Bay Area

I read from my book last night to a group at the Women's Cancer Resource Center in Oakland. It's independent, and sponsors many groups and events, with a feminist/progressive philosophy. For those of you who shy away from the word feminist, take note: I don't mean that they push ideology, but that they aim to be inclusive. We were talking about Thinking Before You Pink, and the exec director said that the center receives funds from the Avon Walk, which goes to show that the mainstream breast cancer philanthropies are becoming more responsive to grass-roots organizations, and are not so wedded to the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about after making his contributions to it.
Several of the women told their stories and we talked about alternative treatment as well as the politics and emotions of breast cancer.
Before that, I spoke to a class on healing stories at John F. Kennedy University in Contra Costa County. I find I'm speaking more and more about the benefits and uses of humor in living through cancer. You can hear a lecture on this by Enid Schwartz here. You can find my piece on humor in breast cancer narratives on the Jan. 19, 2009, post on this blog.

Self/Hood

I have been in therapy, off and on (mostly on), probably longer than many of you have been alive. The short version is, to quote myself on June 13, 2007: I have "the essential feeling: that I do not deserve to live. That I should perish soon. I was not made to live a long time. I was made to live tragically." That sounds melodramatic but it's true. In therapy today I said that this feeling was based on having asthma and thinking,from a young age, that I was able to live only with the outside help of medications, and that if I were born into poverty or if I had been imprisoned in a concentration camp (during a war that ended before I was born), I wouldn't last long. I realized today that to imagine dying in a camp is to give power to the Nazis; to say that under their system I would have perished, and therefore don't deserve to live, is to say in effect that they were right, that the white gloves of Eichmann (pointing to the left or to the right) was a proper way to determine an innocent person's destiny. I was endorsing using torture as a way to determine a person's fitness, letting murderers and madman set a standard. That is crazy. And that is, as I've said before, why I wrote a book called Holocaust Girls, to describe people (like me) who had nothing to do with the Holocaust, but are obsessed with it. Part is the frisson of "there but for fortune would go I," the thrill of having avoided a disastrous fate; and part is that certain of us need an outward symbol of our inner suffering. This is why the crucifix is such a powerful image, and my explanation for the conversion of certain Jews, such as Simone Weil, is that depictions of Jesus on the cross captured their own agony. I think this also explains the power of certain saints. For example, today I said that I felt like St. Sebastian, with arrows stuck in me.

I had a friend in college who said that he felt that his metaphysical core was like an empty roll of toilet paper. He felt that he did not have substance, a deep sense of self. I do have that but I think that I must also have within me a metaphorical magnet that pulls the arrows from the bows of others. My sense of (the rightness of) self is so easily waylaid. Undermined.

Yesterday I was choosing a book on my shelves to read on the L and picked out Hitler's Exiles: Personal Stories of the Flight from Nazi Germany to America, edited by Mark M. Anderson, whom I have met. I was self-deprecating about the choice--more of the same about what I already know, nothing new. But today I realized that I was reading about sense of self by a shipping magnate picked up by the Gestapo in early 1937: "Suddenly it struck me that I was a defenseless prisoner. I was no longer the respected Arnold Bernstein, proud of my record, strong and safe. Suddenly I felt that I was in the hands of ruthless enemies who would not respect either law or human rights and that all my decent life and my merits would be of no help." The world around him has gone crazy, the pressure is so great on people who've been arrested that another writer felt that after four hours of cross-examination, "I had arrived at a stage of exhaustion where I would have admitted anything. I began to understand how under pressure people will sometimes admit things they have never done." (Alice Salomon, born Jewish, converted to Christianity)

Is my point becoming clear? It's that Bernstein was so certain that his "good conscience" and powerful position would keep him safe, though he was planning to leave Germany soon, sailing away on the Queen Mary. He grasped that the system was topsy-turvy, everything rigged against him and his fellow Jews, that the innocent would be found guilty and imprisoned--at best. I seem to be implying that under these conditions I would have started feeling guilty. I don't think I would have, though the very least thing makes me feel guilty now. But I am struck by Bernstein's self-possession. He was afraid of being beaten only because he was afraid he'd "attack the offender with all the consequences to be expected during the Nazi regime." He's put on trial and is determined to fight, and show that he is innocent and that the perpetrators are the criminals. His sense of his own goodness turned out to be a detriment, keeping him in Germany longer than he should have stayed. Yet this sense sustained him, during imprisonment. I feel I can handle the large affronts. It's the small ones that get to me, and I would like to have Bernstein's strength to withstand them.

He was sentenced to almost two years in prison, on trumped-up charges of treason. When he was released he immigrated to New York, where he started all over again, founding another shipping company, which was not nearly as successful at the one in Germany, which he had been forced to turn over to the Nazi government.



"...every time I think of the crucifixion of Christ I commit the sin of envy."--Simone Weil

More progress

I picked L up from the hospital this morning. He was standing outside Fancy Hospital, not in a wheelchair. He is doing fine but has restrictions on swimming, bicycling, driving, picking things up and the like.

I had my six-month mammogram and surgeon-appt. today. Everything is fine. Which means that the slightly suspicious calcifications on my right breast haven't changed, and that I made another appointment for January.

