Lumpy

I found a lump in my right breast — at “around 2 o’clock” as the doctor said — and went to get an ultrasound. I parked outside and then reparked as is customary for a bad parker like myself and tried to find the building. If a building is the size of a city block, the address number should be on all sides. “How many blocks does it take to get to the radiology center of a hospital to see if you have cancer?” I imagine this would have been a much worse ad campaign, even with a cartoon owl. 

For me it was only two but they were blocks big enough to write home about. Inside I tried to check in and was interrupted once the receptionist found my appointment. 

“Oh, I am actually going to send you to the third floor, room 325. There are some really, really nice people up there who will take care of you.” 

I’m no good with numbers or with directions and the building was no good with names or distinction. I wandered a hall and each door was so similar to the one before I couldn’t be sure I was moving forward at all. Eventually there was a sign outside of one of them with pom-poms on it. Fuchsia, magenta, baby pink — every color you could never use for a WNBA team or a lady lawyer’s diploma.

Inside was quite nice and serene and truly really very quite pink. Pink and white streamers presumably from a Party City closing sale. Bubblegum paper snowflakes (it was July). It had everything but rose-colored glasses. I suppose you bring your own.

I was given a pink wrap scrub top and told to leave my right arm out of the sleeve. 

“What have you done?” the nurse asked.

I stared at her a little too long before I realized what she meant, it’s the same question baristas and cashiers and some waiters ask, only phrased in a non-traditional way: “What have you been up to today?” I don’t believe you have to ask it in those words, but I think some word or phrase after “done” is customary.

I said I was petsitting and she asked me to point to the lump. 

Afterward she said she needed to show the images to the doctor and then, if nothing else was needed, I could go. She did not leave the room. Instead, she just went to the other side of the curtain and stood there for ten minutes. 

“The doctor said there’s nothing to worry about. Just dense tissue. You’re just lumpy like young people often are.” 

I suppose this is good news, but when I look in the mirror I don’t often aspire to be lumpy. I prefer a nondescript body when I can get it. 

After the appointment, I went to an old lab named Charlie’s house, which was no longer his but was temporarily mine. His fur was dark brown except at the maw which was graying each day and by now, when this part of him was isolated, he looked more like oatmeal that sat out overnight than chocolate. His eyes were puddly and worn. His body was lumpy and I wondered what the nurse would say about that. I always associate lumpiness with old age, probably just from the slow accumulation of bumps on our elderly dogs Mabel and Louise before they passed, but now I hear that young people are just lumpy. Maybe there is no interspecies connection. I like to think Charlie was lumpy from all the memories he accumulated over the years with nowhere else to put them. His walks around the block with no goal except to walk. He did not need to look at any building numbers. His days sitting on the lawn with his dad, Daniel. His time spent at the cabin at Mount Hood. His naps with his sister, the ragdoll cat with blue eyes. All of that: small protrusions. 

Charlie had a vestibular episode, which was described to me as “doggy vertigo.” His head tilt was permanent and made him look ever so curious. You could hear him move from three rooms over. A shuffle and then a thud or two or three. His balance wasn’t so good these days. Still, he tried to mosey about, if only to get to his food or the lawn. 

He loved that lawn. He would immediately curl into a ball next to the three plastic adirondack chairs and never wanted to move, but as an amenable dog, he would get up the second you said, “Charlie, let’s go inside” and opened the door. On Sunday, August 27th, he got up to go to the lawn with me. I was going to let him go to the bathroom and sit with him for a minute after. A few steps past the three mossy brick steps that led out to the grass that the family spent years growing from bald ground, Charlie got woozy and fell down. It was the same as inside on the slick hardwood floors, only this thud was in the dirt and grass theoretically stabilized by an extensive root system. 

