Summer                                                                Healing Moon

I’m sleeping fine. I don’t feel that jittery, too many cups of coffee acidity in my stomach. I know what regular anxiety feels like, having been all too familiar with it for many years. Aches in my bunched up shoulders. Uncertain about my worth, what I should do. Waves of small fear about what now seem like the silliest things. For example, will the clerks at Best Buy demand to see my driver’s license if I pay by check? And refuse to let me use the check?

So it’s easy to assume that I’m not anxious. Easy for me to assume that. Yet, if I step back a minute, I’m not writing, I’m not doing my Latin. The tomorrow wall rises more often than it falls, not allowing my thoughts and dreams past July 8th. I am, in these significant ways, distracted, not feeling well, dis-eased.

I want to be cool about this, not degenerate into the life of a patient whose every waking moment is taken up with illness, with matters of medicine. That’s no life. That’s waiting for life. Cancer is, however, hard to ignore. This is one of the more difficult struggles in my life.

Trusting the diagnosis, the treatment feels both justified (I’m confident in the pathology, the physical findings, the PSA jump. I trust Dr. Eigner’s experience and his approach.) and necessary. No second guessing, I say to myself, at this point. You know what you’re up against, you’ve weighed the options and made a decision, just let all that play out. I’m doing that. That’s why I can sleep at night, why I don’t feel those frank expressions of anxiety.

I realize, of course, the irony of writing this. It focuses on the very thing I’m saying I want to let be, but I’m living in just that paradox. I feel confident about my decisions and about the probability of their resulting in a cure. At the same time there is this part of my body that no longer participates in the general keep Charlie healthy idea. All of these things persist and tumble around in me at the same time.

This comes, too, after an interstate move complicated by what felt like a very long time to sell our Minnesota house. Becoming integrated into the family here in Colorado has not been as easy as we had hoped either. It’s getting better, we’re all learning how to appreciate each others needs and feelings, but it’s not been what we imagined, at least not at first. It has been family, with joy and travail.

Laying this down as a record, an in this moment statement of how I am. Take it for what it’s worth.