

“And why might you have taken a break?” I asked. He knew the answer.

We all had taken breaks, for she heard TV’s that were not on, refrigerators running in the background, and breathing that hurt her ears.

My 99 year old mother was still sending her money. Believing and hoping that a cure could be found.

I knew this phone call was inevitable. I felt relief, sadness, and grief that a life so filled with promise and potential had ended so bereft and alone.

Flying to California was not an option.

My memorial was that of spending time with my 99 year old mother and older sister as we shared photos, stories, letters and the feelings of anger and love that her behaviours engendered in all of us.

I wrote her obituary for the local newspaper in Maryland; this is where she was Miss Francis Scott Key at her local high school.

Her children and former husband came together to clean out her apartment. Recalling numerous times when she “bolted” from their lives to unknown destinations and for unknown reasons, when her sense of humour had them rolling with laughter, when she slopped the hogs on the pig farm where they lived in Missouri, and when she climbed ladders to paint the farmhouse.

Last week her ashes were scattered in the Pacific Ocean where her mind, body and soul are free at last.

Patricia is a retired, after 23 years, Chaplain/Pastoral Counsellor/Licensed Clinical Professional Counsellor from Brook Lane Health Services. She married her high school heartthrob in 2010 after the death of both of their spouses. She loves books, playing piano, singing, cats, and nature. Patricia is “still a farm girl at heart.”

January 14 – A CALL FOR HELP

by Patricia Roop Hollinger

“God, I am not in the mood for a formal prayer, but I need HELP!” This was my plea as I lay in my bed while my left shoulder throbbed with pain.

This was the same throbbing pain I experienced in my right hip as a result of Lyme’s disease. Within the span of three months a perfectly formed and functional hip dissolved into “mush.” Using a walker had become my method for mobility. After yet another MRI the technician exclaimed, “I don’t know how you are even walking with a walker.” The pain was controlled with Vicodin. Hip replacement surgery was scheduled ASAP.

I wasn’t even able to consider having a shoulder replacement.

With 7 hungry cats weaving in and out of my legs as bacon was frying for breakfast there was a “knock, knock, knock” on the kitchen door. “Who would be knocking on our door at this hour?” I exclaimed.

With reluctance I opened the door. “Hi!” said the familiar voice of Tony. “I just wondered if you needed any help.” I threw my arms around him and exclaimed, “So, you received the prayer request!”

Tony was my “lawnmower, fix whatever” person. This was the first time he arrived without first receiving a phone call from me. The cats and the bacon had to wait.

“My shoulder is killing me, my husband is ill and the lawn needs mowing” I exclaimed frantically. “But….you must know that there are deer tick back here in the woods. Cover up, spray yourselves with DEET.”

“Butch has already had Lymes,” Tony said matter of factly. “Lost his sight in one eye. Would have the other if I hadn’t found a Lyme’s literate M.D. in Hanover, PA.”

“What’s his name, phone number, address?” I cried, as I ran for a paper and pencil.

As soon as I had the necessary information I called the M.D., made an appointment and was treated successfully with 6 months of antibiotics accompanied by supplements and probiotics. My pain subsided and I have had no ensuing symptoms of the dreaded Lyme’s Disease.

Most of my prayers have not been answered so dramatically, but no one can tell me divine intervention was not at work that day.

Patricia has been a Chaplain/Pastoral Counselor/Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor for 23 years at same hospital where once was a consumer. “Seeker of the “truth” which has set me free. Third marriage to high school heartthrob 2010 the best yet. Musician, voracious reader and hopeful writer. Cats a must.”

July 20 – A Beautiful Cornea

by Mary Jo Doig

The nurse places my IV, explains what will happen, and wraps me in two warm blankets. The anesthesiologist follows, telling me he’s giving me Rohypnol, the drug Michael Jackson used. I raise my eyebrows, “But I’m going to have a better outcome, right?”

He chuckles. “Yes, you are,” explaining, “you go under swiftly but you quickly become conscious again. I’ll use this when the doctor gives you an eye injection to numb it.”