When his lumpy brown body hit the lumpy brown earth, he let out a yelp or a scream or a squeal depending on your persuasion, but most honestly it was a mix of all three uttered three times over. It was loud enough for my partner to hear through the closed doors of the house. Charlie was still and soundless then. Something or another, although I couldn’t name what, spooked him and he tried to stand and run away, but his back leg wouldn’t even touch the ground. No dog with vertigo was ever meant to be a three-legged dog, but even before the vertigo he was never meant to be one and that had never been more apparent. In his panicked scurry he lost his balance again and tumbled down a small but steep incline. From there he didn’t move except to shake and shake and shake. So he shook and shook and shook, part of his side on the lawn, but most of him on the sidewalk beside it, his paws sitting across the cracks and the small clovers and flowers growing between them. 

He wouldn’t move, except of course the shaking. He wanted treats so desperately, but still he could not stand to reach them, and holding them just beyond his mouth’s reach started to seem cruel. The animal hospital was 19 minutes away and he made little sound the whole drive, except for the jumbling that the potholes beneath us forced.

It turns out when he fell, he broke his femur near the top of it and it seemed like maybe he had bone cancer. For Charlie, it took no blocks to see if he had cancer, it didn’t even take two steps down the sidewalk. He was too old for surgery, and he was never meant to be a three-legged dog. 

The ride home was bleak and the house was empty. His bed was at the hospital and his bowls outside from when we tried to get him to eat. Coco was still there, a fluffy creature pacing back and forth meowing, and I remembered how she would yell every time Charlie went outside when she couldn’t go with him, and how she would yell any time she was home and he was at the cabin. I thought surely now she would yell until she lost her voice and still her mouth would open rhythmically and only air would come out until she had none of that left either. 

Coco’s white fur latched onto my black Columbia sweatshirt just as it used to cling to Charlie. Every day it would accumulate in larger quantities and her meows grew louder with each one and each one was followed by another. She paced some, mostly by the empty space where his bed used to be — their bed, really — and where his food bowl used to sit. In part, I’m sure she missed getting to eat his food before he could get to it. I think mostly she missed him. 

She would pace and I would stare at her. She would yell and I would stare at her and maybe say, “I know, I’m sorry. You miss your brother, I know, I’m sorry.” Cats are much smarter than we assume, at least I believe that, but I don’t think they know much English. Coco knows sound, though, and that might have been enough for her to know three things: I know you miss your brother; I’m sorry you miss your brother; I know and I’m sorry that he’s gone. 

As capable as Coco may be, and as intelligent as she certainly is, I kept coming back to a question that would rattle around in my head, pacing and staring and pacing and staring and sometimes telling me, “I know, I’m sorry, I know you don’t know how to explain grief to a cat, I know, I’m sorry.” It was a question in a sense: how do you explain grief to a cat? But I voiced it as an answer: I don’t know how.

You can meow back and hope the pitch is just right so as to say: “Your brother broke his femur. He was never meant to be a three-legged dog.” But you just as easily might say something else. For all you know, you’ve told Coco that “Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden.” Yes, this is likely news Coco would like to hear, but it is not what she needs to hear and it is futile to guess a cat’s politics anyway. It’s all a wash when you do not know how to meow. 

Then again, it is kind of arrogant to think that Coco needs you, a person, to explain to her what she knows: Charlie was here, now he is not. This time, his food bowl is gone and his bed is gone and everyone is acting weird and sad. His food arrived in the mail yesterday, and no one even thought to open it. Charlie is not here. Charlie is gone. I am alone. 

The question, of course, is whether she knows what it means. Which is to say, she knows he is gone — she can see that — but does she know he is not coming back and does she know where he is and does she know what death is? Does she know what she knows? She knows what she knows but does she know what what she knows means? That is hardly a readable sentence, let alone an answerable question.

But when I think about myself, which I so often do even though I want to be selfless, I think I ask myself the same questions I ask of Coco. 

How do I explain anything to myself? My sickness, my grief, my body? Do I know what it means? I see my life looks different now than it used to, but do I really know what that means? Do I know my old body is not coming back and do I know what my body is now and do I know what chronic illness is?

