Break's over

I know it’s been some time -- 6 1/2 months to be exact -- since I’ve posted regularly to Chatterlines. Back in June, my youngest son, David, began a second round of cancer treatment for rhabdomyosarcoma, and July 1, I started a new job. Shouldering new editorial responsibilities, helping David manage his medical care, plus being a sounding board as my parents got ready to move from their four-bedroom home to a two-bedroom retirement cottage, crowded creative writing ideas right out of my mind.

But now I have a handle on my job, David is back at college and my parents are settling into their new place. Another tidal wave of change and upheaval has washed through -- for the moment. I can get back to the business of writing.

If you’ve read earlier posts, you know that I’ve wrestled with a way to orient Chatterlines. Should it simply be an online journal, with reflections on the quirky things that happen every day? Should the posts relate to a central theme? I’d like Chatterlines to be a blog about something, as I’ve said before, but about what?

As I think about those things, I can't ignore the fact that cancer has been the driving force in our lives the last 22 months. It's the proverbial elephant in the room. It's the thing that occupies my mind most of the time, and it's probably the thing I should write about.

While I would never choose the path cancer has set down for us -- nor could I ever find a way to justify the physical and psychic suffering David's endured -- this journey nonetheless has been filled with gifts. It's been rich with lessons in compassion, the kindness of strangers, the love of friends, the devotion of family, the resiliency of the human spirit and the tenacity of hope. It's been a privilege to watch each person in our life respond when serious illness knocked at our door. There have been many surprises and very few disappointments.

Since May 2008, I have kept loved ones updated about David's progress through an online CarePage. The entries are filled with the day-to-day, week-to-week drama of surgeries, scans, chemo infusions, side effects, blood counts and hospital admissions, as well as victories, large and small. Some people say it's been helpful to read about what it's like for a family to go through a crisis like this. They've encouraged me to write more.

At this point, I'd like to step back and look at the bigger picture. Where have we been? What does an experience like this teach us about ourselves, and about others? When you are forced to confront something very hard, what is it that makes you stand up and fight and see the thing through, instead of cowering in a corner with a blanket pulled over your head? What becomes important, and what no longer matters? How do you relate to time -- that great shapeshifter -- as it flexes its muscle, sometimes shrinking, sometimes expanding?  

I invite you to join me on this journey, wherever it leads. I can't promise it will be riveting, but I promise it will be truthful.

Five years ago I attended the wedding of a close friend who married her high school sweetheart after her first husband died of brain cancer. At the reception, I happily downed several martinis. A member of our church, who I'd known for years, came up to me as I stood in line at the bar and said, "I never imagined you as the kind of girl who would drink martinis."

Well, guess what? I never imagined myself as the kind of mother who would nurse her child through cancer. Life is full of surprises.

© 2010 by Lorin D. Buck

Show your support?

Ah-hem. If you were on Facebook this past Friday, you probably saw some “colorful” conversations. Here’s a synopsis, in brief:

“Purple.”
“Green.”
“Black, of course!”
“Maroon with a pretty pink design.”
“Tan.”
“Beige.”
“Magenta.”

Turns out women of every stripe and hue were posting the color of the bra they were wearing at that moment. A bit of online exhibitionism? Not exactly. Evidently, the game was launched anonymously to raise awareness of breast cancer -- although a good many women didn’t know they were doing that.

Still, the cyber-peek caught on fast, sweeping across Facebook in hours. And at least one foundation did benefit.

The Washington Post got to the heart of the matter in a story that ran yesterday, "Breast cancer awareness goes viral on Facebook":

“It was no game to the people at the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, who were stunned to find themselves the beneficiaries of a Web phenomenon they didn't begin to understand. At the start of Friday, they had exactly 135 fans on their Facebook page. By 5:30 in the evening, they had 135,000.”

Donations to the foundation were up, too.

And it wasn’t just here in the States. Teasing, I posted this on my Facebook status Friday: “Black. What’s the question? ;-)”

Within minutes I had a reply from une amie in Caen, France: “Just to inform you that the question is ‘what color are your underwears’ ... ;-)”

Here’s another story, from The Telegraph in the U.K.: "Facebook 'bra colour' status update craze 'raising breast cancer awareness'."

It seems women everywhere were more than happy to offer a virtual glimpse of their unmentionables for a good cause.

I wish I could come up with something that clever to focus attention on childhood cancers. A lot of money has been raised to fund breast cancer research because grassroots efforts like the Facebook bra reveal have been phenomenal -- and effective.

A year ago I took a science-medical writing class through Johns Hopkins University's master's in writing program, called Medicine in Action. Each week of the semester, a prominent physician or public health expert spoke to us about the specific issues and challenges he or she faces every day.

A gynecological oncologist marveled at the level of organization behind the Race for the Cure, the pink ribbon campaigns, the 3-day walks and all the other efforts benefiting breast cancer research. If only that kind of effort could support all types of cancer, he said, we’d be finding cures faster.

The good news about childhood cancers is that they are rare. The bad news is that without a large population behind it to push for funding and research, childhood cancer isn’t going to get a lot of notice.

Not only is my son David's cancer one that predominately strikes children and young adults, but it’s also a sarcoma. Sarcomas, too, are relatively rare and, therefore, not that popular. As his oncologist David Loeb explained to us, not many researchers want to put the time and money into conducting clinical trials that will help only a small number of patients. So the development of treatments is slow. Add that to the fact that it’s difficult to run large trials when the pool of patients isn’t that deep to begin with.

It’s hard as a parent to realize that, even though your child is getting the best treatment available, that treatment might not be good enough. And one of the reasons it may not be good enough is because there aren’t enough sick kids for it to matter.

Maybe the question for anyone dealing with childhood cancer should be, "What color is your mood?"

My answer would be "blue."

© 2010 by Lorin D. Buck