I consider myself a lucky woman. After falling in love with exmearden's writing here on the Great Orange - and on her blog and on Facebook - I got to meet her at Netroots a few weeks ago.
She's just as spectacular in person. Beautiful inside and out, our exme exudes a joyful life force that can be felt as well as seen. And her laugh! It's one of the most contagious laughs I've ever heard, the kind that starts other people laughing even if they don't know what started it.
Right now exmearden is at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, awaiting tomorrow's surgery. This is our community's Get Well Card for this beloved front-pager, so please hit the rec button, tell exme what's in your heart, and - if you're so inclined - say a prayer for her.
Since this is my diary, it is also my story about exme's story, drawn from her writings. (I'm sure she would tell it quite differently!) The definitive cancer diagnosis came almost a year ago, August 25, 2009. She had been feeling bad for months and months, often writing about her quest for answers while she got sicker and sicker. Coughing up blood sicker. There were a couple of diaries ABOUT exme after her diagnosis (more about those in a minute) but the first time she grabbed me by the throat with her story and her writing was October 10, 2009 when she wrote her Roy Rogers is riding tonight diary. If you never read it, go now and do so. There are links to the earlier diaries I mentioned, and there's this:
I hope to continue to update if you're interested, and I'll post a "Hair Stage" diary soon – just for kicks. I find this process interesting. It may sound like I'm in a denial – but, frankly, I'm me. This is how I deal. I like this about myself. It may get rougher, I may get angrier, sadder, depressed, ah hell, and sicker, too, and it may be all for naught. Fuck, I may and probably will die. So do we all. But this is life to me now, now, now.
We are, none of us, guaranteed a single fucking thing, though we may think we are, on a day-to-day basis, and I'll gladly grab the joy I see around me, the joy I have, the fun that I can generate, the tears, too. I'll grab it all and stuff it into my heart and damn the torpedos.
In late November and after a few rounds of chemotherapy, exmearden tossed off a little diary about the joy of coming home to her puppy after days in the hospital. Well, it probably seemed little to her. To me, there was breathtaking wisdom and poetry in that diary:
The cumulative minutes as they fall behind me like dominoes, or stretch like elastic between two cans, the tin cans I use to communicate with past and future, will measure the lengthening of this clock, maybe allow me a calculated pleasure in a chosen moment. It may, too, stretch the pain, but it's feeling. If feeling exists, then surely right now it can be tuned by a fine belly rub from a favorite human, or tweaked with the touch of soft peach-colored dog fur on fingertips, warmed in brown puppy eyes that gaze in love and trust.
By the middle of January exmearden wrote a teaching diary for the community, telling everyone facing a healthcare crisis how to become their own advocate, with links to resources we may all need one day. Bookmark it. It might save your life.
Valentine's Day brought us a seminal piece on the ethics of healthcare rationing... but not in the way you might think:
Do I have a right to surgery when the odds are so poor? Do I have a right to suck up more health dollars in a society where there is a high dollar amount on care? When the value of every human life in general is diminished because healthcare is not available to everyone?
I have said here before that I am selfish and do not want to let go. Thank you, my friend, for choosing the surgery. Live, exme, live. I will be atop Pikes Peak tomorrow morning during your surgery, casting my prayers into the four winds and begging the universe to give you more time.
To give us more time with you. ♥
Link to all of exmearden's diaries