Blue and brown

The young man is better, I'm glad to say, and has gone off to Chinatown for his customary Saturday lunch with friends, since he hardly saw them all week.

But Paul and I are both struggling with colds of various degrees. I'm not too bad, but he and I kept each other awake last night with a barking cough.

I struggled to Italian class this morning, and made a few neighbourhood stops on the way home, so our lunch was a ball of burrata mozzarella (with gorgonzola also inside), on fresh Dench grain bread, drizzled with porcini oil. Unbelievably delicious.

I feel ok now and am doing chores on the computer. Behind me, Paul is stretched out on the couch with a pillow, a blue mohair blanket and two burmese kittens. I'd love to post a picture, but the ipod is playing and I don't want to wake him up. It's on "shuffle" so we are jumping from jazz to Leonard Cohen and girly pop songs and retro 70s and 80s pop and lots of Beethoven and Sibelius. Something rather personal about him lying sleeping/listening to my mix, which desperately needs updating, except that my laptop is too old to use the current iTunes.

The heater's on. My three brown cats (one wearing a big brown jumper) are asleep. The sky is wintry pale blue, though at mid-afternoon the shadows are already long and the sunshine weakening.

I ploughed through a huge pile of emails and chores yesterday, and just as soon as I finish these grant assessments, I'll be ready to write a talk for Thursday and finish polishing my Langland talk to send off.

Health and sickness. Winter and sun. Blue and brown.

Gow

It's nearly three years since I blogged about my gorgeous ex-brother-in-law, Gow. I mentioned there his having come through a major health scare. Alas, there is every sign that his disease has returned.

Two days after I arrived in London, I met my sister after work at Green Park tube station (she works in a small investment bank in Mayfair) and we travelled north to Belsize Park, where he was in hospice care. It was a balmy spring evening, and it was a pleasure to be out of my usual Bloomsbury haunts and out into the leafier suburbs.

Gow was thin, and being medicated for pain relief, but his usual good humour and grace were shining through, though there were a few moments, I have to say, when we were all conscious of the gravity of his situation. His room was full of flowers, and he was having lots of visitors. He'd been out in the garden that afternoon, too. The hospice was clean and bright, and his room was lovely, but he had been there for a couple of months, while the doctors worked out what the next steps might be, and while he gathered strength for the next round.

He showed us these extraordinary collages he'd made, images of his internal organs and the weird eruptions the body produces: really, the art therapists must have fallen all over themselves when they met him...
















 
 A close-up, to show you how he made these assemblages from rolled threads and twists of fabric:

 
 And my favourite, which I'm calling "self-portrait with giant medications."  In this one you can particularly see the influence of the blue and white Japanese textiles amongst which he has been living and working...
 
 And here he is, smiling through...



Gow is keen to go back to Japan, if he can, but at least the first step of that journey is complete, as I heard last week he had checked out of the hospice and gone back to his own flat in London. And his brother is moving back to London to New York to help care for him.

It was wonderful to see him, and to see how strong the friendship between him and my sister still is, after all these years. We are now facebook friends, and I said I would load up my pics onto facebook as well, which I'll do now, too. Keep on shining through, darling.

I told you I was sick

... and have now had confirmation.  (And how lucky I am to be registered with a medical practice that holds a no-appointment clinic on Sunday morning for regulars who haven't been able to get in during the week.) I came home with

• a referral for a chest x-ray, as it seems as if my rib is cracked, not just bruised; 
• a prescription, plus repeat, for top-strength anti-biotics since the lingering cough turns out to be bronchitis;
• instructions for lung-clearing exercises that promise to be so painful (see cracked rib, above) I have to take paracetamol before I start them; 
• disprin to start thinning my blood before the flight to Italy, to counter the greater risk of DVT with a lung infection; and 
• a warning that if I don't get better soon I should think about cancelling my trip. 

Sigh. Still, I realise I have been fighting this cold since the day I got home from Berlin last month. No wonder I'm feeling a bit flat and run-down.

But also feeling strangely out-of-body, unexpectedly thrown back to 1971. I'm listening to Joel's new CD of Tea for the Tillerman, which was the very first record I ever bought. It cost $5 and I played it and played it over and over, and pored over the lyrics. And now "Longer Boats" is playing; and I realise how much I love this music still, its lyricism and its passion. Pity I have no breath to sing along with.

I've just dropped Joel at Trinity College for a week-long residential jazz intensive, being run by five members of the Juilliard Jazz programme. Yes. That Juilliard. So many excited teenagers running around looking for practice spaces to start jamming, before sessions start tomorrow. Can't wait for the Friday night end-of-course concert.

Following sport is HARD

I was about to give up on sport. I was so disappointed for Sam Stosur; then Essendon lost narrowly to Sydney and dropped out of the top eight; then Australia lost to the US at soccer (soccer!) in a World Cup warm-up. Well, but why did I tie my happiness to a woman I've never met who hits balls back and forth for a living? I told myself it was because I felt she was an ordinary woman who had recovered from serious illness and who was now about to make it really big. That's a pretty nice narrative to identify with. And she's not a prima donna. And she doesn't dress in chiffon to play tennis. And she is, after all, an Australian. But really, it's so arbitrary.

