May

Last week was a long week. I have had a relatively easy time in terms of side effects, but for about three weeks the fatigue that set in was very difficult to work around. It turns out it was due to extreme anemia, as we watched my red blood cell (RBC) and hemoglobin counts go down. I am relieved to find out it is not the cumulative effects of the chemotherapy and that something can be done to treat it.

Last week, then, I didn’t receive treatment on my usual Tuesday, received a blood transfusion on Wednesday, then received treatment on Thursday. By Thursday my white blood cell (WBC) count was so low they considered not giving me treatment. So I began a 5-day series of Granix shots on Friday to bring up the WBC.

I am grateful that people give blood, and that our blood supply is safe, and that there are ways to treat these blood issues, which otherwise would have caused an interruption or even inability to get treatment. And since Friday I have felt so much better. Two weeks ago I cancelled a poetry reading in St. Paul, and really I could not have done it. But I could have done it this Sunday. I feel back on schedule, with my naps and the hours I can devote to work a couple times a week.

May has been an odd month all around. There were freezes right up to May 15, the normal last frost date. And there were 90-degree days, too.

Time is going very slowly and strangely– there is an interiority to this journey that is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. I’m in this world of “self-care” with attention to the body, to changes, to temperature and time and laundry and food… Things that were once routine can feel overwhelming, and then a simple morning at work checking off tasks and getting things out and clearing the desk puts everything right. But from my couch on a Thursday (now a Saturday or Sunday, with shifts in my oh-so-reliable appointments) everything seems impossible and it can feel like I’m losing touch on my normal life.

The prairie outside my window has mostly looked like the painting hanging in my room. May. Sophia used a flesh-colored paint for some of the stands of prairie. It looked, along with the lemon yellow and white, sherbet-y and unreal. But for a week or so I saw those exact colors  out my window.

Then Saturday, with cracking and smoke and ash on the screened-in porch, the prairie out my window was burned. It was reduced to this 2-D puzzle of black patches and green paths. The wind blew all day Sunday, a wind we get every May and June (usually right after I’ve transplanted the fragile tomato seedlings) that feels like it will blow everything away. It whipped the laundry on the line. It blasted me on the porch. But I hardly noticed it when my friend Kate and her boyfriend Steven, and my husband Steve and I set about getting the irrigation in the garden, pulling the weeds, and getting most of the beds planted: peppers, cukes, zukes, and beans.

In the wind on the porch, after church and my Granix shot, I’d had so many fears– about sunscreen/sun exposure, about the extent of the weeds, about dirt under my fragile fingernails, about getting the trellis up, about energy and what to do and what to let go of– it had all felt impossible. And then, at the end of the day, as I sunk down into a cool bath, everything felt right again.