I bought a card the other day that says, “Please let me be the first to punch the next person who tells you that everything happens for a reason.” You can buy one from the talented Emily McDowell here.

In the best case scenario, “Everything happens for a reason” is an attempt to cheer a sick or suffering person with the notion that meaning can be derived from difficult experiences, important life lessons can be learned the hard way, that more will be revealed in time.

In the worst case scenario, this platitude shames people by implying that their suffering is justified or righteous—that is, in the big scheme of the Universe’s (or God’s) Plan, they got what they had coming (even if we don’t know the reason).

What “everything happens for a reason” is really about is fear—fear of the unknown and the unpredictable, fear that bad things like cancer happen for no reason whatsoever.

This is a reasonable fear, because it happens constantly. Bad things happen to good people, and coping with this fundamental injustice is an age-old moral struggle that has been talked and written about in all cultures for millennia.

I had a student in my health communication course several years ago who grew increasingly frustrated with me as she questioned me about my cancer experiences. It was the second or third class meeting of the course, so we didn’t yet know each other very well.

I had told students that my interest in studying health communication had come about because of my own serious health challenges from bone cancer and late effects. I was diagnosed in the middle of my sophomore year of college, so my story cut a little too close to home for some students’ comfort.

This student—let’s call her Chelsea—asked, “Did you smoke when you were young?”

“No,” I replied.

“Does cancer run in your family?” she asked.

I shook my head. “No, it doesn’t. Why?”

“Were you raised with a healthy diet?” Chelsea demanded.

“Reasonably so, sure. Not perfect, but lots of vegetables, and one fast food meal every week or so, but otherwise home cooking.”

I could see in her face before she said anything—skepticism, frustration, even anger. I smiled gently at her and waited.

“You’re acting like you just woke up one morning when you were a sophomore in college and you just had cancer,” she spit out.

I nodded my head. “Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly what happened.”

Chelsea sat back with her arms crossed over her chest.

I returned her gaze calmly. “I know that’s frustrating to hear. We all want to know what causes someone to get cancer. I wanted to know why me and why at that time in my life and what exactly caused me to get it. But usually there is no known cause.”

For years, I blamed myself for getting cancer. At the time I thought I was just being logical—after all, no precipitating event or other catalyst for the tumor was ever identified—but I now believe that I simply found it less scary to live in a world where cancer was my own fault than to live in a world in which chaos, random chance, and uncertainty prevailed.

If everything really did happen for a reason, then there would be logic and order and predictability in the world, and things would make sense. It is so tempting to believe that lie. It takes a lot of practice to surrender our staunch beliefs in causality, that every effect has a direct cause, and in fairness, that people get what they deserve.

Evidently I didn’t get enough practice in surrendering false certainty during cancer treatment.  But in the almost three decades since then, my many leg reconstructions, amputation, frustrations with using a prosthetic leg, and phantom limb pain have finally brought me to the point of accepting that most of the time I can’t know the answer to “why me” or “why him?”

While sometimes bad things happen because of someone’s negligence, greed, or thoughtlessness, we need to acccept that we live in a world in which random chance unfairly causes devastating illness, accidents, and even death.

While I wouldn’t care to actually punch the next person who tells me that everything happens for a reason, I will argue with her. I will speak the awful truth—that often there is no reason at all for terrible suffering. And we do no one any kindness when we pretend otherwise.

 

Unlike most of North America, I am not celebrating Valentine’s Day today. Instead, I celebrate Biopsy Day. Today is the anniversary of the biopsy that confirmed my diagnosis of osteosarcoma.

Twenty-nine years ago today, my talented and compassionate surgeon broke the news that my right femur (thigh bone) would need further surgeries to remove the tumor and rebuild my leg with a bone graft and metal supports, as well as months of high-dose, in-patient chemo.

Like many cancer survivors, I turn contemplative on the anniversary of my biopsy. I feel tremendous gratitude for my continued survival. I am grateful for the amazing family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues who have supported me through my long journey of cancer care and then of late effects. I am deeply grateful for the privilege of comprehensive and affordable health insurance, without which I would not have been diagnosed as quickly, nor had access to high quality treatment.

