13 Sunday Oct 2013
I write a bi-weekly column for my hometown newspaper, The Antrim Guardian. I love knowing that my parents wait to see what I’m going to write about next, so it was a treat to imagine my dad opening the paper a couple of weeks ago to find that it was all about him. Happy Birthday, Da.
07 Monday Oct 2013
No better way to end a night celebrating the poetry of Seamus Heaney than with a Powers whiskey and a bit of craic. The only thing missing was a turf fire, but this is Phoenix, Arizona, the weather still warm on the first Friday of October. No need yet for a hot whiskey, not the way my father makes it as a cure for the cold or whatever ails you, methodically warming the glass before adding two spoonfuls of sugar and a decent ‘nip’ of Powers. So the glass won’t crack, he’s always careful to place a metal spoon in it before pouring in the boiling water. The final touch, a slice of lemon studded with cloves.
A man like my father would have been right at home in the McLelland Irish Library which rises like a 12th century Norman castle from a spot just north of downtown Phoenix, a city that is not even two hundred years old. In my mind’s eye, he is surveying the arch above the doorway, calculating how much limestone and labor went into it, and marveling that it was quarried, cut, and carved in County Clare by master stonemason Frank McCormack, the kind of Irish craftsman who would not be out of place in Heaney’s poetry along with the blacksmith, the diviner, and the thatcher, well-practiced in the techniques and tools of time-honored crafts, just like my father:
If you look at that doorway, you’ll see old history. You’ll see we used the chisel the same way stonemasons did 1,000 years ago.
Within the walls of this latter-day castle, ten of us, including the library’s founder, Norman McClelland, paid homage to the poet, our readings and reminiscences proving again and again that what Heaney had to say applied not just in Anahorish but in Arizona, not only to the Irish but to people anywhere. Lines I had only ever heard read aloud in Northern Ireland were delivered in American voices and then the familiar lilt of Derry, Dundalk, and my own Antrim, as each of us stepped up to the microphone with our notes and our dog-eared collections of his poetry.
Perhaps she was in the audience on Friday evening, the reporter who had asked me if I thought you had to be Irish to appreciate Seamus Heaney’s poetry. Her question caught me off guard, and the way she asked it suggested she was unfamiliar with his work. Still, I responded inadequately. What I meant to tell her was that in the crucible of Heaney’s poetry, she would no doubt find herself represented along with everyone else; she would find “the music of what happens” then and now; she would find not what it means to be Irish, but all that it means to be human and searching, always searching – digging.
After the event on Friday, I remembered a story in The Observer about Heaney and his great friend, the poet Ted Hughes. Young and bold, they were drinking poteen and singing songs in Belfast one evening after a poetry reading, the world at their feet. Sipping my cool whiskey, toasting him silently and so far away from Northern Ireland, I wondered what our poet would have said about the gathering in Phoenix. His words would have been modest and more about us than about himself, I’m sure.
In 1996, he delivered the Commencement address at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, telling the graduating class:
Make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you.
Oh, Seamus, I hope you know you made the world a better one for us. Thank you.
22 Tuesday Nov 2011
Posted in Being young, Breast Cancer Treatment, Diagnosis
Tags
breast density, diagnosis, early detection, Health Writing Activist Monthly Challenge, lump, mammogram, pink ribbon, self-exam, Susan G. Komen
I should have written about it at the time, right after I heard “tumors” in the context of my right breast but it took 17 calendar days before I could actually put pen to paper. Sort of.
It’s all too common, apparently – all too acceptable. Somewhere between taking a shower and putting on deodorant, on a Saturday like any other, I discovered a thickening, a lumpish thing above the nipple of my right breast. Inexplicably, within a split second of feeling it, I began sobbing, as if my body already knew. I called my husband into the bathroom. He usually doesn’t respond so quickly, especially when he’s reading the newspaper, but he was there in a flash, wondering what was wrong with me. As only he could, he asked, somewhat rhetorically, if I hadn’t been doing my monthly self-exams. He was genuinely surprised to hear that, no, I hadn’t. I think he might even have been shocked or a bit annoyed with me. Don’t all women know they’re supposed to do self-exams? Isn’t early detection via self-exam damn near the same as a cure? So why hadn’t I been checking? Hadn’t I walked with my best friend and my daughter in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure? Yes. Three times. Hadn’t I just donated a dollar for a pink ribbon at the Ulta store? Yes. Actually two, two dollars, because I’d donated a dollar for Sophie as well. And, we’d proudly pinned those ribbons to our T-shirts. Hadn’t I signed up for “Buddy Check 12” email notifications from local TV channel 12, so I would remember to check my breasts each month? Yes, but all those email reminders were directly forwarded – unopened – to my trash folder,. As it turns out, not one of my buddies has been checking her breasts either. Not a one – until now, I imagine – had taken the time to perform a self-exam.
