When I let my mind run down the dark alleys of "What if...", I think of my friend Cathy Seipp, a journalist and blogger who, for the past three-and-a-half years, has by necessity shined light into every cranny, in order to keep herself alive, which she has done against the odds for someone with lung cancer. No, she never smoked or lived with a smoker, worked with asbestos or in a coal mine. She learned of her cancer after a persistent cough, a cough that turned out to be Stage 3B or 4A adenocarcinoma of the lung, which, as she writes in her post today, "[was] too widespread to be treated by surgery or radiation."
I visited her the day after her surgery in 2002; when I walked in her room, bearing a poundcake, she said, "That is so considerate. Nancy. Do you know so-and-so..." and proceeded to make introductions all around, make sure we all had chairs and drinks, etc. The assemblage was rather shell-shocked, but Cathy, from her hospital bed, was putting one foot in front of the other, and so we tried to, too.
I think of her rather as a dance mistress in this. Her friends who knew about the cancer reacted with varying degrees of emotional spasticity: to ask or not to ask about the new chemo? Is bringing over more food annoying or nice? Oh my god, Maia? How much crying is not okay? But whether in person or psychically, one sensed Cathy clapping her hands, and saying, "None of this. We are not going to freak out; we are not going to lie on the floor and throw a tantrum. We are going to do this dance this way."
The dance is facing mortality--a friend's, one's own--with courage, with grace, with no-nonsense and with super-smarts. Today for the first time in 656 blog posts, Cathy tells her readers, of which there are a loyal thousand or nine, about the cancer, and why she's blogging about it now. Read it for yourself, and also, read the comments, if you want to see how a person can bend the paradigm, can shake us into thought, who by example can make us courageous, too.
Thanks Nancy. I didn't blog it myself because I couldn't say it that well.
Posted by: Amy Alkon | October 29, 2005 at 01:00 AM
What Amy said.
Posted by: Jackie Danicki | October 29, 2005 at 05:58 AM
I was like, totally shocked when I read Cathy's post. It was her review of Art Spiegelman's first kids book that got me to buy it and I kept the review (like I do for all books I buy) because I thought "hey she's cool."
Then I found bot hers and your sites at Journalspace, and you were like one of the few peoplle encouraging me at a time when I needed it to get out of the political biz. So, like, if it hadn't been for you and Cathy, I never would have ended up working on a documentary about SAG and finally going back to what I wanted to do in the first place.
that's not a backhanded way of paying myself a compliment - more like a tribute to some of the few people who pushed me , knowingly or not, into the direction I needed to go. I appreciate it and now I'm a bit said that one of 'em has the C, and damnit that's not fair! Argh!
and yeah, it makes me said she has cancer, but I know she'll overcome it. your story alone tells me she has the zen willpower to tell the big C to take a flying leap. And I recall her telling a story from childhood that echoes your line - the whole idea of "now now there'll be none of that here, lets's work it" that will most assuredly help her beat this thing.
Ok, I'm done. If I need to drink a glass of shut up juice that's cool. But I really like what you said and what she said, and that's all I can say.
Posted by: Greg Dewar | October 29, 2005 at 06:57 PM
Best of luck to you Cathy.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned by anyone regarding lung cancer is the #2 cause of lung cancer in America- Radon. Radon is a naturally occurring but very dangerous phenomena. It is very important for all of us to order (often free from our state/local governments) testing kits to find out your homes exposure.
I sit on a mountain of decomposing granite, which is to say radon is a problem. Remediation is usually cheap and as simple as adding a ventilating fan to the basement/crawlspace.
Posted by: eric | October 31, 2005 at 08:36 AM
one of the 9,000 or so loyal readers, chiming in to say, thank you nancy.
Posted by: leigh | October 31, 2005 at 10:15 AM
Since non-smoking women are getting lung cancer more and more, is it possible that the cause is mammograms? Just a thought.
Carol
Posted by: Carol | November 01, 2005 at 12:34 PM