Helluva day.

I love this boy.

Woke up and had coffee talk with GiG at the kitchen table.

Accompanied her to nephew Ben's pre-school graduation.

Off to daily radiation appointment where I met and chatted with my mom's "radiation friend," a warm and lovely teacher who has two children under the age of seven and is on the better side of a battle with breast cancer.

Lunch at Reidy's where we chatted with an ageless Sherry who's worked there since before I was born. We talked mostly about Paula, another of the Reidy's family and Sherry's best friend, who used to serve me mugs of hot chocolate that would turn out to be filled to the top with only whip cream and would always send me out the door with a lollipop (even throughout high school). Paula died almost three years ago of lung cancer. Sherry shared her story with us (after cautiously and kindly asking us if we wanted her to) with all the love and tenderness that she felt towards Paula and with which we needed to hear it. "Thank God for memories," she said.

Walked with my mom on the beach and then sat with her in the sand and talked a while longer.

Headed home for more coffee and a game of Scrabble. (She whooped my ass).

Headin' to bed feeling grateful. Thank God...

I found it!

Like the best weekends, this one has been centered almost entirely around food. The church pictured above? A restaurant.

I have to admit that on Friday night when Dan told me we were going to eat dinner at a place a) called Holy Grail and b) inside a former church, I was skeptical to say the least. My apologies in advance for the offensive nature of this next statement (and of this entire entry) but, with the exception of very few sweet little ones, I don't like churches. All the candle sticks and somber-faced stained glass give me the creeps. Plus, I always feel like I'm trying to "pass" the whole time I'm in there. I'm always a second behind in all the standing, kneeling and peace be with youing . As the daughter of parents who chose each other over their religions, I was taught God, not church.

But I think my sorry soul has finally been saved. I worship at the altar of the Holy Grail Irish pub (specifically the Irish Nacho; thick sliced potatoes fried and topped with corn beef, cheese and scallions and served with a horse radish sour cream). Despite its external churchiness, inside, the place was a hoot. Still very much a former church with its high ceilings and stained glass windows in tact, it now has a giant bar in the middle of it. (It is right to give this thanks and praise.) It was actually built very cleverly with pew-like booths and a grand stairway leading to the balcony (which Dan advised me was more the stuff of restaurant safety regulations than a feature of the original church.) It also had a a huge mural of an Irish village painted on the concave wall above where the altar would have been back in the late 1800's when the church was built. It was all just so neat. I've been to a lot of Irish pubs and this is the only one to which I would willingly return.

Dan questioned the restaurant's theme, citing the English connotations of the search for the Holy Grail---you know, all the Spamalot stuff---and it being an Irish pub. A little googling told me that some believe the Holy Grail's mythology has Irish roots but this doesn't explain the note on the menu which read, "Ask about being a knight at the round table!"

None of it mattered to me as I downed a glass of red wine (the body of Christ) and an Irish (French) dip (the body of Buddha).

I don't think it's the last supper we'll ever be having there.

Then yesterday, we headed out to a Farmer's Market where we bought some fresh salad greens, tomatoes, radishes, spinach, scallions and strawberries as well a pound of grass-fed ground beef from a local farm. This, before heading to a chowder festival at Prescott Park in Portsmouth where I gorged on so much creamy-broth concoctions that it may be off the menu for the rest of the summer. (Alternative ending: I gorged on so may creamy-broth concoctions that it felt like high school all over again.) It should be noted that even though our personal chowder favorite, that of Bob's Clam Hut in Kittery, didn't get the popular vote of the masses, it was voted number one by the judges, leaving Dan and me feeling justifiably superior to everyone there.

Then we napped ('cause what else do you do after 89 bowls of chowder?) Plus, a bout of insomnia had me up from 3:30 to 6:30 the night before so by the time 2pm rolled around I was getting loopy. After catching some zzz's we headed out to my sister Bec's house which is 45 minutes west of us to have dinner with her family (minus teenagers) and my parents, sister and nephew who are up for the weekend for Molly's dance recital. We ate hot dogs (turkey dogs, nitrate-free, holla atcha Bec!), hamburgers (buffalo ones were also featured), corn on the cob, thick cuts of tomato and mozzarella layered with shreds of just-picked basil, a tossed green salad sprinkled with Gorgonzola, and potato salad. For dessert I made up some individual strawberry shortcakes using the strawberries I bought at the Farmers' Market, homemade whip cream and some fresh-baked biscuits from the store. Bec put out a platter of s'more fixings and we all had those (yes, in addition to the strawberry shortcakes) while around a fire which brother-in-law Jeff had built in the backyard fire pit.

