Bravery?

The tumor-suppressing protein healthy genes
produce to prevent tumors from growing.  

So I have another tumor in my pancreas. It’s a neuroendocrine tumor. What’s that? Well I like to say it’s the Steve Jobs kind of pancreatic tumor, not the Patrick Swayze kind. Of course they both died, so that probably doesn’t mean as much to people as I think it does. Just know that the Steve Jobs has a more hopeful outcome, especially if you get it caught early, and don’t delay treatment.

Some people who know me might be thinking, “you get a lot of tumors, girl!” Yes I do.

This new tumor will probably mean yet another surgery. And this will be the fifth major surgery for me (if I count tonsils and wisdom teeth, it will technically be 7 surgeries). The primary reason for all these surgeries is a genetic defect that is known as Von Hippel Lindau Syndrome or VHL.

Reunion with an Old Friend

20 yrs old and good as new!
(forsaken Lexus in the background)

Anyone who lives in Bellingham knows how much folks here love their bikes. All the businesses and busses sport bike racks, bike lanes on main roads are big and wide, and I think I could safely wager that there are more bikes than cars in Bellingham.  I have been itching to ride my bike since we moved here in September.

My bike was in pieces though.  It had been shipped cross country twice and never put it back together.  It had flat tires, a busted shifter, and the shipping company that had taken it apart had no clue what they were doing.

With the warm days of early summer egging me on, I finally had the awesome folks at Fairhaven Bike and Ski put Humpty Dumpty back together again and fix my bike.  Then I ordered a new super cool helmet online.  The helmet took forever to arrive and when it did it didn't fit. I was tired of waiting so I bought the first "not-especially-cool" helmet that fit me.

Finally I am riding again!

National Short Stories Month: No more ugly stepchild!

First, November became National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo; then came National Poetry Writing Month, NaPoWriMo, set naturally in April when the bees start buzzing and dandelions dance on the lawn--and writers start to feel all warm and poem-y inside.  Both of them have been around for years, NaNoWriMo started in 1999 and NaPoWriMo began in 2003, and have a an enormous number of participants.

And so, of course, the next logical step is NaShoStoMo, which has staked its claim on May. But, just like short stories themselves, the month is something of an ugly stepchild of the literary world. It doesn't seem to have to following of the other two writing months--heck it doesn't even have it's own Wikipedia entry yet. I can find references to it on the web as far back as 2010, and in them it's referred to as something that is being done "again," which implies it's been around longer than that. The official NaShoStoMo.org webpage still thinks it's 2011, the Facebook page has 6 followers and the #NaShoStoMo discussion in Twitter has only 2 posts, though we are already 9 days into May 2012.

Nobody seems quite sure of what to do with NaShoStoMo. The website says to write 30 short stories in 30 days. "Wha-huh?!?" says the procrastimaster in me. 

Young Writers: Stay on your path!

I am almost 38. I am a writer, I have been all my life, but when I was young I turned away from it.

When you are young, every adult seems to have an opinion on what you should do with your life: parents, teachers, counsellors, school administrators, mentors, family friends, older siblings, younger siblings, aunts, uncles, your next door neighbor and your mother's best friend's hair dresser.

When you are young, and have dreams of being a writer, these people will often be encouraging but discouraging at the same time.  They will appreciate your creativity, they will pat you on the back and praise your work, but inevitably there will be surreptitious remarks, reminding you that writing is not a "career" choice:  Writers don't make money.  Getting published is hard.  Don't expect to be the next J.K. Rowling.

As a young writer I struggled to survive all this input from the adults around me.  In the end I failed; the writer in me laid down her pen, closed her eyes and gave up the fight.

What to pack for Time Travel?

I was writing a story and I came to this question: What would a girl want to pack when she was just told that she is about to leave on a journey through time? 

I thought perhaps someone had mused about this question before, so I Googled it. I did not find a single serious effort to answer the question. The closest I came was a website for a gag t-shirt which would supposedly help the wearer become rich if inadvertently traveling back in time, because every white space on the shirt was filled with lists of money making inventions. The rest of the results were just information of what to pack for first time travelers.

Hope in a Tube of Chapstick

On November 4^th 2009, I had a pretty major surgery at Johns Hopkins. I had what is called a Whipple procedure.  My duodenum, my gall bladder and the head of my pancreas were removed, after which they had to basically reconstruct my digestive tract.   There was a tumor on my pancreas. Although it turned out to be a kind of benign and non-aggressive tumor, it had spread to nearby lymph nodes.  Technically cancer.  I say technically because I am fine, I was never really sick from it, I didn’t have chemo and I don’t have to worry about it anymore.  They took it out, and its over.

