Living with wolves

NB: You can click through on any of the wonderful images here if you'd like to see more of and learn more about the artists' work. Amazing how creatively fertile "Little Red Riding Hood" remains...

Additional disclosure: Over in the sidebar, there's a significant omission in my explanation for naming this site "The Mouth of the Wolf." I've given you the call but left out the response. When an Italian (or Italophile) tells you by way of encouragement to go ahead and dive "in bocca al lupo!" (into the mouth of the wolf!), you're meant to complete the protective ritual by replying - in your most bloodthirsty tones - "Crepi!" which means "Let him die!"

Maybe my lapses in luck owe something to my repeated failures in wolf cursing.  When I say "crepi," I always say it with a laugh or a wince or a cough, as if I were deliberately misfiring my lone silver bullet away from its target and into the dirt. I like wolves. I like them too much even to wish them indigestion. So I imagine that my own journey into the mouth of a wolf would somehow not be violent but just the slobbery means to a happy symbiosis. I fantasize taking up residence in his big belly and coming to know his appetites from the inside. I wonder what the wolf would come to know about me, apart from my being so tasty...

Wolf's Breath by Swanbones on Etsy

I wonder, too, whether wolves say "In bocca al uomo!" when they're trying to bolster each other's courage. Do you think they repeat well-worn stories about what happens when foolish young wolves stray out of the woods and onto the human path on their way to grandma's den? "Beware pretty girls with picnic baskets!"

Watercolor by Lora Zombie.

Words have not been coming easily to me of late. I'm reading bloody fairy tales and getting paler and more passive by the day, less like a human or a wolf and more like a sea anemone, some tender translucent creature waving its tentacles in the passing current. But I did manage before I subsided into dumb inertia to complete a proposal for the Conversation Project run by Oregon Humanities.

How's this for a cool idea? Send out an open call for prospective conversation leaders to submit topics oriented to the humanities and of clear relevance to Oregonians. Choose and create a catalog from the most promising of these, then invite nonprofits from all over the state to host the conversation(s) that interest them. OH covers stipend and travel costs for the leaders, while the nonprofits are responsible for arranging the venues and getting the word out. Every catalog has a two-year term, during which leaders are effectively on-call, ready as their schedules allow to take their provocations on the road.

The core aim of the project (as I understand it) is to stir the Oregon pot, to use questions of common interest to bring together people who don't ordinarily have much intercourse or discourse and get them talking and listening to each other. (Here, as elsewhere, there's an especially strong, resentment-generating split in perspective between the urban and rural citizenry, but of course things are cracked all over, and our general willingness to engage those with whom we disagree seems very much on the decline.) It's an eminently worthy endeavor, but I love it for selfish as well as civic reasons - what an alluring invitation it offers to a restless mind! OH is careful to insist on what they're not looking for: lecture, presentation with Q&A, debate, or solution-oriented discussion. They're looking instead for rich questions and open dialogue led by the knowledgeable but not oppressively expert. Intellectual omnivores welcome, hooray!

The application would have been moderately demanding if I'd been in full possession of my wits and energy. As it was, I almost gave up before I'd started in earnest. How did I think I could get something cogent and persuasive together when I was up to my eyeballs in chemical-induced oobleck? But I got an enthusiastic nudge at just the right moment - thanks, Paige and Allison! - and decided to forge ahead, to see how far I got. Nothing lost if I failed to finish in time - it gave me an opportunity to articulate some thoughts and questions that are intrinsically interesting to me. It also gave me something to think about that was almost entirely unrelated to cancer, a very welcome change. But I did finish, and I dare to hope that OH will say yes to the conversation I proposed. (Thanks to Kathleen and Lauren for having my back!)

Here's one small piece of what I submitted, an attempt at a catalog-ready description:

---

Illustration by Albertine Mermet.

Living with Wolves, Real and Imagined

Few animals range as widely as wolves. They wander not only across borders between geographical states but across borders between states of mind. For more than sixty years, wolves endured in Oregon only as creatures of individual and collective imagination, but in 2008 they returned in flesh and fur, tooth and claw. Sixty-four wolves are now known to live among us; just last month, wolf tracks appeared on the eastern slope of Mt. Hood for the first time since 1947. As they make their literal journey into the heart of the state, wolves trail a mythical history that complicates the questions they pose for Oregon’s citizenry. They present both a practical challenge and a cultural provocation: How do wolves mirror and threaten us? What is our appetite for wildness and danger? What material risks can we fairly ask our neighbors to assume in the interest of an intangible good?

---

Wolves interest me very much in their own right, but another reason I'm so eager to converse about them is that they have unwittingly taken on so many conflicting symbolic burdens from us. They are irreducibly alien but resemble us closely enough to awaken buried ambivalence about our own rapacious appetites and capacity for violence. They gave us dogs, and their intransigent indifference to our interests shows up in contrast as a betrayal. Furthermore, there's no denying that they pose a real, material threat to anyone whose livelihood depends on sheep or cattle. All that said, the almost gleeful state-sponsored slaughter now underway in Idaho speaks to a fury and a fear all out of proportion to the threat.

There are many interesting discussions going on these days around the concept of "misfear." I ran into one when following up on a personal bugbear, the questionable value of mammograms. (A subject for another day. Suffice it to say that my diagnosis has not altered my judgment that for most women they are an expensive and potentially dangerous panacea.) My own relationship to fear has been in flux over the last three months. I've felt an ever more pressing need to cultivate a new kind of discipline and discernment, to try whenever possible to distinguish phantom from real dangers.

Beyond this, when we're in the middle of a protracted health crisis, we're asked (and not at all politely) to learn to live with real dangers, to discover and possibly to expand our tolerance for risk. Sorry to lay another load at your feet, wolves, but you do make a good jumping-off point for that broader conversation. What appetite does each of us have for danger, wildness, loss of control? And how do our differing appetites contribute surreptitiously to conflicts between humans and other animal neighbors? Can ideals of coexistence and dominion be reconciled anywhere?

Illustration by Joanna Concejo.

Finally (if you've made it this far), a brief progress report, since I've been incommunicado for the last few weeks. Yesterday I had my fourth and final treatment of Adriamycin (a.k.a. the Red Devil) and Cytoxan. Halle-fucking-lujah! My white and red blood cell counts have continued to plummet despite regular self-administered injections of Neupogen, a marrow-boosting growth factor, thus my gradual devolution into a seafloor creature. (I was just on the edge of acceptable parameters with my WBC count yesterday but they decided to go ahead with treatment. As my immensely cheering NP, Michelle Anthony, reminded me, we're aiming at cure, so ass-kickings will proceed apace whenever possible. Another negotiation of alternative risks - there are no right answers here.)

Today I'm not an anemone but a limpet, back clinging to the couch. But the brain is up and running for a change, probably thanks to the steroids I'm taking (with four other drugs) to manage the nausea. They can trigger mild bouts of mania. I get one more dose of those tomorrow, then will crash hard on Wednesday or Thursday. With any luck, the body will stir to life again sometime over the weekend; the brain stayed away 'til Wednesday last week, and even then its return was unsure and tentative. We shall see. Just as I'm getting to know the pattern of one rug, it gets whisked out from under my feet. On April 7th I switch to weekly treatments of Taxol, which is reputed to be easier in many respects but is downright terrifying in others.