Dan and I ended up heading out early because his allergies were out of control by then but there was something special about driving away, seeing my family huddled around a fire in the darkness of a summer night.

I forgot that summer can feel like this.

When I saw GiG yesterday, I was relieved to find her looking fantastic and healthy despite having had radiation and her first round of chemo in a month just the day before. Upon greeting me she said, "I was swimming in the pool and it felt great and I don't even have cancer today!"

Indeed, for the weekend, we are all cancer-free.

Today's agenda:

Stop eating crap
1pm: the nugget's dance recital
5pm: accomplish everything I was supposed to have done this entire weekend but never got to
6pm: relax for the night

Welcome summer.

I'm such a techie.

Counting the printer, that's seven gadget-y things I was playing with. (That's what she said.)

I’ve spent literally 20 of the last 36 hours on my new computer and have accomplished the following:

1) Transferred 13 pictures from 2007 to external hard drive.

2) Completed several multi-step procedures (recommend by the Mac gurus who post on the message boards as this is the level of dorkdom to which I’ve been reduced) involving something called a DNS server in an attempt to get the Mac’s internet web browser to increase from its current pace of punch-the-screen-slow.

3) Erased all music from PC (while trying to move music from PC to hard drive to Mac) except for that which is performed by artists whose names begin with either C or D. Cyndi Lauper and David Cook, you survived. (I believe everything else made it onto the Mac and the visual I have of this is of little music notes clinging to a dock having jumped from the boat before it blew.)

My transition from PC user to Mac-hole has not been pretty. Tasks that I used to be able accomplish in a matter of minutes while chatting on the phone now take several afternoons and serious focus. Much of this is due to the fact that the font in most programs is too small for me to read and I don’t know how to fix it.

Let me be clear: I love my new toy. It’s just that it makes me crazy fucking mad.

And it also makes me slow. So very slow.

And while I have to admit to longing, at times, for the simplicity of my old familiar Dell (and to having mammoth tantrums about this), I recognize that this is part of the transition process. Despite wanting to, I never did end up saying fuck this bike riding shit---which is exactly how seven-year-old Lola would have put it---when I couldn’t yet balance on two wheels. So, I’m still in it. I’m still trying. (As I write this, the screen is getting mysteriously darker and I don’t know how to fix that either.)

I am committed to figuring this thing out though (and the brain pain is, at times, a welcomed distraction) so I’m giving myself the two hours I require to do things like find my address book or rename a photo. This is a change from my usual approach to a technological roadblock which involves whining about the problem incessantly--- “It’s doing something weeeeird!”---until I wear Dan down and he fixes it. I figure trying on my own is the only way to really learn...teaching myself to iFish, I am.

I’ve been so focused these past couple of days on getting things off the PC before it's gone for good that I’ve not even had the time I’d like to play with the Mac's bells and whistles. (It took the word “play” preceding it to make me see that the term ‘bells and whistles’ sounds sort of dirty in a fifth grade sort of way.)

I’ve dabbled with all the fun stuff like GarageBand and iMovie but I still don’t really know how to use them properly. I did apparently figure out Photo Booth though. This is an application which allows you to take photos of yourself with the built-in camera and then offers various ways to distort the photos. I chose to get familiar with this particular product on a night when I had taken an Ambien to help me catch some much-needed Zzz’s. For those unfamiliar with Ambien’s effects (at least on me), I will just say that I rarely take it without Dan there to supervise because a) it puts me in the mood and b)before passing out cold, I get a little wacky. (I used to tell Dan that “I know it’s working when the shells on the wreath in the bathroom start moving.)

I didn’t remember this photo shoot until a few days later when Dan reminded me and I might not have believed it without seeing the photographic evidence for myself.

I was drugged (iDrugged!), I don’t know what Dan’s excuse was.





Yup, the new Mac's totally worth it.

In Memoriam of Memorial Day Weekend 2010

All weekend long I was taking mental notes for a blog entry I knew I wouldn’t have time to write until Tuesday. Now it’s Tuesday and I’ve got nothin’.

That said, I can tell you that this was probably the best Memorial Day Weekend I’ve ever had (and certainly the only one that was eventful enough to warrant even remembering). Dan and I have never really been holiday weekend people. We’re just not the type to barbecue with the neighbors, head to the beach or launch the boat for the season. (We are, however, the type to spend the first nice weekend of summer inside watching all seven seasons of The Shield.) Because I have no school-aged children and am not a nine-to-fiver, I rarely even notice when the rest of the world’s concept of a long weekend has come and gone.

