My cancer survival story continues with this new sequel to Crossing the Chemo Room. Journey with me, my husband Edd, and our children as we encounter post-cancer life, including anxiety, miscarriages, neuropathy, sleeplessness, figure skating, church activities, traveling, homeschooling, and the joys and dangers of our new mountain home. The rich fantasy life of imagination is mixed with the world's reality. I explain what happened to people from "The Chemo Room"--and introduce interesting new characters from my ordinary, adventurous life as a cancer survivor. From the burning California mountains to the summits of New Zealand, the setting for The Lord of the Rings films, you will be amazed at the landscapes, people, and situations we encounter. A helpful Resources section is included with reviewed web sites, 800 numbers, booklets, books, videos, DVDs. and music CDs. I also have an interview with my husband Edd, to show his point of view about surviving cancer and miscarriages with me. For teens and adults. 100,000 words. Published by GreatUnpublished.com. Price $15.00

I never wanted to write this book. I never wanted to write Crossing the Chemo Room. I didn't care about becoming an expert in anything serious--especially not in an alcoholic childhood, where I was the only one in my family to survive. I didn't want to grow up and learn about divorce, cancer, or miscarriages. I didn't need to know what the words "non-hogkins lymphoma, diffuse cell, intermediate grade" meant.

I prefer fantasy stories and fairy tales. I've been writing those since I was a child--creating amazing new worlds. Nonfiction isn't nearly as much fun as describing slimy gray creatures that lurk in cavepools and wait to jump out at torchbearers who disturb their sleep.

With nonfiction I've got to tell about my own life. I've got to be accurate and do research. And I've got to share my emotions, pouring part of myself into the words. Sometimes I feel that, if I wrote with a pen, the ink would be my own red blood.

"I can't do this, God," I complain when I'm balancing family, housework, homeschool, church, email, website, Internet links, a part-time job at the local paper, and writing my books. "I feel like my nose is glued to the computer screen, and all these facts are bouncing through my head. Surely you could find someone else to write interviews and nonfiction cancer survival stories. Just let me stick to fantasy."

But in my heart I hear the answer,

"I've called you to write your own true story."

I don't always like that answer, and out of frustration I go to The Tolkien Forum (www.thetolkienforum.com), where I'm a member of The Writer's Guild, and post this on my favorite place, The Prancing Pony's Poetry section:

If I had time for poetry
I'd write a line or two
But since I got that newspaper job
My head is full of pooh.

Then I realize that I did manage to write a silly little poem, and I've been thinking about my next fantasy novel. I fall asleep imagining horses that fly over snowy mountains.

The moon wakes me up at midnight, slanting into my window that overlooks the forest. Edd, who has been working hard teaching summer school, snores a little on his side. I slip out of bed and notice how the moonlight touches the new mahogany desk Edd bought me, coating the red wood with a thin plane of white light. The moonlight coats the black laptop and the chair I sit at, and the carpet by my feet. I step out into the plane of moonlight, and it covers my aching, nerve-damaged feet with a silvery beauty for those few seconds that I stand there.

And I look out the window, at the moon shining through the cedar trees, caught partly in their branches, forming patterns on the forest zones of boughs and treetrunks and smaller oaks and manzanitas and uneven ground. The moon touches the stone steps leading up our slope to a path and a single bench by the streambed.

And I think, there is a kind of strange, fantastic beauty in nonfiction.

So I continue to write, drawing from my many journals that I keep on my computer, getting inspiration from God, family, friends, The Internet, music, films, art, books, and--of course--my favorite book, the one that glows in the margins, that has real, life-changing words of power, that brought me through cancer and chemotherapy and countless needles and medical tests: my old blue Bible with its rather worn, silver-edged pages.

And I learn more than I ever wanted to about marketing and book promotion. I've been to a lot of writers' conferences. I even went to the biggest, most prestigious one in Maui. I've conferred with big-time editors and literary agents, who seemed surprised at my body of writing--that I bounce back and forth from science fiction and fantasy to cancer survival stories.

A literary agent at one of these conferences once told me,

"No one will want to read about cancer. It's too depressing."

I sat across the table from him, tears forming in my eyes. I was newly pregnant with what would shortly become my third miscarriage.

"Well, I think you're wrong," I replied in wavering words.

And so he was. My book Crossing the Chemo Room has been read by many cancer patients and their friends and family. I get emails from people all over the world. When I go to buy iced tea at Rite Aid, strangers start up conversations with me about cancer and ask for my book. People who face something like cancer want to see a roadmap through it--drawn by one who has made the journey and survived.
And since my story continues, I will share it with you.

It has been seven years since I finished my chemotherapy treatments. My son Jonathan had his eighth birthday last week. He looks like Frodo from The Lord of the Rings, his wild curly hair and startling blue eyes hobbit-like. His face is almost too beautiful for a boy's, and people often say to me, "He should be a movie star or a model." I reply that I moved to the mountains for a reason, and I don't plan to drive for hours, through traffic, to smoggy Los Angeles.

Sometimes Jonathan tells me he wants to be an actor. He makes me print out the photo of him dressed in his Frodo costume, complete with a maroon vest, green cape, and a simple gold ring hanging from a chain (he won Best Costume at the ice skating rink's contest last fall). He practices signing his autograph. "Frodo" he spells in shaky handwriting across his photograph.