At the same time, today is a day in which I grieve the loss of the person I was before cancer. I grieve the lonely nights in the hospital, the unspeakable pain, the endless complications and side effects, the TIA that left my entire left side numb and paralyzed for hours, almost 20 years of surgeries that culminated in the eventual loss of my leg, the advent of phantom limb pain, and learning to live on pain medications.

For a long time, I tried to reject the grief, sadness, and resentment that I feel about my cancer and late effects because I thought it was wrong not to be grateful for my survival. Osteosarcoma strikes many children and teens, killing them before they even have a chance to grow up. To feel pain and loss seemed horribly inappropriate for a long-term survivor when others die of cancer every day.

Yet over time, I came to understand my gratitude and grief as interwoven and inextricable from one another. My cancer diagnosis was a defining moment that forever altered my life course, in good ways as well as difficult ones. I would never have become a professor who studies communication in health care delivery if I had not had such intense treatment experiences. I would not be developing innovative methods for researching and sharing patients’ (and health care providers’) experiences if I had not been forced to conduct research in my unruly survivor body.

So today I embrace both my gratitude and my grief. I feel happiest when I am honest about the whole range of my emotions each year on my biopsy anniversary. Acknowledging my pain and losses frees me to release them in a way that denying them never could.

I wish you all a Happy Biopsy Day!

The animated film Madagascar features animals from the New York Central Zoo who unexpectedly travel to the wilds of Madagascar. When Melman, a hypochondriac giraffe, ends up with a tree branch and some leaves on his head and neck, he screams, “Nature—it’s all over me! Get it off!”

I empathize with Melman and have quoted his line many times (although I thought he said “the nature,” and that’s how I refer to it).

As an SF Bay area resident, I risk social isolation by admitting that I am a child of the great indoors and a dedicated city-dweller. My ideal of immersing myself in the nature is lounging on a restaurant patio with a Diet Coke and a cheese plate on a sunny day. I live in downtown San Jose. I do not hike, and I ride my adaptive bike outdoors only when the weather is dry, warm, and not excessively windy. I lived in California for 14 years before I finally made it to Yosemite, and once was sufficient.

My nature avoidance has a long history. Before I married Glenn, we made mutual vows that—among other prohibitions—there would be no camping in our marriage.

Despite my unwillingness to voluntarily hang out in the wilderness, I have no wish to hurt the nature that surrounds my beloved cities. I believe absolutely in the science behind climate change (and in taking steps to stop or at least slow down pollution that contributes to it), I want to protect our national and state parks, I dutifully recycle (although I draw the line at composting—eeeww!), and I bring reusable bags to the grocery store.

Yet I just do not find the nature particularly restorative as others do. The only exception is my fondness for ocean views and breezes, preferably accessed from hotel balconies or beach house porches.

When my friend jokingly asked me if I didn’t want to go camping with her daughter’s Girl Scout troop, I explained with mock regret that I had to be able to plug my leg in overnight to charge the air pump and the computer processor, so I really couldn’t sleep outdoors on the ground. This is true, but it is only part of the truth.

More truth is that I didn’t want to sleep on the ground or in a tent or whatever, long before my leg was amputated. Some people go “glamping” in lovely RVs and such, which offer electricity, invalidating my standard excuse and exposing the rest of the truth, which is that I just don’t want to be up close and personal with all that flora and fauna.

Years ago, black feminist writer (and nature lover) Alice Walker helped me through one of her beautiful essays to understand my alienation from nature as rooted in the patriarchy and its false dualisms between women and men, nature and culture. My former therapist provided another piece of the puzzle when she pointed to the link between my chronic perfectionism and my inability to control the wind, rain, or temperature.

Avoiding contact with bugs, mud, snakes, and rain (which I refer to as “unauthorized water from the sky”) also bears some similarities to my desire not to raise children. That is, it reflects both my fears and my desire to raise something other than kids and gardens. Kids and gardens (and camping) are great for some people, but they are not what my heart wants to raise.