“Okay,” I say.

He leaves, then Dr. O arrives, smiling, a blue cap covering her dark hair. “Good morning, how are you feeling this morning?”

“I’m fine and so ready for this,” I say happily.

She questions me about any illness symptoms that could prohibit our plan and finds none. I ask about the donated cornea. She smiles joyfully and says, “It’s a beautiful cornea.”

What moving words. Tears fill my eyes as I ask how I can thank the donor’s family. She replies, “I can give you the donor bank address, and you can send a letter that they’ll forward to the family, who may or may not contact you.”

“That’s what I’ll do,” I say.

She nods, and within minutes I am in the OR at the University of Virginia surrounded by a professional team.

Eight months ago I had routine cataract surgery that exacerbated my dormant corneal disease, Fuchs Dystrophy. My then-doctor counseled I might have complications. I did. Since then I had viewed my world through a cornea seemingly covered with waxed paper. It was my worst nightmare: I was visually impaired.

Weeks slipped by as I retired from my career, moved two counties away, and found new medical providers. Dr. O–Leslie Olsakovsky–is highly regarded in my state and, after we consulted, I felt deep confidence in her ability; also the intelligence and compassion she emanated.

Now, awake for nearly all the forty-minute surgery, I listen to her efficient interactions with her team. I ask an occasional question, articulating with difficulty due to anesthesia, and she answers. Sometimes I feel pressure and, sensing this, she asks the anesthesiologist for a slight increase. Soon she is done.

I recover for an hour and John takes me home, where I lay supine for 24 hours so the cornea will well-adhere. Lying on my back becomes a deep discipline and, frequently during that long vigil, I silently convey gratitude to my donor for our sacred bond.

The following morning, Dr. O looks into my eye and says, “It looks beautiful. You are doing very well and you can anticipate a dramatic change in your vision during the next twenty-four hours when the air bubble dissolves. “

This morning, 50 hours post-surgery, I cover my left eye and look out at my world. For the first time in eight months the brilliant blue sky, the lush greens of trees and grass, the lemon yellow of my favorite day lilies–all are exquisitely clear.

Dearest donor, we see these miracles together now. You are forever part of me and I, you. Thank you. 

Mary Jo Doig is an avid reader, writer, editor, and aspiring blogger. She lives in a small, eclectic town in Albemarle County, Virginia where she has an exquisite view from her writing room window.

July 11 – Good Morning

by Andrea Savee

Tomorrow, my brain will be both bombarded and caressed and sections that have been asleep for forty-three years will wake up. My perception of the world, and maybe myself in it, will change, without me taking a drug, staring at a wall for a week, or having a near death experience.

I feel giddy and special. Like it’s the night before the biggest birthday party of my life. A party with one whopping $5600 gift to myself of Danish technology: hearing aids.

My childhood ears were ravaged by chronic infections. Surgical and pharmaceutical interventions–a steady dose of prescription strength Sudafed and Actifed, tonsil and adenoidectomies, drainage tubes, and finally a tympanoplasty — couldn’t prevent severe damage to the ossicular chain, that trio of articulating bones we learned about in elementary school: the hammer, anvil, and stirrup. By age nine, I’d lost considerable hearing in my right ear and was nearly deaf in my left.

Somehow, I’ve spent four decades never even considering hearing aids or the surgery that I’ve learned could restore my hearing to normal. Seeming to naturally embody the phrase It is what it is, I adjusted. In school, I sat up front. In work and play, I reflexively positioned myself to the left of someone I wanted to hear. I watched the mouth of the person speaking more than I did their eyes.

Tomorrow, I’ll immerse myself in a surround sound scenario that will reportedly rock my world as the brain scrambles to sort it all out. Alicia, the audiologist, warns me that as the upper registers of my hearing range flood with information, I may be distressed by the simplest sounds of living. Dishes clanking. Keys jangling. Freddie Mercury.