But we got home at midnight after seeing Richard III (run, don't walk, by the way, to get tickets for the last week of Ewen Leslie's extraordinary performance) and I turned on the TV to watch the second set. It was hard, for all my patriotism, not to be moved by Schiavone's late-career-blossoming, and her passionate kissing of the clay of Roland Garros, but I was all the same very disappointed for Stosur; and that feeling stayed with me much of the day (not improved by Essendon's last-minute loss to Sydney).

But I've just now seen Stosur on TV, saying how thrilled she was with her winning performances in Paris, and that while she was disappointed, she was still going to enjoy her success. So I'm somewhat reconciled, now, and reminded of all those truisms about sport; that it teaches you how to lose, as well as how to win.

I think with sport, I'm particularly fascinated by what looks like the purity of a good athlete's focus and concentration: evident, often, only when they have stopped competing and let go. I find it much harder to have the same kind of on-off switch with my own work. But could wish for it. And I think that's why I like vicariously switching on to see that kind of concentration at work. And surely, Sam's set up well for Wimbledon? No one will take her for granted, at least.

bedding down

If things have been quiet around humanities researcher lately, it's not because I recently joined facebook (I can see how it might be addictive, but I hope I'm not going to be sucked in too deeply), but for these reasons:

(a) there is not much research being done around here lately. It's the pointy end of the teaching year for me, with two new subjects to bed down and a bunch of additional lectures; plus the whole getting-used-to-being-head thing and the business of bedding down our teaching for next year.

(b) there has been a lot of fussing (much of it on my part) about our large Centre of Excellence application (actually based at UWA). I have some excellence in some areas: budgets are not one of them. But finally the draft letter and draft budget of the Melbourne end of it are completed. It seems they all may have to be done again, but at least, now, there are some senior people in some senior research offices at two ends of the continent working together. It's working with an inadequate sense of what might be required that is very difficult.

(c) Finally, about two hours, on Wednesday, after the very successful inaugural recite-the-first-18-lines-of-the-General-Prologue competition (with appropriately Easter Lindten rewards [there's a good joke in there somewhere trying to get out], with first prize going to a beautiful solo rendition from memory; and second to a team effort, acted out with sun, winds, plants and birds, ending in a tableau of poor St Thomas with pilgrims kneeling at his side), I picked up a telephone message from my boy, rather apologetically saying he thought he had hurt his arm when he went over the top of the handlebars of his bike when braking suddenly, and might need an x-ray.

Thus began a two-day saga: I took him to emergency and after a couple of hours he was x-rayed; and then began the question of admitting him, and finding him a bed. Too young, really, for adult hospital, but unwanted by the Children's, he was in limbo (another incipient joke: if only I wasn't so tired) for several hours. It was becoming a political question, which would be resolved only by measuring the extent to which particular bones had finished growing. After P arrived, I left to attend my student's graduation: the hospital said they would send him home and admit him the next day. But because I went straight from hospital, after riding home, I was still in jeans, flat riding shoes; no make-up, and not even a hairbrush. I felt decidedly undistinguished sitting on the stage of Wilson Hall as a procession of beautiful shoes paraded in front of me to take out their degrees. I was very glad of my long robes. I was home by 10, but there was a note from P saying they had admitted Joel to St Vincent's, but because he was under 16, an adult had to spend the night with him.

I turned up at 8 the next morning to relieve P, who had an all-day meeting about his Centre of Excellence application (alas, we are rivals). They hadn't been admitted till 11 the night before; and had to wait and wait for a bed for P to sleep on. J was fasting since 6.00 am and was scheduled for surgery after 1.00. Well. He was bumped several times down the list as the afternoon went on (it's just a wrist fracture, but needed to be pinned), and so then it was my turn to stay overnight. At 3.00 this morning they were still planning to operate, so he had to remain fasting, while they put in a drip. At 5.30 am they wheeled him off to surgery, and nearly twelve hours later we are finally home. Everything went well enough, and apart from some nausea after the anaesthetic, he's feeling fine.

Oh. I forgot to say that the night before all this happened, I stayed up too late finishing the second Song of Roland lecture; and then after the graduation, came home to wrestle with the grant budget. I emailed it at 1.00 in the morning, and got a lovely personal message back from someone in the research office. The Perth people were up and on the case, too, but it was three hours earlier, there.

So while the doctors and medical staff lead odd hours (the orthopedic surgeon in particular often has to wait and wait for a free surgery while road trauma patients and knife victims are being treated), so too do scholars applying for research grants, and the research administrators who support them.

After three late nights and early mornings, then, I am just about counting the hours till I can go to bed again.

Little House on the Creek

In Little House on the Prairie there is a very affecting scene which I must have read many times. The family is suffering from an ague — and Laura, the least sick, must crawl across the cabin to fetch water for Mary. Both parents are also unable to move. Her body is aching but she makes it, and is praised as a hero by her parents.

It's not been quite that dire in this household, but close. P came back from the US last Sunday and immediately took to his bed, with what we thought was a violent case of food-poisoning. We know now better, as five days later, J and I fell ill within hours of each other, with the same thing. The worst of the dramatic symptoms only lasted 12 hours, but we are all weak as kittens, now. Yesterday we were taking turns to be the least sick, and to make the cup of tea and dried toast for the other. I went back to bed at 9.30 last night, and slept with a wet face-washer across my fevered brow. It's just what you want as you head into a new semester's teaching. And P is still a little frail, so it might be a long week.