Only it wasn’t over.  For a few weeks after I was discharged I seemed to be getting better.  Then, suddenly, I was not feeling well.  On Thanksgiving Day I couldn’t keep my breakfast down.  My fever was only 101—the doctors on the phone said a real fever was 102.  I had nothing to worry about.  Then I discovered that I was unable to stand for more than 30 seconds without sitting down in exhaustion from the effort.

No Apologies Dammit! A lesson from the Writers at the Beach: Seaglass2010 conference

The urge to introduce my reading with apologies was so strong!  We had just spent four minutes doing a writing exercise at one of my Seaglass 2010 workshop sessions and now each of us was reading what we had come up with out loud.  The readings were circling the table and getting dangerously close!

In my head I rehearsed my introduction.

"Sorry, I am so bad at reading out loud..."

One person closer.

"Sorry I am not really good at writing on the spot like this...and I am terrible at reading aloud..."

The person immediately to my right!

"Sorry I am not as good as you guys...in fact I am really not a very good writer at all let alone writing on the spot like this...and I am so very terrible at reading out loud!"

Then it was my turn.  I paused a moment.  Had I really just mentally told this room full of my peers that I was not worthy of calling myself a writer? Suddenly I was angry at myself.  No apologies dammit!

And with that thought resonating in my head, I read.

I read like I had never read before, clear and loud.  My voice rose and fell in pitch at just the right places and I found the rhythm of my writing.

When I finished, heads nodded in appreciation and encouraging mumbles went around the table along with a polite applause. The workshop leader said my piece had reminded him of the author whose excerpt he had read to us earlier. I basked in the glory of my victory!

It had been a simple bit of prose.  Nothing groundbreaking or earth shattering.  Nobody would remember it beyond that moment.  But in that moment, I felt a power I had never felt before and I realized my apologies, my lack of confidence, were the only real things that stood in my way.  That is a lesson, from Seaglass 2010, I will never forget.

Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed

This morning I was awake exceedingly early.  I think when the wind blows outside I get restless.  So rather than having my husband drag the covers off me at 10 am and telling me to get up repeatedly, I was out of bed like a shot at 7:30 am after laying there awake for who knows how long.

Great chance to get some things done, right?  Not that lucky.  Restless me putters aimlessly until now, shortly before 9:30 am, before I really settle in to get anything done.  So I figured I would write a blog post.  After all blog posts don't take a lot of time and it won't be long before James wakes up and wanders in sleepily, looking for hugs, attention and food.  Yes, I am talking about my husband.

I marvel at the blessings of being self-employed.  To have time to share three meals a day with your husband and to be able to take time and savor those meals; to have a conversation and find out how things are going with each other.

Just the other day at dinner I was saying to James that there was something of a paradox about our social calendar.  I said: "I don't feel like we get out and socialize that much with people since we started being self-employed and yet our calendar is constantly full."  In fact, we get together with friends several times a week, which I never had the energy for back when I was an employee.  Talking about it we came up with the reason behind the feeling: We don't go to jobs anymore where we have to socialize with our co-workers.

We no longer have a 40 hour a week forced socialization period and this is giving me that false sense that we socialize less.  I say false because, I don't know about you, but about 90% of the time I would never have chosen to socialize with the people I worked with.  Even worse, some of the people I was trapped with, for that long 40 hours a week,  I could not stand to be around.  If you are one of my former co-workers and you are reading this--yes you were in the top 10% that I liked :P

Part of that was probably because, when in an office or work situation, many people will behave in ways that make them unlikeable.  Even I, the most agreeable person in the world, was probably on occasion hard to work with.  The best thing about my home office is: I don't have to be here!  Its completely my choice.  At some point work has to get done or the income will suffer but I could put it off if I wanted to and I could do it in a different place if I wanted to.

On a gorgeous day I can take my work outside if I want.  On those days when I need to concentrate on something and James is in the mood to talk at his computer, I can grab my laptop and head into another room.  On those days when I just can't get in the right frame of mind to get anything done I can just skip a day.

Its both a blessing and a challenge to have such time freedom.  I handle it now better than I might have a few decades ago.  Somehow the work always gets done.  Even with all the playing hooky and all the sleeping in past 10 am.

Speaking of 10 am it's looking like its my turn to drag the covers off the bed and say: "Out of bed sleepy head!"