The air around the temple is clear and blue. The sound of birdsong floats in and out of the columns, and the water in the fountains is crystalline. The priestess summons you into the inner chamber, and takes you through the preliminary mysteries. Then suddenly the goddess appears. It is bright-eyed Athena: statuesque, yet kindly. She asks you about your life. What have you learned? How have you put her gifts of wisdom to use? How will you answer?
...
A few days ago, my friend Paula took me to radiotherapy and then for my three-month “review” with Suzanne, my surgeon. I like it when my friends and family come with me for a radiotherapy session and see me being lined up under the different machines. And I was pleased for Paula to see the breast clinic, in line with my perpetual message to my women friends: don't be afraid.... We check in at reception: Helene, as ever, is wearing a very chic suit and pearls, with her blonde hair piled up in a stylish chignon. There are jelly beans in a glass dish, and a bowl of apples further along the dark wood counter. The waiting room is light and airy, and has interior design magazines, Vogue, literary journals and art books to look at. The paintings and sculptures are original and interesting. The herbal teas in the jars look fresh and inviting. At discreet intervals, the soundscape of birdsong echoes through the large room. Middle-class women sit reading, or talking quietly with friends or partners. One is wearing a close-fitting hat, though it’s 38 degrees outside. A man walks in carrying x-rays. Is he a supportive partner? or one of the 1% of breast cancer patients who are male?
I won’t beat around the bush, here. This is an expensive practice in the private system. I’m here because my GP, Barbara, has been practising in Melbourne for many, many years, and is deeply networked into Melbourne’s medical and surgical elite. Mitchell, the oncologist, serves on the Victorian Medical Board with Bernadette, the surgeon who delivered my child (a complicated footling breech), with Barbara’s assistance, nearly twelve years ago. This service doesn’t come cheaply, and I know how fortunate I am to be here under Barbara’s introduction, and with the capacity to pay for apples and birdsong. And Suzanne.
I have written earlier about my admiration for this woman, and for the things I am learning from her, as well as for her care of me. I’ll be the first to admit I am a little besotted with her. It’s partly the bourgeois process of “choosing” a specialist, an architect, a doctor, a hairdresser, or an academic patron who is fabulous, and hoping their fabulousness will reflect well on us. And I have always loved a good medical melodrama where patients and doctors discuss metaphysical and existential questions in moments of quiet reflection. And after all, Suzanne has saved my life.
Today her first question is about how I am coping. She wants to know what I am doing about my work, my writing, my feelings about all the committees I was struggling with last year. She is pleased when I say I am learning to turn around my priorities: to answer emails later in the day and work in the mornings when I am fresher; to anticipate only a gradual return to full strength and public duties over the next year, once this acute phase of treatment is over, and when I am ready to emerge from my hibernation. She asks how Paul and Joel are coping, and is pleased when I say Paul cancelled all his travel for the rest of the year and has spent as much time at home as possible; and when I report that the three of us have spent more time together as a family over the last few months than for a while.
Only then does she examine me, looking mostly at how the wounds are healing, and asking about the residual numbness in my arm and the back of my shoulder. To my great surprise, she examines the healthy breast carefully, but barely touches the wounded one. I ask when I should begin to start examining my own breasts again, since I know the chance of recurrence is higher in the first few years after the initial diagnosis. Not for about a year, she says, since people are just too nervous to do it properly. She and Mitchell will take care of it between them; and in fact she doesn't need to see me again until October, when I will have a mammogram and ultrasound on the same day. Her complete and utter confidence that she does not need to reassure herself, or me, that there is no discernible lump in my breast, confirms my great faith in her. I feel this is going to be a crucial moment to revisit when I am ready to start building my confidence again. I can see that once visited by the disease, it will be hard to set aside the fear of its recurrence.
Suzanne is charismatic for me because of her quiet authority and stillness in her workplace, in a phase in my life where I feel fragmented and divided from my own. It's no wonder I seek to channel a little Athena-like strength through her.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Other stories, other lives
When I first received my cancer diagnosis, I began to think about other women I knew who had breast cancer. Two women I knew of in my faculty; a historian in another state I admire hugely; Kylie Minogue; and then Belinda Emmett, a starlet who died in a Sydney hospital the night Kylie made her first triumphant return, around the time I was having my surgery. And pretty chilling that was for me, too. Sheryl Crow. Linda McCartney. Anastasia. Susan Sontag. Jane McGrath. A second cousin, much younger than I, who's had a complete mastectomy. Fanny Burney, who famously described her mastectomy in 1811, without anaesthesia, feeling the knife scrape down to the bone, but going on to live another seventeen years.
Once I started reading around, I read dozens of other women's stories, in the support literature, and online. And since writing the blog, I've learned of many more: Meredith at Marrickvillia for example, whom I knew years ago at Melbourne. She doesn't write much about her experience with breast cancer last year, but has recently posted a retrospective as she heads off on holiday. Many friends have emailed to tell me their own stories, or those of friends and relations. I'm glad to be part of this company, though I haven't yet considered joining any kind of support group.
What is it possible to learn from these others, and these stories? That sometimes women die of breast cancer if it spreads to other parts of the body and can't be controlled; but sometimes they die much later, quietly in their beds like other people, or in war, or of other diseases, or of stupid traffic accidents. That some women are terrified and shocked when they first hear the news; that many have a much harder time of it than I have had, especially those who undergo chemotherapy and endure complications from side-effects and fertility issues; and that for most it produces some change in the way they live, or in who they are.