I want to raise words into books and articles.

I want to raise my voice to help create a more equitable and peaceful world.

I want to raise students into critical analysts of culture and fierce advocates for social justice.

I want to raise relationships into loving communities.

May you raise up what your heart yearns for, while I do the same—only I’ll do my raising up primarily indoors.

 

 

 

 

During one of many hospitalizations, I lay in my bed, running a fever and too distracted to concentrate on my school work or anything else. In the doorway to my room, one woman and several men milled about in their white coats. An older man nodded his distinguished gray-haired head to signal to a particular student.

Clearing his throat, the young man began. “The osteosarcoma in 12B was diagnosed via surgical biopsy in February 1989,” he said, and I realized he was speaking of me. “Right distal femur, stage 2b, limb-salvaging surgery May ‘89. Patient has undergone 12 rounds of chemo—uh, methotrexate, Adriamycin, and cisplatin. Readmitted with neutropenic fever. Current treatment is hydration, wide spectrum antibiotics, and acetaminophen.”

I was too weary to object to the reduction of myself to a diagnosis and occupancy of bed 12B, but it rankled. The attending continued to question the student reporting on my case, allowing anyone who was in a nearby room or wandering down the hallway to hear intimate details of my medical history. When the attending was satisfied, he led the way into my room, where he asked me a couple of perfunctory questions before continuing down the hall to his next patient.

Back in the old days, before the passage of HIPAA legislation in 1996 and the implementation of the “protected health information” privacy requirements in 2003, I used to lie in my hospital bed and listen to medical students summarize my case (and those of my roommate and other patients) to members of what my nurses referred to as the “herd”—the cluster of medical students, interns, and residents who roamed the hallways of teaching hospitals on the heels of attending physicians.

This time-tested case study approach to teaching medicine has much to recommend it, having helped generations of medical students grasp the complexities of differential diagnosis and treatment. The gross violation of patients’ privacy was strictly incidental, of course, an unintended consequence of a proven teaching method. At the time, it upset me far more that I regularly learned things about myself from eavesdropping on my case report than it did that everyone in the vicinity also overheard the herd. Why wasn’t all of that information shared with me directly?

Its teaching effectiveness notwithstanding, the hallway case study method had a dehumanizing effect; it sent a clear signal that patient privacy would be sacrificed to the convenience (and power and privilege) of the herd. That is, the education of doctors became the most valued goal of the ward, rather than the care of patients. We were cases for them to learn from, stripped of names but with many of our most intimate bodily details shared openly—not primarily for our needs but for the student doctors’ benefit.

Many years later, I have more language and concepts available to me to explain why hallway reporting was inappropriate. Of course, this was also back in the day when patients were not allowed to touch the paper medical records that hung on the end of our beds, and it never occurred to me (preacher’s kid and good girl at the time) to peek. Now I wish I had been a wild, outlaw, peeking patient! I’m incensed that I was explicitly forbidden to touch the sacred record of my own illness experiences.

Ironically, I have shared far more intimate details of my life, body, illnesses, and relationships in this blog and in some of the journal articles and academic books I have published than were ever included in the hallway case reports. But that is my choice, not theirs.

I am not angry at the herds who did their best to care for me in the pre-HIPAA landscape. Society’s understanding of privacy has evolved over time, along with our expectations for the practice of medicine. I’m pleased that the case study process now continues with the HIPAA requirement that reporting happens in a conference room or other (mostly) private space prior to the herds rambling down the hospital hallways. I am thrilled that healthcare organizations cannot give out my medical information without my written consent and that, conversely, they must provide me with copies of my records at my request.

HIPAA isn’t perfect, but it did promise patients that the power to decide when and how to share our stories in public venues (including hospital hallways) would now rest with patients rather than with wandering herds. Yeehaw!