I wasn't as sick as Mary and Laura, but I will confess to a moment of despair when everything seemed so horrible and difficult, I thought I'd never be able to read or write or teach ever again.

Two of J's friends have just come to pay a call, to make sure he's ok, and cheer him up. Sweet!

Home from the Country of the Sick

So, I'm on this clinical trial, right? When I started my treatment, I was seeing the oncologist every three months; and every six months would fill out an odd questionnaire that investigates things like one's experience of hot flushes, depression, joint pain, mood swings, vaginal dryness, insomnia. All the expected joys of chemically-induced menopause, then, plus the less common side-effects of tamoxifen and triptorelin, the trial drug: various forms of osteoarthrities, DVT, coronary failure, etc.

Gradually, as I continue to thrive, and show no sign of any recurrence of a tumour, I've been seeing Mitchell less and less, until yesterday, when, after a discussion mostly about New York, Daniel Barenboim, and the difficulties of the Australian university system, he suggested I don't need to see him for another twelve months. "We're going to let you off the leash," he said to me six months ago. We also had the discussion we have most times about whether I should have my ovaries removed; and I'm glad to say there now seems no real reason to do this.

The symptoms of the drugs have settled down somewhat, I'm glad to say, and while I still have another two and half years of daily Tamoxifen, plus monthly injections of Triptorelin, and while I still have to line up for an annual mammogram, ultrasound and review with Suzanne, my surgeon, for the next few Octobers, it seems I am on the homeward journey from Sontag's country of the sick, on my way to rejoining the women of my age with just the usual and ordinary struggles of menopause and the usual risk of breast cancer.

If you'd asked me, two years ago, how I'd feel about seeing Mitchell only once a year, I would have had a bit of a panic: I quite liked being under his regular care. Now I feel quite secure about it. And perhaps that's what he sensed; and perhaps that's what's encouraged him to cancel my visa to the country of the sick, and send me home.

Shadows and clouds

It's a dark, rainy Sunday morning in NYC. We are far from home. We learned last night that Paul's mother is in hospital, so we are going to phone every day. He, or all three of us, may go home early. So there is a shadow over us.

As I write, Joel is having his first shaving lesson. I can hear the twinned voices of my partner and child, just working away on the same wavelength of reason and instruction; question and answer. The timbres of their voices are completely distinctive, but also similar.

Before Joel disappeared into the bathroom, I ran my hand over his cheek and could feel that, yes, the down was no longer quite so downy; and indeed, the shadow of the moustache that has been growing for a few months now was starting to look a bit untidy.

For the first three or four years of his life, Joel's two grandmothers would each come and spend a day with him once a week. When it was Jean's turn, she would bring books, musical instruments, a tape recorder and tapes, and different selections of toys and games. They would have boiled eggs for lunch, and kept collections of "egg people", the upside-down shells of the eggs, decorated with different faces and hair, in the egg cartons on the window sill. She would also bring her camera; we have wonderful photos of those days they spent together.

When Paul and his brother and sister were still very young, she trained as a kindergarten, then a primary school teacher, and by the time of her first heart attack in 1990, she was the principal of the large junior school in one of Melbourne's most elite private schools.

The years Jean would come to care for Joel were in the times before we re-built the back half of our house. I am not exaggerating when I say the bare concrete floor was cracked and uneven; that the elm trees at the front of the house were sending up suckers where the floor boards ended and the concrete began; that the ceiling of the kitchen was covered in specks of plaster; that many of the walls were bare lathe and plaster. Jean would sweep and sweep, and one day discovered the reason why she could never finish getting the floor under the cupboards (themselves sitting on piles of bricks) truly clean was because there was a gap between floor and wall: she was actually sweeping the garden into the house. It was brutally cold in winter, though not unpleasant in the little sun-drenched area next to the laundry. On sunny summer afternoons, that area was unbearable.

She and Joel would sing and laugh and play music much of the day. Of her six grandchildren, Joel is the one who carries that music in his body. Not only does he play and sing; he plays in the air, with his hands, even when he makes no sound.

Eight or nine years ago, after Jean had recovered from two more smaller heart attacks, she said to Joel that she hoped, if he married, she would be able to come to his wedding. "Of course, Nan", he said, not understanding why she wouldn't.

He has emerged from the bathroom, quietly pleased, the smooth contours of his face more precisely defined. Without the shadow of that moustache, he looks, in one sense, younger. But there is no doubt that today, he has also grown up a little more. In these shadows, in these clouds, we are all growing up a little more.

Wanna read a blog about a trauma?

Hey, guess what? Someone has written an article (partly) about my blog.

A couple of years ago, in a post I don't think I could easily find now, Pavlov's Cat suggested that blogs about illness and trauma were under-recognised as ways of processing the experience of diseases like cancer. Critical commentary seems to be catching up with her, though.

Yesterday I came across (ok, by checking the referral pages to my blog on sitemeter) an article in M/C Journal (a journal of media and culture) 11.6 (2008), special issue:'recover', by Anthony McCosker, called "Blogging Illness: Recovering in Public", in which he discusses a number of blogs: Brainhell; Prostate Cancer Journal; Leroy Sievers' My Cancer; Tom's Road to Recovery; and Humanities Researcher.

