End of Cancer Treatments + a Poem

My oncologist has agreed that I should go off cancer meds (Aromasin) and chemo. This is something that rated a celebration, so I took myself out to lunch after leaving the cancer clinic. (Do I know how to party, or what?)

This whole journey began over three years ago when, by sheer accident, they discovered cancer in my right breast. It never showed in any imaging. They did a lumpectomy to remove what they thought was a benign papilloma in one of the ducts--it was, indeed, benign--and discovered carcinoma. After three surgeries in two months, I ended up minus that breast and all its lymph glands and counting myself lucky, since the breast had been riddled with carcinomas that didn't show up in any diagnostic imaging. We had caught it just before it began moving out of the breast.

The mastectomy left me with lymphedema in my right arm, a condition that can't be cured but must be managed for the rest of my life. And my fierce, little oncologist who  sees herself in a never-ending battle with cancer (and whom I love and respect) put me on daily meds and an every-six-months infusion to try to prevent the same kind of hidden cancer from growing in my left breast. The side effects of these however, exacerbated my lupus and fibromyalgia, leaving me in massive flare continually. The fatigue and weakness, joint pain, and muscle pain and weakness decreased my mobility more and more as time passed. So I finally decided that I needed to stop at three years, even though she had wanted me to stay on this regimen for at least five years.

So I was nervous when I went in for my six-months treatment and told her I didn't want the chemo and had already stopped taking the Aromasin. I explained that I saw it as a quality-of-life decision--and to my great relief, she agreed with me. I didn't want to anger her. This woman, my wonderful female surgeon, and the rest of my medical team probably saved my life, and I'm eternally grateful to them. I just didn't want to spend any more years as a semi-invalid. 

So, as I finally put cancer behind me, I want to post this poem I wrote one day after my time in the chemo clinic. I met so many people who were fighting hard and sometimes pretty hopeless battles with such courage and dignity. I always came out of my time in the chemo chair--which was nowhere as awful as what some of them endured each time--with renewed respect for those other patients and for the nurses, who were always upbeat, kind, and truly caring.

IN THE CHEMO CLINIC

In the chemo clinic today cushy chairs raise us above

the ground like children with feet dangling until the nurses

put us in recline with our feet out in front

of us and our heads tilted back fluorescent colored

bags hang from rolling chrome towers a different color

for each of us we’re having a real party here this cold rainy

afternoon colorful plastic lines drip the bright

liquids into us every one to her own poison it’s just us

girls here today no guys this time gaunt gray cheeked

white haired if we had any left girls except

a few of us who have swelled like helium balloons

pumped to the breaking with the pills we take

at home and of course the nurses so good at finding

collapsed veins and installing new ports we’re trading

jokes cemetery humor and laughing even if some eyes

look scared or tired of the fight no one willing to be

the party pooper though all too familiar with the job

those bright colored chemicals leaving the bags

for our bodies do on the gut everyone laughing and praying

let me keep it down let me make it out and home

before it hits let me make it let me not die and leave

the drab dripping trees that I know will put out new shoots

green and lacy in the spring let me live to see them

let me be one of the ones who beats this

let me make it please let me make it

©Linda Rodriguez 2016

Poem for My Husband on His Birthday at Summer Solstice

In this photo, my husband Ben sits in the middle between our dear friend, Sergio Troncoso, and me at the 2017 AWP national conference.

Today is his birthday and the summer solstice. In less than two weeks on the Fourth of July, we will have been living together as a couple for 29 years, and on December 27th, we'll be legally married for 25 years. So I wanted to post a poem I'd written for him to celebrate his birthday and the Solstice.

I've written many poems for him, including the title poem of my chapbook of passionate love poems, Skin Hunger. But in today's solstice heat, I thought I'd post the one I wrote about the day after we arrived home from our honeymoon when he ventured out after an overnight ice storm for the newspaper and fell on the ice. It seemed to offer insights into the risky act of marriage itself.

WALKING ON ICE

after a back injury is a constant

putting yourself at risk.

I know this fear well

from years of setting nerve-damaged heel

firmly on glazed cement

that may turn banana peel on me

as if in some eternal silent film gag.

For you, it’s all new—

the discovery that solid earth can shift

you from upright to supine

as soon as the water on its surface hardens.

We age by learning

such hard truths, move through life

gingerly testing our footing, or else

by smashing the brittle in our way

and sweeping the shards

from the sidewalk.

It’s not so hard, learning

to balance on the shine.

Published in Heart's Migration (Tia Chucha Press, 2009)

Poem for Father's Day--"Safe At Last"

This photo is of my youngest brother's Little League baseball team and its coaches, including my stepfather (the small man on the left in the back row).

On Father's Day, it is this man I remember and honor, a man who took on a bunch of traumatized kids when he married my mother and earned his "Dad" the hard way, the man who died in my and my sister's arms with our brothers all around his bed in that town where none of us lived any longer. 

I wrote this poem after his funeral, and it seems appropriate for Father's Day and all of us whose fathers and stepfathers and father-substitutes are no longer with us to celebrate on the day in their honor.

 SAFE AT LAST

I can’t cry any more,

eyes swollen, lashes stuck together,

so come then, elusive sleep,

wipe the screen behind closed lids

of today’s grief. Show films

scrambled in the projector,

ends and beginnings framed

by the middle, split once

and then again, past still coming,

future remembered, present

dreamed but never known.

Mix the stilted eulogy and the trip to Disneyland.

Let him coach the scrubby little-league team

as we stand on glowing green plastic

artificial grass carpet

under the cobalt blue vinyl canopy,

listening to echoes

of his voice calling to my brother,

“Slide home. Go for it. Home.”

Published in Heart's Migration (Tia Chucha Press, 2009)

For Father's Day, In Praise of Men Who Take On Other Men's Children

When I look back on my life, I realize I’ve been lucky enough to be closely involved with three men who had the ability to take on children who weren’t their own genetic children and love and care for them as fathers. It will be Father’s Day soon, and I want to say a word or two about these kinds of unsung heroes. ...

Read more on my blog today at The Stiletto Gang.

http://thestilettogang.blogspot.com/2017/06/men-who-take-on-other-mens-children.html

Books of Interest from Writers of Color--GOOD SEEDS by Tom Pecore Weso

Guest Review by Ben Furnish

(Since Ben Furnish is writing a food memoir called Restaurant Therapy himself, he seemed the best reviewer for this new award-winning (National Winner of The Gourmand Award and IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards Silver Medal Winner) book, which memorializes an entire Indigenous way of life through the gathering, preparing, and eating of food.

As always, I encourage readers to support the small and university presses that publish these books, without which we would have few books by writers of color, at all. Order Good Seeds below.) 

http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/whspress/books/book.asp?book_id=510

Good Seeds: A Menominee Indian Food Memoir by Thomas Pecore Weso (Wisconsin Historical Society Press) is one of those rare books that really does stretch and dissolve boundaries of genre that too often separate literary from culinary and historical writing. 

Weso focuses especially on what he remembers about cooking and eating with his traditional grandparents as he grew up in 20^th century northern Wisconsin. As deceptively simple a detail as the uneasy status of oatmeal on his grandmother’s breakfast table, which Weso recounts early in the book, becomes a key in understanding the religious identity and educational background of his grandparents and mother.

Weso’s grandmother, Jennie, encountered oatmeal—and other such fare as pancakes—having attended Catholic schools that served Menominee areas in Wisconsin. In fact Menominee at that time had to choose between the Catholics and the Lutherans for schooling. If they wanted a secular-sponsored rather than religious education, their only choice was to do like Weso’s medicine-man grandfather, Moon, and attend the federal Haskell Institute in Kansas, where “they didn’t care what your religion was, as long as you were there for head count at morning muster.” 

A generation later when Weso’s mother attended Haskell, however, she learned to eat oatmeal there. So Weso remembers oatmeal occasionally served in deference to his mother, but it remained something of an interloper on his grandfather’s menu. But even so, for the Menominee, oatmeal became a savory rather than a sweet dish, and Weso gives the recipe for Menominee-style oatmeal seasoned with pepper.

Although each chapter ends with relevant recipes for its storyline, the chapters’ narratives form the real heart of the book. Each story offers an intrinsically interesting story about his grandparents’ lives, but Weso goes on to place their experiences in the broader spectrum of Menominee experience of the time, and of Wisconsin and American experience more broadly.

"This is one of the most important differences between Native and European traditions," says Weso. "Wild rice grows and is used; it is not a profitable crop. ... Before a culture can take root, the storytellers need to be fed. ... Wild rice made the Menominee life possible."

Among the later chapter subjects are Wisconsin diners and the Menominee tradition of an Indian county fair—which today lives on as a Menominee powwow. While Weso’s guidance in preparing squirrel or beaver will likely remain for me an exercise of the imagination rather than a practical matter of instruction, that fact only rendered it more compelling on the page. Weso also captures something of the feel of this close rural community of Native Americans near the Canadian border—and of colonialism's uninvited cook at work in the family kitchens of of 20^th century Native Americans.

With the literary economy to rival poetry, these recipes and commentary document a particularly vivid and essential aspect of daily life and cultural expression in a changing ethnic community.   

Ben Furnish works as an editor/publisher and teacher in Kansas City, is the author of Nostalgia in Jewish American Theater and Film: 1979-2004 (Peter Lang), and is currently writing the food memoir, Restaurant Therapy. 

Sparking Your Creativity - Today on The Stiletto Gang

Sometimes we work so hard with such packed days that we burn out. This is not uncommon among writers. Unlike the image of the writer out there in the media, it's actually a hard job, full of dailiness and routine for the writing and the business sides, in addition to creativity. And sometimes the demands of the job leave us feeling dry and empty. At those times, it's vitally important for a writer--or any artist--to get back in touch with the creativity trapped inside her.

Today on The Stiletto Gang, I talk about ten ways to do just that.

http://thestilettogang.blogspot.com/2017/06/sparking-your-creativity.html

Plotting vs Pantsing--Today on The Stiletto Gang

Today, you'll find me on The Stiletto Gang discussing writing novels with and without plotting them out ahead. "Plotting vs Pantsing" is a false dichotomy, I find.

http://thestilettogang.blogspot.com/2017/05/plotting-vs-pantsing.html