Dreamscape

Today, the dean of the college called to ask if I'd substitute this week. The professor who needed a sub was going to the beach with a friend who has breast cancer. I suppose some people decide to coddle their friends with breast cancer. As for us, we insist Dream Girl meet us in the freezing weather every Saturday morning at 6 a.m. for a seven to 10 mile run. Rain, snow, ice or even a full moon, we're out there slogging along the trail.
This week, Dream Girl finishes her last radiation treatment. Nine months ago, she told us on the trail that she'd found a lump in her breast -- a lump that she unconciously rubbed as she waited between sets of lifting weights. "I'm sure it's nothing," we all said, including her. Instead, we made it into a joke about the mammogram machine being broken and whether the jaws of life would be called to free a woman's breast.
Then we learned that she did have breast cancer. They removed the lump and some lymph nodes. Within weeks, she was back running again with a drainage tube secured. Next she ventured through the world of chemotherapy. In October, she ran the half marathon to celebrate the end of her chemotherapy. For the past few months, she has been going to radiation. She enters a room alone and has a beam of radiation aimed at her breast. She is nearing the end of her treatment.
Cancer has changed her life. Not just in the fact that she had to think about death and how she spends her life. She says she has learned so much, things she never would have learned without the cancer.
She hasn't been sick. Most people get throwing up, lying down sick from the cancer treatment. We worried that she wouldn't be able to run with us. We'd walk instead, we decided. Or, we'd meet for coffee. Now we laugh at our fears. She is in better shape than all of us.
Other than not being able to run, the two things she worried about were -- gaining weight because of the steroids and losing her hair. Dream Girl had long dark hair that she would cut off to donate to Locks of Love. She couldn't imagine that hair being gone. But after it started to fall out and she shaved it, she loved the way she looked bald. She refused to wear a wig or a scarf or a hat. She went au naturel. With her shiny head glaring, she started a job as a tutor at a high school. The students assumed it was her look. Dream Girl had no shame about her bald head.
She had planned to get in great shape over the summer before she learned that she had cancer. Then she worried that she wouldn't be able to exercise and that the steroids would make her puff up. Wrong again. She has lost some weight. She is in her best shape ever. When a nurse said to her, "Thin, small breasted women like you..." she wanted to look over her shoulder. Who was that nurse talking to? But it was Dream Girl who is now thin and small breasted!
Even before Dream Girl's chemotherapy ended, her hair was growing in. She looked like a baby chick, all fuzz around her head. Then, a few weeks later, a salesgirl called her "Sir" because she resembled a balding man. Now though, her hair is coming in thick and fast.
She's on target to meet her "goal" of having hair by her birthday at the end of the year, even though Pam pointed out that it is silly to make a goal for something you have no control over. Maybe a wish, but not a goal.
And, a few weeks ago, her eyebrows and eyelashes suddenly sprung to life too.

She's the old Dream Girl, except she isn't and she never can be again. She has lived through an experience, no, not lived through it, she has embraced this experience. She's learned so much about life by looking death in the face.
They say that cancer patients forget about their new outlook on life after a few years. I can't imagine Dream Girl putting this away and returning to a suburban life. She has plans.
She has backpacks and pop-up tents. A sleeping bag that weighs ounces and hiking boots that won't rub off her toenails. She dreams of hiking the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail. She wants to gather in every mountain and ocean, every bat and raccoon, every moonrise and sunset. The world is truly her oyster, and she has earned some champagne to go with those oysters.
A toast to you Dream Girl for making it all look so easy, for blazing the trail everywhere you go.

Chemotherapy and Exercise

Did you know this is breast cancer awareness month? I didn't, even though football players are wearing pink wrist bands. Truthfully, I've been especially aware of breast cancer for about the past six months.
I think it's time for Dream Girl to tell her story, but she won't write it for me, so I'll have to cobble it together the best I can.
It started for us on the running trail. I was complaining about some ache or pain when Dream Girl confessed she had a mammogram in the coming week.
"I found a lump," she said.
Now, most women have had friends who found lumps. It almost always turns out to be nothing. So that's what we told Dream Girl.
Then our conversation took a turn to the jaws of life. Dream Girl had gone to get her mammography but the machine wasn't working so she had to reschedule. We began to speculate on ways that a mammogram machine could break. What if it broke in the middle and a woman's breast was squeezed between the plates?
"They'd have to call the jaws of life!" Dream Girl said.
And we laughed imagining that call to the firefighters.
Then the next week they were scheduling a meeting with the surgeon. Dream Girl had breast cancer.
Here's what she worried about: gaining weight while on the steroids and unable to exercise. Oh, she worried about other things too, like watching her kids graduate high school, hiking the Appalachian Trail or the Pacific Rim Trail, keeping track of the birds that fluttered around her house.
After the surgery, which included some lymph nodes and drainage tubes, Dream Girl tried to run way too soon. She had to run with her arm clamped over the breast that was operated on. She came back to run with us our 7.5 miles on the trail.
She kept saying that she felt fine.
So we ran.
Oh, we shared a flurry of emails as she began her chemotherapy. Would we run without Dream Girl? No, we decided that we would walk if that was all she could do. And when she didn't even feel like walking, we'd meet at a coffee shop.
I pictured her wrapped in a blanket shivering as she lost her hair and battled cancer.
We couldn't have anticipated that Dream Girl would run through her chemotherapy with only a few extra naps on chemo day.
And, of course, she celebrated the end of her chemotherapy by running the half marathon. Here she is dwarfed by her rambunctious family after the half marathon.

