Prepping for AWP 2016 and for more Tests

I’m so excited for this year’s AWP. It’s not just doing the panel, which I am truly enthusiastic about, or the parties, or the book fair. It’s the idea of celebrating – in a land of sunshine and seawater in what is usually for Seattle-ites a dim and blowsy month – being writers together, loving reading and writing books. If this sounds a little squishier than my typical cynical post about surviving AWP, it’s because it is.
My recent health scare (still ongoing, more on that later) has kind of illuminated parts of my life that are important to me, that give me joy and meaning, and dang it, AWP – the chance to be with other writers, while it may be stressful and chaotic, is also a magnificent chance for accidental magic – catching a reading of a writer who might be your new favorite, or running into someone you really admire but have never met and managing to string a half-decent sentence together, the chance to actually see and hang out with friends you love but never get to be in the same space with, for geographical reasons.

Here’s Entropy’s Guide to AWP 2016, which lists our panel (Women in Spec, April 1 Friday 1:30!) as one of their picks (thanks, Entropy!):
http://entropymag.org/entropys-guide-to-awp16/

It also includes good links to other advice about AWP. I think mine boils down to: eat, drink, sleep, and wear comfortable shoes – do NOT take a vacation from self-care, and your body will thank you. Let good things happen spontaneously inside of trying to plan out every little thing – it took me several years of going to AWP with detailed plans to figure that one out. And enjoy yourself in the city you’re visiting – get out and go to the beach, a museum, a great restaurant – and LA has a great restaurant scene as well as amazing dives. (I personally am staying far out from the LA downtown center in order to make sure I actually do some sightseeing. I may be allergic to the sun, but I still love hanging out in Santa Monica and Hermosa Beach, especially.) Also, come visit me at the Two Sylvias Booth at 2 PM on Saturday at the bookfair if you get a chance! I lived near LA for a year, so I got to visit often and so it feels like I’m going back to an old familiar place, which is kind of nice. Also, looking forward to being able to get ahold of really good fresh corn tortillas (hard to find here in the Seattle area, but plentiful in SoCal.)
In medical news, I got to see – finally – a liver specialist this week, a really good one. He was nice and reassuring and called me “young and healthy” several times, which I really appreciated – although, for the young part, well, he couldn’t have been more than five years older than Glenn, ha. He had an idea for hospitalizing me for one more test before trying the biopsy. He also ran down the odds of things the solid growths could be besides metastatic cancer (yay! adenomas, hyperplasias, etc.), and the odds of something going wrong bleeding-wise with biopsy. I like numbers, so I found all the information reassuring (well, the part about the likelihood of a bleeding event during a liver biopsy was sort of alarming, but I guess not totally unexpected.) So I’ll be going back to the hospital for a whole day/night thing soon, when I get back from AWP, but I’m going in with my eyes open, and with all possible precautions taken. Hopefully this test will give us enough info – positive identification of the kind of growth that is non-cancerous – to avoid the liver biopsy all together. That’s what I want you guys to think good thoughts about, if I can ask that of blog readers.
That and me not getting sick/injured before/during/after the AWP trip. This will be the first time I’ve flown in over five years! Last time I flew, I was in a wheelchair, an arm brace from a sprain AND I caught pneumonia, so you can see how that might have made me a tad anxious about flying again. Not only am I flying, I even got TSA pre-checked and found out I basically have invisible fingerprints, so I could have been an international jewel thief all this time. Ah well. Missed my calling there.

I’m looking forward to inspiration, walking on the beach, and spending a few days celebrating being a writer with a bunch of other writers!

The Spaces In Between

Between seasons, between houses, between health and illness, between life and death, between books…I’m in between a lot of things right now. I’m trying not to dwell on the bad possibilities, only the good. I’m walking again and getting stronger, which is good for AWP (because getting around the airport and convention center in a wheelchair is a drag, and I should know, I’ve done LA in a wheelchair before.) I’m trying to spend time outdoors when I can and celebrate the stuff worth celebrating. We went out on a rare sunny March day on St. Patrick’s, taking pictures of the early spring blooms (rhododendrons! cherry blossoms! azaleas!) and checking out Open Books for a poetry boost. Here’s a pic of my haul from Open Books:

We had good news from my mother-in-law, thank goodness, back at home after a long stay in the hospital and knowledge that her cancer surgery was very successful, and my grandmother is on the mend from her fractured back vertebrae. My parents actually went out to see my grandmother and got to visit the campus of Missouri State University, the home of Moon City Press, who are publishing my next book, and picked up copies of Moon City Review.