Amongst the medievalists, my friends have reminded me of Kellie Robertson, at Pittsburgh, who was diagnosed and treated about seven years ago. I've not exchanged more than a word or two, if that, with Kellie, but I've seen her presenting at conferences, and she is something else. She gives a great talk, and I find her energy and engagement inspiring. I also have her book, The Laborer's Two Bodies, on my desk, as I slowly think about the nature of the acts of writing, as work, and as pleasure, in Piers Plowman.
On the web, I came across Kellie's account of her year with breast cancer here. Her diagnosis, type of tumour, and treatment are all different to mine, and as a much younger woman, cancer raised different issues for her, too. But it was great for me to read her account (partly because it's so bracing and compelling; and partly because we inhabit such similar intellectual and collegial spaces) and also to see from my correspondence with her this week that she has become something of an activist. I've put up a link to the Breast Cancer Action site she directed me to, and I was intrigued to follow its critique of the pink consumerism that surrounds breast cancer in October. Just how much of your donation goes to breast cancer research? and of what kind? to support a drug company? or support networks? or just "awareness"? Do the pink ribbon cosmetic or food or water companies you support use chemicals or packaging that might actually be endangering our health and our environment? This is a big theme on this site: I don't know enough to say more about these concerns, but I think they are good questions to ask.
I've now finished the 25 standard radiation treatments, and started the 8 "booster" shots, just along the scar area. It's a different machine, one that comes much closer as I lie on my side. I saw Michael for my weekly check-up on Monday and he said I had tanned up nicely; and it's true. The area under the breast is no longer pink and burned but is a deep dark tan: I could have been in an ad for Reef Oil as a teenager, and gone very, very brown if I had ever had the patience to lie long enough in the sun. The skin along the scar is still tender and feels burned, though, and the skin on the nipple has started to peel. Ouch. And the other breast seems startlingly smooth and white in comparison. But it's not a medical breast, so I can't write about it here. I'm still doing ok. I now know what radiotherapy fatigue is like, though. Not just sleepiness, but also a feeling that my limbs and my eyelids weigh at least twice as much as they did last week. I'm also growing some rather dark shadows under my eyes. Small prices to pay, I say.
Once I started reading around, I read dozens of other women's stories, in the support literature, and online. And since writing the blog, I've learned of many more: Meredith at Marrickvillia for example, whom I knew years ago at Melbourne. She doesn't write much about her experience with breast cancer last year, but has recently posted a retrospective as she heads off on holiday. Many friends have emailed to tell me their own stories, or those of friends and relations. I'm glad to be part of this company, though I haven't yet considered joining any kind of support group.
What is it possible to learn from these others, and these stories? That sometimes women die of breast cancer if it spreads to other parts of the body and can't be controlled; but sometimes they die much later, quietly in their beds like other people, or in war, or of other diseases, or of stupid traffic accidents. That some women are terrified and shocked when they first hear the news; that many have a much harder time of it than I have had, especially those who undergo chemotherapy and endure complications from side-effects and fertility issues; and that for most it produces some change in the way they live, or in who they are.
Amongst the medievalists, my friends have reminded me of Kellie Robertson, at Pittsburgh, who was diagnosed and treated about seven years ago. I've not exchanged more than a word or two, if that, with Kellie, but I've seen her presenting at conferences, and she is something else. She gives a great talk, and I find her energy and engagement inspiring. I also have her book, The Laborer's Two Bodies, on my desk, as I slowly think about the nature of the acts of writing, as work, and as pleasure, in Piers Plowman.
On the web, I came across Kellie's account of her year with breast cancer here. Her diagnosis, type of tumour, and treatment are all different to mine, and as a much younger woman, cancer raised different issues for her, too. But it was great for me to read her account (partly because it's so bracing and compelling; and partly because we inhabit such similar intellectual and collegial spaces) and also to see from my correspondence with her this week that she has become something of an activist. I've put up a link to the Breast Cancer Action site she directed me to, and I was intrigued to follow its critique of the pink consumerism that surrounds breast cancer in October. Just how much of your donation goes to breast cancer research? and of what kind? to support a drug company? or support networks? or just "awareness"? Do the pink ribbon cosmetic or food or water companies you support use chemicals or packaging that might actually be endangering our health and our environment? This is a big theme on this site: I don't know enough to say more about these concerns, but I think they are good questions to ask.
I've now finished the 25 standard radiation treatments, and started the 8 "booster" shots, just along the scar area. It's a different machine, one that comes much closer as I lie on my side. I saw Michael for my weekly check-up on Monday and he said I had tanned up nicely; and it's true. The area under the breast is no longer pink and burned but is a deep dark tan: I could have been in an ad for Reef Oil as a teenager, and gone very, very brown if I had ever had the patience to lie long enough in the sun. The skin along the scar is still tender and feels burned, though, and the skin on the nipple has started to peel. Ouch. And the other breast seems startlingly smooth and white in comparison. But it's not a medical breast, so I can't write about it here. I'm still doing ok. I now know what radiotherapy fatigue is like, though. Not just sleepiness, but also a feeling that my limbs and my eyelids weigh at least twice as much as they did last week. I'm also growing some rather dark shadows under my eyes. Small prices to pay, I say.
Monday, January 01, 2007
Cricket as Metaphor
I’m not sure of the origins of the idea that cricket is a metaphor for life. But for anyone interested, as I am, in the practice of discourse analysis, ideas of nationalism, medievalism, the relation between individuals and institutions, in rituals, cricket, convalescence and the monarchy, the current Ashes tour of Australia provides fascinating and ample fodder. Note to US readers: England is currently on tour in Australia, to play a “best of 5” series, played every 18 months or so in alternate countries. Each game can last up to five days. Australia leads the current series 4-0 (in a game where a draw is not uncommon). The final test starts in Sydney tomorrow.
Here are the parameters of my interest:
• AS an invalid, I’m allowed to watch as much televised cricket as I like this summer.