A few minutes later Jonathan insists he'll be a scientist, and he beams from ear to ear as he wears the safety glasses Dad bought for his birthday and examines the glass chemistry set I ordered from Edmund Scientifics. He carries The Periodic Table of Elements chart around as if he knows what all those symbols mean. Once he put a strong magnet next to a Halogen lamp, so that the computer and lamp and fan went off in a big flash as a house fuse blew.

So sometimes we call him Little Frodo, and other times he's Little Mr. Einstein.

He's been taking piano lessons from Andrea Smith whose father Steve has been a music minister for years. Jonathan can read music or "play by ear." When he plays Dad's fancy new keyboard with its variety of sound effects, his hair bounces as he pounds the notes, and he makes up his own songs key by key. Then we call him Little Mozart.

Seven years ago we put him in his bright yellow and blue stroller and pushed him to the back of our valley property, to take our family photo under eucalyptus trees. I wore my short blonde wig, my cheeks still chubby from Prednisone and my face pale.

In that photo, my daughter Jessica was not yet four. Now she is almost eleven, tall for her age, athletic. Her reddish braid dangles past her bottom, and her auburn eyebrows arch expressively over light blue eyes, bird-like, as she tilts her head to kiss her pet parrot whose bright green feathers fan Jessie's cheek--the one with a birthmark shaped like a baby's hand. Jess understands birds, and she wants to be a bird trainer when she grows up. She teaches Penny how to speak and do tricks, then sits for hours at her roll-top desk, carefully drawing bird pictures with her colored pencils:

Scarlet Macaw
Cardinal
Whistling Swan
Canadian Goose
Chickadee

Jessica can walk outside and tell what each songbird sings.

My older children, Kristen and Ryan, are in their early twenties now. Kristen is getting married soon--to a quiet Christian carpenter she met on a mission trip to Mexico (they built houses together for three months). Kristen has her Vocational Nurse's license and works for a big Hospice company in San Diego. She still has long, straight blonde hair, fair blue eyes, and an impish smile. She's great at dressing up in green capes and telling stories in an English accent.

Her brother Ryan, who lifeguards part time and keeps his curly brown hair short, has a dark tan and freckles. He's tall, easy-going, and kind--a good sport with his mom and younger siblings. Never good at keeping quiet, he can say sudden, clever things that surprise most people. He's finishing up his Associate's degree at a junior college and has his Auto Mechanic's certificate. He works for a dealership in San Diego and tries not to let car hoods fall on his neck. He goes to church with his sister and still wonders what plans God has for his life.

We drive down to San Diego to visit Kristen and Ryan, or they journey up the mountain to see us for the weekend.

My husband Edd is a little older but still has his full red beard, blue-green eyes, and bushy brows. He's leading worship music at our local mountain church and teaching college English in the valley. He plays one of his several guitars or his keyboard and sings from the upstairs level of our home, the sound echoing through the evening forest.

He and the children journeyed with me through these past seven years. Part of our journey covered pregnancy loss.

At least forty percent of all pregnancies end in miscarriage, many even before the woman realizes she was pregnant. Way too many end after she gets the good news, tells everyone, and then arrives bleeding in the emergency room. What do you do when your close friend just found out she's having twins next June, and your own June baby will not even make it past the end of October?

I've had five miscarriages now. I'm an expert. So I sit at my new desk. In between sentences, I stare out the window at the sunlit forest.

Our three-storey mountain house rises into that forest, looking small against the silver Canadian firs and Ponderosa pines that tower above it. It has wood paneling and high windows, decks and fireplaces, and a computer room where we stuff the children's homeschool materials--bookcases, computers, CDs, field guides, rock and feather collections, binoculars, microscopes, solar energy kits, Renoir prints of mothers and babies . . .

I think of Edd, Jessica, and Jonathan as I sit here and type. They lost five babies too. This last time, almost 2 years ago, Jessica and Jonathan seemed so excited to have a little brother or sister. When they heard the news about my pregnancy, they got out their baby dolls and started dressing them up. When they heard about the miscarriage, they put the dolls away and asked tough questions like:

"Why can't I have a little brother or sister? Couldn't you wait a while and see if the baby would live?"

How could I explain to a six-year-old that a six-week fetus can't live outside its mother's uterus?

I felt like a deflated balloon.

And how does Edd feel? He sat with me for five hours in the emergency room while they did blood tests, exams, and ultrasounds. When the E.R. doctor offered no hope of saving this fetus, Edd turned to me with pain in his eyes and said,

"I'm tired of this. Our last little hope has died."

I could have had my tubes tied and spared myself miscarriages, even though my oncologist told me that I should be able to have more children after chemo if I didn't go into early menopause instead. I could have learned more about joy and peace as I recovered from cancer and chemotherapy. I could have made a conscious choice to go on with my steady life--instead of riding a roller coaster. I could have avoided the thrill and anticipation of finding out I was pregnant followed by the disappointment and pain of losing yet another baby. It seemed as though, just when I was getting over a miscarriage and becoming strong and hopeful again, I got pregnant and had another miscarriage . . .

I have always done things the hard way.

Besides, I enjoy being pregnant--feeling life growing inside my body instead of cancer. I'm sure the desire to be pregnant had a lot to do with the cancer. I wanted something amazing to happen after that ordeal. I wanted all my dreams and longings for another child to mean something--to be fulfilled. And how could that possibly happen if I had my tubes tied?