I came upon Brainhell's blog just as he was dying, and had heard of Leroy Sievers', but it was all the same quite odd to read about my blog in this context and in this company. Anthony (I knew him a while back) uses these blogs to make an argument for the particular kind of writerly practice blogging represents:  

an expressive element of the substance of the illness as it is experienced over time, as it affects the bodies, thoughts, events and relationships of individuals moving toward a state of full recovery or untimely death

He concludes, in part:

Whatever emancipatory benefits may be found in expressing the most intimate of experiences and events of a serious illness online, it is the creative act of the blog as self-expression here, in its visceral, comprehensive, continuous timestamped format that dismantles the sense of privacy in the name of recovery.

But one doesn't have to blog about one's own illness to accomplish the work of re-thinking privacy: see Liz Conor's In One Stroke, which recounts her partner's stroke, while on a camping holiday. It includes these memorable lines:

At the moment it dawned on us that something was not right he half turned to me, rolled his eyes back and sat hard on the floor. He tried to get up, half fell out the door and rested there, assuring me he was fine through the right side of his face, drooling from the left.

I also liked this bit:

It is a big part of Jeremy’s job to give the assembled public the assurance of his own calm competency. This he offered to the riveted campers, smiling half-faced through his oxygen mask.

I love this: that remarkable capacity we have to keep going, to reassure others (especially our children) that we are "fine". Just keeping on going on.

Girly pleasures: or why I love my moisturiser

I'm into the second week of this headcold now (apparently it lasts a good two or three weeks, with the possibility of a re-run later). I'm back cycling and playing tennis, though the combination of an hour's tennis and twenty minutes cycling home in a cold wind tonight nearly did for me. A little work tonight, then an early night for me.

Since I've been sick, I've felt constantly on the verge of dehydration, and had run out of my moisturiser, but have since been down to Klein's, and stocked up on my magic jar.

I open the black screw top lid on the little dark brown glass jar, and breathe in the aromatic scents of rosemary, sage and lavender. A fingertip full of soft white cream, and my skin suddenly feels normal again. I'm on the road to recovery.

It's spring, but I'm sick

There is a very nasty cold doing the rounds of my family, friends and workplace, to which I have now succumbed. It's described as having a kick in the tail, as it tends to come back and back. Joel's gone a couple of rounds with it; and I have spent much of the last week in bed. For the first few days I must have been a bit feverish, as my skin felt it was made of hot paper. I still feel I have to drink gallons of water a day just to stay three-dimensional.

On Thursday I managed to get out of bed and assembled myself to go to the Lyceum club, to give a talk on Women and the Order of the Garter. I excused myself from the lunch, fearing I would use all my voice up in conversation, and have nothing left for the lecture, but this was such a shame, as the women I did meet after the talk were all really interesting. It's a beautiful club. I'd been there at night, but during the day the lounges were flooded with natural light. I was speaking to the History Circle, but there are lots of other groups and activities within the club. I can see all kinds of reasons for having a women's club; and this one has an extraordinary location tucked away in the heart of the city. Its walls are covered with original artworks; its tables with fresh flowers; and its plates with lovely food.

I was sorry I wasn't feeling better, though. I would have liked to make more of an effort with my ... toilette: the best I could do was make sure I had an embroidered handkerchief instead of a clutch of tissues. My friend Paula came along for support and I was so pleased she did, but again, I was sorry I wasn't in a more performative mode. Adrenaline got me out of bed and onto the tram, and up behind the lectern, but I would have loved to have been able to present my talk with a bit more oomph, especially for Paula to see. We have a mutual friend who's been much in the news lately through his leadership of the Australian team working on the Large Hadron Collider, and so I've been thinking again about what happens when our research meets the community, and how hard it is to explain technical research to a general audience.

And I might have anticipated something of this kind in such an environment, but after my talk, I was introduced to the wife of a Garter Knight! A reminder I must try and set up an interview with the man himself.

Anyway, the talk just about did for me, and I spent most of yesterday back in bed. This morning I determined to start building up energy again, and pushed myself to do about half of my usual walk along the river. When I got to Ceres, though, I was feeling a bit faint, so I lay down on the bench to recover my strength. I was nearly home again when I realised my keys had dropped out of my pocket, so I had to go back for them, and ended up doing a huge walk. The trouble is, my cold has now gone down to the bottom of my lungs, which now make a dreadful crackling sound when I cough. It also hurts, as I think I've pulled a muscle in my coughing. I've said I'll be back at work next week, but that might be a bit optimistic. I'm a great believer in not spreading disease around the workplace...

Teaching. You're doing something right ...

... when your students leave the room singing.

This week in my honours seminar I taught several extracts from Froissart's Chronicles of the 100 Years' War: the battle of Crécy and the siege of Calais. It came in between The Knight's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, which we start next week — four or five weeks that are usually the highlight of my teaching year.

We were all horribly struck, though, by Froissart's comments about Edward wanting to re-populate Calais with English blood. (I don't have my text in front of me, so can't quote.) I hadn't really thought of Edward as engaged in ethnic cleansing, but there it was.

However, even after this gruesome thought, as we were all packing up and leaving the ridiculously large room (there are nine enrolled students and one auditing/co-teaching graduate student), I distinctly heard one, and possibly another, singing.

I always associate singing with good cheer. It's typically a sign that Joel is better after being sick, for example, when I hear him singing around the house. At that sign, my mother's heart just releases that locked-up anxiety that surrounds a sick child.

He is home today, as it happens, with a barking cough; looking unaccustomedly pale and wan. So it'll be soup for lunch and lots of tea. I'll just put the kettle on now.