But there will be soothing sounds, too, as the lower registers open up and round things out. The hooting desert owl. Eggs boiling in the covered pot. The cat purring from the far end of the couch. I can hardly wait for someone to whisper in my ear.

And being buttressed on both sides now by the sounds of the world will bring clarity. No more mistaking the dribbling hose for chirping birds. The whirring motor several lawns away for bees humming in the trees overhead.

After my initial workup, the otologist asked me with a softened voice how I’ve managed all my life. I was touched by her tenderness. She asked if I’d grown up in a small town without access to good medical care. I hadn’t. In fact, my dad was a doctor. What ifs swirled around the exam room and around the question of why I hadn’t been treated with antibiotics. My later Google search suggests that whether and when to treat children with antibiotics is still the judgment call my parents made back in the 60s.

The child who lost access to half her world when the left side dropped away doesn’t need what ifs. She just needs hearing aids. The ReSound Alera 961 to be precise. I like the sound of that.

Andrea lives in California with her Queen-loving husband, and their cat, Chico.

May 21 – Mortality and a Dancing Queen

by Carol Ziel

Mortality is on my mind today.  The delivery guys just brought my on sale Martha Stewart fade free, stain free, blue fir wall to wall carpeting. It had a twenty-year warranty which clinched the deal. I figured that I had about the same warranty. Eventually the rug would fade around the time that I was fading, and they could carry us out together.  It wasn’t any personal morbidity that had me meditating on my numbered days. My five-year-old grandson has been telling me daily that I am getting old. He notes in wonder that my hair is getting browner. Of course he means grayer, which is a color he hasn’t mastered yet. I wish my hair was getting browner, or redder.

So I am sitting in front of the radio bemused with my accelerating aging process and the symbolism of my rug when I hear about Donna Summer’s death. A part of me dies with her. We both arrived on the scene about the same time. She was singing  ”Bad Girl” when I was trying to embrace the “bad girl within”.  That was my anthem for a few years, along with “She Works Hard for the Money”, and “Disco Queen”.   This was a period of serial births and deaths.  I was constantly stretching out of my skin to embrace parts of myself that I could not even name.  My love of yoga, tofu and natural peanut butter, running, and fruit juice fasting had to die to make room for marijuana and alcohol. My farmer john overalls and Birkenstocks had to demise to make room for slinky black Danskin body suits and four-inch heals.

Eventually I found my way to a spirituality that supported the best of who I am and could be.  However, my persona as a disco queen had to die to create space for a spiritual me to grow. That was painful , too. A veritable dark night of the soul.

I am sitting on the edge of my garden as I catalogue these deaths.  I began planting it six months after I bought my house. I was diagnosed with a brain tumor–and then ovarian tumors that were presumed cancerous, two knee replacement surgeries, and many years of trauma therapy.  Each diagnosis was a mini death, and the chronic emotional and physical pain was fearsome. However each time fear seemed ready to suck me into the quicksand of despair I planted something–coreopsis, lilies, rose of Sharon, fairy roses, butterfly bushes. Sometimes they lived, sometimes they died, but nature was incredibly generous. Birds and squirrels brought seed for things I would never have thought to plant–like the monkshood that is a hummingbird magnet.

My garden teaches me about the partnership between life and death, and lets me relax into my own cycles. This is where I belong. The first fireflies of the year are blinking in front of me now, and I accept that as affirmation for a life still to be lived.

Carol is a sixty-four-year-old gardener, grandmother, social worker, Goddess centered aging woman who has been writing with SCN Circle 6 for 2 1/2 years.

September 27 — Celebration

by Cathy Scibelli

Today I’m celebrating the good news I received–my MRI was “normal,” making me officially a two-year breast cancer survivor. The two year mark is an arbitrary one, but nonetheless it’s certainly comforting when they tell you that your odds of surviving long term just increased a few notches.

So how to celebrate? The first reaction to news like this is always to feel as if I want to dance on the moon and shout the news from the mountaintops.

