Feet on either side of the line

A kiss from the rose on the grey?

As WTF host Marc Maron says, "Hey, it's life. Doesn't end well." Or as my husband says, on the days he can talk about it at all, "We're all dying honey. You're just doing it a little faster than the rest of us."

What I'm struggling to spit out is that planning around the hole you're going to leave is pretty much normal human behavior at any age. I'm younger than I would have expected, and will be leaving a sorrowfully bigger hole than I'd meant, but the challenges are similar to everyone else's. I don't need to plan for retirement, so what I've saved can go to college funds, at least. As long as I die fairly soon, I can do so secure in the knowledge that the kids will be taken care of. 

Whose future is it anyway?

Which brings me to the gigantic, self-righteous elephant humped in the middle of my American living room: The American Health Insurance System. Most expensive in the world, with oftentimes mediocre outcomes, medical bills are by far the most common cause of bankruptcy in the US.

I can't afford to bankrupt our family. But that's what the state of US health care means to someone living with a fatal illness today. No one talks about how, in the pay-to-live system we have in America, co-pays alone can wipe out a family's financial security forever. I think people would be shocked at the number of times the ill choose between living and living as long as is financially possible for themselves and their families.

I called MD Anderson—home of the edgiest cancer-fighting gadgets on the planet—and they want $200,000 up front to sign up for their fancy photon therapy. They're certainly not taking any chances on our insurance company spontaneously leaping to do the right thing.

We're fighting this uphill battle, draining my family's financial resources just as my kids are getting ready to enter college and my husband tries to ready for retirement. We have the kind of medical insurance to which health care workers are entitled, so we're atypical in some ways. I'm receiving good treatment.

But this could still bankrupt us. And ours is a universal story.

Being this

I'm writing a letter to someone which requires me to divulge the state of my health. I've crossed out "terminally" in front of the "ill" or exchanged it for ''very''. Or extremely. Because, how do you say, I'm seriously too sick to do that job I promised or nope, I probably won't be around on that date. At all. Anywhere. How do you say "I'm literally dying" in a way that doesn't kill the other person?

And then I began to realize that it's kind of none of my business to keep others safe from my news. It's just news and I'm just the messenger.

Lately, simply being the messenger has become a straight up time management problem. I decided to blog about my treatment because, as the friends around me saw, I needed one place to tell everyone what they needed to hear.

So here's where I am:

I have a Stent in my esophagus, which is keeping it open and me alive

I have a port implanted that allows them to deliver chemo  directly into the heart of the beast. Er, me.

I have chemo next Wednesday to Friday. I get to bring the meds home overnight--a sleepover!--in the form of some kind of fannypack. A fanny pack they're calling it. Sounds cute, right? Hmmmm. 

By their measurement, I'm sure a fanny pack equates to a full-on mountaineering back pack. Complete with dining tent.

Planning for a future in which you're not

You never truly know how you're going to feel about most things until they actually happen. I mean the big, nasty surprise things--like learning you're literally dying... It turns out I had no idea how I'd feel, even now as I'm feeling it. Now don't run screaming for the social workers. As far as I'm concerned, this detachment is very healthy.

Fuck talk therapy--no offense to my wonderful therapist friends--but who really needs to be talking about this shit?

What I need to do is plan. For the future, which will most surely go on in my absence.

mind: boggled

Yes, these things do happen to you, Tanya

I don't know why it never occurred to me that I could actually get cancer. Maybe it's a familial thing. I'm not aware of a single ancestor who was so much as diagnosed with cancer. They certainly don't tend to die of it. I remember hearing somewhere--I'm an NPR freak, so probably there--that it's an Ashkenazi jew thing. That there are thousands of 100-year-old Jewish ladies around. But my I-can't-get-cancer stance was more like a complete denial that cancer existed at all. I'm the type to get a PAP smear approximately every time we switch presidents.

Besides, I tend to eat fairly well, my smoking days are tucked safely away in the past. I'm not obsessed about eating organic, but I've always tried. I suspect we make these sorts of pacts with ourselves, without even noticing. We do all the right things and then expect some immunity from the wrong.

And that's how esophageal cancer gets you. It grows fast like the evil twin baby it is. It doesn't even occur to you to worry, until, in a month or two, you can't get a sip of beer past the baby in your throat.

Here I am, two days after staring at a full color, vaguely gynecological snapshot of my glistening, completely occluded esophagus, and I'm reeling. My husband, who lost his mother two years ago and never stopped reeling, is reeling.

I am literally dying.