Ironically, and in spite of being proactive by scheduling and actually showing up for a baseline and three subsequent mammograms in recent years, I probably wouldn’t have been able to detect the specific lump any earlier anyway. The dirty little tumor that has taken up residence in my right breast has hidden itself in dense tissue for who-really-knows-how-many years. But that news will come later.
It was a Sunday or a Saturday, as it always is when I need to see a doctor, so I promised my husband I would make an appointment for Monday. I’d been fighting a sore throat for a couple of weeks anyway, so I thought I could kill two birds with one stone. Monday came and went, with the kinds of distractions that people running schools actually and easily put before their own health (and their own children) all too often. Whatever. I remembered to call the doctor’s office first thing on Tuesday, and by some miracle got an appointment with my doctor the next day. I love my doctor. She’s a runner with fabulously unruly hair and a sense of style. She’s earnest and gentle which doesn’t really match the manner in which she begins every appointment, – an assertive handshake that strikes me as more typical of a vendor at a conference. On this particular day, she was dressed in autumnal colors, and she even had boots on. Shallow, I know, but I remember thinking less about the weirdness in my right breast and more about my doctor’s fashion choice that morning. Like me, I imagined, she was thankful that Phoenix had finally delivered the sort of weather where it wouldn’t look wildly inappropriate to don boots. And socks.
Why hadn’t I seen my ob-gyn she pondered? Well, it hadn’t occurred to me. I suppose it was more manageable – in my mind – if my family doctor could just dismiss the lump as nothing to worry about, while she figured out whatever was going on with my throat. No such luck. It took her but a minute to attribute my sore throat to the dry desert weather at this time of year. Allergies. Post-nasal drip. No big deal. She was so much more interested in the lump. While she palpated my right breast, she sort of talked to herself about how she couldn’t quite discern if it was just really dense tissue or if something else was going on.
“You’re dense and lumpy,” she murmured as if this was something I’ve known all along. I didn’t know to ask if my denseness was something that might possibly have been related to the negative results of three previous mammograms. Yes, she concluded, my right breast was definitely “distinctly different” from the left. She definitely thought “we” should check it out, so she ordered a mammogram for November 4th, my brother’s birthday, and off I went. I wasn’t even a little concerned. A seasoned hypochondriac, I knew deep down it was nothing, maybe just a little cyst – nothing to write home about.
Not that I thought about it there and then, but there is no history of breast cancer in my family. My mother has had all manner of medical ailments, but none involves a breast. Everybody in our family knows the heart is the organ of concern for those on my mother’s side – blockages, aneurysms, hardening of the arteries, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, that kind of thing. Not breast cancer. And, from a cardiovascular perspective, I am a fine specimen. My doctor tells me so. I’ve been eating well and running again. Every other day, I’ve been running along a 5K stretch of canal, accompanied by “Couch to 5K” podcasts created by a stranger named Carli, who encourages my 48 year old feet to keep going with an eclectic mix running the gamut from Eminem to The Grateful Dead.
My hair’s almost the length I want it to be. Christmas, my favorite time of year, is right around the corner, and we’ll celebrate our darling girl’s 14th birthday. She’ll have a small group of her artsy friends over for tea and cake, and they’ll watch Monty Python’s Holy Grail. For me, after wishing aloud that Bob Seger would bring his Silver Bullet Band back to Phoenix, turns out he’ll be here December 23rd, and I’ve managed to score great seats – an aisle seat for my husband, otherwise he’ll complain, and a ticket for our daughter, who remains completely unconvinced that one day she’ll look back on all her ticket stubs and realize that her mother is very hip and trendy after all.
She’s not quite there yet. Nor is Christmas.