The third treatment was the one that melted away most of my lingering bravado. This shit is hard. I'm in awe of my body and its secret work. All unawares, I pulled a Grimm reversal and swallowed a wolf.

Illustration by Elia Fernández.

Forza!
Gretchen

Return of the Martian queen

As many others can attest, my husband is a pretty terrific guy, thoughtful and kind in just about every circumstance. But his tongue occasionally runs out ahead of his judgment, most frequently in pursuit of a laugh.

The morning of our wedding (way back in 1999!), I went to a salon to get my hair done for the second time in my life. The first was at my Granddad's instigation - he'd decided when I was seven and Megan six that our mom would love nothing better for her birthday than framed studio photos of her tomboyish daughters decked out in new dresses and Shirley Temple curls. It didn't turn out so well. Meg's adorableness was pretty much indestructible, but I got immortalized on our living room wall as a freckled monkey in a fright wig. Thus was born my enduring mistrust of the dark arts of hair dressing.

So I really would have liked to do my wedding do myself. I didn't mean for it to need much doing. At that time, my version of "dressy" involved a simple French twist that I secured with a couple of foreshortened chopsticks. The only problem was one of durability - I couldn't count on my handiwork to hold together for the length of the festivities, so I reluctantly sought some professional help.

If I'd been a less lackadaisical bride, I would have done my research and made an early trial run of my chosen "look." Instead, two days before the wedding, I'd picked a salon out of the yellow pages and made a last-minute appointment with the only available stylist. If I could do my do, I figured anyone could do it.

I'd selfishly failed to consider how my lack of planning might affect the stylist, who visibly gulped when he understood the height of the stakes he suddenly faced. Whatever my pretensions to casualness, however strong my distaste for fuss, I wanted what just about any bride wants, to look smashingly good and smashingly myself. As well as I could, I wanted to justify Pete's ludicrous choice to spend his life with me, to begin at "for better" or even at "for best"; I depended on the stylist to help quell any doubts my sweet fellow might entertain and to stave off panic until our vows were safely exchanged. Brave man, he did not flinch but set to work with teasing comb and hair spray.

A total naif to the ways of the do, I watched in horror as he made of my hair a towering thicket, big and impenetrable enough to hide a family of badgers. "Don't worry!" he said. "This is just so it will stay put. I promise." What could I do but helplessly hope that he wasn't avenging his last bad tip? I held off despair, then began to breathe again as he switched out the comb for a brush. Moving methodically from one temple to the other, he swept the tangled mass into submission, and what was matted soon became sleek. Thank goodness, he had understood what I was after: elegant simplicity and the freedom to shake a tail feather without coming undone. I smiled in relief.

"There," he said. "Beautiful. I know I had you worried there for a minute, but it looks even better from the back." He handed me a mirror and slowly spun my chair, the better to let me absorb the full effect.

I still count it a great feat of self-control that no one heard me scream. All the sticky-sugared volume he'd whipped into my tresses now extended behind me, like a great dorsal fin spun out of hair. I sat for a long moment speechless and paralyzed, afraid to stand lest I topple onto my back and bury my frosted hatchet head into the floor. But I did stand, and thanked and paid and generously tipped the stylist, who was not in any way to blame.

What did Pete say when he saw me, two hours before the wedding, when nothing could be done? What magic words did he use to dispel my sense of mortification and let me know that all would be well?

"Ah, my Martian queen!"

He lived, and somehow the wedding went forward. For the nearly fifteen years since, I have managed to avoid further disasters on the hair front by clinging resolutely to the same safely boring cut I had when we met. But that recently stopped being an option. As promised, the morning before my second chemo treatment, my hair began to slip from my head without protest: no tug, no tangle, just a weirdly full comb.

I'd thought I was mentally prepared for this - I'd even planned that day to get a pre-emptive shave - but it shocked and depressed me. I think there's something more than vanity involved in such a dramatic and involuntary transformation of one's appearance. Words make only a small part of our dialogue with the world, and I knew my bare head would be shouting things to strangers on the street. "I've got cancer!" for starters. But I was also just deeply reluctant to expose my big, lumpy cranium to the open air and to throw my stark features into stronger relief. I hadn't realized how much I depended on my hair to soften what often seems to me too harsh, too avid, or simply too much in the self I offer to others. Where would I hide?

The big reveal turned out to be more traumatic in the anticipation than in the event. Last Sunday, after the final meeting of an excellent and most fortifying writing class taught by Karen Karbo, I walked six blocks to Rudy's Barbershop, where Pete was already getting his hairs cut by a lovely and compassionate androgyne named Nick. Too few minutes later, it was my turn.

I couldn't have chosen anyone better to shear me - Nick had done the same for his mom when she'd been under treatment for lung cancer. "Ready? Here we go." He took it in stages: first the ponytail felled with one crunchy swipe of the scissors, then a brief stop at Rosemary's Baby-era Mia Farrow before he finally brought in the clippers to peel my hard-boiled noggin. As big as the shock of my appearance was the discovery of how damned cold it is without hair! How do you bald guys ever manage without hats?? I was thankful for the egg cozy I'd brought along: a Timbers watchcap sent to me by an unusually gracious engineering supply rep I've never met. (Thank you, David!)

Pete took me out afterward for pizza and a movie, and we drew looks but no stares. In truth, there are probably few places better than Portland to be a Martian (or Venusian). I may soon learn to fly my alien flag proudly, but in the meantime I'm blessed with an embarrassment of hats!

Forza!
Gretchen

So it begins

Apologies in advance for the length and workaday newsiness of this post - it's been a full few weeks, with some dramatic ups and downs. January 27, four weeks to the day after my bilateral mastectomy, Pete and I met with my medical oncologist, Dr. Christine Barnett, the woman who will (with a significant support staff) see me through the next and most challenging part of my treatment. Despite the preponderance of good news in my final pathology report, I arrived at our appointment moderately panicked over one ominous phrase, to the effect that the tumor displayed "central necrosis," meaning that it was dead at its center.

This proved a good object lesson in the perils of too much / too little information. I had discovered online a specific tumor subtype which is designated a "centrally necrotizing carcinoma" and has a terrifyingly short prognosis of 12-24 months' survival even when caught early. But Dr. Barnett brought me gently down from the ceiling by reassuring me that this particular carcinoma was not the carcinoma I had (past tense!) and that the necrosis in my own case only told us what we already knew, which was that the tumor was highly aggressive, growing quickly enough to outstrip its blood supply.

Again, the rest of the news was much better than she'd feared at our original consultation: a relatively small (2.1 cm), grade 3 tumor, excised with clean margins and no detectable metastasis to the lymph nodes or beyond. Dr. Barnett was now able to run the final pathology along with my age, weight, BRCA1 and triple-negative status through the magical algorithms supplied by Adjuvant! Online, a nifty, growing database designed to help physicians and patients balance the relative risks and rewards of pursuing adjuvant (non-surgical) therapies in various scenarios. 