 

 

I write this in a cramped airplane seat, smooshed between an amicable teenage stranger and Glenn, the love of my life. We are on a return trip to our honeymoon destination to celebrate a milestone, our 25^th wedding anniversary. I’m feeling thoughtful.

My inner feminist contemplates the heterosexual privilege that enabled us to marry so many years ago when others were forbidden by law to marry their sweethearts. Love is love! At the same time, my mushy heart reflects on what has enabled us to sustain our relationship for so long, with the good times far outweighing the bad.

For me, romance is what keeps love alive, but not the Hallmark variety. Instead, I understand romance in a way that I think will resonate with long-term cancer survivors and people who live with other chronic illnesses (and presumably some non-sick people as well).

Here’s how I explain romance to my undergraduate students. I teach a course called “Gender, Health, and Sexuality,” a more grown-up version of high school sex ed that features research on interpersonal communication about sex and sexual health. One of the exercises I use to help students think about their (possibly unrealistic) expectations of romantic or sexual relationships is having them write responses to this prompt: “Three things Disney movies never taught me about romance…”

Students’ answers are inevitably wonderful, running the gamut from “condoms are messy” to “how not to get pregnant” to “what to do when the prince cheats on you” and “sometimes two princesses fall in love.” I never horrify students by talking about my own sexual choices, even those made 30 years ago, but I deliberately gross them out with a particular story about romance.

A couple of years after the amputation of my right leg, I woke in the middle of the night, sweat beading along my forehead, nausea roiling in my stomach. I panted, trying to catch my breath as I grew increasingly certain that dinner would not remain in my stomach much longer. I reached for my crutches but fell back onto the bed, dizzy and unable to stand up. “Glenn,” I moaned. “Glenn! I need your help.”

“What? Huh?” asked Glenn, groggily.

“I’m going to throw up and I can’t get up. I can’t get my crutches,” I groaned.

My stomach started to convulse, and I slapped a hand over my mouth. Glenn sprang into action, grabbing the waste basket from his side of the bed and thrusting it in front of my face just as I threw up.

Turns out that above-knee amputees, weak with stomach flu, cannot maneuver our radically off-balance bodies (when we aren’t wearing a prosthesis) to the toilet (and even if we could, we certainly cannot kneel or otherwise get close enough for precision targeting of vomit).

After I lay back weakly, Glenn emptied the plastic basket of its vile contents, then lined it with a fresh trash bag, actions he repeated every few hours throughout the night and following day as I waited miserably for the flu to run its course. “Thank you,” I whimpered again and again.

“Of course, my love,” he answered each time.

“Now THAT is romance,” I declare to my students. “That is a love worth celebrating.” I see a variety of responses among the 20-21 year olds. Some nod, getting it. Others look thoughtful. A few look queasy or bewildered.

I ask them what romance means, scrawling key words of their responses on the board—whirlwind emotions, desire and love (or at least like) converging into passion, being swept off your feet, soul mates, being wooed with sweet words and flowers and special nights out.

“And how do you feel when you know that special person is being really romantic, going all out to let you know how they feel?” I ask.

“You feel special,” says one woman softly.

“You feel like they really get you, like they care about you,” says another.

“Exactly.” I respond.

If all goes well, we will celebrate our anniversary tomorrow night by dressing up and enjoying a romantic dinner in an upscale restaurant. I doubt it can compete with the flu for making me feel loved, but I’m willing to give it a try.

I have read several “best of 2017” book lists as we near year’s end. My favorite escape has always been books, and the calamity of our political climate is such that I have wanted to run and hide in books even more than usual.

I moved a lot growing up, and one of the things that comforted me when I landed in another new town was rereading my favorites, particularly the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I identified with the author/heroine whose name I share and with her itinerant childhood, one part adventure and one part anxious longing for a permanent home.

So in the spirit of fostering comfort and respite, I offer a brief list of my favorite rereads of the year, books I have turned to again and again—one fantasy trilogy, one nonfiction book that offers hope, and one affirming tragedy.