All of the things I know, I still do not know. It’s the same thing I say in therapy all the time. I rationally, intellectually know that XYZ is true. But it doesn’t feel true. Or often the other way around.

While Coco sits and stares at Charlie’s absence, I am likely sitting and staring at something similar that is just mine, or maybe used to be. 

I don’t know how to explain grief to a cat. I don’t know how to explain illness to myself. 

    *

The flower has a name: phlox, which means “flame.” If you look up why, various dictionaries will cite their vibrance or showiness, and I understand that. They are long-stemmed and each blossom is made up of a cluster of small bright pink flowers. They look like a high definition version of the clover in Horton Hears a Who! Phloxes can burn things down — burn through them. 

I spent months building the garden that phloxes seized in moments. Their variegated pink crowns were more regal than mine. As the days grew longer, the green stems grew taller, casting shadows on the picked-over strawberries I had planted before. I don’t know where I went wrong, but somewhere in the hours I spent hunched over garden beds, soil accumulating under my nails, I lost my way. Wildflowers were springing up everywhere with no warning and no regard for their surroundings. It was just like that saying: man plans, God sends wildflowers.

My path to plants was twisted, coiling around me like a vine around a trellis. I am not green-thumbed by any means; I have always been the type to pull handfuls of grass out of the ground or a leaf off a tree as I walk past it, not to grow anything. I watched the garden beds in my backyard tangle together and never thought to intervene, I was the bystander I’ve been taught not to be. I only found myself tending to the garden after I learned to tend to my health. I didn’t expect a learning curve, I thought gardening was simple. Plant the seeds, wait for them to grow, and maybe, harvest them. Nothing natural is simple, though; it’s uncontrolled and unpolished. I was flustered by the insurgent phloxes and their secrecy. I burrowed into these mysteries of nature. As a mystery of nature myself, it felt organic. 

I examine their ruffled petals like doctors examine me. The doctor changes but the question never does: well, aren’t you just a medical mystery? I find this mundane and routine dejá vu tiring. Yes, I am a medical mystery; no, that is not all I am, even though sometimes it feels like it is. Mystery is a beloved genre, but a bad identity. It’s turned me into a novelty, a puzzle that everyone wants to be the one to solve. I don’t figure many people just walked past the excalibur set in stone. In all fairness, I wouldn’t either. I would disregard the fact that I cannot do a single push-up and that there is a bottle of iced tea in my fridge I can’t open. I would pull on the sword, because what if I was the one? The term “medical mystery” is imbued with some sort of magic — it turns “you” into “it.” You are no longer a person, you are a problem that must be fixed. Your pain is a clue, not something that hurts you — how could something hurt you when you don’t really exist? Empathy loses out to intrigue; “I’m sorrys” lose out to “how interestings”; you lose out to some dissociated version of yourself — a detached set of symptoms. I am not myself, I am the mystery, with doctors staring at me — or past me or through me or into me — the same way I now stare at those unpredictable wildflowers. 

It is a shame the strawberries couldn’t weather the phloxes, but even in their violence I find them soothing, because I can see them. I can see the strawberries being suffocated and I can see why: the wildflowers. I can see the soil being overtaken and I can see why: the wildflowers. I can see the plants dying and I can see why: the wildflowers. There is something comforting about getting hurt and being able to see the assailant — it’s the security and validation of visibility. A problem exists whether you can see it or not. If there’s carbon monoxide in the air, you’ll feel it even if you can’t see it. Still, it is much easier to trust something you can see. If that was not the case, you wouldn’t be able to finish the sentence, “I’ll believe it when I ___ __,” and more people would believe in God. I think, although I have never seen a world like that, so I cannot be too sure. 

I can see my strawberries’ wildflowers, but I cannot see my own. I feel them everywhere, but they are wrapped in anonymity. I feel them in the hives tattooed on my skin, in the endometriosis growing in mysterious places, in the joints slipping out of place, in the nausea filling my body with sour nothings, in the swelling inside my bones, in the pain rooted in the deepest parts of myself. The wildflowers are there. I am sure of it and I doubt it. I know it and I think what I know is wrong. I am certain and I must be mistaken. 