Because the numbers that these algorithms churn out have such deceptively "objective" authority built into them, and because they necessarily disguise so much in the way of individual variability, they must be taken with a good dose of salt. The late great evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote an astute and enduring analysis of the limits of such statistics, "The Median is not the Message," then went on to outlive his "terminal" diagnosis of mesothelioma by twenty years.

Still, the human desire to know what can't be known remains irresistible for many of us. There was a terrific recent op-ed in the NY Times written by Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer at age 36. He found that his diagnosis totally upended his previously rational attitude toward statistics, and he became as frustrated as his former patients had been with him when his own oncologist weaved and dodged around what was at least temporarily to him the only really important question: "How long do I have left?" It's a question that any of us might choose to obsess over; the temptation just gets exaggerated when we're seriously sick. (Talking with the women in a Kaiser support group a few weeks ago, I found that I'm not alone in developing a comical but real phobia around crossing streets; some of us think it would be "just our luck" to get flattened by a truck.)

For whatever they're abstractly worth, my numbers are much better than Dr. Gould's or Dr. Kalanithi's, let alone my mom's. Without chemo, I stand a 70% chance of living ten years or more; with it, my odds jump to 85%. Without chemo, the nonexistent average patient with my clinical presentation has a 60% chance of a "cure" (no recurrence or metastasis after ten years); with it the odds jump to 80%. However average I feel (or don't), the stats make a persuasive case that I should undergo five months of rollicking heck (i.e. voluntary self-poisoning) despite our hopes that I am already cancer-free.

Pete didn't find these numbers so heartening, but when Bob reminds me that Mom was facing 98% odds against outliving her diagnosis with inflammatory breast cancer by even five years (she made it almost exactly three), I learn something new about her fortitude and her own healthy attitude toward statistics.

I'm learning more every day. Mom took some of the same nasty drugs that have been prescribed for me, and she had many fewer options for "supportive" therapies. I had my first of four planned "A-C" (Adriamycin-Cytoxan) treatments on Monday, and the days since have taken a big toll on my courage and cheer. I seem not to have metabolized the fancy (read: outrageously expensive) modern anti-nausea drugs that they gave me before treatment quickly enough to get "ahead" of the chemo, with the result that I've been clinging to our couch for the last four days as if it were a broken mast in wind-shredded seas, subsisting at moments when my gorge subsides on corn chips and orange jello. Really regretting that third rum-and-coke. (Joke!!)

Twenty years ago, when Mom went through it, this was pretty much as expected. No longer. They called me back into the clinic today for a three-hour glucose drip and sent me home with more drugs and a patch behind my ear. This afternoon I managed to consume and even possibly to digest a chicken sandwich and some waffle fries (unwise, I know, but also somehow exactly right) in a couple of widely spaced stages. This counts today as a major victory, moral and gastrointestinal.

Forza!
Gretchen

Among my significant consolations...

An opening

Owing to an overabundance of pride and a tendency toward claustrophobia (fear of mental cul-de-sacs and small spaces with locked doors), I've never been much of a joiner. The stronger a group's communal identity, the greater the support it lends its members and the higher the levy it exacts from them (in range of movement and thought). I sometimes long to belong, but I'm rarely willing to pay the going price.

That said, I've always been attracted to the idea of secret societies, the more spontaneous the better. I believe with E.M. Forster in a special form of aristocracy: "Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky." I look for the gossamer threads that sometimes appear with a shift in the light, linking people who never suspected their capacity to share comfort, strength, and inspiration.

So while I don't guess I'll be grabbing a haybale seat on the BC sisterhood wagon, I do find it difficult to regret my diagnosis when it has connected me instantaneously and irrevocably with remarkable people who would otherwise have remained strangers or near strangers. One of these is Naomi Seid-Cronkite, the mother of a good friend. She's an artist in clay, and she sculpted this powerful, unsentimental response to her own mastectomy some years ago:

As much as I love seeing big men wear pink, and as much as I appreciate the real good that major breast cancer organizations have effected and the real comfort that the "survivor" identity offers (especially in mitigating the loneliness of a frightening diagnosis), I am most grateful right now to individual artists like Naomi who have the pluck and tenacity to insist "This is what it's like for me if for no other." I don't need to identify wholly (or at all) with her vision of rupture (though I do) in order to recognize and take courage from its alchemical power.

Big thanks to Naomi for sharing it with me and letting me share it with others.

Forza!
Gretchen

A poem for Ellen

And Again

A woman has as many beauties
As a cat has lives
To summon from the close, sleeping shell
Of possibility
Into the chill air of necessity.
The sea with its rough salt tongue
Has licked you clean.
First breath burns
Lungs newborn;
They fill and the old skin
Collapses.
Yesterday hisses in your wake
As your feet find the sand and you
Step into the next dance.

Forza!
Gretchen

Your body needs your attention

You may not - for whatever reason - be able to love it wholeheartedly, but your body needs your care.

Ironically, that luxury of health I wrote about earlier, the ability to forget our incarnate, material selves for long stretches of our days (and longer stretches of our nights, if we sleep soundly), is not an altogether healthy indulgence. I'm feeling remarkably good right now, but I don't want that to mean that I'm feeling very little at all. In the best of circumstances, I'm way too apt to float up into the mental ether, as if my body were only a sorry sack of sand tethering me to the earth, an anchor to be loosed at the first opportunity. And the temptation to fly from sensate experience gets stronger as sensation gets less pleasant.

Pema Chödrön speaks powerfully of "the wisdom of no escape." I'm not there yet, not ready at every moment to embrace what is. I'm still compelled toward various modes of flight, but I do begin to practice resistance, and I'm sometimes able to stay put, the better to "make sense" (it's a very rich phrase) of my present predicament. My internal sands have shifted significantly, and some have simply trickled away. When I am quiet, I can overhear the alarmed conversation that's been taking place between my chest and my brain over the last two weeks. Well, "conversation" may be too glorified a term. My chest continually repeats variations on "WTF?!" and my brain responds with weak reassurances and useless platitudes: "I got this. We're good. Remember, the best way out is always through." "WTF??!!"

Dr. Lee sewed me up well and tightly, but it feels from the inside as if there's a jagged hole where my breasts used to be. The vessel of me - kiln-fired and for more than forty-four years entire, secret, and intact - now gapes open, and I cannot say what will pour in or out.* My brain leaps at the opportunity to show off by quoting Rumi: "The wound is the place where the Light enters you!" But not only light. I'm sure of that.

My struggle in the two-plus weeks since my surgery has been to acknowledge the sorrow and horror I feel around this wound, this maiming, without allowing its shadow to creep outward and thwart any attempt at repair. Reintegration.

Among the senses, vision often shoulders its way forward and insists on its superior competence in such tasks. But I have an instinct that touch will best lead this work. I've been taking showers by candlelight, denying my eyes their avid fascination and forestalling their premature judgments. I soap my chest with a potter's hands; I ask the clay what form lives in its silence.