The Circle Trilogy (Morrigan’s Cross, Dance of the Gods, Valley of Silence) by Nora Roberts. This is like Lord of the Rings crossed with a romance and an evil vampire saga, with time travel thrown in. As an academic, I am supposed to disdain genre fiction, particularly romance and “chick lit,” but I do not. Although I confess that my feminist sensibilities voice frequent objections, I adore this series, particularly the audiobook version. Six people—a witch, a wizard, a warrior, a scholar, a shape shifter, and a (good) vampire—join together to fight Lilith, the evil vampire queen. It takes three books to time travel, cross the Atlantic to Ireland, journey to the mythical land of Gael, have all three couples fall in love, wield lots of magic, and fight an epic battle, but (spoiler alert!) they save the (admittedly gender-stereotyped) world in the end. Yay!!!!

Help, Thanks, Wow by Anne Lamott. This is nonfiction, a reflection on prayer, which Lamott makes clear can be aimed at any sort of Higher Power, benevolent universe, Cosmic Muffin, or other god figure you like (she is a feminist and a liberal Christian.) She explains that “help!” “thanks!” and “wow!” enable us to reach outside of ourselves and connect with something larger. I have read this on Kindle and in paper, and also have the audiobook version, which I began to listen to on repeat instead of NPR after the political climate grew so grim I could no longer bear it during my morning commute. Help and thanks are self-explanatory, but wow (as a prayer) was unexpected. We say wow when a miracle occurs or we behold beauty, but we also say it as we witness the devastation of Hurricane Katrina or the magnitude of the Syrian refugee crisis. Lamott suggests experiencing our inability to fully comprehend either epic suffering or magnificence is a prayer. She’s irreverent, self-deprecating, and compassionate; she calms me down and offers me hope.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. Two snarky teenagers meet in a badly run cancer support group. The disappointing movie reduces the story to star-crossed lovers, but the book is much richer and nuanced, despite its brevity. Hazel shares her favorite book, reread dozens of times, with Augustus, and this sparks friendship, love, and an adventure. I have never read a more accessible, more delightful, or more painful embodiment of the fundamental truth that bad things happen to good people. Eighty-percent of childhood cancer patients now survive, and that means the other 20%—thousands of kids—and their families experience excruciating loss that is magnified by the shame and bewilderment of ending up in the grim minority. Green affirms that life is not fair, that cancer happens to good people and not-so-good people alike, and that many who fight, persist, and pray suffer and die anyway. Kids with cancer are neither one-dimensional heroes nor angels but imperfect, regular people, and they don’t die because their parents didn’t pray hard enough or because of God’s plan. They die because that’s how it goes sometimes. I know this sounds depressing, but it comforts me enormously to hear again and again that cancer isn’t anyone’s fault, that we don’t owe it to anyone to be inspirational, that cancer sucks, and that we are still individuals (not just cancer statistics).

So that’s it, this year’s revisited narrative hiding places that sustained me when the strain of life became too much. May one of them prove to be a shelter for you when you need one.

(I do not receive any compensation for book recommendations.)

My back, shoulders, and (biological) foot and knee all ache, and I have a blister on the skin at the edge of my prosthesis. But I’m smiling as I write this. Glenn and I hosted a holiday open house yesterday, and it was lovely.

It was also exhausting—three whole days of work. I spent a day cleaning with a generous friend who organized all my clutter, a day planning the menu, shopping for food, and digging out holiday dishes and table cloths, and a day cooking, hosting, and cleaning up. Glenn did a ton of work, too, virtually all of the heavy lifting, and was incredibly patient with my control-freakiness. My mother kindly cooked some of the food and made the cookies and frostings for kids to decorate, and several friends helped us cook and serve, washed dishes, and gathered up dirty paper plates and other detritus during the party. And today we will have to spend at least a couple more hours cleaning up and putting things away.

But even with all the work involved, the process of opening my house to friends reaffirmed for me the fundamental truth that humans are designed to live in community with others.

