Posts Tagged ‘Linda Pattillo’

Ann’s Diary: Angelina’s Decision

One of the hardest things about this cancer journey is realizing my immature behavior. Please know I am not proud of what I’m about to admit. And understand that I write this down for the world to read if only to look at it myself and try to understand it. And that’s just so that I have a shot at getting passed it and through it, so that I can stop feeling like this…

I’ve had numerous people ask me what I think about Angelina Jolie’s decision to have a prophylactic mastectomy because she has the gene that predisposes her to breast cancer. And I have to tell you each and every time I get asked it’s all I can do to not say “Who cares?”

Now of course I don’t truly feel like that about Angelina Jolie.  I wish her health and hope always, as a woman. As a mother. As a wife, as a daughter…etc. What’s truly going on for me is this: I feel angry about the world’s attention to a starlet who has every opportunity to tell her story, via a New York Times Op-Ed piece, interviews that will definitely be coming on Oprah, and every single magazine cover in the market today including TIME magazine. I am jealous and upset at the attention her “brave” choice–that’s what the headlines are calling it–is getting.  And why is that?

Because: this whole thing crashes up against the reality of my life as it is now. I’m a nobody who can’t get even one speaking engagement unless I happen to be receiving an award at the event.  I’m a person who’s been forced to make dozens of “brave” choices for the last 9 years and it’s all I can do to update my website with photos of me and 6 local girl scouts. Meanwhile, Angelina Jolie makes a non-life-threatening decision based on personal medical history and the spotlight shines on her in ways I would give my teeth to have. And what’s ahead? I’ll call it now: Angelina Jolie will be deigned the “woman who helped save millions with her “brave” decision” to remove her breasts and have them replaced. And I’ll be lucky if the folks at the dry cleaners give me back the right shirts.

I know life is not fair. I know it’s not important to be a celebrity. I know this is how society works–what glitters gets attention. And I realize I have helped hundreds of folks in my own small, tiny, itty-bitty  way–and with luck I will keep doing so for many years to come. But I am inwardly outraged at life as it is playing out now in the cancer headlines and it has nothing to do with Angelina Jolie the future cancer survivor.  Many will listen to her story and read it and absorb it and maybe duplicate it–and save their own lives.  Bravo!  I am thrilled! How could I not be–it’s exactly what I’m doing.  But damn, she sure jumped waaaaaay ahead of me in the make-a-difference category.

So if you ask me about Angelina’s decision to take off her breasts prophylactically and I reply thoughtfully, “It’s her decision. I applaud anybody’s choice to get to their own path of health,” just smile and believe me.

And I will work hard to start to believe me too.

Posted May 20th, 2013 by
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Ann’s Diary: Spinning Out

Some days I swear I’m moving backwards in time.

I don’t mean health wise–as in when I was cancer free and never dreamed I’d get it.  That would be a nice problem to have–but no..

I mean emotionally.

Lately I have been strangely pubescent in moods.  I’m fine.  Then I’m sad.  I’m happy.  Then I’m upset.  At whom is usually the other crazy thing–at people whom I love and who love me.

People who have been nothing but generous and kind, thoughtful and helpful.  Folks who have my best interests at heart 24/7 who, if they knew they’d offended me, would be devastated.  I look at these folks and think, “Ann, all is well. There’s nothing wrong here. It’s just your life. Your life is f-cked up with this cancer and you can’t possibly expect smooth sailing all the time.”

And I reply, “I know, I know–but why can’t I stop feeling like crap?”  And I say back, “I don’t know but get a grip.  You must.  So maybe your peeps make minor verbal faux pas’ that they don’t know bother you.  Tell them and they’ll stop.”

“No, I can’t,” I retort, mad at me for not understanding this cancer space I’m stuck in that forces 95 percent of this awkward, awful headspace into my brain. “I can’t say anything because a) I don’t understand it myself and b) if I try to explain then my pals will walk on egg shells around me afterwards, worried they’ll mess up.  I can’t have that–that’s like another kind of cancer, a social cancer, where you’re something nobody wants to be around.”

