Still in this dance

As Josh slowly got better over the weekend, Bob went down.  Nausea, fever and chills – the whole package.  My friend, Cheryl called me late in the morning on Sunday.  Cheryl used to be an athletic trainer at the college and later become a massage therapist.  Her further studies have taken her to training with John Barnes in myofascial release and with Thomas Myers (author of Anatomy Trains).  She said, “Do you want to come over right now, or later this afternoon?”  I saw her in the afternoon and she worked on my head, neck and upper body for two hours.  When I left her house I felt I had returned to my own body abeit a bruised and stiff version of it.

Sunday night, Bob was still running a fever, so my friend Cheryl drove me to the meeting with the surgeon.  It was a good meeting, but, once again, was not the information I had hoped to hear.  The pathology report from last Tuesday's surgery showed "microscopic foci of invasive lobular cancer" - near two margins.  The tricky part of this kind of cancer is it is not "palpable" or visible on a mammogram or ultra sound.  So the surgeon is very uncertain that "all of the cancer" was removed.   I had an MRI on Monday to try to see if there are other suspicious areas.  If there are we could 1) do biopsies of all those areas, or 2) I just vote for either a single or double mastectomy.   I am waiting to hear what the MRI shows.  I am leaning toward option 2 since, but I am waiting for all the information.  

My surgeon said she would get the information from the MRI to me as quickly as possible.  That was Monday.  It is now Wednesday.

I swing rather wildly between feeling fairly grounded and ready to face whatever tasks are in my future and wanting to curl up in a pile of blankets and have a good sob.  I answer e-mails and write letters of recommendation for students.   I stare into space.  I look for words to inspire me.  Recently I came across a poet named Jewel Mathieson.  She is also a dancer, storyteller and breast cancer survivor.   She wrote a poem called Ravenet following her mastectomy.  The last lines read:

a dance with the mystery

a dance with destiny

I’m altared by this holy, wholly dance

my dance

the one that only I can do

As I have said before.  I am still in this dance.