• CRICKET commentary (on radio and in print) has long been my delight, for its brilliant and/or hyperbolic use of metaphor and meta-narrative. Shane Warne’s announcement of his retirement after the Sydney game brought out this from Peter Roebuck:
"Shane Warne has been the most extraordinary, exotic and entertaining cricketer the game has known. In his hands, a cricket ball could perform previously unconsidered gyrations, spinning at right angles, skidding like a puck upon ice, changing directions after an initial curl or else dropping sharply to leave the batsman groping at thin air.
"He took a bag of tricks onto the field and dipped into it with the cunning of a rat and the theatricality of a tragedian. And now the end is near. Treasure these last few days as the old rascal pitches another jewel of a leg-break or carts another irreverent 40 or plots another clever dismissal or presides over another imposing performance. Treasure them because we will not see his like again."
• I'VE cherished a long-standing interest in tracking metaphors drawn from medieval culture in sporting discourse (this might even become a Research Topic one day). E.g. Greg Baum on the English capitulation in Adelaide: “Like medieval royals with syphilis, they went suddenly mad. England lost its last nine wickets for 60, the same England that made 6-551 declared in the first innings.”
•
THE Ashes rivalry is deeply colonialist: the little urn we fight over contains the ashes of the bales burned by some Melbourne women after Australia first defeated the English in 1882, to signify the death of English cricket, as reported by the English media, thus inaugurating a tradition of the English press savaging any unsuccessful national team. How do sporting teams come to represent the national character? Martin Johnson explains:
"What seemed to catch England unawares here, for reasons that will take a bit of explaining, is that Australia's reaction to losing the Ashes [in 2005] was a bit like Scotland Yard's on discovering that the crown jewels had been stolen.
"The Australians have been intense, intimidating, downright nasty at times, but while they are the equivalent of a long-distance truck driver ploughing on beyond the health and safety regulations, England can only go so far before pulling into the service station for a mug of tea and a kip."
• AS an old game, cricket is replete with an elaborate set of rules and rituals. When any umpiring decision is in doubt, the rule book says “the spirit of the game” should be invoked as the deciding principle. (Note to medievalists: cf. Augustine's rule of "caritas" in scriptural exegesis.) This is ritual practice in action, as the game veers between wanting to modernise itself to attract new audiences, and wanting to uphold its own traditions (cricket thus parallels my interest in English ritual practice and the monarchy’s struggle between tradition and modernity: and yes, the Helen Mirren movie The Queen was made in order to prove my current research thesis on the Order of the Garter). Peter Lalor described Adam Gilchrist taking some beer to the ground staff in Perth after the third test as proof that the Australians are “not only better cricketers, they are morally superior too” (tongue-in-cheek, but nevertheless, printed). Jonathan Agnew’s blog on the BBC website, and his mention of the MBEs awarded to the English team in 2005 attracted the following comment: "I agree totally with MZ, the England team should be ashamed of their efforts, no will to fight etc. They should all hand back their stupid honours from last year’s streaky Ashes win. It just shows what an outdated system both cricket and the honours are in England!"
• MY son has started to play cricket so this summer I am attending training sessions and games of the Edinburgh Under 12s, watching these young boys being taught this “spirit”, and the principles and conventions of the game. In the last game before the January recess I watched one frustrated young batsman calling out to his teammate: “Come on, go out!”, as he could see the innings drawing to a close without getting a chance to bat. There has been some stern lecturing from the coach, an extraordinary 18-year-old, on the protocols of cheering and applauding the successes of both teams.
• AS a game, cricket is curiously poised between individual and team performances, so for people like me, who identify strongly with their workplace and who also compete against themselves, it’s a fascinating analogy played out in public. This isn’t an issue just for the juniors. There was an extraordinary interchange this week between the Australian coach John Buchanan and the middle-order English batsman Kevin Pietersen. Buchanan accused Pietersen of not being a team player, to which Pietersen responded:
"I've also been helping Monty Panesar big-time. It's just ridiculous Buchanan has come out with such a bizarre statement. And if I wasn't a team player, I could say, I've played my part — I've scored 420 runs at an average of 60 but what about the others? But you will never hear that from me. Cricket's a team game."
Oh good; I’m glad that’s clear!
THIS last point, apart from the excesses of the Pietersen case, is the one that resonates most strongly for me this week, as I think about the relationship between my work and my life over the last very odd months, and as I contemplate the idea of re-entry once this intense phase of my treatment is over and I can establish some modest work routines. The achievements of sportspeople are very much more public than the work of academic scholars, yet our successes and failures are equally visible and public to those in our small circles. Is academic culture more, or less forgiving than public sporting culture? In an institutional context where we are made to measure ourselves and our colleagues all the time, what's to stop us all becoming as self-promotional as Pietersen?
Here are the parameters of my interest:
• AS an invalid, I’m allowed to watch as much televised cricket as I like this summer.
• CRICKET commentary (on radio and in print) has long been my delight, for its brilliant and/or hyperbolic use of metaphor and meta-narrative. Shane Warne’s announcement of his retirement after the Sydney game brought out this from Peter Roebuck:
"Shane Warne has been the most extraordinary, exotic and entertaining cricketer the game has known. In his hands, a cricket ball could perform previously unconsidered gyrations, spinning at right angles, skidding like a puck upon ice, changing directions after an initial curl or else dropping sharply to leave the batsman groping at thin air.
"He took a bag of tricks onto the field and dipped into it with the cunning of a rat and the theatricality of a tragedian. And now the end is near. Treasure these last few days as the old rascal pitches another jewel of a leg-break or carts another irreverent 40 or plots another clever dismissal or presides over another imposing performance. Treasure them because we will not see his like again."