“Alllrighty then,” I stare at myself, one eyebrow up and the other hovering over my other disbelieving-what-it’s-hearing eye. “I think you need to take a holiday. Step off, step out–get away from yourself for a while.  You’re going crackers.”

“Yeah, that’s genius,” I think sarcastically.  ”Thanks for the hot tip. Like I didn’t know that.  I came here for answers.  You don’t have answers, you have observations.  I already know I’m spinning out.  I need help to slow the hell down.”

“Well,” I say out loud at me, taking stock in the fact that I’m actually talking to myself–”if I don’t have the answers, who does?”

Of course there is counseling. Of course I will figure this out, eventually.  But lately, this maze of myself has been a hard puzzle to move through–and that’s where the conversation ends today.

And that’s where it begins all over again tomorrow.

 

Posted May 13th, 2013 by
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Ann’s Diary: Yoga Fail

I remember the day news anchor Katie Couric looked into the camera on the day she’d returned to work after losing her husband to colon cancer and said something like this:

“And to all of you who endure inconsolable loss and stand gaping as the world keeps moving on without you I say this: I understand.”

That was 15 years ago, and today not only do I remember those words, I live them.

This morning I was ready for yoga.  I haven’t done it since the “big news” of my brain/liver/lung metastatic breast cancer 3 weeks ago–mostly because I haven’t had the time. I was on that treadmill of “what do I do NOW” and busy getting it done. Now that I’ve done the brain radiation, the port, and am on chemotherapy round 2, I was ready this morning to get back to 9 a.m. yoga.

But driving there, I got in a tiff with someone. Then I got bad news about stuff on the homefront. NOT medical. But personal stuff–you know, in the running-of-the-house-and-family category that encompasses but is not limited to bills, kids grades, broken appliances, etc.  Or as I like to call it, the” we-know-it-doesn’t-matter-in-the-scheme-of-things-but-day-to-day-you-can’t-avoid-it-in-real-life”–

until you get a diagnosis like mine and that entire category of life blows up.  Paying off a credit card bill is not as important to me now as planning a family vacation–which puts yet one more emotional divider between me and the non-sick world.

So back to yoga–

there I was, trying to get into the class, but dealing with this “day-to-day” junk that was important and not important at the very same time. The yoga instructor said “grow your breath” but mine stuck in my throat.  She said “jump to the top of the mat” and my feet dragged like logs. “Think of someone you need to forgive” but there were too many choices in my head and I was the biggest one. Then I started feeling sorry for myself. That is the classic sign for me to abort the mission. If I’m going down that road I know I’m losing ground. I rolled up my mat and left the class. No yoga today.

I had prepared myself for possibly leaving yoga but not for emotional reasons. I thought the chemo might make it tough to stand the high heat in there. But It was heat of another kind–the unexpected–”the head trip of life as a woman who may or may not see her kids graduate high school”–that’s another way to put it–that got me. I drove away cursing.  I had so wanted to do yoga.

But as Katie Couric so prolifically said to “me” all those years ago, regardless of my situation life will go on around me–even as my world spins in and out of control.  Some days I’ll handle that motion, and other days I won’t.

Here’s one thing I know: there’s a yoga class next Wednesday at 9 a.m. with my name all over it.

Posted March 27th, 2013 by
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Ann’s Diary: Writing Crossroads

I haven’t been blogging much lately–for a reason.

I’ve hit a roadblock and it’s not a creative one. It’s not medical. It’s not financial. It’s not unexpected, nor is it planned, and it caught me off guard–though I should have seen it coming. The reason I haven’t been blogging is–for lack of a better adjective– maternal.