I saw friends from different parts of my life come together in moments of politeness, kindness, and genuine interest in each other. Kids enthusiastically decorated cookies with gorgeous swirls and smears of frosting, brightly colored sugars, and sprinkles. I received more offers of help than I could imagine. I didn’t get as much time to talk to some people as I would have liked, but even that felt kind of good, like I was blessed to have so many wonderful people in one place that I couldn’t get enough of them in one afternoon.

In lieu of gifts, we asked for guests to bring warm socks, and our friends brought dozens of pairs that will be donated to people who are homeless in our local community.

At the end of the party, we lingered with several friends, talking and laughing and sharing our lives. We discussed books we had read recently. We all agreed that the new Thor movie is clever and surprisingly funny, and that it is classier to describe the actor Chris Hemsworth as “easy on the eyes,” rather than “freakin’ hot,” but really, both are accurate. I was able to offer support to one friend who is dealing with some extremely tough times, and it felt good to listen to her and offer her sincere compassion and admiration.

There is something about opening up your house, putting on your festive gear, preparing tasty tidbits, and welcoming your particular assortment of kith and kin into your personal space that feels both vulnerable and gratifying. It is a way of saying to others, this is our home where we are comfortable (which in our case includes a sheen of cat fur on most surfaces), and we hope you enjoy sharing our space for a little while.

Holidays can get busy and stressful, but this party was worth every ounce of time and energy because it fed my soul with human connection. While I am almost always a social person anyway, it nonetheless felt special to have so many people I care about in my home enjoying themselves.

Tomorrow I’ll get back to planning next quarter’s syllabus and working on my latest research paper. But right now I am relaxing with a sense of belonging and hope, a much-needed counter point to the crushing pain of national politics and the depression I have to fight off every morning in the face of each day’s new sexual harassment scandal.

For a brief time, we ate and drank and made merry together, and that is a wonderful thing.

I had coffee with friends this morning—well, I had Diet Coke and they had coffee—with whom I have gathered at local coffee shops most Wednesday mornings for the past 15 years. We shared laughter, our to-do lists, updates on mutual friends, and a little bit about the news. I left feeling nurtured and connected, with the added benefit of two recommendations for contractors who clean and repair rain gutters.

I love getting together with these women (and other friends) to share our lives, loves, and relationships, to support each other, and in short, to gather. There is no substitute for sitting, walking, playing, and eating together with friends. I truly value many long distance friendships, and I enjoy keeping in touch via Facebook and email and texting and phone calls. But I crave face-to-face communication with friends. I felt this way before surviving cancer, but recognition of the centrality of friends in my life deepened  during cancer and my ongoing struggle with late effects in the decades that have followed.

The weekly coffee date grew out of an early morning water aerobics class that some of us still attend. A few weeks shy of my 49th birthday, I am one of the youngest of the group, with the others ranging in age to their mid-70s. This group overlaps substantially with a group that gathers once a month as part of the Dining for Women organization, and also with some of my past and current co-workers. Having friends of all different ages is a tremendous gift.

My older friends have hilarious stories and tales of epic failures from having maintained  relationships—or not—and a wealth of fascinating experiences. Many of them are retired and have time for shopping trips, lunches, or theatre with me, all while continuing to pursue their interests in photography, genealogy, lay ministry, travel, sea turtles, volunteering, church, or good books.

I have friends who are close to my own age, and with them I have the comfort of sharing historical reference points—we remember when Jimmy Carter was elected President and where we were when the Challenger exploded. We enjoy singing along to the hits of the 80s while driving up the highway and groan over pictures of our big 80s hair. Recently we have noticed that we approaching our half-century mark.

And I love having friends who are younger than me. I have two millennial friends who are former students of mine who used to do house sitting and cat care for us when we traveled, and who are now my honorary nieces. They teach me things like what’s new in music and what current slang means. For example, it turned out that “Netflix and chill” does not mean what I thought it meant!

