Blog from Erin Cummings

My dear friend Erin Cummings, Founder of Mittens for Detroit, was one of the people I told about my stage IV Melanoma diagnosis early on. Erin recently went through surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment for a cancer that was discovered last year. I spent a long time on the phone with her as she was heading to a radiation treatment. She subsequently wrote a blog entry on her site which I would like to share with you......

Knock-knock. Hello? Oh. It's you.

Journal entry by Erin Cummings — 5/14/2017

I love the movie "Clue." 

It's one of my favorite movies. I love everything about the film. I love how whimsical names like "Colonel Mustard" and "Professor Plum" and "Miss Peacock" seem pedestrian when brilliantly portrayed by Martin Mull, Christopher Lloyd and Eileen Brennan. There's a scene from Clue that came to mind as I was reading the latest on Twitter and thinking of my little "pre-existing condition." 

The doorbell rings. The door opens. There's a person in a bellhop uniform who immediately starts tap dancing and singing, "I--am--your singing telegram," when a gunshot kills her on the spot. The genre of the film and the timing of the shot actually makes this a comical moment. It just works so well. Can you imagine that? Someone showing up on your doorstep that you don't want to see and you just shoot them and shut the door? Imagine that the person wasn't a person, but a thing instead. Like... your student loans show up on your doorstep and you shoot them and shut they door. Boom. Gone. Done. How lovely would that be?

The thing that made me think about this moment was the expectation of a "surprise" guest. You could anticipate that person's next move and prepare for it. You could have a tray of freshly baked cookies for a friend or a loaded gun for a foe. You could outsmart them by the knowledge that they were coming. No surprise. No scramble. No pretending that you weren't spending the day in sweatpants, house in disarray, binging the latest Netflix series. 

But I guess that's how surprise guests work. They surprise you. They show up out of the blue. They come over unannounced. They just assume that you don't have things going on like... oh, I don't know - LIFE. This is how cancer is. I used to think that cancer was this terrifying dragon who breathed fire and required a knight in armor to be defeated. I don't think that way anymore. Cancer now seems to me to be the awful neighbor who does any number of things to make your life miserable. That neighbor who spies on you. That neighbor who calls the cops when you play your music past 9pm. That neighbor who gossips with other neighbors or builds a fence on your property line or poisons your tree or steals your mail or fucks your spouse or shoots your dog - your neighbor is just plain awful. So, if you have the means, you move. 

You do what you think you need to do to get away from this really shitty neighbor. You liked where you lived but you realized that life with this neighbor was not a life. So you went to great expense. You started researching - real estate agents, neighborhoods, etc. You put a part of your life on hold to make this huge, dramatic change so that this horrible neighbor would go away and wouldn't be able to disrupt your life anymore. And then...

Knock knock. 

Hello?

Oh.

It's you. 

Cancer has moved next door. 

My dear friend recently told me that his cancer had come back. I'll call him DD. He thought he had killed his dragon twelve years ago. He moved on. He dedicated his life's work to saving children in third world countries from atrocities. He was and is a man of God. And then, in a random screening, he got a knock on his door. He doesn't have long. Maybe a few years, at most, if the immunotherapy treatment works. They don't really know because it's so new. His wife is at a loss. She thought that they hadn't left a forwarding address and she doesn't understand how that neighbor tracked them down. 

I asked him how he felt. We laughed at the absurdity of cancer and the beauty of the white noise it creates. There's terribly horrid jokes that we cancer patients make to one another when others aren't around. They are wonderful. They are the kind of jokes that make cancer truly feel like a special club, without the guilt of privilege. They make me want to flash back to the 90's and make a shirt that reads, "It's a Cancer thing. You wouldn't understand." (it was a saying with "cancer" substituted for almost any other noun back in the day). 

I asked him if he had a bucket list and he told me the most wonderful thing. He said the one place in the world he once wanted to visit was a city he had now been to three times. He had done everything he wanted to do. He said that the only thing that made him sad about dying was the pain that he knew would be felt by the people he left behind. I said this to my therapist and told her that I was considering making a bucket list. She said that I already had. I vowed to go to Mexico. I'm going on July 14. I vowed to shave my head. I did that back in October. I vowed go on Dancing with the Stars. I'm working on it.... (cross your fingers).

I realized in my conversation with DD that we don't know when we are going to get the knock. And when the knock comes, we may not be ready with a gun to say, "fuck off, I still have things to do." We have to make a list. We have to decide what is important now and just start doing it. We can't live our lives with the idea that one day, we're gonna be a contender. If we do that, we will just end up in the back seat of a taxi saying, "I could've been a contender." (that's a Marlon Brando reference, in case you're confused). 

I keep saying I want to write a book. Well, where is the book? I keep saying I want to climb a mountain. Which mountain? I keep saying I want to be this and that and the other thing. Okay, so when? Why do my dreams only exist in the future? Why aren't they happening now? More importantly, why aren't I taking the steps to make them happen now? If I look at "writing a book" as a thing that will happen "one day," instead of a thing that I am working toward TODAY, it will never happen. And I'll get a knock on the door as I'm scooping up scraps of notes and no book will ever live beyond my mortal coil. However, if I write... and I write... and I write... Even if I'm never able to actually put those scraps together into a format that people will publish and print and bind and sell, my words will live on. Someone will find them and read them. Someone will possibly put them together and say, "these were the words of a woman who knew the knock was coming." 

I guess what I'm saying is that I know the knock is coming. I know it will come back. I haven't even finished fighting my fight. I am indulging in a brief respite from radiation called the "weekend," but I'll be back before the matador on Monday. However, after I finish my radiation and after I finish my Herceptin infusions and after I have my port removed and after I have my reconstruction surgery and after I finish my physical therapy and after my period comes back and after my toenails and my eyelashes grow back, I will stare at the door. I will put a chair in front of the door and a part of me will sit in it and stare at it and wait. I will wait for the knock. I already hear it. When I have a pain in my elbow, I wonder, "do I have bone cancer?" When I have sinus pressure, I ask, "do I have brain cancer?" When I have a headache that lasts longer than ten minutes, I ask, "should I get an MRI?" I think about the one cell that could be floating throughout my system. The one cell that wasn't poisoned, cut out, or seared by radiation. The one cell that just waits for that moment to knock on my door with a familiar curled smile. Maybe I'll die an old lady, quietly in my bed. I hope so. For now, I just wait for the knock. And I keep my gun loaded, whatever that means.