• I'VE cherished a long-standing interest in tracking metaphors drawn from medieval culture in sporting discourse (this might even become a Research Topic one day). E.g. Greg Baum on the English capitulation in Adelaide: “Like medieval royals with syphilis, they went suddenly mad. England lost its last nine wickets for 60, the same England that made 6-551 declared in the first innings.”
•
THE Ashes rivalry is deeply colonialist: the little urn we fight over contains the ashes of the bales burned by some Melbourne women after Australia first defeated the English in 1882, to signify the death of English cricket, as reported by the English media, thus inaugurating a tradition of the English press savaging any unsuccessful national team. How do sporting teams come to represent the national character? Martin Johnson explains:"What seemed to catch England unawares here, for reasons that will take a bit of explaining, is that Australia's reaction to losing the Ashes [in 2005] was a bit like Scotland Yard's on discovering that the crown jewels had been stolen.
"The Australians have been intense, intimidating, downright nasty at times, but while they are the equivalent of a long-distance truck driver ploughing on beyond the health and safety regulations, England can only go so far before pulling into the service station for a mug of tea and a kip."
• AS an old game, cricket is replete with an elaborate set of rules and rituals. When any umpiring decision is in doubt, the rule book says “the spirit of the game” should be invoked as the deciding principle. (Note to medievalists: cf. Augustine's rule of "caritas" in scriptural exegesis.) This is ritual practice in action, as the game veers between wanting to modernise itself to attract new audiences, and wanting to uphold its own traditions (cricket thus parallels my interest in English ritual practice and the monarchy’s struggle between tradition and modernity: and yes, the Helen Mirren movie The Queen was made in order to prove my current research thesis on the Order of the Garter). Peter Lalor described Adam Gilchrist taking some beer to the ground staff in Perth after the third test as proof that the Australians are “not only better cricketers, they are morally superior too” (tongue-in-cheek, but nevertheless, printed). Jonathan Agnew’s blog on the BBC website, and his mention of the MBEs awarded to the English team in 2005 attracted the following comment: "I agree totally with MZ, the England team should be ashamed of their efforts, no will to fight etc. They should all hand back their stupid honours from last year’s streaky Ashes win. It just shows what an outdated system both cricket and the honours are in England!"
• MY son has started to play cricket so this summer I am attending training sessions and games of the Edinburgh Under 12s, watching these young boys being taught this “spirit”, and the principles and conventions of the game. In the last game before the January recess I watched one frustrated young batsman calling out to his teammate: “Come on, go out!”, as he could see the innings drawing to a close without getting a chance to bat. There has been some stern lecturing from the coach, an extraordinary 18-year-old, on the protocols of cheering and applauding the successes of both teams.
• AS a game, cricket is curiously poised between individual and team performances, so for people like me, who identify strongly with their workplace and who also compete against themselves, it’s a fascinating analogy played out in public. This isn’t an issue just for the juniors. There was an extraordinary interchange this week between the Australian coach John Buchanan and the middle-order English batsman Kevin Pietersen. Buchanan accused Pietersen of not being a team player, to which Pietersen responded:
"I've also been helping Monty Panesar big-time. It's just ridiculous Buchanan has come out with such a bizarre statement. And if I wasn't a team player, I could say, I've played my part — I've scored 420 runs at an average of 60 but what about the others? But you will never hear that from me. Cricket's a team game."
Oh good; I’m glad that’s clear!
THIS last point, apart from the excesses of the Pietersen case, is the one that resonates most strongly for me this week, as I think about the relationship between my work and my life over the last very odd months, and as I contemplate the idea of re-entry once this intense phase of my treatment is over and I can establish some modest work routines. The achievements of sportspeople are very much more public than the work of academic scholars, yet our successes and failures are equally visible and public to those in our small circles. Is academic culture more, or less forgiving than public sporting culture? In an institutional context where we are made to measure ourselves and our colleagues all the time, what's to stop us all becoming as self-promotional as Pietersen?
Sunday, December 31, 2006
New Year's Eve
I suspect that's the longest gap between postings since I began the blog. It's partly a result of the busyness of Christmas; partly the increasing need for naps and sleep-ins as the radiotherapy comes to the pointy end. Something new, and not altogether pleasant seems to be happening in the relationship between work and living and reading and writing, too.
A quick health update, first: I have five more big radiotherapy sessions to go, then eight shorter, lighter doses to be directed along the scar line. I was measured up for these before Christmas. I feared going into the CT tunnel again (I always forget till it's too late that I hate enclosed spaces and low ceilings), but this was more low tech. Lie on your side, Michael will draw on you with blue pencil, and then Andy will come in and make a tracing onto a transparent sheet then take a photo (I almost said polaroid, but it looked suspiciously like my own digital camera).
My breast is starting to resemble a roasted beetroot: pink and brown in patches, within a sharply delineated area which probably looks square on the infra-red grid when I'm lying down, but which on the body is curved into odd angles. I'm assured this will all start to fade as soon as the treatment ends, but right now it feels pretty much like sunburn. I woke in the middle of the night last night saying to myself, 'I don't know what to do with it!', where to put it in the bed, as if it were a detachable appendage. I had also been dreaming that Kylie Minogue paid me a visitation and delivered some wise words I was not able to remember. So I got up, had a chamomile tea, then went back to bed and slept in till 10.00. We had breakfast in bed (cereal, raspberries and blackberries) and made a plan for the day. Paul went to work in the garden and at his computer; Joel set to work on his new animation; and I lingered on reading Garrison Keilor's Love Me, about a Minnesota man who moves to New York and fulfils his dream working at the New Yorker until he develops writer's block and the magazine is taken over by the Mafia.
