Before and after

The prompt this week for the Writing Through Cancer workshop http://www.writingthroughcancer.com/ is 'How has cancer changed you?' These prompts are just that, something to get you writing, and this is some of what I came up with:

Water erodes me, chiseling out pathways
to answer gravity.
Lichens take hold in any nook,
Pry their way into me,
Tiny footholds where the water
Freezes, expands, freezes, expands.
What was granite is now broken.
Trees take root in these spreading cracks,
Further weakening me.
With the relentless power of water
Larger pieces of me shear away,
And I have to accept
My future as dust.

And this:

On August 28, 1972, sometime in the early afternoon, I thought about death for a couple of seconds. I was flying through the air, on fire, covered in gasoline, having either leapt or been blown out of the boat we had been fueling. Once I hit the water my mind turned entirely to survival; the air pocket I created on entering the water meant I was still on fire and time was crawling. Naturally, I started twisting around like a drill to get rid of the air pocket. Having watched plenty of war movies, I was sure the surface of the water was on fire, so I swam like crazy until I came to a spot shallow enough. I launched out of the water, so the surface fire would burn my stomach and not my eyes. The water was not on fire. It wasn’t until later, when I was rewinding the tape in my head, that I realized I gave death a thought while airborne. More a question - am I about to die?

With second-degree burns, the nerve endings remain intact and on the surface and the skin has been burned around it. Infection is the biggest danger with burns; so the treatment is to scrub with Betadine, then apply Sulfamylon crème. This is mostly sulfur, which burns any infection, and has the side effect of making you think you are already burning in hell. The Demerol they prep you with just keeps you conscious. Since you are already in hell, any thoughts about death are seared from your mind. After 45 minutes the burning effect wears off, the Demerol takes over, and you’re loopy.

I don’t remember thinking about my imminent death again until February 7, 2005, when the doctor said ‘You have leukemia.’ And now I don’t remember not thinking about death a little bit each day since then. I lie in bed every morning, flopping back and forth, wrestling my thoughts about death and dying. I am not obsessed, but I like to reach over and smack the death thought around a little bit, try on different scenarios. Some days I think about all the stuff I will miss or haven’t done, but then I tell myself I am not dying yet. When I get up I have some tea and don’t think much about death, unless I am asking the docs about my odds.

And for fun, what we are faced with in the morning: