22 Years Cancer-Free!

Today marks the twenty-second anniversary of the day my radiologist called and told my parents, “We got it all.” I wasn’t home at the time, and this pre-dated cell phones, so the way my parents chose to tell me the news was by banging pots and pans as I drove up the driveway. I got out of the car to the clanging of spoons on metal, and my parents rushed toward me to tell me that I was cancer-free.

(Truth be told, I don’t know the exact date, only that it was during my high school’s Regents Week, which is around this time of year. I chose this particular date to celebrate the anniversary because it also happens to be my half-birthday.)

Cancer-Time

It was 1999. I was a senior in high school, preparing for auditions at music colleges. In the past three-and-a-half years, I’d made great friends, gotten good grades, joined the marching band, and played Mae Peterson in “Bye, Bye, Birdie.” I’d gone to prom with my boyfriend, taken school trips to Broadway and played solos in concerts. Woven among those wonderful memories, though, was a chain of cancer-battles. Four surgeries, from July 1995 to August 1998; three treatments with radioactive iodine that required me to isolate in a clean room for 4 days (yes, folks, I was quarantining way before 2020); countless doctor’s appointments, ultrasounds, and tests. It was hard on my family. It was harder on me than I allowed myself to process at the time.

I handled it in a rudimentary, teenaged-brain way, by compartmentalizing. “This is the cancer-time,” I’d say before another hospital stay. “This is my real life,” I’d insist before going back to school. Many of my friends knew very little about it. My best friend was one of the few allowed into both spaces (as I wrote about in “Dr. Pepper,” recently published by Barnstorm Journal). My bandmates helped me simply by being there and absorbing my emotion through music (as I expressed in my essay “The Band Room,” performed at Lincoln Center in January 2020).

Of course, I didn’t know that day in the driveway that the cancer-time had truly ended. It was only the first good news. There would be scares later, routine ultrasounds that showed enlarged lymph nodes that led to biopsies. This happened twice. Both turned up negative. I’ve been lucky, and I’ve been blessed. If I get sick again, I’ll have the support I need. I’ll know how to deal with it emotionally as well as physically.

Celebrate!

Today I woke up and decided to do all of my favorite things (within the confines of 2021 restrictions, of course). I wrote in my journal, did a long (virtual) step aerobics class, and snuggled with my kids. I’m making a loaf of bread that I started fermenting on Inauguration day (I named it Harris, after Kamala). I’m listening to a playlist of happy music all morning. Tonight I’m serving my great-grandmother’s two-day chicken soup. I feel grateful for a body that has energy and good health even without a thyroid, for a mind that sparks creatively and communicates her feelings much better than at seventeen. I’m grateful for the ability to make good food to share with my family. And most of all, I’m grateful for that family– old and new, chosen and born– who made these twenty-two years so precious.