I'm sometimes asked what I'm doing, how my own writing is going, how much trash TV I'm watching. In fact, I spend a lot of time in the garden, feeding the goldfish and admiring their babies, and talking to Mima, my fifteen-year-old tabby. We have become very close over the last few months and have had many happy conversations on the couch in the afternoon sun or walking around the new garden and its fishponds. No trash TV: we are working our way through the West Wing on DVD in the evenings, and watching some very short cricket matches in the afternoon. I'm as keen for a 5-0 Ashes victory as the next woman, but it'd be good to see the English team defer their inevitable implosion till they get on the plane to go home, so that they could at least take the game into the fourth day.
But there's no real reason why I shouldn't be writing. I'm alert and sprightly enough for good portions of each day, and can find energy to blog, and read, and chat (and cook: Siena cakes, florentines and chocolate brandy balls for Christmas). But we have eaten dinner the last two nights with dear friends, all of whom are scholars and writers, and I listened with a kind of detached interest about their various writing projects. My own writing seems miles away. As far as work is concerned, I am just able to keep up with the little tasks that need to be done: ask Maria to organise a little seminar in honour of David Wallace for late February; arrange my travel plans to get to Adelaide earlier in the month; set aside some time for a meeting of our grant team next weekend to start re-writing our application for the ARC.
I guess the energy for writing will return when the current radiation fatigue recedes. When I think about it though, I didn't actually do much writing in 2006. I finished a big essay in February, and wrote a conference paper in July that I was very pleased with, but the rest of the year seemed to disappear in committees, the Headstart training program, and then the flurry of starting work on the NCS program committee then handing it over to Ruth and David and John when I became ill. I don't think I'm too worried about not writing. It's normally a source of great pleasure for me, and I have several projects on the boil, individual and collaborative, that I'm still intrigued by. Fortunately, I had lots of things in the pipeline (I've corrected three sets of proofs since I've been sick), so I'll still look ok on paper for a while yet, in terms of the research productivity that is such a preoccupation for us all now.
It's just the nature of academic life, that you can never let it go completely. I'm far from complaining: this is the other side of the coin that makes it possible to take time out for daily treatment and comprehensive sick leave without any threat to my job security or income. I'll just have to trust my own instincts, that the desire to write will return when I have something to say, and when I can read anything other than fiction for more than half an hour before falling asleep.
It's New Year's Eve today. We would normally be in the third day of cooking and cleaning and preparing for a big party, but prudently decided not to go ahead this year. We're going to open a special bottle of wine, climb up on the roof to watch the fireworks, and have an early night. Health and Happiness in the New Year to all.
A quick health update, first: I have five more big radiotherapy sessions to go, then eight shorter, lighter doses to be directed along the scar line. I was measured up for these before Christmas. I feared going into the CT tunnel again (I always forget till it's too late that I hate enclosed spaces and low ceilings), but this was more low tech. Lie on your side, Michael will draw on you with blue pencil, and then Andy will come in and make a tracing onto a transparent sheet then take a photo (I almost said polaroid, but it looked suspiciously like my own digital camera).
My breast is starting to resemble a roasted beetroot: pink and brown in patches, within a sharply delineated area which probably looks square on the infra-red grid when I'm lying down, but which on the body is curved into odd angles. I'm assured this will all start to fade as soon as the treatment ends, but right now it feels pretty much like sunburn. I woke in the middle of the night last night saying to myself, 'I don't know what to do with it!', where to put it in the bed, as if it were a detachable appendage. I had also been dreaming that Kylie Minogue paid me a visitation and delivered some wise words I was not able to remember. So I got up, had a chamomile tea, then went back to bed and slept in till 10.00. We had breakfast in bed (cereal, raspberries and blackberries) and made a plan for the day. Paul went to work in the garden and at his computer; Joel set to work on his new animation; and I lingered on reading Garrison Keilor's Love Me, about a Minnesota man who moves to New York and fulfils his dream working at the New Yorker until he develops writer's block and the magazine is taken over by the Mafia.
I'm sometimes asked what I'm doing, how my own writing is going, how much trash TV I'm watching. In fact, I spend a lot of time in the garden, feeding the goldfish and admiring their babies, and talking to Mima, my fifteen-year-old tabby. We have become very close over the last few months and have had many happy conversations on the couch in the afternoon sun or walking around the new garden and its fishponds. No trash TV: we are working our way through the West Wing on DVD in the evenings, and watching some very short cricket matches in the afternoon. I'm as keen for a 5-0 Ashes victory as the next woman, but it'd be good to see the English team defer their inevitable implosion till they get on the plane to go home, so that they could at least take the game into the fourth day.
But there's no real reason why I shouldn't be writing. I'm alert and sprightly enough for good portions of each day, and can find energy to blog, and read, and chat (and cook: Siena cakes, florentines and chocolate brandy balls for Christmas). But we have eaten dinner the last two nights with dear friends, all of whom are scholars and writers, and I listened with a kind of detached interest about their various writing projects. My own writing seems miles away. As far as work is concerned, I am just able to keep up with the little tasks that need to be done: ask Maria to organise a little seminar in honour of David Wallace for late February; arrange my travel plans to get to Adelaide earlier in the month; set aside some time for a meeting of our grant team next weekend to start re-writing our application for the ARC.
I guess the energy for writing will return when the current radiation fatigue recedes. When I think about it though, I didn't actually do much writing in 2006. I finished a big essay in February, and wrote a conference paper in July that I was very pleased with, but the rest of the year seemed to disappear in committees, the Headstart training program, and then the flurry of starting work on the NCS program committee then handing it over to Ruth and David and John when I became ill. I don't think I'm too worried about not writing. It's normally a source of great pleasure for me, and I have several projects on the boil, individual and collaborative, that I'm still intrigued by. Fortunately, I had lots of things in the pipeline (I've corrected three sets of proofs since I've been sick), so I'll still look ok on paper for a while yet, in terms of the research productivity that is such a preoccupation for us all now.