Anything we neglect may hold a promise, a latent possibility - or many. I wonder whether I'll learn more from my breasts' absence than I ever bothered to learn from their presence. 

Forza!
Gretchen

*Thanks to Erika's mom for helping to inspire this image and post!

N0 news is good news

Yesterday morning we met with Dr. Lee for a post-operative consult, and it brought relief in many forms. First, and most importantly, the final pathology report confirmed all the tentative happy negatives from the "frozen" analysis performed during surgery: both of the sentinel lymph nodes that were biopsied were found to be clear of malignant cells. The official designation used in "staging" my cancer is N0 (N for node and zero for absence). Furthermore, the tumor itself was smaller than suspected from physical examination, measuring 2.1 cm in its largest dimension (designated a T2 tumor but at the smaller end of that spectrum). While it was confirmed to be a highly aggressive, grade 3 growth, it appeared not to have infiltrated the surrounding blood vessels, and the margins around Dr. Lee's excision were found to be clean and clear. The final (let's hope) diagnosis is a stage IIa, triple-negative carcinoma, making my prognosis with chemo much better than we'd feared a couple of weeks ago. I'll have a better sense of how much better when I meet again with my medical oncologist, Dr. Barnett, on the 27th.

In the meantime, I'm going to try to make the most of a short window of feeling not bad at all. The other great and immediate relief yesterday came from the removal of the drains; I hadn't realized quite how much they had weighed on me psychologically nor how much they had interfered with my unconscious attempts to accommodate a new physical reality. Dr. Lee had warned me to take a dose of oxycodone before the appointment, and getting those silicone snakes tugged out of my chest was painful and weird as anticipated, but Pete held my hands (one at a time), and after five or six deep breaths it was done. We celebrated by driving directly from the hospital to the Hoyt Arboretum, where we walked for an hour among strong and abiding trees.

In the twenty-six or so hours since, with nothing but ibuprofen to put a veil between us, I've been making more direct acquaintance with my altered somatosphere, assembling a new sense of my interior presence (composed in part of conspicuous absences). Scary but interesting work.

Forza!
Gretchen

Creature comfort

Parental advisory: The following contains graphic violence, strong thematic content, and pervasive language.

Many others have observed that one of the great luxuries of physical health is an ability to forget that we are physical. When we are ill, by contrast, our bodies insist moment to moment on their presence, their pains, their petty but consuming needs. These are times when we can safely use that overused phrase "I am literally..."

Five days out of surgery, I am literally deflated. I am literally drained. If Frankenstein had made me, this would be the point in the story where he'd flee in horror back to his rosy-cheeked Swiss family and try to forget that he ever dreamed me to material life. I am a hybrid human-mechanical monster, darkly scored in two great slashes across my collapsed chest. On either side, a small wad of gauze blessedly hides an open wound from which a tube snakes out and leaks fluid - now thick and crimson, now watery and yellow - into a clear silicone receptacle the size and shape of a toy grenade. These drains will be with me at least until Monday. Warm with my own internal heat, they nestle in specially designed pockets in my specially designed "post-surgical camisoles," of which I was prescribed two. The camisoles also have pockets for "softies," tear-shaped pillows that wait on my bedroom dresser (two A/B pillows and two C/D) for the day I am ready to play (as I did when I was ten) with the shape of my body, to make multiple, provisional reconstructions of my femininity. For now, concave is the version of womanly that suits me best.

I cannot run from me. And Peter, bless his stout heart, does not. He and I share a tendency toward squeamishness but have discovered together that this delicacy of feeling is simply not an option at present. There's shit that needs doing, and we're the ones to do it. Three times a day, more often when the flow to my drains is sluggish, we "repair" to the bathroom, where we have all but perfected our little routine of cleaning, stripping, emptying, and measuring: 2cc's from the left, 3 from the right. I tuck the grenades back into their holsters and we wash our hands again. Sometimes I dare a look in the mirror before I zip my camisole closed, sometimes I do not.

Thursday was hard. Dr. Lee had instructed us to remove the "tegoderm" bandages and gauze that covered my long seams. I already suspected from our discussion post-surgery and from what I could see around the gauze that he had not achieved the flat scape I had hoped for. For someone who intends to get implants, a surgeon will leave extra skin if possible, the better to accommodate them, but I've chosen (for reasons I'll save for another post) not to pursue reconstruction, and insofar as I had any aesthetic desires invested in my surgery (very small in proportion to the "I want to live!" desires) they all flew in the direction of Kansas. I had in my mind a tabula rasa, blank canvas, bare ground. But I found that I am moon-cratered. Where mountains stood there are now depressions. My body holds a rumpled memory of abundance.

I couldn't think immediately what they resembled, these transformed features of my new topography. Then it came to me: "I have Eeyore boobs, Pete. Happy birthday."

"Still have your honeypot" was his rejoinder. 

Thus a gal who is literally deflated may feel her spirits lift and expand.

Forza!
Gretchen

p.s. There's a lot that I'm finding unintentionally comical these days. Somehow I don't think Garnet Hill had me in mind when they sent out their new catalog, as apt as their tag may be. The image of exuberant fecundity (a little freezer burnt in transit) also gets spun in an unexpected direction by my present turn of mind:

Busted!

Kim McGinty (née Terauds) has known me since fifth grade, when we were reckless together in the way of girls who can't quite escape being good but like to pretend. She reminds me that there was another time in my life when I needed some help up top. Check out this sassy pair:

So we travel in circles. This was also about the last time I wore that shade of hot violet that's now blooming everywhere in my wardrobe.

Forza!
Gretchen

The good and the bad

Just a few words from your bleary correspondent. As promised, I've been relieved of a significant weight, literal and figurative. My breasts and I are parted. The surgery was lengthy but without complication, and while it will be another week before definitive pathology results come in, the news is tentatively excellent. Two "sentinel" lymph nodes (acting much like Francisco and Bernardo on the ramparts of Elsinore) reported no hostile incursion, and the border of the tumor likewise appeared clear. We're holding off on the champagne for now (not a good mix with Oxycodone), but we have real grounds to hope that the enemy has been successfully expelled.

The bad news actually came Friday, but I could not post it here until I'd had a chance to talk with those whom it affects. I had a call from Cheryl Miranda, the genetics counselor I'd seen, relaying my test results. She told me that I do indeed carry a mutation of the BRCA-1 gene, which we can only assume I inherited from Mom (and she from her mother or father). While the heaviest risks from this mutation fall on women (who face a 60-80% chance of developing breast cancer and a 40-60% chance of developing ovarian cancer over a lifetime), it can also raise a man's risk for prostate cancer, melanoma, and even breast cancer. Thus my bad news is also potentially bad news for everyone in my matriline. The odds that my brother, sister, or uncle carries the mutation are 50-50.