It’s a myth that music helps plants grow, or so National Geographic tells me, but some flora can hear in a way unlike our own. I have heard that plants thrive when you talk to them. I do not know if it is true, but I think it is benign enough to believe. I talk to myself often, muttering and humming around my room, and I think maybe the wildflowers can hear me. I think they can hear me when I say, “I think there is something terribly wrong with me, but I don’t know what and everything looks okay.” I think they hear me when I say, “I think wildflowers have taken root, but I don’t see any here.” I think they hear me when I try to convince myself that I am not crazy, that something is wrong and the wildflowers have not only sprouted but have bloomed and died and bloomed and died and bloomed and died and bloomed again. I think they hear it, but I know I do, and I need to say it and hear it more than I do.

Chronic illness, in its mystery and camouflage, is a trap: pitfalls and shambles and snares cobbled-together. It sends you down a Rube-Goldberg machine, crashing and stumbling and rumbling and colliding before forcing you into an endless cycle of:

I know something is wrong. But nothing seems wrong, so I must be wrong. I know I’m right, but how could I possibly be? I know something is wrong. But nothing seems wrong, so I must be wrong. I know I’m right, but how could I possibly be? I know something is wrong. But nothing seems wrong, so I must be wrong. I know I’m right, but how could I possibly be? 

I do not know how to be sick and look healthy without gaslighting myself. I do not know how to do that without pitting myself against my body. I do not know how to do that without eroding every fragment of self-trust I have left. I know how to talk to the wildflowers but I do not know how to make them talk back to me, and I cannot be sure that if they did, I would listen. They can hear me, but I cannot control them. Every once in a while I think they are trying to show themselves, to tell me, “Hello! Yes, we are here!” It manifests in hip aches that give way to an unsteady limp, and at the very least my wooden cane might convince other people the wildflowers are there, too. But then my hip feels better for a day and I wonder if it ever really hurt in the first place. I do believe the wildflowers are there, but I do not know if I will ever know for sure or if I will always exist in a perpetual interrogation and doubt. This is what it means to have faith, though. To know even when you can’t — to trust what you feel and let belief be enough. 

Of course there is always the option to pretend you feel nothing. That is what I had always done. My body talked to me and I heard it and I pretended I didn’t. My symptoms — my body — reached out toward me, and I pretended that I didn’t see it. I averted my eyes like I was passing an estranged friend on the street. Feigned ignorance was fool proof in the sense that it proves I was a fool to try it. It worked well for a time, but the bubble I placed between myself and my illness filled with pressure until it ruptured like the cysts inside me. Ignoring and subduing my body only lasted so long — I wanted to take control from a body I pretended didn’t exist. I knew you could not control wildflowers, and I had to learn it again, anyway. My body was not in control, and it was too exhausted to pretend to be.

Illness never exists alone. It is born with a deathless grieving of the version of you that you cannot be, and the version of your life that you cannot have. You have to manage the illness and what it means to be ill. I have joint issues and that means I cannot lead a very active lifestyle anymore and I cannot have the same hobbies I used to and I have to field questions about my cane whenever I need to use it and and and. There is the grief of what you cannot do or be for yourself at all or, even more painfully, anymore. There is anguish of hope found and lost — of coveting the body you cannot have, the health it cannot provide, the life it cannot give you, and the one it leaves you; a life of the unfulfilled, unfollowed, undone, unlived, and unanswered. 

To my disappointment, you cannot finish mourning an idea of yourself or your future that isn’t done dying, but that dies in little ways each day. You also cannot begin mourning something until you admit it is dying, even if it is dying subtly, and it is hard to do that. I have always been told not to lose hope, no matter what, I needed to hold onto hope — it was hallowed, untouchable, and often contrived. I understand the fear of saying, “the version of my life I had always imagined will never exist.” But you cannot build a new idea until you say it, and hopelessness is no more an enemy than a friend. 