It's just the nature of academic life, that you can never let it go completely. I'm far from complaining: this is the other side of the coin that makes it possible to take time out for daily treatment and comprehensive sick leave without any threat to my job security or income. I'll just have to trust my own instincts, that the desire to write will return when I have something to say, and when I can read anything other than fiction for more than half an hour before falling asleep.
It's New Year's Eve today. We would normally be in the third day of cooking and cleaning and preparing for a big party, but prudently decided not to go ahead this year. We're going to open a special bottle of wine, climb up on the roof to watch the fireworks, and have an early night. Health and Happiness in the New Year to all.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
The day I finally get the point about the chocolates...
Three posts ago I was noting the custom of leaving little chocolates in the lockers where we keep our gowns at the radiotherapy clinic, on the last day of treatment. The same day the assistants apologised for taking so long to get the machinery and the flat bed into place. It takes two or three of them to position me and the machinery properly: I have to lie flat with my arms outstretched behind my head grasping a bar, while also relaxing my right arm so it doesn't get in the way of the machine as it beams its rays up at me from below my right side. Sometimes I have to let go and bring my arm back then rotate it again with their help until I am positioned correctly. They then move the bed back and up and check and double-check the height and placing of the rays, reading the measurements back to each other and checking the infra-red grid on my body. The machine has to be programmed for its two positions before it can begin. (I guess they treat the breast from either side in this way to avoid a daily blast of radiation directly into the lungs and rib cage: this way it kind of passes through the breast. I'll never breast-feed again on that side, but hey...) Sometimes it takes a while to get all these measurements and co-ordinates perfect, and Sue apologised for the time it was taking. That's fine, I said, in my cheery good-patient voice: take your time and get it right. It's just that sometimes patients are feeling a little frail, they explained, and don't like being jerked around. I couldn't understand why you would mind waiting for these people to do their job properly on your behalf.
But now, I get it! I'm a third of the way through my treatments (12 down, 21 to go), and yesterday the thought of getting my cramping menstrual body up into this position was pretty forbidding. I asked if they could possibly treat me while I lay in the foetal position, and they very sympathetically said no and helped me up on the bed anyway, with just the right amount of understanding that acknowledged my unwillingness without letting me spiral into self-pity. So I understood that day that sometimes you don't want to be jerked around on the machine. And that some days a piece of cheap chocolate left by someone who's gone through it and come through is exactly what you want.
I'm very conscious that my case is a minor one, and that my residual good health is seeing me through this process with minimal damage. So far: a slightly re-shaped breast; two long scars that are healing well; some residual numbness under my arm that may or may not heal; a little rash from the radiotherapy that is irritating but treatable, and which will start to heal after January 17th. There are some more serious hormonal side-effects that will kick in after the new year, but really, nothing exceptional. I know that in comparison to a thousand other possibilities and conjunctions of illness, treatment, side-effects, social and emotional and financial contexts, my situation is excellent.
All the same, there's no doubt that emotions and impressions are heightened; and that I am experiencing an unaccustomed fragility that is sometimes emotional, sometimes social, sometimes intellectual. I can write, now, of a moment over a month ago, when I finally looked at myself in the mirror before a shower, with all the bandages and surgical tape removed for the first time. All I could see were the two long black lines of my surgical scars. Images from Caroline Walker Bynum's essays on the wounded, perforated and open bodies of Christ and the saints flashed through my mind and I started to black out; and caught hold of the bathroom bench just in time. I looked carefully at one of the scars today and was surprised to find it much shorter than I'd remembered it. How long is a scar? How deep is a wound?
But now, I get it! I'm a third of the way through my treatments (12 down, 21 to go), and yesterday the thought of getting my cramping menstrual body up into this position was pretty forbidding. I asked if they could possibly treat me while I lay in the foetal position, and they very sympathetically said no and helped me up on the bed anyway, with just the right amount of understanding that acknowledged my unwillingness without letting me spiral into self-pity. So I understood that day that sometimes you don't want to be jerked around on the machine. And that some days a piece of cheap chocolate left by someone who's gone through it and come through is exactly what you want.
I'm very conscious that my case is a minor one, and that my residual good health is seeing me through this process with minimal damage. So far: a slightly re-shaped breast; two long scars that are healing well; some residual numbness under my arm that may or may not heal; a little rash from the radiotherapy that is irritating but treatable, and which will start to heal after January 17th. There are some more serious hormonal side-effects that will kick in after the new year, but really, nothing exceptional. I know that in comparison to a thousand other possibilities and conjunctions of illness, treatment, side-effects, social and emotional and financial contexts, my situation is excellent.
All the same, there's no doubt that emotions and impressions are heightened; and that I am experiencing an unaccustomed fragility that is sometimes emotional, sometimes social, sometimes intellectual. I can write, now, of a moment over a month ago, when I finally looked at myself in the mirror before a shower, with all the bandages and surgical tape removed for the first time. All I could see were the two long black lines of my surgical scars. Images from Caroline Walker Bynum's essays on the wounded, perforated and open bodies of Christ and the saints flashed through my mind and I started to black out; and caught hold of the bathroom bench just in time. I looked carefully at one of the scars today and was surprised to find it much shorter than I'd remembered it. How long is a scar? How deep is a wound?
Monday, December 11, 2006
An uncomfortable piece of surgery
Waking up to breakfast radio this morning, and the announcement of a conversation, later in the morning, with a speaker 'who's had a biography out'. Nasty...
