Being bald

The winds of autumn just won't stop, washing my bald head with clean air from a thousand miles away. Covered in a layer of moist from my walk back to the hospital, I am freezing cold and my thoughts frozen with me. 

I prepared for this newly bald head for months, my hair slowly falling like the autumn leaves and doctors furrowing brows to understand why.

I didn't know it would spin me 360 degrees to shave my head. Live with cancer long enough, and you grow immune to it, the constant thoughts of mortality, the wonder about what will happen if. You pray your body is growing immune along with your mind, that you just might fight it off with those magic natural killer cells your bones make. That the radiation is over and you'll finally be out from underneath the cloud always leaden with rain about to fall.

I run thankfully through the early morning mist cool and concentrated, to Monday's central nursing orientation at my new job, looking for a reprieve from these renewed thoughts racing always toward cancer, future and past, life and death. The last half of the day we are lectured by chaplains, social workers, and nurses who work with palliative care and hospice. My mind races deeper into itself with each word they speak. That isn't me, is it? One nurse in particular keeps giving me pointed stares as she talks about the hospital services for people with life-threatening or long-term chronic illness, stressing that this is available to employees as well. I duck deeper into my hat and scarf, and grit teeth against the bile while I struggle to think up something to transport me out of this suddenly claustrophobic room.

Think there's a stigma against smokers? Try being one with a bald head. Every grandma and mom in the neighborhood will take it upon herself to stop you and tell you that's why you have cancer. My mind screams a futile protest. I've only been smoking since May and I've had cancer since 2008. But why try to argue with the unwanted adviser who shakes her finger at you out a passing car window? So much for relaxation. I run back to orientation, sweat clammy on my neck, wind blowing down my overcoat.

Shaving your head is like undressing in front of every stranger you meet throughout your day. Everyone can guess your story, and you get every reaction in the book, while you wish you got none: sympathy, the averted glances, the advice, the looks askance.

I didn't know a naked head was equivalent to a naked and vulnerable story. 

And after the storm, I run and run as the rains come 

And I look up, I look up, 

on my knees and out of luck, I look up. 

Night has always pushed up day 

You must know life to see decay 

But I won't rot, I won't rot 

Not this mind and not this heart, I won't rot. 

And there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears. 

And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears. 

Get over your hill and see what you find there, 

With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair. 

And now I cling to what I knew

I saw exactly what was true 

But oh no more. 

That's why I hold, That's why I hold with all I have. 

That's why I hold. 

I will die alone and be left there. 

Well I guess I'll just go home, 

Oh God knows where. 

Because death is just so full and mine so small. 

Well I'm scared of what's behind and what's before. 

~After the Storm, Mumford and Sons~

Bald is beautiful

It's the coldest day of fall, the wind sweeping through our little valley and stripping maples of scarlet and cottonwoods of silver. My hair is fading fast, patchy, itchy, painful to the touch. It wakes me up at night when I turn to the other side. One doctor says it's stress, another radiation damage and burns, another says it's just "idiopathic". All agree we won't know until I shave it off so they can see my scalp.

And so, unable to face another shower through which I grit teeth and lose handfuls more of hair, I ask Aaron if it's the right time. He smiles big and says yes. Grabs the clipper set and gathers the children in the kitchen. As he starts to shave, the relief is immediate. First a mohawk (just for the heck of it), then a military buzz cut. Kids clamor to feel it each time. The patches of loss are evident in the buzz cut and I begin to believe deeper that this is the right decision.

And we can immediately see what the problems is - red burned patches all over my scalp. The entire top of my head is one big reddened sore. Through piles of hair I didn't want to move much, the betamethasone cream prescribed for the burns hasn't been working over the past 3 weeks. Now hairless, I can apply it straight to skin and as I do, the burning quells for the first time in months and my scalp actually feels weightless again.

And so I come to a new stepping stone on my cancer journey. Three years after diagnosis, I finally lose my hair to cancer. I empathize deeply with the patients in my past who've cried through chemo and radiation and finally begged to have their head shaved. The relief is unfathomable. And bald is beautiful. My husband grins even larger, and kisses the soft top of my naked head. Says it's beautifully round. That being bald brings out my eyes and my lips and makes me even more beautiful to him than before. More compliments than I've received in a single day in my entire marriage.

To think that God knows every one of those strands of hair now cut off, knows how it will grow back, and loves me, like my husband, however I look...I have no worries. Just relief. I am so glad it's over with and so glad it feels better. God is good to me.

Pretty, pretty please, 

don't you ever, ever feel 

Like you're less than

less than perfect 

Pretty, pretty please,

if you ever, ever feel 

Like you're nothing, 

know you're perfect to me

~Pink~

Relevant '11

I cup warmth over my soapy face on the coldest day of autumn yet. I count on two hands the friends left after we quietly closed the doors after us on one church and opened up the doors on a new one. It's been a long year since, a year of more trials, and a year of days spent at home instead of out on playdates and coffee dates. Yet I feel so rich. Richly blessed, not friendless, content. Part of that blessing has been the rising of the online blogging community to support me and encourage me through this year. New friends, all afar, emerged from the Relevant blogging conference last October.

This year, at the last moment, the Lord opened all the doors for me to attend Relevant again. I am doing so to the tune of about $800, and our pocketbook is stretched thin with no paycheck yet from my new job. I come here humbly to ask that, if you feel so led, you might support me, too, through a donation. I've posted a link to a special Paypal account on the left. It's also included in this post. Simply click the "donate" button in either location, and enter the amount and your checking or credit card information. I have yet to pay for taxis, hotel room, or food for the four days I will be gone. I thank you in advance for anything you feel called to give. Just like warm water on a cold face will be your gifts on worries.

...comfort yourselves together, and edify one another, even as also you do. (I Thessalonians 5:11)

Just when the caterpillar thought life was over, she became a butterfly

At the edge of the sea, at the edge of the Great Lakes, where you can't see anything but water far into the horizon, you stand as close as a mortal can to oblivion. If you never turn around, and just keep staring out into that vast void of endless waves, you begin to realize in some small part just how small we all are.

Death seeps into the edges of life like black ink on the blotting cloth. A photo of youth, someone you can't hardly recognize in their form of today. Just a memory, that youthful face forever engraved in sepia on paper.

The flies and sinkers hang on their rod above my grandfather's work desk, right where he left them the last time he poured the hot lead into the mold and turned off the tungsten brown of the light off for the very last time. Life is but a breath, a vapor in the wind.

The last of the summer's flowers shouts in her yellow dress: this can't be the end! There must be somewhere cancer can't devour, and hearts can't flutter to a stop and tears leak for days on end like a dripping faucet that refuses to be completely shut off.

I hold a dying man's hand for the first time in many years, and I am grateful to be back. Being a nurse is such a large chunk of who I am created to be. I revel in the reading, catching up on ventriculostomies and arterial blood gases while the unit whirs constant around me. I come home refreshed, with a brighter joy when I see the faces of my children.

It feels like something returning, something that was snuffed out for many years. I think it might be me.

you do your work the best that you can 

you put one foot in front of the other 

life comes in waves and makes it's demands 

you hold on as well as you’re able 

you've been here for a long long time 

hope has a way of turning its face to you 

just when you least expect it 

you walk in a room you look out a window 

and something there leaves you breathless

you say to yourself it's been a while since i felt this 

but it feels like it might be hope 

it's hard to recall what blew out the flame 

it's been dark here since you can remember 

you talk it all through to find it a name 

as days go on by without number

~It Might Be Hope, Sara Groves~