A while ago, I did something I had never done before, and wasn’t sure I should… I used this platform, and my Twitter feed, to solicit funds for a dear friend who was in serious medical trouble.  Her name is Jo Carson, and you can read more about her here and here.Between your generosity, and that of her friends and colleagues in the theater, we’ve raised almost $25,000 to help pay for her treatment and care. I am extraordinarily grateful to all of you.  Jo’s been sending out semi-regular emails to update her friends on her status — improving, thank goodness — and so I asked her if I could post one here… or maybe she’d like to write something just for you.  Here is her response.  You’ll get a sense, I hope, of just what kind a person and writer she is, and why she is so important to me.  Her needs continue, so if you’re moved to help, or help some more, please click here.

 

So Peter, you want an update in this ongoing re-forging of my mettle…

I think a lot these days about what this brush with the grim reaper really is. I don’t think I’m being melodramatic, people do die of cancer, and both my grandparents Carson died of this sort of cancer (so I probably have some genetic inheritance at work in my colon). They died before there was much to do about cancer beyond surgery. Grandpa had surgery; Grandma opted out of it, but she was really sick by the time she was diagnosed. I remember both their deaths; they were both long and rather painful, and the surgery probably gave Grandpa a few more months to be in pain.

My options are different: the cancer in my colon had not metastasized when we found it; chemo and radiation usually work (they have already mightily shrunk this cancer); and with the upcoming surgery, my chances of cancer free survival are very good.

But I have to want to live.

This is a chance to opt out of this life, and cancer studies suggest that my attitude towards life (literally whether I want to go on living or not) makes a great deal of difference in my chances of survival. Not everyone who wants to live through cancer gets to, but those who don’t want to pretty much just don’t. Let me state, right now, that I do want to continue living, and even before I got the cancer diagnosis (I was already pretty sick), I had done some things to make that ongoing life possible and more comfortable. I moved from a big house to a small one. It was the hardest thing I’d done yet to that time because I simply didn’t have the energy to do it, so I gave away 4/5 of the things I owned, and moved what was left. The little house is a blessing, and I renovated it towards being green before I moved in, so it is warm (or cool) enough rather cheaply and the kitchen is wonderful if I say so myself. But there was a hard reason to move that hasn’t changed: I’m deaf. I have some genetic inheritance here too, I’ve been hard of hearing for years, but I had a bout with some serious antibiotics that left me profoundly deaf in most of the ranges of human hearing. (I’m still good for earthquakes, I can hear very low pitched noises.) I needed to get out of the big house because I couldn’t tell what was going on in it, and I no longer felt safe. The truly unsafe feeling arrived one afternoon about a year before I finally moved when I met a man I didn’t know coming in the front door. He turned and ran when he saw me. I suspect he rang the bell and I didn’t hear it so he’d decided to jimmy the lock and come in. (There had been a series of robberies in the neighborhood.) The little house is very open: when I sit at my computer, I can see most of it and I can see the door. So I’ve done myself a big turn towards life ongoing and I did it before the cancer diagnosis. But: to go from hearing (even not very well) to non-hearing so abruptly is (or was for me) to question whether life ongoing is really worth it. The adjustments are mind bogglingly hard. Being newly deaf after 60 years in a hearing world is stunningly isolating. I can still talk, I just can’t hear what people say in return. Can’t hear myself either, really. It is an odd sensation to feel yourself speaking without being able to hear the result. I was (I still am) struggling with all this.

So now you know why I grew a cancer.

With the diagnosis came a decision to be made. I was already aware of the need for a decision. I wasn‘t even very surprised at the cancer diagnosis. Did I want to live through it? Was the quality of this life good enough for this fight? My first response was no. How, as isolated as I felt, could I ever get through it? And I lived with that for about two weeks. Mostly, I laid in bed with that for two weeks. And the thought that haunted those two weeks wasn’t fear of dying, it ran more like this: what will I think of myself if I just lay here and let this cancer kill me? Not much. “That’s just sorry actin’, Josephine… sorry.” (my Grandma’s voice). So, I had to fight it. Can’t have no sorry acting, no sorry being, around here. And when I knew I had to fight it, and that I would, I told other people what was going on.

The help and support forthcoming from that telling has turned my isolationist bellyaching into the nonsense I desperately needed to understand that it was.

The problems are real, Ms Carson, but so are the friends and fellow travelers. This has been/is the real re-forging. I am in love with this world again like I am supposed to be, committed to it, what a way to wake up in the mornings! And especially with Al who literally saved my life by being here when I needed him, my cook Bob, and Peter and Lisa, Sylvia… This list goes on, it is rather long, and it includes people I don’t even know who—for some human generosity—contributed money to help pay monumental medical bills.            

It is all ongoing, I still have surgery and more to get through. But I can tell you I want to live, and I mean it because I’ve truly thought about it… for two whole weeks.

Also, I’m not done writing and to quit now when maybe I’ve learned something would be sorry actin’ and that’s just not allowed. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 3:58 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.