"You're brave," my friend Ann told me once, while we were sitting at the ice rink and watching our children skate. She's an OB-GYN, a baby doctor. She prayed with me before giving me a D & C the year of my fourth miscarriage.

"Brave?" I questioned. "Stupid is the word that comes to my mind."

"Brave," she repeated. "You put yourself in harm's way, risking the possible pain, for a chance at joy. A lot of women, after they've had a miscarriage, stop trying to have a baby."

"Well, after five times, you think I'd take a hint," I replied bitterly. "I've got to stop expecting the impossible and get on with my life. I guess I'll write a book about all this."

"That's a good idea. There's not enough support out there for women who have miscarriages. I could help you do research," she offered.

I stared at her for awhile, not wanting to write this book.

Long after the kids finished skating, Ann's words remained in my mind. They reminded me of what another doctor once said a few months after I finished chemotherapy,

"You must be very brave to have gone through cancer."

I smiled and said nothing though I felt like shouting,

"But I was scared most of the time!"

Maybe that old saying is true: bravery is not the absence of fear, but facing the thing that terrifies you.
So I write nonfiction, even though I'd rather be spinning another fantasy novel. I find myself weaving my stories through these past seven years, not always in the order they happened. The present mingles with the past and looks toward the future. I hope that my experiences will help someone: maybe even someone who hasn't had alcoholic parents, cancer, or a miscarriage.

When I stand in line at the supermarket and hear someone complain about a broken fingernail, I can't help but smile. I fight back the temptation to say, "I'm a cancer survivor. Here's my card. You can check out my website and read all about it."

My challenges in life have been big. I wish I could have worried only about my fingernails. But, despite everything, I've lived to tell the tale.

I realize that this new book is not just about pregnancy loss. It is a continuation of my cancer survival story. Some people who read "Crossing the Chemo Room" said that they became so much a part of my world that they were disappointed when my story ended so abruptly. I finished it with a tale about Betty and the lump on her neck. I felt that lump, then looked over my shoulder at the mountains in the distance. I saw the wind blow between Betty and me and wondered if an angel moved in those winter leaves.

Since that night with Betty, over six years have passed. I am still cancer-free. I get to hike in the mountains where Edd moved us four years ago. We got tired of standing in the dusty, over-crowded valley and looking up with longing toward the distant, snow-covered peaks. We came up to the mountains on a vacation and, for fun, decided to look at houses. We ended up buying one. So Edd sacrificed himself to drive an hour each way to work five times a week, up and down mountain roads in snow, fog, rain, or rockslides--roads where several people a year drive off that steep edge and plummet thousands of feet to their deaths.

Edd gave me the mountains. Now the kids and I figure skate at the local rink, swim in the lake, and take long walks in the forest. We find coyotes, bobcats, and bears. Squirrels scamper through interlacing trees. Wildflowers dot the meadows with purple, yellow, and pink. Bees swarm in the lazy air. The setting sun lights up pine trees, all golden at first until the sun slants westward and the rays travel slowly up treetrunks toward the middle and higher branches until it illumines just the tops. Then it jumps off the trees, leaving pink and orange trails in the blue-green western sky. The trees become black against dark blue, until the stars appear--white against a black universe, hanging low and big and bright above us. We feel the cool wind blow down through treetops at the summit. We look over cliffsides toward the millions of lights in the cities below.

And though I am six thousand feet above those cities, I am still tied to them and the stories I left unfinished there.

As I recovered from cancer and chemotherapy, my hair started growing back, and my monthly periods resumed. I also felt all the usual post-cancer symptoms like depression, anxiety attacks, guilt for surviving when others do not, sleeplessness, and haunting dreams (what doctors call post-traumatic stress disorder). My symptoms got so bad that I thought something was wrong with my heart, and I ended up in the emergency room and the cardiologist's office. The echocardiogram showed my heart had not been damaged by the chemo.

I learned to reach out--in desperation--to the Internet and the bookstore for information. I called the American Cancer Society and spoke with an oncology nurse. And I joined a breast cancer support group.

One of my best sources of information was the National Cancer Institute website (http://cancer.nci.nih.gov). There I found helpful articles about the long-term effects of chemo--things an oncologist won't necessarily tell you. One of the articles, called "Facing Forward: Life After Chemotherapy" listed the main long-term effects that I felt even six years after my treatments ended: fatigue, nerve damage, sleeplessness, and chronic pain.

I had been having a rough week. I was tired during the day, and I couldn't sleep well at night. My feet especially hurt. Ibuprophin did nothing for the pain. Neither did plain Tylenol. My new general practitioner was unwilling to keep prescribing pain medicine, but I knew the pain was not in my mind. I needed to sleep so that I could function the next day as the mother of two active children.

I felt like The Little Mermaid from the original Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale. Unlike the Disney version, when this mermaid becomes human, she must pay a terrible price for her new legs. Each step she takes is agony, like walking on knife blades. She cannot speak to tell her pain. She cannot explain her love and sacrifice to the human prince for whom she left her ocean home. And then the ignorant prince doesn't even pick her. She turns into sea foam at the end of the story, a kind of water angel to guard children from the threatening waves.

That is the price she paid to see a new world.