Her husband apologized for not parking close by and she waved it off. It was only a half marathon.
Dream Girl doesn't want to tell her story because she doesn't want to give other women false hope. If they find out how good she felt, they might feel resentful or guilty. They might blame themselves for feeling too lethargic to move. Dream Girl feels like she did nothing special. She just got lucky.
But maybe Dream Girl buoyed herself up for those chemotherapy treatments with all of that exercising she did, not just last year, but the years before. Maybe exercise does make a difference in fighting cancer and recovering from chemotherapy. Shouldn't she tell that story. What if she could help someone else?
Before Dream Girl started chemotherapy, she was asked if she'd like to join a study about chemotherapy and exercise. She said, "Sure."
Then they found out she was a runner and said she was too fit to join the study.
Maybe someday we'll see the results of that study. Maybe it will announce that moderate exercise or intense exercise helps counteract the effects of chemotherapy on the body.
Or maybe we can just look at the results that Dream Girl had and decide that exercise makes things better, cancer or no cancer, chemotherapy or no chemotherapy.
Then again, maybe the study should be on friends and it might discover that chemotherapy is much easier to bear if it includes a weekly meeting with friends -- on the running trail or in the coffee shop.

Run, Dream Girl, Run

Sunday morning, as the sun rises in the east, Dream Girl will join thousands of other runners in surging down Broad Street eastward from the starting line of the Columbus Marathon.
She plans to run a half marathon to celebrate her last chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer. I think that was about a week and a half ago, maybe two weeks.
I can't imagine going through surgery and chemotherapy for six months then running a half marathon. That's 13 miles.
Dream Girl is truly amazing. She tries to say that she isn't doing anything special, but that she hasn't felt bad.
All I can say is that when I think of Dream Girl, I think of a word that Grace texted me last week: awe-full. That's me, full of awe for all that Dream Girl has gone through -- with a smile while trying to make other people not feel so bad about it.
My friend Pam is running too, but she doesn't want anyone to know, so don't cheer for her, like we did one year, yelling, "Go Pam!" at every group until we finally found her.

Friendship Runs

I do not want to go for a run this morning when my alarm goes off at 5:15. Princess texts me at 5:20 that she isn't going to make it for the run. In diplomatic fashion, I text back, "Oh, you wimp. Let's go." She ignores me after that.
I am yawning as I meet my friends at the lake. We wear long sleeves in the morning air that hoveres in the 50-degree range.
It is dark again when we start, now that the sun is getting lazier and rising so late in the morning.
Dream Girl is still bald as she continues her chemotherapy for breast cancer. She usually lets her shiny head glint in the sun when we run, but she wore a hat this morning and wishes for ear muffs as we start.
We talk and talk as we run. We interrupt and chide and praise and laugh then laugh some more. We pause (from running, not from talking) at the 3.75 mile turn around while we drink water then we run more. And when we get back to the lake, rather than stopping at 7.5 miles, we run the 1.2 miles around the lake -- twice. So we ran between nine and a half to ten miles this morning and it wasn't bad.
As we go around the lake again, we notice artists set up, their easels open painting in the brilliantly clear morning air. They take in the trees, the lake, the clearest blue sky.
"The light is just like Provence today, isn't it?" I say to one artist and he nods in agreement.
After I finish, I stand facing the lake with a weeping willow obscuring my view.
"See," I tell my friends. "If you look from here, it is just like being in Monet's Garden." Which is where Earl and I visited in April, see the following picture as proof of the willow and the lake and the sun.