I know it's utterly irrational but also probably inevitable that I feel as if I have personally put them in danger, laid a blood curse on my nearest and dearest. But the curse is really one of knowledge, and therefore mixed. We now have an explanation for our family's lousy "luck," and we can take precautions, some of them radical. I learned when I called Megan that she had been rehearsing her response for weeks, readying herself for an expected blow. Predictably, she worries most for her daughter, Maya; as to her own health she is coolly pragmatic. "Someone asked me the other day what plans I had for the summer, and I said I don't know, maybe getting a double mastectomy." My brave, loving sis has always been ready to follow me anywhere, but I fervently hope she won't follow me here.

Forza!
Gretchen

First and last day as a pinup

Posing on the edge.

I had to laugh the other day when I caught sight of a copy of Woman's World while waiting in the check-out line at Safeway. A headline read: "Lose 4 pounds and 6 inches overnight!"

It can be done, I thought. Ask me how.

In about twelve hours, I'll be thrown back to the boyishness of my early youth. If I could get my good knees back in return for what I'll be losing, I'd consider it a good trade. As it is, I do hope to have more spring in my step. (I'll certainly have less bounce.)

Pete and I returned this morning from a brief but restful stay in the "Little Apple," Manzanita. We lucked into a spell of spectacular weather, clear enough that, when we hiked yesterday through a fir forest and deep muck out to Cape Falcon, we could see the breath of migrating gray whales rise in bright plumes near the horizon.

Sweet man on a sweet beach.

We got back (by design) in time to see the Chargers dance with their glass slippers right past the Bengals. This could be their year, it really could.

Surgery is scheduled for 12:45 p.m. tomorrow and could take four hours or more. Please keep me in your thoughts. Pete or I will try to post here tomorrow night to let you know how things go.

Forza!
Gretchen

Goodbye to glamour!

Full of inner beauty, no doubt.

Well, the fun and easy bit (all relative here) will be drawing to a close nine days sooner than originally anticipated: my surgery has been moved from January fifteenth to the sixth, one week from today. The hypothetical is about to get painfully real. A few needle pokes and claustrophobia-inducing scans aside, I've so far had to endure little in the way of physical insults; apart from a bad cold a couple of weeks ago, I've been the picture of health (to anyone without the technological means to look deep). As you know, I've been very much in a partying frame of mind, and well able to sustain a face that others call brave. But I've only had to smile down the horror of my diagnosis in the abstract. I really can't say how bravely I'll face what's to come.

The more immediate surgery date is a very good thing in the larger analysis, and it's owing entirely to my surgeon's consideration for my well-being and peace of mind. The scheduler, Cynthia, had failed to note when she put me down for the fifteenth that Dr. Lee would be leaving for a conference on the sixteenth and would therefore be unable to follow through with my post-operative care. That made him and me both uneasy, as did the prospect of pushing the surgery further out. When he and Cynthia conferred again, the only earlier date they could find where his availability and that of the OR overlapped was the sixth. Cynthia called to tell me, and if I hadn't thought to ask whether I'd still be coming in first thing in the morning, I might not have learned that Dr. Lee had given up his day off for me. I'll be his only patient.

It will surprise no one who knows my husband that I am a sucker for kindness, all the more when it's allied with competence and wit. I think Pete forgives me for being a little smitten with the man who will cut away my underappreciated assets.

Will I still be punning when he's done? What will become of my own wit, competence, or capacity for kindness when my breasts and hair and final pretensions to youthful imperishability are gone? Will they abandon me completely when I'm ugly, exhausted, and fighting despair? I was at least half joking when I told my Grandma Di the other day that I was stocking up as much capital (in charm and graciousness) as I could manage now, knowing how little I'll soon have to offer. But she took me at my word. "Yes, you're going to be an unlovable specimen for the next while," she told me. "And we're going to love you all the same."

I believe her on both counts. If you're going to be lucky in anything (in the sense of your rewards far outrunning your merits), best to be lucky in love.

Forza!
Gretchen

Like the card says...

One of the people I spoke to when I first received my diagnosis was my (honorary) Uncle Ivan, who lives in a rural New Jersey exurb of NYC. He lost his beautiful, vibrant wife, Lisbeth (my stepdad's cousin), to ovarian cancer and has responded (as anyone who knows him might have predicted) in the years since by ratcheting up the intensity of his (already powerful) commitment to life, to joy, to revelry of the deepest kind (the kind that touches reverence).

(Whatever small sense of restraint I might have possessed around parentheticals has evaporated. But parentheses are pretty cheap and harmless, as indulgences go.)

Once I'd finished delivering my tale of woe to Ivan, I finally asked him how he was, what he'd been up to. He said he'd just seen some Shakespeare the night before. "Twelfth Night?" I asked. "Was it Twelfth Night?" No, it was Much Ado About Nothing at the Public, but he was planning to see Twelfth Night before it closed. Oh, was I jealous. I had missed Mark Rylance's Olivia ten years before, and I would miss it again, alas!

"Well, come on out, then."

"What?"

"Get a plane ticket, tell me the dates. I'll take care of the rest."

So I did - after head measuring, before PET scanning - and he did. And Meg and Mike, my sister and brother-in-law, drove up from Maryland for what turned out to be an unutterably magical weekend with Ivan and his lovely gal, Lucette. (We even fit in lunch with Pete's and my dear friend Shelley, who burns as bright as anyone in NY.)  I give you pictures instead of meager words:

And I give you a taste of Mark Rylance's alluring strangeness. Truly, if you ever get a chance to see him onstage in anything at all, do jump.

A very merry Christmas to you and yours!

Gretchen

p.s. Biggie Smalls, the most adorable deaf dachshund pup ever to ignore my instruction, also sends her enthusiastic Christmas greetings.

On the joys of being unremarkable

I can't in general recommend cancer as a cure for narcissism. On the contrary, if my experience is any indication, all suspicions that one has been singled out by fate and that one deserves special consideration and dispensation from others may be outrageously exaggerated by one's diagnosis. I have been particularly alarmed - no, that's too strong a word in the context of my radical self-absorption. I have been particularly bemused by the recognition that my response to a mysterious, unseen enemy resembles George W.'s in at least one respect: I have decided that shopping is an excellent remedy for fear and helplessness. If I stop spending, the cancer wins!

The sudden absence of external controls or brakes conspires with me in my extravagance. The first time Peter and I bought a couch, fifteen years ago, his caution balanced my impulsivity, so that we took months to settle on a common choice. Wednesday, when I visited a local maker of custom sofas and found a huge and heavily-discounted sectional in my very favorite shade of gray blue (you see? fated), I had the courtesy at least to call Pete to ask his thoughts, but I knew very well that he'd tell me - as he did in fact - "Go for it." The beautiful behemoth (ordered and then discarded by a couple who found it could not negotiate the hard angles of their Victorian home) will be delivered in time for Christmas. Talk about self-gifting!

So I was feeling very special when I received a call later that afternoon from Christine Brown, my (splendid) "cancer care nurse navigator." She had reviewed the results of my PET/CT scan with Dr. Christine Barnett, my (excellent) medical oncologist, and she wanted to read a few things directly from the report: "Cerebrum is symmetrical and unremarkable... The thyroid is unremarkable." Furthermore, "There is no paratracheal, subcarinal, hilar, or lung parenchymal abnormality. Liver, adrenal glands, and pancreas unremarkable. There is no paraaortic, iliac, or inguinal hypermetabolic abnormality." How elating to discover the ho-hum ordinariness of my brain, glands, nodes, and organs!!

