Yesterday, J and I reached a milestone: twenty years of marriage. The day was pretty emblematic of our lives, a bit chaotic and unfocused (okay, it was mostly me who was chaotic and unfocused) but ultimately, pleasant. We’ll be celebrating more officially this weekend, with a dinner date and a concert by an artist who will be playing his 2004 album in its entirety, one which was part of the soundtrack to our early marriage. I love you, J.

There’s so much this photo doesn’t say — that we honeymooned in a town in Costa Rica that was undergoing a building boom, so every morning we greeted the day to the sounds of drilling and hammering, not tropical birdsong. That the swim-up bar was closed most of the time, until we finally requested that someone serve us drinks there, mostly so we could say we’d been to the swim-up bar. That there were ants in the syrup every morning at breakfast, but no one on the staff noticed. That we signed up for something we thought was an eco-tour but was actually an extreme sports day which began with a long, bumpy ride on the Pan-American Highway (all potholes), then a horseback ride to a hot springs, where the abrasive mud threatened to scrub my sunburned skin clean off, before it was basically boiled in the hot water of the springs. But that wasn’t all! Then there was lunch, and the zipline with a crew of drunken and unruly British seniors who were complaining that they hadn’t seen any “cappuccino monkeys.” And finally, a terrifying waterslide through the forest that went irresponsibly fast. We also missed our internal flight back to San José for our flight home. We returned home sunburnt and bruised, but highly amused. (There were excellent nature viewing parts of the trip too.) And that’s how this marriage began.

In retrospect it seems fitting that things started out that way, because the past twenty years have certainly been full of thrills (childbirth), chills (multiple bouts of pneumonia, then COVID), and spills (teaching young children how to eat without looking like a kitchen exploded on them). And oh yeah, three bouts of cancer. I lost my dad, we moved states, I tried to make a go of a new career, I finally went back to my old career, but in an entirely different way.

I’m learning to embrace the advantages of aging. I mean, first of all, there’s the simple fact that I get to. But also, I just generally feel more conviction in the things I undertake these days. I’m not tentative. When I actually let myself work on poems, that helps me. But I feel it in other things too. J has also attained this, I think, whether it’s playing music or playing basketball, finding new clients and solving problems for them, or finding delicious new recipes and trying them out. (Because I’m now out of the house three days a week, J has pretty much become the default chef. I’m so grateful for this. I do help out where I can.)

But when I encounter a photo of me from 20 years ago? It’s hard not to judge Present Me, not to mourn my “lost youth.” Leading up to my wedding, I did workouts from a ridiculous book called Buff Brides. While that makes me blush now, look how buff I was! I was still a runner, back then, and the following year I would complete a half marathon. These days, my knees don’t tend to appreciate my attempts to take up running again. I’m not feeling super committed to regular exercise — the most I seem to manage is every so often, I’ll go off on a five mile walk or hike. I guess it’s helpful that I can still do that, although the recovery is pretty grueling. I need to cultivate more respect for the body I live in today. It saw me through two pregnancies and childbirths, multiple bouts of pneumonia, COVID (without leaving me with the devastating and scary long COVID symptoms that friends are continuing to deal with), cancer, recurrent uveitis (currently in remission), cataract surgery, and a Crohn’s diagnosis. Not bad.

Next week is Thanksgiving. Another 10th anniversary, of my recovery from colitis just in time to enjoy the best holiday meal I’d ever had in my life. That’s a pretty high bar for this Thanksgiving to clear, so I’ll just be thankful.

Happy Anniversary, I’ll Live. I’m a few days late, my first post was November 9, 2014. This corner of cyberspace (to use a term that makes me sound ridiculously ancient) has existed for ten years now, which seems like an impossibly long time, in Cancer Years. A decade ago today, I posted three times on the same day, indicating how little I was up to, because I was so sick.

I’ve had plenty of occasions to think about the name I selected for this blog. It wasn’t intended as a prophecy, although maybe secretly I hoped it would be. It was mostly meant to be ironic: “Yeah, you know, it’s just a little Stage 4 cancer… but I’ll live!” [shrug] Little did I know how unlikely my survival would be, what a fluke the durability of my response to treatment — which has yet to be referred to using the C-word by any practitioner who has had me in their care, and might never be(?). “Long-term remission” seems to be the most I can aspire to saying. Whether I am “cured” is the elephant that comes into the exam room with me when I visit my oncologist after every set of scans (my next scans are tomorrow). I spend my time updating my oncologist on details of my personal life he knows to ask me about from seeing notes about it in my EHR — what I’m up to at work, what my kids are up to, etc. It’s more of a social call these days — a social call with a costume change to a gown and some palpation at the end of it. Sometimes I ask what happened at the latest ASCO meeting, to sound like I’m more of an insider. I don’t think there have been any recently, so I might ask Dr. L what conferences he has been to. There are always conferences. He won’t really care what I got up to at the last conference I attended, of course. That’s not his job. His job is more like, “Make sure she gets to attend another conference.”

The last time I went for my social call with Dr. L, I didn’t even get the bloodwork I’ve been getting for a while now, a CTDNA test, which checks for circulating tumor particles in the bloodstream. The reason I’ve stopped getting the test is that they have switched labs, and the new lab needed a tumor sample from me. And there simply are no new samples, just the one from ten years ago now. I have even aged out of being checked for circulating tumor particles. (Yay?)

What Dr. P’s and Nurse Practitioner K’s and Nurse Practitioner R’s jobs were, exactly a decade ago, was, “Do what you can to ensure she will be sitting at a computer ten years from now writing a reflective blog post, instead of where she is today in 2014, working hard to recover from the colitis her cancer treatment brought on, sleepless due to Prednisone, cultivating empathy for anyone in the history of the world who has been starved or had to avoid eating because it was causing them terrible pain.” I continue to be so grateful to them, but find it hard to express this in a comprehensive and comprehensible way. They are responsible for my survival, but I haven’t spoken to them in years, at this point.

I suppose I am somehow responsible for my survival, too, but I’ve never figured out where or for what exactly I could take credit. I treated cancer like it was my job, because at the time (at least, ten years ago), I didn’t have another job. So I showed up and took my meds and went to all my scans. I recall one morning when I was in a subway delay on the way to NYU for a scan. There was no way to know when we’d get moving again, there wasn’t phone service underground, and the first thought that sprang into my head was, “This is so unprofessional!” I was a professional cancer patient. But so many other patients have complied with what they were asked to do, and they didn’t make it. It isn’t compliance or professionalism, although of course compliance helps. Ultimately, it’s just luck of the draw.

I haven’t slept well the past couple of nights. Is scanxiety rearing its head? Because it couldn’t possibly be anxiety about the state of the world, hormonal fluctuations, or any one of an endless number of other things. Perhaps tonight, before heading to bed in anticipation of another early wakeup (I try to schedule my scans as early as possible), I’ll try to cultivate some serenity through music.

(I’m just not sure how many times I can listen to this on an endless loop before throwing my phone across the room…)