Excruciatingly Personal Blog Post No.3

The first stage is always the hardest. I'm struggling to climb up a steep hill which is covered in boulders of grey stone. They're loose, and keep tumbling down. Eventually I'm able to get higher, where the ground levels out a bit, where the stones stop sliding, and where tufts of grass start appearing between the rocks. Another effort of will, and I'm further on, where the ground is covered in grass so I can walk barefoot. A month or so later, I look up in surprise one day and see a tree, like a small birch, with leaves of green and silver flickering in the sunshine. Another day I see a little yellow flower like a dandelion; or a small yellow or white butterfly.

I walk along further and come to a little spring of water, flowing swiftly enough for me to sit on the edge and wash my feet. I walk along upstream against its gentle current, a mixture of bathing and walking, until I climb up into a deeper pool. At first this was pretty austere, surrounded by grey stone, but as the months have gone on, the pool is now surrounded by columns of golden stone, intricately carved, and interlaced with shiny green vines and climbing plants, and framing skies of Athenian blue. I swim here, quietly, stretching out, cleansed, in the pure water, fed by another spring.

And then I am summoned. A woman comes for me and I walk with her into a place of sun and light. I look up and feel myself bathed in sparkling light, a crystalline shower of light and water, and feel myself blessed and cleansed by the goddess, who is both invisible, and yet somehow radiant.

I walk on, inside, this time, into a dark hall with large doors that stand open into the sunlight. I find a large recumbent statue — a Buddha, I suppose — with an extraordinary property: I climb into its lap and whatever position I assume there is instantly peaceful. I stay there and sleep, or lie still and watch the motes of dust entering the room down shafts of sunlight.

And this is as far as I have got.

When I was reading my way into the world of breast cancer, I read about meditation as a form of pain management and relaxation. I took to it reluctantly, and still struggle hugely to still my mind enough to stop fretting about all those other things, the boulders that tumble down on me in the first stage. I'm also deeply dependent on my physical surroundings: sunlight and warmth figure hugely in this dream-vision narrative, and so I often need to be sitting outside, feeling the sun on my skin before I can begin.

But the true beginning was actually in the radiotherapy chamber. At the time, just over a year ago now, I wrote about my daily trips to the hospital here and here, but when the technicians had left the room, I would close my eyes and try and visualise the effect of the rays on the cancer cells. Years ago, I read about cancer patients playing Space Invaders with their cancer cells, zapping them into oblivion, fighting the evil invading cells as if they were so many aliens. I never felt comfortable with such military analogies, and so I visualised the machine showering me with health- and life-giving radiance, like a shower of pure water glistening in the sunshine, a shower that would wash me clean, would rinse and wash away the damaged cells.

So now, when I take my walk, I get to a certain point along the creek, and I stand and breathe in and hold my breath, and as I exhale I address any remaining cancer cells. I know which ones they are: the ones that the Tamoxifen has "locked" against oestrogen. So I say to them, "loosen; detach; dissolve", and they do; they slip from their moorings, move into my bloodstream and out at my feet into the waters of the Merri.

When I visualise the waters of the Merri moving down to Dights Falls, to join the Yarra, and out into the bay, I think I am seeing satellite images from Google Maps to help me. When I think about my dream-vision landscape, I think about the bits of Jung I have read. When I visualise moving into a large hall, with the possibility of moving through its doors into the sun again, I think about Joel's video games, the endless chambers and corridors of the Zelda games. When I think about being cleansed and showered with light and radiance by the goddess, I'm embarrassed, but I think about a whole range of conversations with various folk about health and peace and the world of spirit, which is not a world where I have spent much time at all. If I call her Athena, and think of her as goddess of learning, it helps a little to find something - a being - beyond myself, who has only my interests at heart. And indeed, I wrote about my wonderful
surgeon as a figure for Athena, too.

But if this landscape needs those external triggers, it's also a landscape I can take with me. In September last year, I climbed alone to the One Tree lookout over Ormiston Gorge, west of Alice Springs. I reached the top and looked over the other side of the gorge, and saw the rocks and grasses of my visionary landscape. I even poured a libation to Athena from my water bottle into the red sand of the cliff, and watched as steam rose up instantly from the hot rock. This was a week before my first annual mammogram and ultrasound. I then climbed down and swam in the dark waters of the gorge, in afternoon light.

Several weeks ago, too, I drove to Barwon Heads and walked along the beach to Ocean Grove and beyond. After about half an hour I turned back, and walked into the afternoon sun. The tide was out, and the flat smooth beach was covered in sheets and sheets of sparkling water, as shallow waves spread up the beach and receded, washing the beach again and again. Easy, then, to still the mind once more, and be transported into a state where I could sense light and water cleansing me of disease.

I'm encouraged, too, by the sudden appearances of a flower, a butterfly, in my dream-vision (I'm calling it that because that's the term we Chaucerians use: there is something not totally un-House-of-Fame-ish about this sequence of rooms and landscapes). If I concentrate, if I keep going, even if I need the sun on my neck, or the sound and sight of water, I feel there might be more of this landscape to discover.

An abrupt ending. I don't know what the next paragraph is. This was the third of the three difficult and personal posts. And now I don't know what the next post will be. But then, I never do, anyway.

I Know It's Not a Virus, but...