New faculty and graduate students I meet often are 15 or 20 years younger than I am, digital natives who can always seem to get the projector to hook up to my laptop correctly. They understand the academic world in a way that I no longer remember—when theory and methodology and enormous bodies of research still spread out before me as vast, uncharted wilderness to explore, and the language of academia had yet to be absorbed. I recall that I was terrified of learning to conduct my own research and looked with awe at senior scholars whose work I had read, but I can’t remember what the thrill and terror and awe felt like in my bones.

When I hang out with new scholars, I glimpse a time when I was less cynical and less sure I knew my field. I learn a lot from my younger colleagues’ fresh perspectives and keen awareness of the cutting edges of our fields. They ask different questions and make different connections among ideas than I do, and I love that.

My friend Bill Rawlins’ research on communication in friendship across the life span richly describes the rewards and challenges of friendship. “Friendship is part of living well, a part of being able to connect with others, a part of productivity, a part of a good romantic relationship, a part of facilitating community building, and it teaches people how to treat others with respect and joy,” he says. I agree.

I make it a priority to foster friendships both as rich, meaningful ends unto themselves and as sources of help, companionship, and, of course, recommendations for getting my gutters cleaned.

I just returned home after the annual convention of the National Communication Association, which was held in Dallas. On the third day, I encountered some technical difficulties, and I muttered to myself,  “#amputeelife, #thingsthatbipedsdon’tdealwith.” I felt very hip and millenial to have had a thought in hashtag form as a 48-year-old Gen-Xer, even as I endeavored to solve the problem.

That day I wore a dress with black thigh-high stockings. The stockings have stretchy bands at the top that keep them in place. The band on my bioleg (AKA left leg, original equipment) worked just fine. The band that I had pulled over the prosthetic socket that encases what’s left of my right leg would not stay in place on the super smooth surface of the socket, however.

Side note—it is not unreasonable to wonder why I bothered to put a stocking on my prosthetic leg, which is not covered with flesh-simulating foam but rather appears from the ankle up as a collection of mechanical parts. I do this mostly for symmetry. I have a white-person-colored, rubber foot cover on my prosthesis (so that I can wear the same size shoe on both feet). If I don’t cover the rubber foot when wearing my more formal shoes (read: black flats) and a black stocking on the bioleg, the peachy-beige rubber foot glows weirdly and contrasts horribly with the black shoes and black stocking-covered leg, particularly in fluorescent lighting. On a more practical level, it is also a lot easier to cram my prosthetic foot into the shoe when the rubber foot’s nonskid surface is covered with the smooth stocking.

Anyway, after the stocking slid down yet again, I rather impatiently yanked it up, with perhaps more force than necessary.

Riiiiiiiiiiippp! Uh oh.

The band lined with gripping material remained in my hand, but it was no longer attached to the stocking. Sigh. With no time to go to my room for another stocking, I dug through my computer bag, coming up with an elastic hair tie and a paper clip. I slipped the hair tie over my shoe and up my prosthetic “ankle” and “knee,” gathering the stocking material tightly at the point where the computerized knee joint attached to the socket, and I twisted the elastic tie as tightly as possible, securing it with the paper clip.

Miraculously, this fix held—see photo below—and my dress was long enough that it wasn’t visible. I told a friend of mine, and she pronounced it a “MacGyver moment,” referencing the TV show of our teenage years where the hero improvised highly improbable mechanical solutions to problems, a feat accomplished every episode via video montage with a signature soundtrack.

At that moment, it occurred to me that the creative work-arounds necessitated by my fairly regular bodily and device failures have often, although certainly not always, held well enough—both of the paperclip variety and of the extensively engineered titanium implant or computerized prosthesis variety. I reflected on the ingenuity needed to solve these big and little bodily failures, and it occurred to me that this is pretty much what it means to be a scholar.

Yes, I sometimes bemoan the number of mundane details, pains, and bodily annoyances I must deal with due to my particular body (while also acknowledging that there are many daily hassles, microaggressions, and burdens that my privileges enable me to avoid). But I also realized that my creative efforts to solve daily problems, cope with as much grace as possible, and even keep a stocking in place, actually provide me with great practice for addressing challenges in my research and writing.