Bottom line: apart from a "mildly hypermetabolic focus" around my left ovary, and excepting the tumor itself (which is confirmed to be a fierce and hungry little bastard), the scan appeared clear: "No suspicious FDG-avid abnormality at other sites." This includes the axillary lymph nodes where my doctors had felt some suspicious swelling, an unexpected bit of good news. PET scans measure relative metabolic rates (malignancies consume lots of sugar in their mania for growth) and generally cannot detect cancers smaller than a centimeter. Thus the report doesn't rule out the possibility of microscopic to small incursions outside the breast, BUT now that an ultrasound has returned yet another "unremarkable" verdict on the overactive ovary, there's real reason to hope that we've caught this thing while it remains relatively local and contained.

Hallelujah.

It also means that the path forward is much clearer. Yesterday I met for a pre-op consult with my (remarkable) surgeon, Dr. Chris Lee, and we set a date: January 15th. Even absent the result of my genetic tests, the consensus among my doctors is that I have some strong susceptibility that puts my left (apparently healthy) breast at significant risk for a new cancer. I would really like to avoid going through this again if I can, so I have opted for a double mastectomy. This morning I made a reservation for the weekend before surgery at a lovely inn on the coast at Manzanita, where Pete and I will bid a fond farewell to my good-natured gals. They never meant anyone any harm.

Forza!
Gretchen

Chapter 13. In which it is clinically demonstrated that I have a big head.

There comes a point at which accumulated bad luck begins to look like something else altogether. When Mom was diagnosed with melanoma at the beautifully ripe age of thirty-five, the news ripped the floor out from under the reality my family had theretofore inhabited and taught us at a blow how flimsy every personal metaphysics can be.

We didn't dare lay any new boards during the three years of brutal treatment and two years of held breath that Mom needed before her doctors declared her officially in remission, and the structure we built thereafter always had a little of the quality of a dream, or of the impassioned ramblings of a drunk college friend who's just discovered quantum physics: "Dude. Put your hand on this table - or no! better idea - I want you to hit this table as hard as you can. Come on, hit it! Fine, I'll do it. Ahh! Shit, that was too hard. But it feels solid, right? Total illusion, dude. It's mostly space, with maybe a sprinkling of dust. That's it. That's all we are, substancewise. My hand throbbing right now? That's about energy."

Ten years after the melanoma came the inflammatory breast cancer. When I was writing recently about receiving the news of Mom's second diagnosis, I remembered what a friend of mine says about the old expression that some long-neglected activity is "just like riding a bike." She doesn't find this reassuring. "Yeah, I remember riding a bike. It's sweaty and awkward, and it makes your crotch hurt like fuck."

My family has ridden this tandem beast before, and yes, with my own recent diagnosis of a triple-negative carcinoma (more on that designation later), there's a strong feeling for us all of déja fucked. (For maybe the last time ever, I beg pardon for my French.) We're not just indulging a communal sense of self-pity, as it turns out. We may have some scientific justification for our suspicion that we are substantially less favored (genetically speaking) than your average family of bears. Three aggressive cancers diagnosed in two premenopausal women at one degree of separation amount to a strong indication that our shared matter might have come unzipped somewhere. Thus last Monday found me in a basement examining room with a tape measure around my head.

That sounds medieval, or possibly Victorian - back to the days of phrenology! - but the geneticist wanted to see whether I might carry a "PTEN" mutation, one of the few currently known to create a strong vulnerability to untrammeled cell growth, also to big crania. Despite the doctor's discovery that I've got enough brow to make a neanderthal's heart go pitter-pat (58.3 cm!), he doesn't guess this is the problem. The PTEN mutation usually announces its presence in clusters of thyroid cancers and autism. He's more immediately concerned that I may carry the "Angelina Jolie" mutation, a misspelling in the BRCA gene that works (when it works) to correct replication errors in our DNA. The two algorithms currently available to guesstimate risk from patient data (clinical presentation and family history) returned a 10% and a 26% probability that I carry one of the two known forms of the mutation. From our consultation I went directly to see a phlebotomist (can't resist all this juicy language), and two vials of my blood (tucked adorably into a small foam cushion) winged their way that day by express mail to a California lab.

Results are expected just in time for New Year's, and we're waiting to proceed with surgery and the rest until they arrive, because they'll help determine how much of me will remain to me. If the BRCA test is negative, I may lose only the one boob. If it's positive or equivocal, I'll likely undergo a double-mastectomy now and an oophorectomy (removal of my ovaries) later - the risk of a new cancer would otherwise be high.

As you've probably gathered, the two weeks since my diagnosis have not been filled with comforting proviso, qualification, or reprieve. The blows have come in a staggered (and staggering) series:

Tuesday a diagnosis of invasive ductal carcinoma;

Wednesday night the news that the tumor cells display poor differentiation (paradoxically, they are highly diverse) and "brisk mitotic activity" (they are replicating quickly), signaling a high-grade, aggressive growth;

Friday afternoon my new surgical oncologist's judgment that chemo (which I dread far more than surgery) will almost certainly be on my menu of treatment "modalities", also his detection of a suspiciously swollen lymph node near the tumor;

Monday morning the confirmation that the cancer is "triple-negative," meaning that it is not fed by the hormones (estrogen and progesterone) or protein (HER2) that feed most breast cancers and that it is consequently invulnerable to certain of the most effective modern therapies (e.g. Tamoxifen); also Monday a confrontation with the real possibility that I may carry a genetic defect whose detection would have serious potential implications for the future health of my sister, brother, uncle, great-aunt, and all of their offspring;

Thursday the judgment by my new medical oncologist (echoing that of my surgeon) that my tumor may well be larger than suggested by ultrasound and that a PET scan is therefore warranted to check for possible metastasis before we proceed with surgery.

I go in to meet that terrifying prospect this afternoon. Sunday I'll have an MRI of both breasts as a similar precaution.

There is an upside. I am a member of Kaiser Permanente and wildly grateful for this, for reasons I will expand upon in another (effusive) post. But you might have noticed from my litany of bad news how very quickly everyone has mobilized, and how few bureaucratic or scheduling roadblocks I've had to stumble over in pursuit of a more or less definitive diagnosis and a "solid, fluid plan." Beyond this, I am absurdly well-networked, owing to that crappy luck referenced above - Mom's medical oncologist, Dr. Robert Carlson, is now the CEO of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, and he has most generously offered his informal guidance as well as the names of two Portland oncologists he could recommend highly; one is now on my team and consults with the other. I do not feel that I could be in better or more compassionate hands.

Also, I am learning a lot. My inner biologist manqué has awakened from a long sleep, and my doctors welcome my active participation in the dialogue around my best course of treatment.

And then there is you. If you are reading this, there's a good chance that you're a card-carrying member of my personal League of Extraordinary Gentlepeople. Please forgive me if you have written to me and not yet heard back. You will. But you should know in the meantime that I owe you most of my wherewithal and pretty much all of my courage in these hard days. I'd have a much stronger case against Fortune if she hadn't brought me you.