... we've just heard of the third friend/acquaintance/colleague to undergo surgery for breast cancer in the last three weeks, plus another, a few weeks ago whose lump turned out to be benign.

When I was first diagnosed, it was not uncommon for people to respond by adding me to their list of friends/acquaintances/colleagues with the disease. Or they might claim that breast cancer was a virus, or imply there was something about my lifestyle - my workplace, the time I spend in front of a computer, the way I worked - that might have caused the cancer. Suzanne, my surgeon, said simply, "we don't know why anyone gets breast cancer". The ABC studios at Toowong in Brisbane have been closed down, but to date, no reason has been found for the extraordinarily high incidence of breast cancer there. It's called a "cluster".

Of course I don't want to see my disease as anything I brought upon myself. Though I am full of determination about keeping on trying to simplify the way I work, to say "no" as often as I can (which still won't be enough), and to try and live more calmly. Will this keep any recurrence of the cancer at bay? No one knows, but I'll feel less at the mercy of forces beyond myself.

I am in the process of moving into my newly painted study, and making all kinds of ridiculous resolutions about keeping it clean and beautiful, as I get ready to pick up the threads of various writing projects in the new year. I do get things done, and I do meet most of my reading and writing deadlines, but I am not at all organised or disciplined about it. I have learned to respect my own work patterns of displacement activity (e.g. I have only written half that sentence but if I just go out and look at the goldfish one more time then when I come back I will bring it to a ringing final cadence), and even the longer-term patterns of the big halt halfway through a book. I wrote ten thousand words of my book on Gwen Harwood then threw them away and started again. I stopped Congenial Souls to have Joel and really struggled to pick up and find a way to finish it. This book on the Garter looks as if it will have suffered a similar hiatus, as a result of the horrible year I was having at work before I got sick; and then getting sick; though I think I am almost ready to pick it up again.

Anyway, at the moment only beautiful and clean things are allowed into my new study. This is not exactly "before and after", as the "before" image represents the rock bottom of the re-structuring. Literally. The old house had not much in the way of foundations apart from the rocks you see here:



And here is a glimpse of the "after", in the same corner.



The fireplace will re-appear, just as soon as we find a little extra money to install it. And for hot days...



I'm so entranced with these beautiful green walls I don't want to put anything in the room that isn't silver or grey or green or white. Luckily the computer qualifies...

I have a single gardenia on my desk and it's filling the room with its sweet white fragrance.

And I'm thinking of my friends and colleagues and acquaintances, and thinking of my life a year ago, and hoping they will be able to come through the next year into a similar place of peace and promise.

"It's brought out a strength in me I never knew I had."

Monday night. Normally time to prepare for class tomorrow. But tonight, as the kids sang and danced their way down the corridor to bed (Joel's oldest friend, Eva, has been staying with us since last weekend while her parents are a-conferencing), I flipped across the channels and realised Andrew Denton's Enough Rope was on. Tonight a "special", on three women with metastatic cancer, which had begun, in all three cases I think, with breast cancer. Paul is away, too, in Norway (Hi Meli!), and in any case, would probably have been working, if he had been here. So with a stomach full of tender roast lamb and home grown rosemary, and with these two beautiful young children safely tucked up in bed reading, I watched alone.

Here's a link to the website: I think transcripts and excerpts will be available there soon: Enough Rope

I don't think you would need to be a cancer patient or carer to be moved by this program, but the tears were certainly streaming down my face. These women were brave, and scared, and positive, and pragmatic, at different times. But I can't put a measure on the extent to which my story is their story. My medical prognosis is better, but at the same time I know myself touched and changed by the things that have touched and changed them. I don't put myself in their class, but on the other hand, to refuse to do so might be a form of denial, as I still must work out how I am to live; and I think their courage might help me.

One of the women said, "It's brought out a strength in me I never knew I had." It was said smiling under the eyebrows her husband painted on for her each day (that's their sex life now, they joked), and I realised how far cancer can take you beyond the normal vanities. Everywhere else on television are beautifully groomed faces and hair; here were bald heads and darkened eyes, confronting their own deaths; in one case, little more than a week away.

But I knew what she meant, about the strength. I have sometimes, myself, been surprised to find myself less distressed about things that normally would have worried me. (If I had had to, I think I probably would have been able to face the world without hair, for example.) But has it brought out a strength that was buried in me? Or did I grow it myself?

In the first half of last year I went to the physiotherapist complaining about pain on the outside of my right knee. He diagnosed a weakness of the muscle on the inside of the knee, and gave me what seemed like minimal exercises to strengthen the inner muscle so as to re-balance the whole knee. I realised, too, that I had developed a habit of riding my bike with my right leg slightly bowlegged (to protect my pants and shoes). One of my legs is very slightly longer than the other, too, as the dressmaker discovered when she made my long "wedding" skirt (scarlet silk chiffon over midnight blue peach satin, for the record). I've re-oriented my walking, running and riding habits, and now have no pain in the knee, and even a discernible bump where the strengthened muscle sits.

I think this is the kind of "strength" that cancer helped me grow, little by little as I got through the treatments and the sheer shock of being ill, last spring and summer.