Going to a liver specialist – actually a liver transplant specialist – on Monday for a review of all my tests and any more recommendations before the biopsy. It’s the first time since the diagnosis (non-diagnosis?) of growths “strongly suspicious for metastatic cancer” in my liver that I’m actually seeing a liver specialist, not a gastroenterologist, primary care doc, or hematologist/oncologist. So I’m hopeful that maybe he’ll bring a new perspective and give me some hope about what else could be going on.

You may know we sold the house last August and we’ve been shopping for houses ever since, unsuccessfully, being outbid by people with just more money overall and way more cash. That’s been a little frustrating. We lost another bid last week, and are going by a house today. Try, try again!

I’ve been working with Moon City Press to get blurbs together, a cover, and a description of the new book for the book catalogue – all due at the end of the month, eeeep! And that’s while I’m still wondering if I’ve been doing enough to promote my book that came out last spring, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, while contemplating a November launch of Field Guide to the End of the World (my next book!)

Getting taxes and my AWP panel PowerPoint together are on the agenda for this weekend. I’m hoping for some unexpected good news to kind of balance all the rough news we’ve had the past couple of weeks. I’ve dreamed about being an acrobat and a ballerina in the past week – along with a lot of battle dreams – so I think there’s something I’m dealing with about balance, risk, and dealing with assorted dangers. Spring is coming! I feel well enough to eat and move around and do the things that make me happy, which I am grateful for. I read three books of poetry and finished Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders. I think to myself: the discomfort of being in between is temporary. I’m trying to capture the small moments of wonder inside those spaces.

March-ing Through Chaos

So this last week has been pretty chaotic – my mother-in-law got colon cancer surgery which includes a week-long hospitalization back in Ohio, my grandmother in the hospital for a broken back vertebrae, and of course, countless interactions with doctors on my whole “does your liver indicate you have metastatic cancer or not” thing.

At this point I have been granted a little bit of a reprieve, at least for a few weeks, in that I am going to be meeting with a hepatologist to discuss a possible new test called a FibroScan (low risk, but maybe only tells us if I have scarring instead of cancer in the liver, which would be a good alternative to cancer) and running allergy challenge tests with a few of the meds I’ll have to encounter with the liver biopsy.

Which means, hey, I can go to the AWP after all! Unless something else comes in and interferes, which hopefully it won’t. So I’m now trying to get back to doing taxes, making up a PowerPoint presentation for our AWP presentation on “Women in Spec” (April 1, 2 PM – put it on your schedules!) and other run-of-the-mill work.

The thing is, I’ve been distracted and it’s been hard to concentrate. Sending poetry work out has barely happened, and I haven’t been keeping track as well as usual of correspondences and commitments. Things keep slipping. I guess there’s a time frame, dealing with this kind of stuff, where you let the stuff that can slip, slip.

I am very much looking forward to seeing many of my writing friends who live across the country, who nonetheless mean a lot to me and bring a lot of joy just hanging out with them. Part of going through a crisis like this is being heart-warmed by the people who remember you, who write and send packages, flowers, and postcards. Not to be too Hallmark-y, but it’s meant a lot to me to know that people even care. AWP can be about a bunch of politics, but for me, it’s always been about being around these wonderful people – people whose work you’ve loved, and written reviews about, people you’ve corresponded with but never met, old professors and classmates – that remind you that being a writer doesn’t have to be so solitary, after all.

I’ve been trying to focus on as much of the “good stuff” of life as possible – I’ve been struggling to shake a bronchitis infection since the nuclear test, but have been reading a lovely and absorbing book – Julianna Baggott’s Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders: A Novel, which has a character with a bleeding disorder and a bunch of allergies (just like me!), noticing the signs of spring as they happen around me. Since part of my journey lately has been trying to write poems in the middle of stressful situations, here are a few of my recent haiku-ish things:

Cherry blossom petals
in the hospital parking lot
land in my hair.

Cut hyacinth
blown over by rain –
stay alive.

Daffodils spring up
wherever the shade’s fingers
cannot reach.