Hope is contingent on control, usually the illusion of it — the idea that things can be better, and because of that they will be better because I can make them better. The strawberries will be okay and they will live the way they did before the wildflowers, I just need to control the phloxes. I can have the life I dreamed of, I just need to control my body and make it something it isn’t. I have a teen-like angst toward hope because even when I had no control I was told to have hope, and hope without agency is self-destruction masquerading as self-preservation. Often hope is a projection of self-preservation to placate the people who love you. It is plaited desire, expectation, and suspension — a longing for change, and clinging to the idea that it can or will happen. It is the space between two existences, and I know it well in all its sterility; it is a waiting room. You don’t get better in the waiting room, you can only get better in the exam room where you tell the doctor the truth. Even still, you might not get better then, but your chances are far higher. 

The line between hope and delusion or optimism and denial is tangled and vinelike, but hope is dangerous when it is closer to the expectation of change than an openness to it, and when it is not rooted in rationality. Hope that resembles “the wildflowers will go away, even though they never have before” is not optimistic, it’s venomous. 

Hope makes for a wonderful idea, but I think hopelessness makes for a healthy reality. A few years ago, I decided to lose hope, to do the thing I had been warned not to, to accept that the wildflowers were not going anywhere, at least not any time soon. The wildflowers might leave one day, but my mentality today does not rely on that happening. 

Wildflowers took root when I was eighteen months old. I tried and tried and tried and tried to get better. My body has been an experiment, a riveting mystery, and a set of symptoms devoid of personhood. It has been a house, not a home. A shelter, not a refuge. A body, not my body. I have done every diet — vegetarian, pescatarian, vegan, gluten-free, GAPS, low-FODMAP, paleo, low-carb, low-histamine, anti-inflammatory, and more I cannot remember. I have taken countless medicines in all forms — pills, powders, creams, gels, repugnant liquids, tinctures, suppositories, daily injections, IV infusions, and everything else possible. I have had multiple surgeries. I have undergone physical therapy numerous times for my bladder, my eyes, my joints, and my pelvic floor. I have done extensive and invasive testing that has stripped me of any semblance of privacy, dignity, or autonomy. I have done that. I have relentlessly done that for over two decades. I am used to answers from well-meaning doctors who want to help me. I am used to answers from doctors who have barely spoken to me and who haven’t listened to me but think they know me. I am used to answers from doctors who just want to be The One to fix me. Almost all of these answers have been wrong. I think many of them believed they could really help me and so they gave me a promise, but it is important to remember the first part of con-man is confidence. My illness has gotten better and worse with treatments, but I am still sick. 

I have been told that there is no cure and I have been told to believe one day I will not be ill. I am generally an obedient person, so I have. I have believed countless times that a treatment would cure me, but when hope bleeds through all of your treatments, knowing your illnesses are hard to treat, and it doesn’t work, it is devastating. You become bereaved and you kick yourself because you knew. You knew it wouldn’t work. But somehow, you convinced yourself that it would, that this would be the one that would change everything. It is a rebirth  — or re-death — of sorts, the experience of “becoming” chronically ill again because, for a second, you convinced yourself you might not be. And then you do it again. You start again, replanting the strawberries that phloxes will make their own. 

In his special Blocks, Neal Brennan said, “I guess it makes sense if you’re looking for a magic bullet, occasionally you’re going to get shot.” The type of hope I was afraid to lose was just a habit of shooting myself in the foot. Even when the treatments did not harm me, which they sometimes did, they wore me down — I was grinding my own bones to make terrible gluten-free bread. When your body is Sisyphean, hope is always misguided and almost always false, and it can feel fatal. There has to be a point where living with illness is better than living with illness and the endless grief of hope. There must be a time when it makes more sense for the boulder to rest down here and for the wildflowers to stay where they are. There must be a life worth making with my illness and a garden worth making with the wildflowers.

