June "Outlier" Fremer Mirassou / July 6, 1964 - August 17, 2016

The One About The "Sweet Spot" Harvest Season

I’ve Warning: Not completely proofread!

had on my To Do List for a long time to attend a support group(Not surprisingly cancer warriors do better if they reach out for support not only from family and friends, but also people who can completely relate with them about what they are experiencing.I finally made it to one last week and one of the topics* that came up was anger – are you angry about anything? and how are we dealing with our anger?Throughout the group, There was a lot anger expressed about treatment by medical professionals during treatments. I didn’t have much to add to that area. I’ve been lucky (apparently), not to have the same experiences. I talked about THIS (see below) a little in the group, but it keeps bubbling up in my thoughts since:

Let’s back up, first though… to put things in context.in fall 2014, just before my diagnosis, Steven & I seemed to had hit a wonderful stride in our marriage.  When we were both working, we would send each other the kind of texts that you would expect from honeymooners….NO! Not THAT kind of texts…Get your minds out of the gutter! More like, “I love you!’ <emoticons of sparkly hearts and kissy faces>  Or a standard exchange between each other, “I love you!” “I love you, too!” “No, I mean I REALLY love you” If you’ve been reading my blog for a long time, you know already that my diagnosis happened in the middle of the 2014 harvest season. 

What I’ve never wrote before though, was that this harvest was different for me than harvests before - from the beginning. Not much differently for Steven as far as what he had to do in the beginning: he was driving back and forth from San Jose to Livermore for so many years to make "Magic happen" (turning those grapes into delicious wines) while we lived and I worked in San Jose. All the kids were old enough at that point – and done with school (except college), so I made a decision that I was going to make the effort to do anything I could do to make this harvest season  less difficult for Steven, while I could learn more about how it works. We had  the gift of potential time together if we were  , I was committed to make it happen.

I brought an inflatable mattress for his Livermore office…pillows and blankies…(One amart alek wanted to know where his teddy bear was...)so he could sneak in a nap at times and didn’t have to drive home every night and he could roll out of bed around  - by 5 a.m. and be the first one in the production area, greeting new bins of  freshly picked fruit as they were rolling in from the vineyards. 

He was in his element. What a joy to watch him when I could see him in those moments!  

A few times, I drove up to Livermore in the middle of the week. (after my work day ended) to share dinner together and, I’d get up the same time as Steven and battle of traffic towards the South Bay to get home and get to work on time myself. Sounds crazy, I know, but it was worth it. And it seemed only fair after so many harvest seasons when Steven was carrying the burden of commuting.

I refer to this time as a “sweet spot” in our marriage. And…. Yes. I have been angry that that was abruptly interrupted by the shocking discovery of my health condition. 

Steven and I have talked about this during our ritual walks through the vineyard with the doggies. 

More than once, he’s pointed out how he is even more proud about our marriage as a result of how we’ve handled our situation. Smart man that I married, huh? He’s always been a Smartypants, but he impresses me more and more daily. How can I be angry about that? I’m so lucky now – and really, if I think about it, I have to recognize how lucky we have had that “sweet spot”. I have a feeling that not all married couples have that ever.I wish that for you all.

[Kiddies - if there reading this and engaged to be married, I hope you are thinking that this is what it looks like when you say, "in sickness and health..." You better mean it.]

  

And don’t get me wrong. This hasn't all gone away.We still have aspects of that time that this  - mother fucking brain cancer HASN’T robbed it all from us. It's can be still so sweet.We still send each other those “sweet nothings texts” and more than ever, I TRY to express to my best friend, love of my life, how lucky I feel to have him in my life – how proud to call him my husband. 

KIddies some more truth here: It’s hard having to rely on his support morethan I can it seems that in anyway I can reciprocate, but I HOPE I can some day in our future that we’ll have another ‘Sweet Spot Harvest” on our horizon. One beautiful thing is: that I will recognize it because I already know what it looks and feels like. And I’ll treasure it, too, like what I do  right now.                    

*

*I'm pretty sure that I'm breaking any rules with support groups by just bring up a topic ewithout any names or such?  #freepass #newbiepass

Wanted: One Brain Cancer Sherpa

I'm going to start this blog post with one of my favorite teaching jokes;

I've told this one many times, and it's funny, but true.