At the same time, the program was a wake-up call for me. I feel so strong, physically, that it's been hard not to slip back into old ways of committing myself to lots of things. And yet I do get tired and wrung out by stuff; and I have to remind myself that while I'm nearly at the one year point since my diagnosis (with a mammogram and ultrasound to mark the event next month), it's a much shorter time since I was suffering considerable anxiety about re-entering the world of work. That world is particularly distressing at the moment, with the threat of job cuts in my faculty, and while I want to be involved, I'm finding it harder and harder. I'm not sure I do actually have enough strength for that.

I turned off the television, and could hear Herbert, our little frog, croaking into the balmy spring air, and was reminded of the ephemerality of it all. How hard it is to keep the balance between one's normal, human commitments to others, and the sense of stillness that mortality grants us.

Happy Blogiversary, dear humanities researcher ...

Yes, my dear blog turns one today. It seems well more than a year ago that I began this blog with my very earnest intention of charting the progress of my new grant application. A hundred unexpected things have happened since then, and of course, I never actually submitted that application (just the re-submission of our "near miss").

Time, then, to reflect on the passing of the year.

First up, and looming largest in my mind, I got cancer and got as near to cured as they can get me. There's an unknown quantity of a 7%-10% risk of recurrence over these first ten years they can't control, but I'm doing my best with diet and exercise and a generalised intention of staying calmer, and trying to live a little more simply. It's not that I think I got cancer through working too hard; but I do find my health is better if I can keep anxiety and stress at bay.

This is pretty difficult in the academic sector, of course. And especially in my corner of it. What with the massive re-structures and widespread curriculum reform at Melbourne, the re-organisation of my ancient and ramshackle department into a program within a much larger school, and the disastrous budget deficit in my faculty, my workplace is barely recognisable from what it was twelve months ago. There are lots of things that are exciting about the new structures and plans; but much that's alarming, too.

Academic work often seems open-ended or provisional. There is a lovely finality about seeing an article published, or holding your book in its shiny and handsome covers, but you know you can nearly always do it better. You've almost never done enough, or it's the wrong kind of thing, or you've published it in the wrong place. One of the things I've learned about being sick, though, is to put all this stuff into a different time-frame. I've done hardly any writing on my Order of the Garter project these last twelve months. I'm sure I'm not the only scholar in the country whose work doesn't fit neatly into the time-tables we draw up for ourselves. But I'm not worried about this, and am starting to approach that project again, obliquely, so it doesn't notice me creeping up on it. I'm just going to do what I can, when I can.

And even with being sick, I've still done a fair number of things in the last twelve months. I've given papers at four conferences (New York in July, Adelaide in February, London in April and Perth in July), travelled to St Louis to start working on the Chaucer conference before I had to resign from the committee, and convened a day seminar at Melbourne in February. (I missed the Piers Plowman conference in Philadelphia but only because I knew I wouldn't be able to write something from scratch: if I'd had a paper written, I probably would have got myself to that one too.)

But it's true that life no longer stretches out into an infinity of endless health and energy. Given the limits I now find, I'm sometimes surprised to find myself still blogging. But it's part of the great mystery about how work gets done. Blogging doesn't stop me writing: it's a clearing house for ideas and reflections; and it helps me feel in touch with the broader community of readers and writers. That community is truly a virtual one, though. I know one or two colleagues and perhaps three or four postgraduates at Melbourne who read my blog. If others are, they aren't letting on. That's absolutely fine. I kind of like the mysteriousness of not knowing who reads and who doesn't.

For the record, I'm currently averaging 58 readers a day, and have received a total of 12,494 visitors (that's not counting my own visits). More than some, fewer than others. But unlike other forms of bean-counting in academia, this set of statistics isn't going to be used for me, or against me.

I'm currently reading the account by Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford Redesdale of his mission to Japan in 1906 to take the Garter insignia to the Emperor Mutsuhito. He writes of a ball at the British Embassy:

Princess Arisugawa brought her daughter. It was her first ball, and very much she seemed to enjoy it. Being in Japanese costume she could not, of course, dance round dances, but she did take part in quadrilles. As for me, when I see these things I feel like Rip Van Winkle. I have been asleep, and centuries have passed over my head.

Redesdale's comment is striking. There he is as a modern ambassador for the medieval Garter, with its own centuries of ritual, commenting on the implicitly medieval scene of the princess and her daughter. For once, the Garter stands for the modern. The obvious contrast, this week, is with the brouhaha surrounding the Queen, the BBC and Annie Liebovitz. Reading between the lines, do we detect the Queen, after all her years of service to court rituals, tiring of it all? The picture shows the eighty-year-old in full Garter regalia, and it would not be surprising that getting kitted up like that, with tiara and all, would pall after all this time.

Apparently the BBC documentary shows scenes of the Queen walking down a palace corridor and telling her lady-in-waiting: "I'm not changing anything. I've had enough dressing like this, thank you very much".

Snippets like this remind me, in the end, of how lovely it is to love one's research.

Waiting for the Reports

This blog began in part to keep track of a grant application to the Australian Research Council. In the end, I didn't work on that application after I became ill, but in February I did re-submit a collaborative application that had come close to success the previous year. It is often said that one's best chance of ensuring success is any given year is to re-submit; we made quite a few changes to our scope and method, sharpened the application generally, and updated our track records, of course.

Today, the reports are supposed to be available on line. Actually, they were supposed to be on the ARC site last Friday, but a delay was announced; and at 1.30 this morning (according to the collaborative team member with by far the youngest children), they were still uploading them. And this morning it is so jammed I can't log on to the site at all.