Dream Girl has started to do some calculations in her head. She has four more chemotherapy treatments. Her last chemo will be the week before the Columbus Marathon and half marathon. She thinks maybe she should do the half marathon to celebrate the end of her treatment.
"Great idea," The Queen of Privacy and I agree with her. Neither of us volunteer to run it with her. Of course, the Queen just ran a half marathon in April and she may be planning to run the full marathon in November. She doesn't like to commit ahead of time.
But the possibility of that half marathon is one of the reasons we kept running this morning rather than stopping at 7.5. When we finished the nine and half to 10-mile run this morning, it felt like Dream Girl could definitely handle the half marathon if it were tomorrow. The run felt good, but the therapy on the trail felt better.
These friends, who I see only once a week, are not there to say, "Good job" to all my choices. They correct me when I'm wrong and argue with me. These runs are good for my body and my soul. They take me to task when I've done something dumb and love me anyway in the end.

American Heroes

My friend Dream Girl is making me feel depressed. You remember her. She's the one who found out she has breast cancer. I was all worried about whether I would act differently around her, what I would say. And, of course, I was worried because I want her to get better.
I see her every Saturday for our weekly runs and we stay in touch by email the rest of the week. Her emails have depressed me and it's taking a toll on my body.
I've already eaten a small box of malted milk balls and I just ordered pizzas for dinner. I haven't run this week at all either. I left the house two mornings to run and ended up walking around the block before coming back.
Today was Dream Girl's echocardiogram to make sure her heart wasn't affected by the heavy duty chemotherapy she has taken. Here's part of the message we receieved from her afterward:

So I ran far and did 6 hill repeats this morning to crank my heart up before my echo. I bombarded Janise, the girl who did my echo, with questions about how high a score I could get on my echo. Average/a good score is 55, and she said my previous 62 was really good, but I wanted to know what the best number would be. She said a younger person could get like 75-80, and that there were people my age that could get up to 70-75.

See, some people might think, "I have cancer. I need to treat my body gently." But Dream Girl thinks she should whip her body into its best shape ever while going through chemotherapy. She's running 60 minutes a day and doing extra hills, plus riding her bike on paths that run through corn fields. She's swimming laps without needing a swim cap (since she's bald).
She doesn't know the score on her echocardiogram yet, but here was the follow up message she sent:

I don't know my new score yet. I have to wait until I go back to the Dr. I'm hoping for a 70! Hee hee! It probably would be too if I had been swimming. Dang.

And you can probably see why this level of activity by someone healing from breast cancer can be disheartening from those of us who are complaining about plantar's warts or heavy periods.
Really, can any excuse stand next to the woman who is having chemotherapy, the woman who got jabbed five times at the doctor's office last week because they couldn't get a good vein. As she left the office, she reassured the lab technician that it wasn't his fault that he couldn't get a vein. Can Mother Theresa have been reincarnated into my friend's body if she was already alive when Mother Theresa died?
Some people might see this kind of reaction to breast cancer and be inspired to try harder. I wish it had that kind of effect on me. Instead, I feel defeated before I begin.
So, I'm eating malted milk balls and pizza before a night on the couch watching bad sit coms.
Don't get me wrong. Dream Girl is amazing. She's my hero. She's just flown so far out of my realm that I can barely see the soles of her feet any more.

Remembering What's Important

As the new year dawned, I decided to slack off on the hair straightening. I was getting tired of all that time with the flatiron. Although my hair started off with nice long curls in the morning, it frizzed as the day wore on until I looked like Roseann Roseanna Danna from Saturday Night Live. To combat the frizzes, I tamed it in a high ponytail, imagining how romantic the curls looked cascading down to my bare neck.
Before mass on Sunday, I had pulled my hair into the ponytail with a clip and I stopped in front of the mirror to loosen one curl so it hung down from the nape of my neck. Sexy!
Then I got to church and was thrilled to see many of the friends I hadn't seen during our busy fall schedule. That's when Michelle walked in. She beamed and looked radiant and wore a blue knit cap on her head. Michelle's hair was very like mine, dark and curly, but she had lost it all in chemotherapy since I'd last seen her. Michelle is two years younger than I am but has much younger children -- four of them ages 9 to 3.
Here are Michelle's beautiful
children from last Easter
Seeing Michelle, whose latest MRI shows tumors too small to measure, I wanted to pull down the curly ponytail which seemed ridiculous. I at least wanted to tuck up the errant curl that I had so lovingly released. Michelle didn't notice. She hugged me and asked about Grace's college search.
And I sighed, realizing that once again I'd been caught up in the minutiae of life with hair and teaching and kids' sports eating up my thoughts and my time. I bet Michelle doesn't spend time thinking about those things any more. I bet she sits with her kids and reads; I bet she gives them hugs that never end. I bet she doesn't give a thought for the long curls that are missing, but gives thanks every day that she can comb her little girls' hair.