I realized today that the new mammogram area has a theme. There are four "suites," each named after a tree species. And the big key rings for your locker are giant green leaves! I was in Cedar/Dogwood.

I asked the mammographer why they separated people who've had breast cancer from people who haven't, and she said they don't. I'd thought that was the case last time I was there, and wondered why. Were they afraid we'd scare the innocent ones? On the other hand, we would be a shining example of people who'd had cancer and were still well enough to come to the hospital to get our breasts smushed severely. The mammographer said that people getting diagnostic mammos are in one place, and those people have often had cancer. So there is no conspiracy. How disappointing.

L's progress

L is out of the recovery room and is talking baseball (he went to last night's Cubs/Cardinals game) and is as well as could be expected after being poked and cut. He's a little groggy but coherent. He's supposed to be released tomorrow.

The shoe is on the other foot.

Defibrillator on left; pacemaker on right




Or I'm wearing a different hat. Or, less metaphorically, L is wearing the pale green Fancy Hospital smock today. He's supposed to be out of the operating room at 11:30 am Central Standard Time. Some of you may recall that he has hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. He is getting a cardioverter defibrillator installed to prevent a life-ending event, as the doctor said. He's supposed to be in the recovery room by 11:30 am CST. The very very worst thing about this is he can't play contact sports, for fear of moving the device, so yesterday was his very last basketball game. He loves basketball. It's his in-the-moment, everything-else-disappears activity. He will have to find another, one where a ball or a person or a floor won't hit him in the defibrillator.

In the waiting area today were three men, all with gray hair, two with paunches and canes, and one who looked diminished. One of the cane men was a patient and the other, his friend. L is in such perfect shape. He doesn't look like the usual cardiac patient.

A nurse told us that a (dreaded) Fellow was going to do the operation along with the Attending (the staff cardiologist). I have a horror of Fellows and interns and residents and medical students. They are real doctors, but they're amateurs. I could feel the difference between a Fellow and an Attending during a biopsy. The Fellow was uncertain and tentative and had to be guided after her first attempt to poke around in my breast. I said we wanted the Attending to do it. I don't know if L was forceful enough with the doctor. He just asked, You're going to do it, right? The nurse had demurred, saying, This is a teaching hospital. Yes, but let them learn on someone else's body. I know this isn't charitable or generous or unselfish. So be it.

Compare and contrast

Very quickly, now:
In Sofia, the trash bins on the sidewalk are rusty metal. In Budapest they're nice plastic lined with plastic bags. In Berlin they're plastic with jokey stuff printed on them, such as: Corpus fur alle Delicti.
There are stray dogs and cats in Sofia. Each belongs more or less to a street and people on the street feed them. In winter, said T, the cats come inside. Some people have private dogs, which they walk, but the leashes can be rope.
A story I heard on my travels:
Once there was a cat who peed in the neighbor's flowerbeds. The neighbor didn't like the cat or its smell. So the neighbor trapped it in a cat box.
I asked the same thing. The neighbor got a handyman to make the trap. The cat was caught, then driven far away and let out.
I think this is terrible but I laughed anyway.
What did the cat owners say? Where did they think the cat went?
The cat/trapper doesn't know because they don't speak to one another.

In the US we wouldn't do anything like that. Instead, people catch stray dogs and cats and sell them to labs. /laboratories, not labrador retrievers.

My keyboard has an accent.

From high in the Buda hills...

Budapest is the new Prague, which was the new Paris, which was just plain Paris, and forever Paris because that's what Paris is. And Prague is known for its own magic, which may be what has drawn frat boys from all over the world. In Sofia the people wore dark jeans and mostly dark clothing, solids. Here the people dress baggier and more fashionably and there are a million young people walking around so that it seems like Wrigleyville, where I live. The drunks aren't quite as obnoxious, though. The people are bigger and more well-fed, as are the cars. I don't take note of brands, but the cars are more substantial-looking here and I saw a very long limo the length of half a city block. When I was here 10 years ago I used to keep a log on number of dachshunds vs. number of cell phones. Now the cell phones are definitely winning. I just saw two dachshounds today. One beagle, my first on this trip. I also saw black people. I saw not a one in Bulgaria or Serbia.
There is much angry-looking graffiti here, scrawled all over empty display windows under a cannonade. Adults wear shorts here, and sandals, espcially (for the men) with black socks. There are many bike riders, though few with helmets. The feeling is that this town is here to provide food and drink and fun for anyone who can afford it, and most of all to the young. There are sidewalks filled with cafes and you can see people plugged into their iPods. One street corners you can see the slogan of the right-wing party stenciled on the cement. Like everywhere in Europe, there is a crazy scary party that's popular. The buildings are so solid and heavy that I thought of course they're that way to make the people of the Austro-Hungarian empire feel they were subjects. My friend V said they were not built this way for that reason. Still, it's interesting to think of Paris' graceful buildings, and these heavy, imposing ones. Tonight is Wednesday and people were partying like it was the weekend. It is summer, in the new Europe. V offered me President's cheese today and I think it's the same brand we get at the Jewel. I said it was surprising to see it in Hungary, and she said, This isn't Hungary, it's Europe.
So it is.