How do I work around this barrier? How do I compensate for this missing piece? How do I forge connections where none exist? How do I explain this need to someone who has never experienced it? These are the same questions that scholars face, and I relish the challenge of constructing interesting and useful responses through my research.

Back home from the conference and comfortable in cotton socks and sneakers, I look back on a successful conference where I presented new ideas, met with both junior and seasoned scholars, enjoyed time with friends, and engaged in outside-the-box thinking to keep my stockings up.

 

 

Pigeons mate during spring; in Massachusetts, the season of pigeon lust begins in early May, a fact I had been unaware of until I had cancer surgery.

Here is a funny moment from when I had the first of the “limb salvaging” surgeries on my right leg to remove the tumor and insert a bone graft and metal hardware. It was 1989 and I was 20 years old.

My experience with that surgery was complicated by the randomness that resulted in me having a hospital roommate named Louise. She was a white lady in her late 60s and what my nana would have called, “quite a character.” Louise routinely joined my conversations with visitors uninvited, interrupted me when I was reading, watched TV all night so I couldn’t sleep, and offered her opinions on anything and everything to anyone who would listen. I did my best to be friendly at first and then resorted to being as civil as possible as I grew more and more exasperated.

But one afternoon, Louise made me laugh so hard that I will never forget it. I was reading the hardcover copy of Mitla Pass that my father had brought me when Louise started another of her diatribes.

“Oh my Lord would you look at that! Oh boy, oh my Lord, would you look at this?!”  I looked over at Louise, but I could see nothing out of the ordinary. I rolled my eyes and refused to encourage her by asking what she was so excited about. I tried to return to my book.

“Oh my LORD, those pigeons, look at this, would you look at THIS!” She jabbed her finger toward the window, and I shot her an annoyed look.

Louise shook her head, outraged. “Look at this, I can’t believe it, I can’t BELIEVE it! Can you believe this? I’m trying to eat!” She waved her hand at her lunch tray and looked at me indignantly, expecting me to join in her disgust.

I had no idea what she was talking about, and I didn’t care. I tried again to ignore her, but she ranted until finally I gave up.

“What are you talking about?” I asked with a sigh.

Gratified that she had my attention at last, Louise continued shouting, “You know what this is?  It’s progo! Pogo! What’s that called? Porno! It’s pigeon PORN!” I started to laugh as Louise waved her arms in the air, gesturing towards the window emphatically. “I said to Eddie—he says I’m as naive as they day I married him—but I says to him, how can they do it in all those positions? You on top of me, me on top of you, side-by-side, but now I’ve seen it all—look at those birds! NASTY birds, why don’t you go home?”

Through my laughter, I squeaked out, “The balcony outside our window probably is their home,” but she ignored me. It occurred to me that I ought to take notes in my journal, and I tried, but my laughter made it difficult.

Undeterred, Louise continued. “Go home! I wish I had a stick! If I was on a street corner and I saw two dogs doing it I would just walk away, but I can’t get away from this! I shouldn’t have to watch this!” Louise turned to watch me as I held my belly, gasping for breath as I continued to laugh. “Go ahead and laugh you! Go jump in the lake! I wish these birds would go jump in a lake too! Look at that, he’s right on her! Don’t they get tired? How long can they do it anyway? He’s walking away—good. Oh no, he’s BACK! Would you look at them go?! I shouldn’t have to watch this kind of stuff! Stop laughing! This is awful! Oh look, there’s another one! Are they going to have a three-way thing!? Ah, they are flying away. Good. Go home!”

A few minutes later, a doctor came in to examine Louise’s leg, and I was still laughing. The doctor kept missing Louise’s comments because she was so busy staring at me, presumably trying to figure out what was so funny.

Furious that she did not have her doctor’s undivided attention, Louise demanded, “Just ignore her, doctor! She’s just, well, just ignore her!”

I subsided into giggles, feeling grateful to Louise for the first (and only) time.