Everyone I mention my good news to tells me things like “You should go out to a fancy dinner,” or “why don’t you take a really special vacation?” or “buy yourself something great.” But an odd thing happens after you’ve been through a life-threatening battle with disease, or at least in my case it happened. The most ordinary things that I used to take for granted become the very things that feel special and celebratory.

It’s like winning the lottery to hear that you’ve just beaten the odds and been given the opportunity to enjoy the fall (my favorite season) without another doctor appointment or scary test until after Thanksgiving. Suddenly, I can feel “normal,” joining the rest of the world picking out my Halloween pumpkins and buying decorations, enjoying long walks in the cooler weather watching the fall foliage emerge. I can look forward to the Pumpkin Fest at my cousins’ Sugar Shack where I can get plenty of warm hugs and hot cider. Then I can come home to my cozy apartment, do some fall cleaning and redecorating, work on my blog and writing class, and continue participating in the women’s writing and breast cancer groups I’ve joined.

Don’t get me wrong, I do still have bigger goals on my Bucket List. One day I’d like to go out to San Francisco and see some of the sites my father told me stories about seeing when he was there while in the Army. I’d like to visit relatives in Tennessee and then attend the Story Circle conference in Texas next April. I think about one day moving to the country and buying a little place where we can have a garden.

But right now it just feels great to wake up in the morning and look forward to a “normal” day. Because when you feel as if every day is a gift and where you are in your life is a place surrounded by loving friends and family, that’s really all you need to have a celebration.

Cathy Scibelli is a freelance writer and breast cancer survivor whose life has been immensely enriched by joining Story Circle Network. She blogs at http://iconicmuse.blogspot.com

July – Bless the Birds

by Susan Tweit

Almost two years ago, on a sunny August morning, my sculptor husband, Richard, and I were headed for a two-week artist/writer residency in a remote cabin in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, a precious gift of time away from cell phones, computers, and the busy-ness of every day life to nurture our work. As we drove, Richard looked around at the dry grasslands and wooded mesas, and asked, “What’s with all the birds?”

I looked around and saw nary a bird.

“What birds?” I said, cautiously.

“There, and there, and there…” He pointed to the barbed wire fences, catttails in a nearby pond, utility wires, the wildflowers, everyplace where a bird could conceivably perch. He described hundreds and hundreds of birds: giant birds on distant mesa tops, tiny birds on each pebble in the road.

I saw not a one. “Show me a bird,” I said.

He pulled over on the side of the road and pointed to a chicory plant.

“Right here. See it?”

I shook my head.

He walked over cupped his fingers gently around the bird he saw. They passed through empty air. He turned to me, his face devastated.

“They’re not real.”

“No,” I said gently. I hugged him. We got back into the car and I drove us to Durango for breakfast. The birds followed us, perching on every building ledge, sign and planter. The residency was not to be.

The birds followed us on the five-hour-drive home. They were gone the next morning when I convinced him to see a doctor, gone when he landed in the hospital in Denver, his right brain so swollen that his doctors couldn’t believe he was alive. Without those birds, we would never have known his brain was growing a tumor that would require four brain surgeries, six weeks of radiation, and two kinds of chemo.

Throughout those months, the grueling procedures, the middle-of-the-night hospital ride over the mountains in an ambulance when we nearly lost him, the diagnosis with Stage IV brain cancer and twelve months to live, my formerly rudely healthy husband has kept his spirits up. Even when he who once taught graduate-level mathematical economics could no longer make sense of a computer screen; even when he whose abstract sculpture gives voice to native boulders as “ambassadors of the earth” had to rely on me to button his shirt every morning.

Today, on his 61st birthday, the tumor that had spread throughout his right hemisphere has receded a bit; his vision and brain function are slowly returning. He’s relearning to juggle, use a computer, see the rocks he works with, hear birdsong, and be present.

He says he is determined to approach each day with “an attitude of celebration and gratitude.” I am determined to walk this journey with him, a path we never expected to take, in a spirit of grace and love.

Happy Birthday, Richard! Onward we go, hand in hand…

Plant ecologist Susan J. Tweit likes to say she “evolved” into a writer. Her twelve books have won national and regional awards, and best of all, she says, the love of her readers.