My children are getting older and now they can read this blog. They are old enough to actually stop and look over my shoulder at what I’m pecking out on my laptop–my frustrations, my fears, my medical updates–all of it. Before they didn’t care but now? Teenagers are curious. And that means that anything I put out here can get back to them–

and that’s no good. Because they need to be strong and not be afraid of the demons and dragons that their mother is out there slaying in the cancer kingdom. And if I write about my fears here, and am as honest as I have been about my worries–that will absolutely scare them. And I can’t do that to these kids, they are going through so much with this crap already. I can’t have it thrown in their face via this blog.

So I find myself at a crossroads: how do I do write here without upsetting my children?

That is why I haven’t been writing.

Thank you for having patience with me as I figure this out. Writing is my outlet, it’s my joy, it’s a passion and some days I think it keeps me sane in this utterly insane life I am leading fighting metastatic breast cancer. To give it up would slay me worse than the dragon I’m battling..

but to keep it up as I have been doing might hurt two people I love more than life itself. What to do?

To be continued..

Posted June 25th, 2012 by
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Ann’s Diary: In Her House

It’s always difficult to re-enter my real world–the one where I have a husband and children– after spending time “back home.”

By ‘back home’ I mean the place where I grew up. My folks still live in the house I came home from the hospital to: the tile on the bathroom floor is still the same white-checker-board-with-black-tile-middle that I stared at as a kid. My 10-year-old signature still dons the wall on the cellar stairs. That place where my cousin Peter jumped from my bed and mistakenly put his head through the wall still shows through the 35 year-old-plaster patch job my Dad did (Peter was, mercifully, okay). And the lamps I used to rub on my mother’s bureau, pretending they were the bottle on the TV show “I Dream Of Jeannie” are still there. They say “you can’t go home again” but in my case, not only can you go home, you can take a tour of what used to be.

It was this way this weekend, when I traveled 3 thousand miles to say good-bye to my godmother, who’d lived in the same house next-door to mine for more than 50 years. Though remodeled a bit more than my folks’ house, Darlin’s home still resembles the place I ran over to to visit, hang out, play, escape sibling strife, wash cars, and in one long stretch, polish silver weekly in a 6th-grade effort at making money. I never signed any walls over there but if those walls could talk they’d have a lot to say about me and my romps next-door to see Darlin and Prez–her husband and my godfather. 46 years of living is a long time to make memories.

So it was difficult to say good-bye this past week–not just to my godmother, but also to her house. Of course her place will be lived in from now until its eventual sale–but it won’t be hers; she’s no longer here. And that reality, as strange as this sounds, makes her passing as difficult and as heart-wrenching as her actual death. It’s one thing to let my godmother go: it’s another thing to say good-bye to her home.

Why is this? I have no idea.

What is it about walking over there more times than I can remember–for cocktails, for coffee, for conversations, for counsel–you name it, I did it–that embedded itself into my heart and soul? I slept there, ate there, cried there, laughed there, answered the phone, took in the mail, polished tea sets, raked the leaves, even mowed the lawn–I guess that makes it my second home? And from the looks of my first home–with all the elementary-style Crayola tattoos I gave it– my memories are strong and lasting. They are memories of what once was and what I can still revisit: but next door I suppose–with my godmother’s passing–those memories can neither be made nor visited any more. Is that why it hurts?

That’s life, I know. That’s the way it goes for all of us, eventually. One day it will be my childhood home that no longer holds my heart and soul. I’m not going to like it then, either.

I am not certain why it is this way but I have learned that with death there are two endings: the life that has lived and died, and the house that was a home for all those who loved there. And in the case of my godmother, I was certainly one of ‘those.’

While I still don’t get this whole house-means-sadness thing, I do know one thing: if my heart breaks this much at a next-door buidling, there must have been a damn beautiful place inside there–for many moments of my life– that I got to call my own. And while I hate this strange new lesson in my life, I know I am so very lucky to have known someone who made me feel so very welcome in her life, in her heart, in her soul, in her home,

and in her house.

Posted January 6th, 2012 by
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