Thursday, December 07, 2006
How we teach and write now
This is a question for all you literary/historical types.
For the little essay I’m writing on Piers Plowman, I’m reading around and thinking about the question of authorial and narrative voice, and thinking about the ways we can help students think about the voices in the poem. I’ve been reading David Benson’s wonderful book, Public Piers Plowman: Modern Scholarship and Late Medieval English Culture, and am pleased to find he has been thinking about medieval public culture (using Habermas) in ways I know I am going to find useful when I eventually get around to working on the project and grant application whose progress I began this blog in order to chart. Oh well. Sigh. Being sick just means I have to go slower, is all.
I was very struck by this passage, on page 74:
“Piers is an interactive text meant to be applied to its readers’ lives. As such, it somewhat resembles a modern newspaper, which different readers will use differently, each one finding information or advice to suit his or her own needs.”
I find this a very evocative analogy, because it chimes with my slowly-germinating idea about the pre-history of public or mass culture in a manuscript era. I suspect, too, it is the kind of thing we often say when we are teaching, as a short-hand guide to students trying to make sense of unfamiliar works. And because it takes the form of an analogy, it is different from Kittredge’s famously ahistorical pronouncement about Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde as the first novel.
But there is perhaps an interesting issue to be teased out here, about the way we use analogy or other similar devices to explain the effect of medieval or pre-modern texts. I don't mean to raise the hoary methodological issue of "presentism". I'm interested in the rhetorical status of this kind of remark in what is a profoundly historicist study, after all.
Perhaps it's a question about the relation between pedagogy and scholarship. Have we tended to censor this kind of remark out of our writing, when we might use it freely in the classroom? Is that self-censorship lightening up? What do people think? How do we see the relation between our teaching and our writing?
Now that I think about it, I am reminded of a comment one of my students made after our discussions of Troilus and Criseyde this semester: he was a little disturbed by the easy and familiar way we were talking about the characters' personalities and sexualities. It's hard *not* to do this when you are teaching, though I would almost certainly not write in that way. Hypocrisy? Or respect for the differences between spoken and written discourse, between informal and formal contexts, between pedagogy and scholarship?
n.b. A few people have commented that they have found it hard to post a comment on this blog. I'm not sure why that would be, but if you experience technical difficulties, and would like to post, please follow the links to my homepage and email me (and signal whether you'd like me to post on your behalf).
For the little essay I’m writing on Piers Plowman, I’m reading around and thinking about the question of authorial and narrative voice, and thinking about the ways we can help students think about the voices in the poem. I’ve been reading David Benson’s wonderful book, Public Piers Plowman: Modern Scholarship and Late Medieval English Culture, and am pleased to find he has been thinking about medieval public culture (using Habermas) in ways I know I am going to find useful when I eventually get around to working on the project and grant application whose progress I began this blog in order to chart. Oh well. Sigh. Being sick just means I have to go slower, is all.
I was very struck by this passage, on page 74:
“Piers is an interactive text meant to be applied to its readers’ lives. As such, it somewhat resembles a modern newspaper, which different readers will use differently, each one finding information or advice to suit his or her own needs.”
I find this a very evocative analogy, because it chimes with my slowly-germinating idea about the pre-history of public or mass culture in a manuscript era. I suspect, too, it is the kind of thing we often say when we are teaching, as a short-hand guide to students trying to make sense of unfamiliar works. And because it takes the form of an analogy, it is different from Kittredge’s famously ahistorical pronouncement about Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde as the first novel.
But there is perhaps an interesting issue to be teased out here, about the way we use analogy or other similar devices to explain the effect of medieval or pre-modern texts. I don't mean to raise the hoary methodological issue of "presentism". I'm interested in the rhetorical status of this kind of remark in what is a profoundly historicist study, after all.
Perhaps it's a question about the relation between pedagogy and scholarship. Have we tended to censor this kind of remark out of our writing, when we might use it freely in the classroom? Is that self-censorship lightening up? What do people think? How do we see the relation between our teaching and our writing?
Now that I think about it, I am reminded of a comment one of my students made after our discussions of Troilus and Criseyde this semester: he was a little disturbed by the easy and familiar way we were talking about the characters' personalities and sexualities. It's hard *not* to do this when you are teaching, though I would almost certainly not write in that way. Hypocrisy? Or respect for the differences between spoken and written discourse, between informal and formal contexts, between pedagogy and scholarship?
n.b. A few people have commented that they have found it hard to post a comment on this blog. I'm not sure why that would be, but if you experience technical difficulties, and would like to post, please follow the links to my homepage and email me (and signal whether you'd like me to post on your behalf).
Personal, professional and reproductive lives
Anyone reading this blog with an interest in how we combine the professional and the personal aspects of our life might want to check out Wednesday's post from Ampersand Duck, an articulate, but ultimately very sad tale about the tensions between a professional and a reproductive career. Alert: anyone who is currently pregnant and feeling vulnerable should probably skip this one.
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Notes from the radiotherapy clinic
I'm settling into the routine of daily radiotherapy. The technicians are fantastically efficient, and if I get there on time, I wait only a minute or two before I'm called through to change into my gown, and then summoned into the treatment room. They mark me up (using the tattoos as a guide) under the infra-red light (I think that's what it is: same technology that reads the barcode on my library card), then leave me as the big machine moves back and forth over me for a short silent burst of radiation on each side of the 'treatment area'. It takes perhaps ten minutes in all, and then I'm free to go.