Keeping the Faith and Celebrating the Breaks Between Storms

So, the news from the nuclear test was not the good news we were hoping for, about benign growths. This means the liver biopsy is still necessary. I’m somewhat trepidatious about this next step, not only because my bleeding disorder makes a usual-twenty-minute procedure into a 24-hour hospitalization, but because my allergies to medical stuff seem to be on high swing (and I had a pretty nasty day-long reaction to the SPECT test contrast) and it would involve several different new drugs for me. So, not excited. But without it, we can’t know whether it’s 1. metastatic cancer or 2. any (dwindling) number of less dangerous alternative benign growths.

These days, in stormy March in Seattle, we have to take advantage of the brief moments of sunshine in between the rain, hail, wind. These pictures of early cherry blossoms were taken in just such a break in the storms. And here’s a peek at a heron in our pond, surely a sign of good fortune.

: Great Blue Heron

: Cherry Blossoms in the stormbreak

: Cherry Blossoms in the stormbreak

It seems like a metaphor right now – for me to take advantage of the times in between hospital trips, arduous medical tests, doctor’s appointments, blood work. I have to remind myself, my body, of why it makes sense to keep fighting, or what’s worth it. Something to help me keep the faith.

So today I went into one of those precious breaks in the rain to wonder through the UW Arboretum (for Futurama fans, “Yes, we have looking at trees”) to catch some of the early blossoms and then to the Aquarium to visit some of my favorite mammals – which run wild through a lot of the Seattle region – river and sea otters, seals, as well as the lovely jellyfish and octopus. Even just hanging out a bit downtown in the tourist area – where I listened to families speaking a variety of languages eat delicious fried fish, ride the ferris wheel, and otherwise enjoy the day, and watched a person with a unicorn head mask play the drums – reminded me of the variety and liveliness of everyday life.

: a peeking seal

: me posing next to camellias in bloom

: sleeping river otter

: Cherry tree in sunbeam

In terms of poetry work, still haven’t got a cover for the new book yet, and I’ve been sending out the remaining poems to journals, and I’ve written just a couple of poems, but that’s the extant of what I’ve been able to do in the midst of everything else. I’m still hoping to make it to AWP, but I don’t know if that’s realistic or not. I’m also really appreciative of this Shenandoah Literary blog post about Becoming the Villainess by Claire Sbardella. I’ll try to keep you all updated on all the news, health, poetry, and otherwise. Thank you once again for all your good thoughts and wishes during this stressful time.

Delay on the Nuclear Test, some poetry news and a Few Words about Luck

Thank you again for all your continued good thoughts and prayers. Had to delay my scheduled nuclear SPECT test from last Friday to this Wednesday because they wouldn’t let me in for the test at the nuclear lab with a high fever and flu-like symptoms because they have so many immunocompromised patients (can’t blame them, although I literally caught it AT the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance Blood Lab, which last Monday was crowded and full of people coughing without covering their mouths) but it has prolonged the suspense over this test a few extra days. Still won’t know whether or not I need to schedule a liver biopsy til after this test. But it’s been okay – I rested up from the flu, read up a little more on the test, the types of benign growths it might reveal, and even treatment options for said benign growths, just for good measure. It was nice to think about options OTHER than cancer. I think I feel a little less scared. In the meantime, I’ve received real mail, flowers, and even a pink unicorn in the mail from friends – friends that I realized can be a real boost when dealing with serious life crises like, say, a cancer scare. In a way, this unwelcome health discovery has also revealed how lucky I am in my friends and even acquaintances – that a world that can seem indifferent can also be surprisingly comforting. In two days, hopefully I’ll have more news for you – good news, I’m hoping!

After a week of getting three rejections, I also had a little bit of good news about The Robot Scientist’s Daughter – that it is a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal for thought-provoking books from small or indie publishers.

I’ve been writing poems lately about the nature of luck – good luck charms, bad luck omens, the thing we think of as lucky and unlucky. Getting, for instance, the news that you might have metastasized cancer at 42 might be considered bad luck – but only having some benign growths that might require some surgery would really only be average or mildly bad luck. I’ve had good luck in some things – not health stuff, maybe, but in my marriage, my writing life, my friends.

Here are two poems I’ve written in the last few weeks. Maybe not my best work, so these poems will probably go “poof” in the next few days. Think good thoughts for me this Wednesday (hopefully this time I will be well enough to actually get the SPECT test!)

*POOF*