I cannot find it unless I acknowledge I might have to, that I might have to live with my illness for quite a while. I do not claim to know everything, but I feel confident that some things do not get better. It is not bleak, defeatist, or self-pitying, although I will concede it would make a less compelling nonprofit. “Things Probably Won’t Get Better Project” doesn’t roll off the tongue quite like “It Gets Better Project.” I don’t think it is grim to accept my illness if my illness is my reality; what is grim to me is forcing a diaphanous hope. Chronic illness already feels like an endless struggle to tread water, slipping into drowning spells, and as much as it would be nice if hope could save me, it has been a cinder block more than a life-preserver. 

I realized that I would never find acceptance while clinging to hope. How could I accept the wildflowers, when my acceptance is contingent on their disappearance? How could I get to a place of acceptance, with perseverance contingent on hoping I will get better? I couldn’t. It is not possible. I do not think I will ever be fully well; I do not know whether I will ever feel better than I do now, I might, but I also very likely might not. People tell me not to say things like that, that it’s grim. But it is true, and keeping the facade, doesn’t keep depression at bay, it brings it closer.

I have been afraid of hopelessness and what it might do to me, but mostly I was afraid to admit that my body is not mine to rule. That it is not my body, it is the body and I just happen to be in it. The body is mine in the way that time is mine, which is to say it is not. I was afraid that the body would not get better in large part because the world makes it seem like a life of disability is not a life worth living. It is trite to blame the Big Bad Wolf “Society” for your troubles, but despite how internal my illnesses are, my relationship to them was always impressionable. In high school, at a time I was most fragile, my health teacher would close every class with: “Remember, if you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything.” If the body is not normal, you don’t have anything; it is a scary thought.

At the same time as my body feeling like the body, not my body, it is still me. Perhaps most disorienting is the way illness inextricably joins you with your body and convinces you that you have been marooned by it. Coveting is a sin and I understand why it should be, at least in my case — when I covet a version of my body, I sever any connection I have with the one I have now. Coveting my body does not feel like coveting myself, not in the slightest. I only recently had the epiphany that my body and I are the same being. I think you are supposed to realize that at the same time that you develop object permanence, but I was an adult then. You can teach dogs to recognize themselves in the mirror, but I couldn’t teach myself. I don’t know that I fully learned even now. I had lived for what feels like an eternity thinking my body was against me. I confused my body for the wildflowers, even though I would never confuse the garden beds for the phloxes. I thought my body was hurting me, and really my body and I were hurting together. People say to treat your body like a temple, and I treated mine like the British Museum treats a temple in another country. I made my body evil and traitorous and malevolent and I cut it off from myself. I made my body the enemy because I could see it even when I couldn’t see the wildflowers. 

I am not mature enough to be nice to my enemies, so I was vicious to myself instead. I still am vicious, because I made it muscle memory. I could shut my body out because I imagined it being a temporary divorce — because I told myself I would be better soon. Who needs a relationship with this defective body when I will have a good one soon? I understand now that my body and I are not separate and I am learning to treat it better. It is very straightforward and I have never been more confused. It is very easy and I have never done something so hard. It is very clear and it is so mysterious to me. I am getting worse at it and I am getting better at it, too. Every day I get more better than I get worse, and I think one day I will just be getting better. 

I have the hope for the way I relate to myself that I cannot have for my health — not ever again. I cannot control my illness, but I can control whether I punish myself for having it. It feels like healing to let myself exist without healing and to have saved myself from cyclical loss and unrelenting trying. It feels like healing to be sick and okay. Still, I struggle with it, I see an unholy hope like a siren and I have to pull myself away from it. I am at peace and I have to fight to stay there. I see now why the serenity prayer is, indeed, a prayer, a call for divine intervention. Dear God, might I feel okay? I don’t think the wildflowers are going anywhere any time soon. I don’t think my health is getting better any time soon. But I think my garden is worth tending and my life is worth living.