May 3 – A Window Opened

by Ruth Hetrick

It started as an ordinary day. Can I possibly explain how magnificent that is? It has been almost two years since I have enjoyed an ordinary day, for every day I have awakened, not knowing who I would be. Would I be lost, fearful, powerless, exhausted, lonely, sick, confused and worried?

Those are just some of the words that described me, a woman trying desperately to recover from being an “accidental addict” to a prescription drug given to me many years ago for anxiety due to a serious health crisis. Now, after almost a year of being drug-free and suffering horrible withdrawal symptoms, existing
through a life that I no longer recognized, becoming a negative, sad, frightened version of myself, I awoke to an “ordinary day!”

No longer shaking all over, I lay there for a while. There was no heavy darkness weighing down my brain, no fear that some unknown horror was going to descend upon me, no body jerking, no anxiety, nausea or crying.

No, this day I was not lost to myself. I felt normal, just as the people in my internet support group had told me would happen.  They told me a window would open and give me a glimpse of normalcy and then I would know that the “real me” was still there. Two year is a long time to be “lost” from yourself and I
had doubted that my brain and central nervous system would ever heal and that I would get my life back. I had prayed every day to just be “me” and to have an ordinary day where I would not be afraid to take a shower, get off the sofa, go grocery shopping, cook a pot of soup, make a bed or a phone call or step
outside, just to do things that most people take for granted.

Today, what started out as an ordinary day has turned into an extraordinary day for me. I am no longer lost; I am found and I am—oh, so gratefully—finally going forward with my life!

Ruth is a married sixty-five year old woman with two grown children who lives in Pennsylvania. She finds herself, at this stage of life, fighting for her life since becoming an “accidental addict” to a drug she did not know was addictive. As she says, “I WILL WIN!”.

March 7 – James and Me

by Kathleen Hewitt

I put on my worn periwinkle sheath and capis shell flip-flops. It was to be a warmer than average day in Boston this spring of 2007. I sat in the traffic on Storrow Drive after my long ride in from my seaside home. The same sad man held a sign that explained that he was not a drunk, just down on his luck, and I gave him money again. I had the valet man park my car just so I could hear him say, “Good morning, sunshine.” In truth, I was just so tired.

I ran to the revolving door, my hair long and red, full with city breeze. Ten minutes later, Teresa had pushed the thick needle through my chest after unzipping my favorite dress just a little.The clear fluid of my life at that time dripped in slowly, offering healing and an occasional wave of nausea. I would lie there reading for a few minutes but would always fall into a restless state that only my rosary could take care of.

I was a woman who knew many days, most often, good ones. But since the cancer, I had to push to have them. Even though this wasn’t what I wanted, each day was not a trudging, resentful push, a ‘something you don’t want to do’ push. It was rather a push towards making more memories, another story, moments that could be recalled with tear filled eyes or a deep river of laughter. To push to make it all happen took every mountain of need I had.

At the end of the day, I would softly lie with my nurturing blankets, grateful the I pushed so hard.Teresa would stop in, checking for comfort or tears, ready to care or nurse me through anything. After four hours, she would announce with that joyful young voice I grew to love, that I was “free”. She lovingly zipped up my dress, told me to have a good week, to rest sometimes and to ‘take care of those beautiful kids’.The valet man said, “hello there, beautiful lady”, and ran to retrieve my car. I walked to the edge of the sidewalk and waited in a patch of warm sunlight, listening to the car horns, the conversations of young doctors walking by, and looked at the poor little children who should have been playing instead of walking into that building.

I prayed for them silently and turned towards the push of something irresistible. I heard nothing but the soft humming and whistling of a tall man coming towards me. I shielded my eyes from the bright sun and smiled.

James Taylor smiled back at me and as he passed by, so close, I heard, “The Secret of Life.”

Kathleen Hewitt is a writer, a mother, a nurse, a counselor, a cancer survivor and a fan of James Taylor.