And while I understand that yesterday was supposed to be about memorializing fallen soldiers and not about a third day in the sun with my family, I have to admit that my focus was on the latter. (Though we did end the weekend watching Phil Donahue’s documentary “Body of War” so to be in touch with that particular brand of sorrow.) My mind has been so intensely focused on cancer, in fact, that I only last week took my head out of the sand about the BP disaster in the Gulf.

This weekend, however, was much more about family than cancer. With Katie coming in from Memphis last Tuesday, we had the entire family in town which doesn’t happen often. Two of my sisters as well as their spouses and children stayed at my parents’ house with Dan and me. There is always a certain charm for me (I'm not sure about everyone else...) to the chaos of a house full of family; someone always knocking on the bathroom door, endless piles of dishes, taking showers in shifts. I had a certain sentimentality about all this even before my mom was diagnosed but, indeed, everything in life has a new poignance about it now that wasn’t there before. Being together with my entire family I couldn’t help but be aware that I was together with my entire family. That mindfulness is shared and savored among all of us lately. We drank our coffee together in the morning as the sun glistened on the river and again later when it fell across the sky to the west. We played poker and Trivial Pursuit, ate crab claws and homemade lobster rolls, cheese platters and local strawberries, and toasted some variation of “to life” whenever we remembered to.

On Sunday, GiG had her heart set on getting us all out together for a lunch at Ocean Cliff, a beautiful Newport hotel which sits, aptly, on a cliff abutting the ocean. It was a sunny afternoon and a band fronted by a jazzy female singer played 40’s standards under a covered patio where we had a leisurely lunch, each of us taking a turn walking the grounds. We laughed and talked, a few of us even cried when the moment seemed especially rich or sad. Afterwards, my mom, a couple of sisters, nephew Ben and Dan and me sat out on the lawn in Adirondack chairs staring at the ocean and marveling at the different types of beauty the day presented.

Cancer came back today in the form of radiation and tomorrow will bring another appointment with my mom’s oncologist. But joy peeked out from behind the cloud of cancer this past weekend and not one of us missed its warmth.

GiG is home.

Photo by Barry Alan.

A week ago today, I left New Hampshire at 5am in an effort to beat Boston traffic and make it to Rhode Island with time to spare before my mom's scheduled appointment with her oncologist. When I got to the house at 7am my mom was asleep on the couch, evidence of a night of awful sickness surrounding her. My dad was visibly shaken and tearful.

This was the start of a week that got considerably worse before it got better.

For right now, I'm concentrating on the better.

I wanted to be sure to let the masses know that GiG came home from the hospital today and is feeling better though the tiredness of a week of sleepless nights has caught up with her and she'll need to make up for the rest she missed.

I'll need to do the same thing. I have an emotional hangover. This happens. I spent the week in a mode of function and purpose; tend to my mom. Now that this particular fire is out, the intensity of it has just caught up to me and I am exhausted by a week's worth of emotion crashing through my body in one massive wave. The last two nights I've taken 5pm naps.

But, tonight as my mom rests easier, I will now do the same.

Sleep tight, peeps.

In real life, even House doesn't have the answers.

I am sitting at the foot of my mom's hospital bed watching her sleep, the green blanket from home which lay over her rising and falling with her breath. I am comforted by the motion of her breath. I am grateful for its ease this moment.

Dan is next to me working on a crossword puzzle. The room is lit only by midday sun sneaking through the cracks of the closed window panels. We're hoping she sleeps for a while as the three nights she has spent here so far have not provided much rest. The deepness of her current sleep is aided by the sedative drugs she was given this morning when she underwent a procedure in which a scope was inserted through her mouth and snaked down to her left bronchus for the purpose of getting pictures as well as lung samples. Even though the procedure went smoothly, we decided we should take shifts watching her sleep in case there are any complications. It is expected that she will cough more following the procedure; even cough up blood.

That was a minute of writing I got in yesterday before family started showing up to visit with my mom and the day busied up.

I am happy to say that my mom seems to have improved from where she was these last few days, from where she was even yesterday morning.

Dan's wrap-up was pretty right on (and, of course, adorable). That is, unless any of you caught the first version before I corrected it in which Dan said my mom had a pulmonary edema, a much more serious diagnosis than the pulmonary embolism she actually had. As the pulmonologist explained to us regarding emboli, "Tiny ones cause pain, big ones kill you." My mom's, thankfully, was small and thus she is still alive.