I'm not there long enough really to meet other patients, but it's easy to see that we are all at different stages. Some are inpatients in dressing-gowns and slippers, some are in wheelchairs, some are accompanied by relatives, some of the women are wearing scarves and beanies. One elderly woman was helped to her taxi by a kindly driver. I'm still sprightly enough: it's too soon, I was told yesterday, to start feeling the fatigue that is the common side-effect of treatment. No one looks particularly gaunt or ill, though; and this is reassuring to me. Someone came in yesterday and updated us on the cricket scores from Adelaide. Today I leafed through the brochure from the wig company.
On the way to the treatment rooms, there is a bank of about seventy little cupboards, each with the name of a patient on the door. Inside is the gown we wear to treatment (so clever, to save the washing and I guess to keep it a little familiar), and yesterday, there were two mini chocolate bars. I asked who had put them there and was told it had become a convention at this hospital. A woman who was delighted to have finished her treatment left a treat for everyone else, and it has become customary. There was another there today. I haven't eaten them yet; and have started stockpiling them in the 'fridge. Something about respect for these gifts, perhaps, in not consuming them instantly?
I'm not there long enough really to meet other patients, but it's easy to see that we are all at different stages. Some are inpatients in dressing-gowns and slippers, some are in wheelchairs, some are accompanied by relatives, some of the women are wearing scarves and beanies. One elderly woman was helped to her taxi by a kindly driver. I'm still sprightly enough: it's too soon, I was told yesterday, to start feeling the fatigue that is the common side-effect of treatment. No one looks particularly gaunt or ill, though; and this is reassuring to me. Someone came in yesterday and updated us on the cricket scores from Adelaide. Today I leafed through the brochure from the wig company.
On the way to the treatment rooms, there is a bank of about seventy little cupboards, each with the name of a patient on the door. Inside is the gown we wear to treatment (so clever, to save the washing and I guess to keep it a little familiar), and yesterday, there were two mini chocolate bars. I asked who had put them there and was told it had become a convention at this hospital. A woman who was delighted to have finished her treatment left a treat for everyone else, and it has become customary. There was another there today. I haven't eaten them yet; and have started stockpiling them in the 'fridge. Something about respect for these gifts, perhaps, in not consuming them instantly?
Monday, December 04, 2006
And we like sheep... Ritual, music, summer (part two)
Over the last eight days, three radically different musical events. Last Saturday, the annual Return of the Sacred Kingfisher festival at Ceres, the environmental park twenty minutes' walk north along the Merri Creek. The festival celebrates the seasonal return of this beautiful migratory bird; but also its return to the creek after twenty or more years' work cleaning up the water of most of its pollutants, reclaiming the tip site for Ceres, and replanting the creek banks with native grasses and trees (yes, we miss the willows, but are learning to live without such "exotics", as they are called). In some years the festival is well-funded; and it has won several awards. We've seen crowds of school kids taking part in processions of birds and insects; fire dancers and elaborate silhouette shows; ritual narratives of environmental destruction and renewal; political narratives of refugees and colonisation; massed community choirs; dance classes teaching us the "kingfisher boogie". One memorable year we saw a group of Aboriginal dancers and performers enacting Wurundjeri life prior to the invasion of the First Fleet (the local bicycle club, streaming white sails on flags above their bikes as they rode across the grassy playing area). Some way to the side of the campfire, not really part of the main action, we saw one man — fleetingly, unheralded — become a kangaroo. Sprawled on the grass, he twitched his head, and moved a paw to his ear. It lasted perhaps three seconds; and then the Fleet landed.
This year's festival had received no budget, and was thus a much more modest affair, though still structured around a cleansing rite of renewal and rebirth through fire. A singer conducted the crowd of several hundred people in a complex three-part harmony of the lullaby the farmer sings to Babe, "If I had words". As the sun went down, I thought I saw a flash of blue fire disappear into a tree. A visitation from the presiding spirit?
The next day Liz took me to a concert from the Gloriana choir: a program of unfamiliar and diverse music, including works by Brahms and Schumann, Anne Boyd's hypnotic As I crossed a bridge of dreams, and a Mass for Four Choirs by Charpentier. There were only about thirty singers, so that made only about one or two person per musical line. They sang beautifully, in an old bluestone church in Fitzroy. Liz found the Charpentier transcending; and I could see how it might be, but on this, my first hearing, it felt more like listening to an elaborate, absorbing conversation among friends. Heather invited us for champagne on the grass outside the church afterwards, in the last of the afternoon sun as the bluestone shadows lengthened.
Yesterday, another community event: a People's Messiah, performed by amateur choir and orchestra in a white Georgian church in the city, with four excellent soloists and an invitation to bring or hire a score and sing the choruses. I had gone to my first sing-along Messiah this time last year in St Louis, walking through the cold air to Graham Chapel at Washington University, and sung with some very serious and committed singers. The people around me started talking to each other only as we left; they were all singers in choirs of various kinds. Yesterday's performance was of more mixed musical quality; but people sang gladly under some spirited conducting; and an update on the cricket after the break: Australia was 3/187, so we could lift up our heads (o we gates!). Joel and I went with another family, but they left at interval: Lucien was tired, and Robbie had a bit of trouble working out why everyone was singing about liking sheep. This will become a family classic, I think: it's making me smile and chuckle even now. How lovely that translation is, though. The phrase "man of sorrows" has become familiar, but to be "acquainted with grief"? I wonder: is this emotional understatement powerful? or just startling in its unfamiliarity?
Joel and I had afternoon tea at the European: a rhubarb and tamarillo mille feuille that was downright architectural. Imagine cooking rhubarb so it is tender enough to eat, but firm enough to line up in neat geometrical rows and then cover with a crisp rectangle of pastry and then repeat the layers; and to build another little stack of rhubarb logs on the side of the plate. Well fortified, Joel sang snippets of Hallelujahs and sheep and a child being born all the way to the tram.
Sheep? Babe liked them, too.
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