Tired of being in pain and not sleeping, I got up, went to the upstairs computer room, turned on my Macintosh computer, and searched the National Cancer Institute website until I found the "Facing Forward" article. It listed nerve damage as one of the effects of chemotherapy, and I suddenly realized why my feet hurt.

When I was finishing up my chemo treatments seven years ago, I told the oncology nurse about the numbness in my fingers and toes. To my surprise, she said that the damage was caused by the chemo and would be permanent.

As I sat and stared at my glowing blue computer screen, I read that "neuropathy" was one of the leading causes of pain in post-chemo patients. Doctors, afraid that a patient will become tolerant of or addicted to pain medicine, often will not prescribe it. So the pain goes untreated.

Chemotherapy can even change how your mind works. You may have trouble focusing on a task or remembering things.

Why didn't I know this before? How can the medical profession fill my veins with some of the strongest chemicals known to man and then abandon me when the treatments are done?

Photographs of cancer patients were spread throughout the article, along with these words:

"If I could get over the physical part, if it would stop hurting, I think I would be fine."--Rose, lung cancer survivor, 70.

"I don't think you ever forget the fact that it is always possible for it to come back."--Grant, leukemia survivor, 68.

"As long as I was in treatment, I was killing the cancer. [After treatment] I was waiting for the other shoe to fall."--Judy, breast and thyroid cancer survivor, 45.

"I found myself kind of going through the motions, through the treatments, through the doctor's appointments. I never really stopped to consider the emotional side of things. After I finally realized what I was dealing with, I didn't feel like I had the emotional support I needed."--Carmen, Hodgkin's disease survivor, 20.

"I went [to radiation treatment] every day, and they treated me, and we were like ... family. And now there's this instant separation."--Tom, prostate cancer survivor, 70.

"A process of assessing the 'values' of [my past life] took place. I did not want to stay in the 'sick' world, but my former world seemed so superficial."--Ronnie, colon cancer survivor, 62.

As I scrolled down on my Internet browser, I saw so many photos, so many stories. I stared at the faces on the screen: black or brown or white, male or female, old or young. Tears started pouring down my face as I sat there alone in the computer room at one in the morning.

I live with a loving family. Edd encourages me to write, do research, and help other cancer patients. Jonathan cuddles with me, comforting me somehow for all I've been through. Jessica makes me laugh at the things she says. But none of them have been through cancer, and neither have most of my friends. I haven't gone to a cancer support group since we moved to the mountains.

This is my family, here, on the computer screen, I thought as I wept and touched the cold glass with my numb fingertip. The glass poured out light toward me, as if the lives in the photos touched me back.
*****************************
I probably should join a cancer support group again. I could fit it into my busy schedule somehow. But sometimes the best support groups are the informal ones that happen through emails or when one cancer survivor visits another:

Doris Bowers is our mountain homeschool science teacher. In her sixties, she can still outhike a thirty-year-old fireman on mountain trails. She has known these mountains for over forty years. Go with her on a trip, and she will show you wonders. She will lead you past waterfalls and fern grottos and meadows filled with wildflowers. She will show you where the wild cougars roam through twilight and where the white egrets land on a mountain lake. She will lead you 12,000 feet to the Summit where nothing grows and snow nestles in the cracked gray granite.

Doris wears her whitish hair tied back in a black bow, a white- collared shirt, jeans, and boots. She is a naturalist, primarily a botanist, and her happiest times are leading a group of children through the forest, showing them gray lichen on treetrunks. She can teach oceanography, filling a classroom with seacreatures and ocean photos. She's been to Mount Ararat in Turkey, looking for petrified seashells and Noah's Ark. She studied archeology in Israel. She can conduct a real archeological dig, unearthing bits of pottery and glass bottles from the nineteenth century when loggers settled these mountains. I have a photo of her, kneeling in a mound of dirt, surrounded by children. She stares up at the camera, the sun lighting her face beneath her white Tilly hat.

Doris got breast cancer twenty years ago and survived that. Then, ten years ago, she found melanoma in her leg. She had surgery, and the doctors told her she would not hike a mile again. Undaunted, she left her backpack out in her living room for inspiration, and a year later she was climbing our local mountains. Recently, her melanoma has returned, and this time she had to go into the hospital for more surgery and strong chemotherapy.

I visited her in her mountain home not long after her last treatment. Her hair had thinned a little but not fallen out. She looked a little smaller and paler but still every bit the naturalist, sitting in her log cabin with its stone fireplace and wood mantel decked with photographs, books, and dried plants. Stacked around her were boxes of paperwork and projects: parts of an archeological dig to catalog, seeds to identify, insects to mount, and medical insurance bills to deal with.

For a moment I was a little girl again, sitting with my grandmother the college professor who surrounded herself with her research papers. I felt comforted, as if I had entered a quiet museum full of the familiar and the unexpected.

We talked in calm tones about her recent treatments and side effects and about my long-term struggles after chemo.

"I want to start teaching again," Doris said, a wistful look in her blue eyes. "Just put me in front of a group of children, inside or outside, and I am happy. "

Doris never had a child of her own, but you could not tell by the way she relates with young people.

"I'd also like to hike again," she continued, nodding toward her blue backpack that sat in the corner. "I make myself go out to work in my garden. When I was in the hospital, I could barely walk to the bathroom."