Forza!
Gretchen

Cancer haiku with product placement

Photo by pamelarosiedee.

A shampoo purchase
Makes me teary. Time to try
Johnson & Johnson's.

What did Beckett know
About existential doubt?
Visit a mall, Sam.

Eat Wetzel's pretzels -
Sinful cinnamon! - and read
Of ancient cancers,

Of tumors that start
As melan cholo babies
But sometimes grow great,

Of rogues and nomads -
Mutinous cells, strivers who
Sail the seas of blood.

My source of inspiration here - pretzel aside - was George Johnson's terrific new book, The Cancer Chronicles, a history of the disease that ranges from the personal to the pathological to the anthropological. As a sometime melancholic, I was struck to learn that Hippocrates believed cancerous tumors to be clots of black bile.

On a related note, I have claimed Pete's sign - Pisces - as my own this week, only because Rob Brezsny's "Free Will" horoscope includes this quotation from the Mexican journalist Lydia Cacho: "I am not fearless, but I'm not overtaken by fear. Fear is quite an interesting animal. It's like a pet. If you mistreat it, it will bite, but if you understand it and accept it in your house, it might protect you."

Forza!
Gretchen

Vocab list

The right man for the job.

Study up! These will all be on the test.

1. codswallopped, adj. Stunned, as by a blow to the face by a large fish of the genus Galus. Sloppy misappropriation of n. "codswallop," British term of indeterminate origin meaning "nonsense."

Use in a sentence:

"I was codswallopped by the diagnosis of an invasive ductal carcinoma."

2. haded, adj. Abducted to the underworld by a pomegranate-bearing S.O.B. with a seriously funny-looking guard dog. Subject to bouts of intense self-pity alternating with wild hope.

Use in a sentence:

"Don't hade on me, dude."

3. overpantsed, adj. Persuaded by one's suddenly peremptory spouse to wear one's underwear over one's head, "because it will make me laugh, and I need to laugh. Are you really going to deny me this simple request?"

Use in a sentence:

"Some men look quite dashing when overpantsed."

Forza!
Gretchen

p.s. The photo above has persuaded me that a piratical look may be the best option if my lumpy head gets exposed to the elements in the coming months. If a mastectomy proves necessary - still an open question - Pete suggests accessorizing this look with a boob patch rakishly tilted over the conspicuous absence.

p.p.s. Big thanks to Shelley S and Ellen A for inspiration for the above. Big thanks to all for inspiration for the rest.

The tonsils of the wolf

A month ago I found a lump in my right breast, maybe an inch large and highly distinct, off on the "distal" side toward my armpit. (These are good occasions for searching out the intersections of science and poetry - "distal" is lovely and deserves a wider acquaintance.) I have been waiting for this almost as for an inevitability. My mom was ten years younger than I am now when she was diagnosed with melanoma. Thanks to a skilled surgeon and a brutal but effective regimen of chemo, she made a near-miraculous escape and thoroughly enjoyed an eleven-year reprieve before one of her breasts swelled suddenly to twice its ordinary size. Days later, she received a diagnosis of inflammatory breast cancer - very rare and very aggressive. She was forty-five then, forty-eight when she died.

Thus, for our family, cancer took on an aspect of the ordinary horrifying, one of life's givens, and that has included for me an assumption that I would one day get my own diagnosis. A rite of passage, though through what and to what none could say. I think my sister, Megan, shares this irrational persuasion (irrational because the cancer that killed Mom has no established genetic basis), but it's strengthened in me by the weird coincidence of a shared birthday. I was born twenty years to the day after Mom, and my superstitious sense of symmetry suggests that I have four years left before my time is up.

I should have expected but did not expect that I would feel so close to Mom when I went in to Kaiser's "imaging" center two weeks ago for a mammogram and sonogram. As it was for Mom, the mammogram was for me all but useless - Megan and I share a matrilineal legacy of low blood pressure and unusually dense breast tissue - but the sonogram confirmed the presence of a tumor. I returned to the center last week for a core needle biopsy and expect results tomorrow that may or may not be conclusive.

The good news is that there's a strong probability - maybe nine to one - that the tumor is benign. The bad news is that it is likely of a type that will require "excision," not just of the tumor itself but also of a wide margin of healthy tissue. "Phyllodes" tumors have a pretty Greek name that refers to a leaf-like pattern of growth at the cellular level. When benign, they may rapidly grow until they distort the breast or even create open lesions on the skin. When malignant, they do not resemble most other forms of breast cancer but are classified as sarcomas, and they may metastasize outside the breast. Both types present a high risk of recurrence if any stray cells are left behind, and definitive distinctions between them are difficult or in some instances impossible to make. (The tumors have three classifications: benign, malignant, and borderline.)

The last and most hopeful possibility is that it's a late-blooming fibroadenoma, which is lacking in both poetry and danger. But that tends to be a young woman's no big problem, and I am no longer a young woman.

So it looks like I may lose at least part of my right boob, and I am having a harder time with that prospect than I could have guessed, given that I've been complaining for thirty years about being overburdened. Yesterday I was flying very low to the ground, not in a grateful or celebratory "Live, dammit!" frame of mind like I've been intent on preserving. A Chargers win could really have come in handy, but nothing doing there.

What could I do but stop running and look my wolf in the teeth? Pen in hand, natch.

Poems in honor of my breasts

I.

I wear a thin woolen sweater in a shade of royal purple
Against my skin
It clings and I revel in the fulsomeness I have from my mother
As she had it from her mother before her.
The question mark drawn from breast to waist
Makes an empty invitation -
Its terminus has been closed for years,
The chamber collapsed, the altar smashed.
Still -
The gesture remains fertile.
Generous,
Covetous eyes
Complete the riddle.

II.

They've never known from perky.
Droopy and friendly as basset puppies,
With plump bodies and soft noses
Warm with fever.
I put them away for polite company -
They're too much!
And too much neglected.
But I loose them for love, for play.

Forza!
Gretchen

Love with conditions

From Harry Harlow, "The Nature of Love," 1958.

When I hear the words "unconditional love," I think of Harry Harlow. Harlow was a psychologist and a major contributor to our current understanding of the role that attachment plays in a child's development (though he worked almost exclusively with monkeys, most of them rhesus macaques). What Harlow did in order to learn what he learned can make you wish he'd never taken up the question of love and its distortions - if you don't already know about his research, I need to apologize in advance for possibly breaking your heart. But his damage is done, and his work remains an illuminating bit of darkness.

Harlow's most (in)famous experiments were inspired in part by a fractious debate back in the 1950s about best parenting practices. Behaviorists were then in the ascendancy, and their view of child development held sway in many American laboratories and homes. Mothers got admonished (as they're always getting admonished by someone for something) for "reinforcing" their babies' cries with cooing and cuddles, for comforting their toddlers when they scraped their knees instead of teaching them that pain was part of our common portion. By the behaviorists' lights, "good" parents simply and matter-of-factly answered their children's primary needs for food and shelter; those who indulged in lots of hugs and kisses and "I love you's" were molly-coddlers who infantilized their infants and naively barred their way to becoming stoic, self-reliant, boot-strapping individuals worthy of respect.