Lots of people learn things in a different ways, and I used to tell this to my students. When they had that panicked expression in math class, that "I don't get it!"  look, I would remind them that it was MY job to help them "get it", and if they weren't getting it, I need to try some other way to teach it. And passing out papers or quizzes, an F is not for "failure". It's feedback that we need to try some other way to learn something.

Some learners are auditory, others are more visual, etc. And the brain learns thing best by connecting it to something it already knows. LIke the ABC song, for instance. I have heard that the Japanese have a song for teaching the multiplication tables similar to that. I don't speak Japanese, nor have I ever been there, so I have no confirmation. It would be great if we had that for English, too, huh? Anyway, that's why teachers use music or analogies to connect new learning to what your brain can "hook" to that.

I wanted to try to write to you all about how Steven and I have gotten through all the decisions about my treatment plan with our medical team...I thought before I was fully awake about writing a song to the tune "Purple Rain"...starting "G=B=M, G-B-M..." But after I was more awake I thought it might be a bad idea...percieved as tasteless and #toosoon? Yea, I know it's too soon. No disrespect! Hey, I was part of the Prince generation - blaring his music in our dorm rooms and dancing around like maniacs. (although, I think Prince was so cool, he'd appreciate the effort.)

R.I.P. Prince.

So, I'll go with an analogy instead...
Here we are in our situation right now:
Last MRI has shown disease progression after a string of clean, stable MRI's. (the primary site is still looking stable, BTW). So, we're facing the decision making of options for treatment presented to us.

I began to think of a possible analogy...here's what I came up with:

Imagine Steven and I are hiking on a beautiful trail. All around us, there are beautiful things to see and hear - wind rustling the leaves above our heads ... occasionally, 'rounding  a corner, viewpoints to look out all the way in the horizon and seeing green, green mountaintops and valleys...

and we gather our things and leisurely continue our hike,pointing out to each other bright yellow  wildflowers just off the trail, ..And just feeling peaceful and calm.Sometimes just enjoying chitchatting, other times no talking, just enjoying each other's company.

But the wind kept getting stronger, and if we looked up into the sky, we could see dark clouds starting to move in over us. It started to rain. At first, it's no problem. Little drip-drop-drip...we stopped for a minute on the side of the trail, and pulled our rain gear out of our packs because we're prepared. You never know, but sometimes, it just starts raining in the middle of a hike. NO biggie.

Then the wind started to pick up. And the sky became ominously dark. It's like we were hiking in the night. But again, we stop and pull out our headlamps so we can still see in front of us on the trail. No more chattering and joking around. But it's not altogether unpleasant. The smells of the wet bark and dirt of the trail are different than before.
The rain is coming down harder and harder

 We can hear water rushing as we approach a trail crossing. rocks and boulder we have to hop on, leapfrog, to avoid falling into the rushing water. The second crossing, the water has splashed on one of the rocks and Steven sees me starting to wobble on it, reaches out, and grabs me tight, pulling me to the side of the trail, so I don't fall in. Because of the intensity of the storm, it's clear that if we turned around and tried to attempt to go back the other way, we would probably not be able to get back to trailhead with these treacherous conditions.

At each trail crossing, we have to make a decision. And as the conditions worsen, we rely on each other more and more - remembering advice and experience and that "gut feeling" to help guide us to safety... We can't see the end of the trail. We are in the moment, focused on the Now.

It's getting tense. Shouldn't we be close to the destination we'd planned out? Nothing looks familiar to the maps and guide books we looked through so many times before the beginning of this.

And here we are now. We've reached a trail crossing that nobody told us about. No earlier advice, no notes or map. The water seems to be rushing by like a freight train, and we look to each other as we had each other time. "What do you think?" We each say.

Yea.

It's kind of like that.

I'm ready for the rain to stop and the water to dry up some more. Or just find some safe spot for Steven and I to find a place that we could sit on a bench together to rest for a few and then grab ahold of each other's hands and walk out of this shit storm to safety.I think we need a brain cancer sherpa or something. Do they exist? They should.