"You'll be hiking again," I assured her. "Let me know when you're going. I would love to hike with you in the mountains."

We continued chatting. It was nice to relax and carry on an uninterrupted adult conversation while Jessica and Jonathan were at camp. When it was time for me to go pick them up, I followed Doris out to her yard. A clump of dried white flowers stood in a ceramic pot.

"Would you like to take these home?" she asked, pointing to the moon-shaped, translucent silver seed pods that dotted dried brown stalks. "These are called moon flowers or lunaria or silver dollar plant."

"Sure," I said, picking up part of the clump.

"I've been taking the brown seeds out of the seed pods," she continued, going back to the house to fetch some for me. "You could plant them in your yard, and in two years you'll have little purple flowers and then these moon pods."

She put a few seeds into an envelope for me and held it out. I took it out of her hand as if receiving treasure.

"Thanks, Doris. We're looking forward to hearing about the new science classes."

"I'll probably do 'Survival' and 'Trees' first. I haven't done those in a while."

"Good. We can always learn about how to survive out in the wild, and I love trees. Jessica did really well in the science part of her S.A.T. test, especially biology. She wants to be a bird trainer. Jonathan wants to be an inventor. He has his little laboratory in our backyard, and he enjoys making potions."

"I'd like to teach chemistry soon," Doris remarks.

We look at each other for a moment as sunlight shines down through treebranches and onto our faces. We are both cancer survivors, bearing the scars but still very much alive.

So let me finish the stories I began in "Crossing the Chemo Room." Perhaps I'll add a few:

Betty died a few months after I touched that lump on her neck. She switched doctors and took more chemotherapy treatments (as I had suggested). As a result, she got a strange lung disease. She went into a coma and slipped away in the hospital.
Chemotherapy doesn't always cure.
******************************

Lori died a few weeks after I finished my chemo treatments. I didn't find this out until months letter when I got an email from her daughter Jackie:

"I just wanted to thank you so much for the beautiful letter you sent to my grandparents. I just received it from them today. Your letter and the book excerpts really touched me.

My mother, Lori, passed away on July 24, 1996. That same day, I had flown back to Cleveland to visit her. I landed in Cleveland at almost nine in the evening. My boyfriend (at that time) and his mother met me at the gate. It wasn't until I was standing by the baggage claim carousel, excited to get home and see my mother, that they told me the news in two simple words: 'she's gone.' I was in such shock. It felt like the wind had been knocked out of me, and a part of my soul ripped out of my body. My mother was my very best friend. She was my counselor, my confidante, one of the only people in the world that I would ever so willingly give my life for.

When she left for Cleveland, everything was so rushed, because they had to get her on the airplane in a special wheelchair. I only had a few minutes to spend with her, and I never really got to say goodbye--at least not the way that I wanted to. To make matters worse, I had delayed my trip to Cleveland by a few days because the store where I worked was having an inventory count. As a shift supervisor, I felt that I needed to be there. I learned a lesson . . . work is never so important that it should come before your family. You can always find a new job, but family can never be replaced.

My life today is occupied mostly by school and work. I am a psychology major at a university. I believe that I am still picking up the pieces, both emotionally and financially.

I find that sometimes, I almost forget what has happened. Please understand that I lived away from Mom for over four years. I sometimes think that she's just far away. But then, something wonderful, or something terrible, will happen, and I want to talk to her. I could pick up the phone and dial her old number, but she'll never answer. I won't get to see her sitting at my wedding, she can't give me advice, she'll never get to meet my new boyfriend. Some days, I feel like I've lived through what others see over the course of a full lifetime. But I have grown up stronger, wiser, and more courageous because of it. As my mother would say, I'm 20 going on 45.

You may never understand how much it means to me that my mother touched your life as she did, even if only for a brief time. We've had our rough times, of course, but I have always looked up to her. I know now that she will always be with me. Like the precious angel that she was in my life, she is now an angel for the world."

******************************
Linda Biehl died a year after my book ended, just after Christmas, from pneumonia. Her husband John gave me photos to put in my book. Here is my memorial for Linda:

Today we go to the college to visit Daddy at work. After playing hide and seek for awhile under Daddy's desk, the children ask if they can go outside in the sunlight. Edd leaves to teach, so I take them to the rose garden in front of the Humanities Building. They start climbing on the concrete circle that surrounds the roses. I stoop to smell a huge orange and yellow rose and notice someone walk past me.

"John Biehl?" I ask, standing.

He stares at me, his blue eyes squinting beneath his clear glasses. He looks older, his hair grayer and more wispy about his head.

His wife Linda died early this year, of pneumonia--a complication of chemo treatment, two years after she had a bone marrow transplant for non-hodgkins lymphoma.

"I'm Lonna Williams," I say, holding out my hand.

"Oh, Lonna, I didn't recognize you. You look great!" He smiles and takes my hand.

"Thanks. I was sorry to hear about Linda. You must miss her a lot."

Dumb statement, I think as John lowers his head.

"That sun is so bright--the curse of being fair-skinned and blue-eyed," he mumbles.

"Yeah, I know what you mean. That's why I wear dark sunglasses--and probably why you didn't recognize me. Plus, my hair is different," I lamely reply, holding on to a strand of my curls. We wait a moment in awkward silence.

"Oh, I'm doing all right," he finally offers. "A lot of things came together for Linda her last two years of life, though those two years were hard on her. Her funeral was really beautiful. All her family were there, and kids from her class at school."