Last year we had four reports (you can get up to six, or as few as none, if you are incredibly unlucky). Two were strong, but brief; two were more mixed but longer, so the rejoinder was difficult to write. Still, we made it into the top 10% of unfunded grants.

The system is a bit odd. We apply in March to one of several panels; the applications are then farmed out to both Ozreaders and "International" assessors. The former are paid ($30 per application!), and read up to 20 applications in their own area, or fields adjacent to their own; the latter aren't paid, and read fewer in their own specialist area. Most of them are Australians, too. The panel, or the "College of Experts" then divide them up and each has about a hundred to read and rank. The reports go to the applicants in June, but we don't get to see the percentage scores or rankings given to the various parts of the application, just the comments. We then write a "rejoinder" rebutting any criticism, offering further information and quoting the best parts of the best reports back to the panel (which is why it's nice if the good reports are long); and then the panel member may or may not adjust his or her ranking according to the reports and rejoinders. The panel then integrates its rankings, and then goes down the list adjusting the budget requested. In the end, these "Discovery" grants have about a 25% success rate.

So my day today, in between reading Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, and marking an honours thesis on Chekhov and Woolf, will be a series of attempts to log on to the ARC site and download the reports.

I'll also be thinking of the family of the courageous Brendan Keilar, who was shot and killed on the streets of Melbourne yesterday after going to the aid of a woman attacked by a bikie. And of a new aquaintance I've met so far only on email through my article in the Age, who's just last week learned that the tumour was cancerous, and who this week has just learned that there are shadows on the bone, too. A reminder that some reports are more devastating than others.

Big Sickness, Little Sickness

As of this month, I am now officially back at work full-time. In one sense, this is pretty arbitrary, as academics work odd hours and cycles over weekends and "holidays" at the best of times; and over the last few months I've submitted a grant application, given two conference papers, eight lectures and done bits and pieces of other writing. But given that returning to regular work filled me with terror and anxiety just a few weeks ago, this week has been much less traumatic than I feared. On the other hand, I did come down with a head cold, so I only spent my first day back in the office today.

In line with my post-illness resolutions about looking after myself and not pushing myself beyond reasonable limits, I stayed home on Monday night instead of going to the Medieval Round Table, but I'm pleased to report that it didn't develop into a full cold. I think my new regime of a daily walk, more fruit and vegetables, less meat and pretty much only the one glass of red wine a day, plus a goodly amount of crystallised ginger as a "treat" must be doing good things to my immune system. And the evening primrose-oil-plus-fish-oil capsules that are supposed to help with the hot and cold flushes. Hmm, it's probably the fish oil, actually.

It was clear to me that I was back at work today for a whole day, rather than a flying visit, as I treated myself to lentil soup from the lebanese food stall in the union, and as I determined to re-arrange the furniture in my office. I'd always had the desk facing the windows, or at right-angles to them, but for the first time in my life I'm now going to sit behind the desk and face people as they come into the room, with the desk at right angles to the door in the opposite corner. I'd always thought it was more friendly to students not to sit behind a desk, but Claire, who helped me move my very rickety desk, says it's better feng shui this way, and that it's awkward for other people to come into the room, or walk past it, and see my back (I often have the door open when I'm in). It feels very grown-up to sit behind the desk. But from my new position, I can still look out the window and see the big plane trees. This also means I no longer look out on the university's enormous promotional banner "The Evolution Starts Here" strung across the bridge between the two towers of my building. This is a Good Thing.

When I'm in next week, I'm going to take in a plant or two; and perhaps buy a little carpet. Anyway, something to mark a difference between the old life at work and the new.

Right now, I have to finish my conference paper on Brian Helgeland and Bryce Courtenay, which is late because I've been writing a little piece on cancer and this very blog for The Sunday Age. Melbourne readers, you have been warned...

But how do other people sit in their offices? Behind the desk? Or with their back facing the door? Or with the desk at right angles to the door?

You Know You're No Longer the Invalid in the Family ...

When you offer, twice in one week, to drive your son back to school in the afternoon after he has left his English book in his locker ... (well, it did Look Like Rain; and he had already ridden his bike there and back)

When you offer to drive to the chemist on a rainy night when your partner's back goes out ...

And when you're really happy to do it because you're so glad to feel well and capable, and able to do something for someone else. And in any case, you get to go out for afternoon tea with the boy (Monday) and spend the second trip (Thursday) having a meta discussion about having a discussion about being more organised; and about whether the correct expression to describe having finished that discussion is "I've done now", or "I'm done now". This might be one for the Brontë sisters.

What My Disease Looks Like

What a shock, to follow the links on the BBC website to an article about breast cancer researchers at the University of London, and see this lovely image of 3D breast cancer cells that they have made in a test tube. They are using this form of modelling to see how the healthy cells respond to cancerous ones, and may be able to reduce the use of animals in testing the progress of the disease.

"They discovered that one type of cell - myoepithelial cells - from healthy breast tissue can suppress the growth of breast cancer cells, but this ability is absent in cancerous breast myoepithelial cells."

I'm not sure, really, what we're looking at in this image. Is this one cell, a cluster of cancer cells, or one or more of these clever little myoepithelial cells? Either way, all I can think of when I see this image is a nipple. I can't help feeling there must be a figure of speech to describe this resemblance: a form of synecdochic mirroring, perhaps?