I am not afraid of you, 2018

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Book the First, Chapter I.

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The clouds hung heavily upon us as we made the trip across the river to the election night party. I was already feeling gloomy, as just the day before, I had received a lay-off notice from my employer. Our whole research team was getting axed—we had until the end of the year to find something new inside the company. The radio blasted the bad news that was sweeping the country from East to West; Trump and his man, Pence, were winning. It seemed impossible. Already depressed, we climbed the stairs to the party, which turned out to be a wake, a sorrowful celebration of the previous eight years. A celebration of a dark-skinned man full of light and hope, now replaced by a light-skinned man full of darkness and greed. A pall of disbelief and grief settled across the subdued chatter. The newscasters sounded less chipper than usual. Thus ended 2016, setting the tone for the long winter months and endless year to come.

By January, I had landed another job within the company. The hiring manager had been effusive with praise about my qualifications. In fact, she wanted to put me in for a promotion right away. It was going to be wonderful. I was moving to a group that needed me, and valued the kind of work I did, or so I was led to believe.  We walked in the woman’s march, and I was feeling a renewed hope, in spite of the election loss.

By March, my new boss had lost her enthusiasm for me. I wasn’t going to make her look good. In fact, my incessant probing around the lack of quality of the research she had paid too much for was wearing thin on her. She suggested that I had an attitude problem, that I was arrogant, that perhaps I should start looking for a new job. She said that I was “not a good fit,” code for “I don’t like you.” She had said the same thing to a couple other of my colleagues, so I took solace in the fact that I was not alone.

For the next couple of months, I made an effort to be less arrogant, to pretend that the research we were doing was valuable; it was not meaningful. I tried vainly to carve a path of my own, putting forth research proposals that went unread, or at least unanswered.  My career was wasting away before my eyes, and I could not have cared less. I skated along for the next couple of months doing almost nothing, knowing that my time there was almost up. Time to move on to the next chapter.

In June, I always give myself a mammogram for my birthday, and 2017 was no different. It wasn’t even different that I had to go for the follow-up ultrasound; I usually have to do that. When they said they wanted to do a biopsy I got worried, and when the next day, the doctor called to tell me that I had breast cancer, I was shocked, horrified, devastated. The words, “You have invasive breast cancer,” reverberated for days before I would learn that I had “the good kind.” It had been caught early, and was treatable.

I never would have guessed that getting cancer would have been one of the best things to have happened to me in 2017.  Work was a shit-show, domestic and global politics were (and continue to be) a disaster, my mother-in-law was dying (and has since died), my own mother was in severe physical and mental decline, climate change has wrought havoc on the planet, and more immediately to our house in the form of a UPS truck crashing into it during one of the numerous ice storms we endured. After all that we had already sustained, getting news that I had “curable” breast cancer was relatively good news.

One of the truly good things that happened during 2017 was that Ken, my husband, was awarded an endowed professorship at Princeton. With all that was going on in our lives, it was uncertain whether we would/should/could go up until the day that we departed. My breast cancer was diagnosed in mid-July. I had surgery at the end of July, and because I qualified for brachytherapy, a much shorter stint of radiation therapy, I did that, wrapping up my treatment before mid-August when we left. I had sailed through, almost entirely unscathed, and in record time. No chemo, something else to be grateful about.

My psyche was intact. And then came the news that my mother had taken a serious fall, breaking her pelvis in four places. We all (including her) felt certain that the end was near. We loaded up our car, and set off on our journey eastward, which included several unplanned days in Denver to visit her.

We arrived in New Jersey at the end of August, and less than a week after arriving I boarded a plane back to Denver to celebrate my mother’s 90th birthday. All of the siblings were able to make it. We celebrated with her as well as humanly possible at the rehab center where she stayed for many weeks before her release. I planned to return again in a few weeks, wanting to give respite to my sister, Liz, who has had the stressful and lonely job of primary caregiver, but the bad ju-ju of 2017 had still not been entirely spent. On the plane trip from Denver back to New Jersey, my breast swelled up like a balloon, and felt like the weight of a bowling ball on my frontside. I wound up admitted to the hospital for an anti-biotic resistant post-surgical infection. This was far worse to deal with than the cancer, oddly. I was flattened for two months by the sequential anti-biotic treatments, and experienced anxiety and depression like I have never experienced before.

The bright side of having to deal with these health issues, is that it forced me to give up thoughts of returning to work right away, or ever, for that matter. I was able to spend time unwinding, reading, doing yoga and barre, cooking, building this web site, writing, and taking long walks and bike rides with my husband and daughter. We explored New Jersey, and learned to love it, in spite of ourselves. Living in Princeton was like living inside a snow-globe, its own perfect little world without poverty, hunger, or ugliness of any kind. I could almost forget that Donald Trump had been elected President…almost. I was able to fully recover from all that had been 2017.

And just before 2017 came to an end, we left our Princeton bubble, and took the journey of a lifetime back to our Portland home, a story for another day. I ended the year feeling blessed in every way. Both my mental and physical health have recovered. I quit my job, and am ready to begin the next chapter. I am not afraid of you, 2018.