The English psychiatrist John Bowlby had already complicated the question of what children really need before Harlow joined the fray. He'd been sent to boarding school when he was all of eight, and his personal experience of the miseries of separation bolstered his adult conviction that we "hunger" most powerfully for attachment itself, that we build ourselves up from the ground of a caregiver's (most often a mother's) steady and immediate presence. He hypothesized that touch satisfied a need distinct from and possibly more powerful than the need for literal nourishment, and Harlow's research helped support his claim.

Harlow untangled the need for food from the need for tactile comfort by taking baby macaques from their mothers only hours after birth and offering them the choice of two inanimate surrogates. In the study's most salient (and at that time surprising) variation, each surrogate roughly approximated the size and shape of an adult female macaque and each was warmed by an internal light, but one was constructed of thick wire mesh and "naked" save for the nipple of a full bottle protruding from its rib cage. The other, made from wood, was covered in foam rubber and terrycloth but nipple-less.

Harlow found that, given a choice, the babies would spend only as long with the hard wire surrogates as they needed to fill their bellies, returning immediately to cling to their softer "moms." As they grew a bit older and bolder, they began to venture out to investigate their small cages, but loud sounds and other novel, frightening stimuli sent them scurrying to the cloth surrogates, which they would cuddle and stroke in ways that appeared to help them self-soothe.

When the monkeys were left alone or with the wire surrogate, they did not learn stoicism or self-sufficiency. On the contrary, they lost their ability to return to calm from even mild experiential shocks. Some would freeze in a crouch, or rock and hold their own bodies tightly, while others would scream and run frantically around their cages. Even a horribly inadequate and unresponsive "mother" (one who never cuddled back) became "a haven of safety" (Harlow's words) for a monkey who'd never known anything better.

These are not the most disturbing of Harlow's studies. He later set out to test the limits of the monkeys' established attachment, by replacing neglectful (but cozy) surrogates with truly abusive ones. He and his research team created "monster mothers" who would unpredictably lash out at their devoted infants, suddenly blasting them with air or poking them with blunt spikes or rocking them violently enough to make their teeth chatter. Many of the little monkeys would hang on through it all, and those who ran away or got dislodged would invariably return to their tormentors for comfort.

This is why the phrase "unconditional love" has a sinister edge for me. Creatures who do  love unconditionally are so often those who have little choice. And on the other side, those who have a moral responsibility to love without conditions - by virtue of having invited or created a deep dependency (e.g. from a child or a pet) - are those most secure in being loved however little they deserve it.

Harlow's horrible research clearly demonstrates that the need for secure attachment among highly social animals is so strong and deep that it can override the imperatives of physical self-preservation, but to my mind that knowledge is cause less for celebration than for caution. We need first to be cautious in creating dependencies, to ask ourselves whether we can wholeheartedly embrace the obligations they entail. But we need also to arrogate back to ourselves when we can the choice of whom to depend on.

Louis C.K. gave an interview to Rolling Stone last year, and something he said there has stayed with me: "You don't owe anyone a relationship." When it comes to relationships among more or less independent adults, I strongly agree. We have the right simply to walk away when love becomes indistinguishable from pain (even if metal spikes don't enter the picture). We have the right to seek out those people whose love for us is reliable in its very limitations. Once we stop expecting to be loved unconditionally, we may be inspired to love more and better.

Forza!
Gretchen

Small wonders

Sexy beast. Photo by Bob Kieckhefer.

If you ever vacation in Namibia - an outlandish choice but a very good one - you should strongly consider setting aside three days for a trek with Tok Tokkie Trails through the Namib-Rand Reserve. In this stunning but superficially inhospitable place, you may see life whose power is heart-stoppingly obvious - like a leopard surprised at the waterhole where your trek begins. You will almost surely see an oryx (or fifty), whose beauty is similarly grand and impossible to ignore. At night your eyes can travel the Milky Way the whole breadth of the southern sky, while a clear day will tempt you never to drop your gaze from the shimmering horizon. Your guide will rescue you from this mistake. His name may be Nico, and his knowledge will be vast. He'll wisely encourage you to adjust your focus to sights of a finer grain.

A Tok Tokkie climbs a Coline. Photo by me.

The founders of Tok Tokkie named the company for creatures whose small size and ungainly looks belie their modest magnificence. Tok Tokkies are a subset of the darkling beetle family, twenty or so species that have "learned" to thrive in the Namib desert. They're not out of Seuss - they came by their comical moniker because they "tok" to each other when they're looking for mates, by tapping their tiny beetle butts on the wind-compacted sands of the dunes they call home. Research into the relative seductiveness of various time signatures remains inconclusive, but we do know that Tok Tokkies have mastered some other fine tricks over the course of their eons-long evolutionary improvisation. Long legs lift their bellies away from the sand and let them outrace the afternoon heat. In the mornings, "fog basking" Tokkies and others perform headstands on the crests of the dunes, facing west toward the chill Atlantic. Mist gathers on their bodies and trickles into their mouths.

Dawn in the Namib. Photo by me. 

When we trekked with our hosts Nico, Agnes, and Willy three weeks ago (a sweetly merry French family joined my stepdad, my husband, and me), we caught the Namibian winter by its tail. Thank goodness for wool underwear and hot water bottles! We awoke from our first night's fitful sleep quite literally frosted over, so it was delicious that morning simply to move and to feel the blood return to our extremities. (I pitied the sluggish Tokkies their lack of internal combustion.) It was also good that we got our leopard sighting done early - we knew we'd already exhausted our given portion of spectacle and this let us relax into a contented curiosity about the small dramas playing out all around us, many of them at our feet. The sands, Nico told us, were the desert's morning paper. They recorded the night's events in a tracery that would become illegible in the next strong wind.

Who goes there? Photo by me.

The wind itself makes beautiful patterns on every scale, in partnership with whatever it finds. Nico continually reminded us that these partnerships go beyond the aesthetic. The seeds of "bushman" grass catch the wind by the feathery tips of their long, spiraled stems, and wherever they land they wait, like the Tokkies, for the morning fog. As moisture expands the twined fibers of the stems, they twist and so drill the pointed seeds down into the ground.

The beginning of something? Photo by me.

I want to take a lesson from this, maybe one about ambition and finding what we're made for (instead of all trying to be big cats). But for the moment it seems enough just to enjoy the peculiar and entrancing shapes that life takes when pressed.

Forza! 
Gretchen

p.s. One of the best uses I've found for my iPhone while traveling has been the recording of audio snapshots, which can be, contrary to the old adage, more evocative than a thousand pictures. Agnes, the talented cook who accompanied us, belongs to one of the Nama peoples descended from the San, a.k.a. Bushmen. (I hope she will correct me if I have gotten any of this wrong.) Her language, like theirs, is sonically rich and full of clicks; her nightly delivery of the menu was a highlight of the trek.