"She told me she was a Christian," I mention. John lowers his eyes toward the garden, and I wonder if he sees Linda in a white rose.

"Yes, that was a very important part of who she was."

Our moment of silence is interrupted by Jonathan who picks a rose and brings it to me.

"You shouldn't pick those," I admonish, putting it back in the planter. Jessica pushes Jonathan, who screams and pushes her back.

"I guess I'd better be going," I announce, grabbing Jonathan by the arm.

"Yeah, I've got a biology class to teach." John tips his head in farewell and walks toward the Humanities Building, his shoulders a little stooped and his briefcase heavy in one hand.
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Since I finished Crossing the Chemo Room, I've met many other cancer patients. One of them was Vicki, who battled melanoma for years. She died a couple of years ago--at home, peaceful, surrounded by her children. I wrote this for Vicki:

I dream of Vicki. She is my age and dying of melanoma. In my dream I visit her in a mountain cabin surrounded by pine trees. Sunlight shines through the window into the wood-panneled room.

"Hello, Lonna," she says from a corner.

Her grayish brown hair hangs down her back, straight and wispy. Her brown eyes shine dark against her pale cheeks.

"I'm glad you finally came to see me. Don't be afraid. I have a present for you."

She gets up from her recliner, takes some red, high-heeled shoes out of a box, and hands them to me.

"They're good for dancing," she sings as she raises her arms above her head. She dances through the cabin and out the open door.
******************************
Another friend of mine from our old valley church, the older woman who used to come and "babysit" me the day after my chemo treatments, found out she had carcinoma--and a few weeks later, she died:

I haven't visited Ramona since last June. I make mental excuses like I've got my hands full with my own two children and their three cousins who are living with us.

The real reason is my own weakness.

I don't want to see Ramona as the cancer progresses. It ravages her body, thins her hair, and fills her with pain. She can barely get up to go to the bathroom. Some days she doesn't get up at all.

I thought I was strong and could bear all this . . . It's been too soon since I saw Vicki suffer, since I watched Lori decline, since I faced my own cancer.

Murlie, Ramona's daughter, told me that Ramona has been feeling depressed. She wants people to call her on the phone and visit more often.

So today I call Murlie and tell her I'm bringing Linda and Jessica to visit.

We pack some soy-protein bars, Fig Newtons, and my cordless headset phone (Murlie mentioned that Ramona's arm hurts when she holds a receiver). We arrive at Ramona's trailer after dark.

Murlie's eyes have dark, puffy circles under them. Her mouth-corners tense as she greets us. She escorts us through the cluttered trailer and to the back bedroom where her mother lies. Ramona looks pale--almost gray, her bad shoulder and elbow sticking up at an odd angle above the sheets.

She smiles and sits up when the little girls run to hug her. Jessica sets the box of Fig Newtons on the T.V. tray next to Ramona's bed. Linda hands Ramona a protein bar. I report about the church and the people who go there--a place and friends that have so long been Ramona's life. I start to describe the Sunday School room where she taught for years, where she taught Jessie and Linda, which she decorated with Bible verses on patchwork quilts and animal faces . . . but I pause halfway through because someone else teaches there now, and Ramona cannot do her work for the Lord.

"Thanks for teaching Sunday School all those years," I say awkwardly. I'm not sure if Ramona hears me.

Murlie comes to hand Ramona a paper cup filled with multi-colored pills. Ramona surprises me by swallowing them in one gulp. Murlie holds a straw to Ramona's lips, so she can drink water from a plastic cup and wash the pills down.

Suddenly I see myself a few years ago, walking drowsily through my house--in my green robe, a pink cotton cap covering my hairless head, my hand holding a yellow bowl. Ramona, who has come again to babysit me the day after chemo, hands me a cup of water and my Prednisone pill . . .

Murlie goes back to the kitchen to wash dishes. As Ramona talks to Jessie and Linda, my eyes wander about her small bedroom. Books, stuffed animals, unused clothes, and Bible verses decorate the room. A verse from a hymn, painted on glass with red flowers, says:

"Because He lives,
I can face tomorrow."

Light emanates from the corners of this room.

"What a lovely clock," I say, picking up the brass and glass timepiece that rests on a shelf above Ramona's bed.

"The home care association gave that to me when I retired," she tells me. I trace her name engraved in cursive letters.

I find it hard to look at Ramona. She's so different now. Her body is shrinking in on itself . . .

"That's a bright painting," I point to a back-lit gazebo surrounded by pastel flowers.

"It's a Thomas Kinkaid," Ramona tells me. "My children keep buying his art for me."

Ramona's room seems like a portal to another world, as if the window above her bed will melt away to the shores of a glass sea spreading beneath stars--toward a transparent-walled Jerusalem.

Ramona's world is more than our small country church, than her three children and their families, than this trailer filled with objects she collected over a lifetime.

The room and Ramona's connection to another world close in on me. I glance at my watch.

"It's getting late. I'd better get the girls home," I say, leaning over the white-sheeted bed to hug Ramona. Her fragile bones almost burn my fingertips with shared pain. As I pull back, I imagine her with a new body--tall and straight, clothed with light like folds of silk, her face glowing.

Lord, please don't let Ramona suffer much longer, I cry silently.