I cannot yet write at length about what has transpired over the last few days---soon I'll have to shower up and head back to the hospital---but I can at least summarize where things stand now while I sit here having my morning coffee alone in my parents' kitchen at my mom's seat at the table. My mom went into the hospital with chest pain, utter weakness and fever on Wednesday. The chest pain was attributed to the pulmonary embolism (which is, apparently, common with lung cancer), the weakness was due to chemo and general dehydration, and the fever---well, they're still trying to figure that out like, as we've said many times, it's our very own episode of House. While fever is often seen with pulmonary embolisms, they have to rule out infection which is of particular importance because my mom's immune system is so compromised by the chemo. All testing has ruled out the presence of bacteria, but the reason they did the bronchoscopy is to be sure there isn't an infection hiding behind the tumor. While in there, they saw just how much the tumor was obstructing my mom's airway (thus causing breathing difficulty, the collapse of lung tissue and the potential for infection) so they may have to do some radiation soon to shrink the blockage.

This is the science of things. Decisions will be made this week regarding radiation, chemo, etc. Surgery is pretty well off the table. Science.

Since Wednesday morning when my mom was admitted, science has been very much second to life and emotion. Conversations were had that I never imagined having. Many tearful phone calls and worried text messages were exchanged. My sister Katie will be flying in tomorrow.

But, it seems that for the time being, the worst of this particular episode is over. Last night my mom ate an entire sandwich and bowl of soup for dinner---the most she's eaten in days. The color has returned to her face and she was sharp enough yesterday to bust my and everyone else's balls.

"Mom's back," was how my dad put it.

So now I'm going to head back to the hospital to see her. Yesterday morning when I raced there to be sure I would get a chance to see her before she went under for her procedure (a measure of the sort of just-in-case that is hard to believe is reality) I wasn't going to see that mom. Glad she's back today.

Whether things will stay this way, whether this is the beginning of a years-long road or the beginning of the end, we have no idea. Stripped of its platitudinal essence and from its spot on book marks and coffee mugs, the "this" of "this moment" is truly all we've got.

So off to the shower I go.

Thanks all for the support and prayers and love for GiG.

A Guest Spew

Lola couldn't be here today as she was out getting her new tattoo.

I don’t know if Lola will get mad at this, but I decided to Guest Blog on her site in her absence. She’s been trying to update over the last few days but she’s been quite busy tending to a few things that take precedence. However dear Spewers, one thing you should know about the anxiety-ridden mind of Ms. Lola Mellowsky, a mind I am so lucky to know in so many wonderful ways, she feels a great sense of debt to update her readers and her blog frequently. She feels very lucky to have so many fans; so much so that she really starts to feel pressure when she lets the blog go a few days without update. Hopefully, this will make her take a quick breath in relief as she prepares for her next entry. Believe me, she is working on her next entry right now, she just hasn’t been able to put it down on the Mac.

So, for today, you are stuck with me. First, the big update: Becky is still winning the battle of female incontinence. The second update: Gigi is in the hospital.

The evil word of the day today is Pulmonary Embolism. Gigi had a rough night a few days ago and she was up most of the night vomiting and spiking a fever. When they went to have their regularly scheduled visit with their oncologist, they decided to admit her to make sure all was ok. After a day or two of a Dr. House mystery (could it be Lupus?), they discovered a pulmonary embolism, which, if I am to believe Wikipedia, is a blockage of an artery or branch of the lung due to a clot which travelled through her blood from elsewhere in the body. Gigi is being treated now, but she’ll be in the hospital until she’s better. I’ll let Lola update you on what this all means (because I don’t really know), but that’s the scoop. Hopefully, she’ll be back home soon.

For the past few days, Lola has been spending most of her day at the Hospital with her Mom (she highly recommends the Stuffed Shells from the St. Anne’s kitchen). Her Dad has been there too, and of course her sisters (and Our Tina) have been checking in as well. Last night, Lola and her Mom watched a movie together on her laptop and talked until it was time to leave. Her Dad had to work, so it was Lola and Gigi in the dimly lit hospital room watching a Sandra Bullock comedy as the beeps and hoots of the hospital machines chirped in the background. It sounds sad (and it is in many ways) but I am sure it was a night neither Lola nor her mom will soon forget.

Lola called me on the way home. She was exhausted in every way. Her voice was gravelly and hoarse as she gave me the update on her day while she made her way home and into a rarely empty Mellow homestead. She said goodnight to me as she crawled into her childhood bed and we hung up, both missing each other as we turned out the light. Today, for Lola, it’s more of the same.

So that’s the update. Lola will be back soon to tell you more and to Spew all over you (yes, that’s what she said).