"Thanks for coming to visit me," she says, her voice low so that I have to lean near her to catch the words.

I wish I had come more often.

The cool night air greets us. Linda points to the cirrus clouds that form a white, patchy quilt above us. The full moon, circled by a yellow halo, shines through the opaque layer.

"What does that mean?" Jessica asks, pointing to the strange moon.

"It means a change is coming," I reply, thinking that more than weather will transform.

Ramona died two days later.
**************************
Edd's college colleague and friend Ed Henry died of bone cancer. When we visited him a few weeks before his death, this is what we saw:

Our friend Ed Henry is dying of bone cancer. Today, on a hot summer day before the Fourth of July, we drive down our mountain to visit him and his family.

We stop at Costco on the way. It's crowded with sweating people getting ready for the holiday. We stock our cart full of summer food--roasted chicken, potato salad, watermelon. We add cranberry juice for Ed who has a catheter.

Traffic isn't bad on this side of the freeway, since everyone seems to be getting away from the city. We exit and find the Henry's quiet suburban neighborhood backed up against dry brown hills.

Melinda, Ed's youngest child, answers the door. She is eight--Jessica's age. She squeals when she sees her old friend.

We haven't seen the Henrys in the two years since we moved to the mountains.

I find Linda in the kitchen. We often talk to each other on the phone, so it doesn't seem that long since I've seen her. She looks pretty much the same--tall, slender, with short black hair, smooth dark brown skin, and glasses. She's wearing jeans and a t-shirt, practical clothing.

She's from Saint Lucia. Ed is from another Caribbean island--Jamaica.

He's lying in the computer room-turned-sick room. Propped up with several pillows on his hospital bed, he looks smaller than I remember. His skin seems darker than ever, a rich chocolate black against the white sheets. He's wearing a hospital gown so that I can see how thins his legs are, with ridges along the shin bones. His feet are wrapped in blue foam. He's paralyzed from the waist down now, and he can't move his right arm.

But he's completely alert. I expected him to be asleep or in a morphine haze.

He shakes my hand with his left arm. His deep brown eyes have black circles around them. On the top left side of his bald head is a lump like a lone horn growing. It's a tumor.

"Hello, Lonna!" he says enthusiastically. I sit down in the chair next to him. Everyone else is busy with food, so Ed and I are alone in the small room lined with bookshelves.

"How are you doing?" he asks. I look sideways at his eyes and think that the irises look the same as always.

For a moment I see him as I first met him seven years ago. He hired me to teach English part-time at the college. He made me feel at ease during the interview as he sat in a chair by the window, smiling, wearing a brown suit and blue tie.

Ed smiles at me now, and I think that he still looks, in a way, beautiful.

"I'm fine," I reply.

"I read your book. How nice that you got it published. It was good to see it in its finished form. I felt close to it, especially since I read it as a manuscript."

He still sounds like a college professor.

"I feel badly that I didn't finish my book," he admits. I remember how he showed me the first few chapters, typed on neat white pages. "I should have worked on it when the cancer was not so strong in me, when I could still get around."

"Well, you still had the disease," I try to comfort him. "The reason I could finish my book is because the cancer left me."

Ed nods his head a little. I look around the room. Posters of Jamaica adorn the wall, between bookshelves--green cliffs reaching down to teal-colored water, palm trees against a sunset, hills above a jungle.

"How is your home in the mountains?" he asks, and I look back at him. "I meant to come visit you. I think I dreamed of it. It's all made of wood, isn't it?"

"Yes. I described it to you once, over the phone." I pause, trying to create a picture with words, like a 3D image hovering in the air of his sick room.

"I love my mountain home. It has three levels. Downstairs is the spare bedroom, the den, and a bathroom with a tile floor and a huge, walk-in shower. We usually stay on the middle floor with its small kitchen and dining area, living room, and stone fireplace. In the back are the two bedrooms and small bathroom. Upstairs is the loft with a wood rail all along it. But the most wonderful part of the home is the high ceiling made of pine panels--warm, honey-colored wood--with a single long beam at the A-frame top.

"And there's a window three stories tall. It looks out over the upper deck. At dusk you can walk out on that deck. The sky turns dark blue above the horizon of tall evergreens. The moon comes up and shines upon the trees, casting shadows on the slope below. The stars appear, bright and large and low. The wind picks up and blows against your face. You smell a cedar tree and reach out your hand to stroke its scaly green branches. On that deck, you feel like you're in a treehouse."

Ed Henry has closed his eyes. I see a tear in the corner of one of them.

I think he must be wishing he had made it up the mountain.

"We should have come here to see you sooner," I say, touching his arm tentatively. "Maybe I have tired you with all my chatter."

"You haven't tired me. Later, my sleep will be restful. And don't feel badly about not coming before. This was the time. I can understand why you wouldn't want to leave your mountain," he replies, his voice low. He has seen my pretty picture and longs for it.

I feel tears in the back of my throat and wonder again why I survived cancer.

"Thank you," Ed Henry says, reading the look in my eyes.

I think I know why I survived.

Edd comes in with his sheet music and guitar, followed by the three Henry children and our two. Linda waits by the door, and I get up to help her with dinner. We stay and visit for a few hours, Edd playing music in the sickroom and bending down to pray with his old friend.

When we finally leave at nine o'clock, the hot summer day has cooled under darkness and a layer of clouds. The California freeways are not crowded as we head back toward our mountain, past billboards and neon lights and tall buildings. We exit the freeway and climb the familiar curves of our mountain highway.

We reach the five thousand foot level. Above, the nearly full moon breaks out of stormclouds, lining their edges with bright light. I look down, again, at the wide, crowded valley below, filled with a million small lights. Then I look ahead at the darkness lined with trees and a few brave stars. I smile in the darkness and think,

Soon Ed Henry will see a better mountain.
*****************************
Let me end this chapter with the story of one who survived:

A sixteen-year-old boy named Josh got a rare form of lymphoma in his spine. Josh is the son of our email friend Herb in Texas (a Lutheran minister). The insidious tumor wrapped around Josh's vertebrae and broke it. Josh had terrible pains in his back and thought he'd injured it playing football. Then his doctor discovered the cancer.

Josh spent a lot of time in the hospital, getting a worse form of chemo than I got. Josh almost died. After his last chemo treatment, he swelled up, as Herb put it in an email, "like a pillow with legs." He was battling an infection in his intestines (chemo can wipe out your immune system as well as your cancer). Amazingly, he slowly rallied. After several weeks in the hospital, he was released to go (of all things) dove hunting. In an email from Herb, I read these words:

"We drove out to Luther Hill's pasture-land and unloaded by the windmill which I accidentally shot last year. They don't let one forget such things easily in West Texas. Ruins of old cattle pens stand by the windmill, and the overflow forms a small pond surrounded by three gnarly trees. Josh found a spot under the northeast tree and set up one of the folding chairs and sat down . . . For the first hour we saw almost no birds, yet the mild and quiet evening surrounded us. I quickly noticed how Ben and Elise chattered with Josh under the tree. How wonderful it was to hear them enjoying one another. Their lost brother was finally among them again.

"Though the doctors thought Josh wouldn't have the strength to fire a gun, he dropped a dove near the windmill."

City of Hope in California is one of the world's top cancer research and treatment facilities, known especially for their work with bone marrow transplants. Sometimes a BMT is the last possible treatment for cancer patients. Two years after the end of my own chemo treatments, I visited a friend at City of Hope:

We follow the map I downloaded from the City of Hope website. Twilight falls as we find a long driveway, bordered by trees and white lights, that leads to a gate. A security guard directs us to Hope Village, where Dalilah is staying with her caregiver in Room 42.

Edd drives to the circle at the hospital's main entrance, then turns right past a Japanese garden, a tree-shaded park, a visitor center, and a synagogue. We find Hope Village, park the car, and get out to walk.

Jessica and Jonathan prance toward flowers whose colors are still visible in the half-light: orange, yellow, pink, and purple California poppies.

"They're my favorite!" Jessie exclaims.

We walk on a sidewalk toward the cottages. A woman with a shoulder-length blonde wig sits behind a window. She's typing on a laptop.

That could be me . . .

We look at numbers. Forty-two is vacant, the beds made.

"She must be at the hospital," I say, turning to Edd who holds Jonathan's hand behind me. "Could we walk from here?"

"Sure," Edd says. We stroll down the sidewalks of this parklike place. The hospital itself looks modern, multi-storied, solidly built. I hesitate before the glass doors of the entryway, reading the metal letters that scroll above me:

City of Hope
National Medical Center
and Beckman Research Institute

I stand on the threshold of a great place--the front line of battle against cancer.

City of Hope began in 1913, at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, when working-class people erected tents as a refuge for people suffering from tuberculosis. After tuberculosis was cured, cancer became the primary focus. People who cannot afford treatment can get it here for free. City of Hope's philosophy is "there is no profit in curing the body if in the process we destroy the soul." Their thirteen-point creed stresses "the sacredness of man, formed in God's image," "we are our brother's keeper," and "'love thy neighbor as thyself.'" They try to meet the spiritual as well as physical needs of their patients.

Here the first bone marrow transplants were performed in 1976--thousands done since then. Here Linda Biehl had her own bone marrow transplant. Here Linda Biehl died.

Do these glass doors open to eternity, a gateway, like the dream Jacob had in the wilderness when he saw angels ascending and descending on a ladder that bridged earth and Heaven?

As if reading my thoughts, Edd opens the door for me and says,

"I'll bet John Biehl walked through these doors a few times."

The receptionist guides us down long corridors to Urgent Care which takes us to the BMO (Bone Marrow Oncology) ward. The nurse on duty at Wing Six tells us that Dalilah was admitted to the hospital because of mouth sores. "She's down the hall, in Room 626."

I start ahead of Edd and the kids. The long beige hallway, windowless and lit by panels of fluorescent lights, suddenly closes in around me. My feet don't want to walk down the polished linoleum floor. With each step I think,

I could be in that room at the end of this hall.

Another nurse explains that the children cannot enter Dalilah's room, but they can wait with Edd in the hall. She shows me how to scrub my arms and hands for three minutes and then put on the face mask. Dalilah has already had the strong chemo, and the doctors have already put her bone marrow stem cells back in her system. She can't afford to catch an illness while her blood replenishes itself.

I see her reclining on her bed. The T.V. is on. Her sister-in-law, a shy woman who speaks only Spanish, sits in a chair next to her and watches me. She's also wearing a face mask.

"Hi, Dalilah," I say. "It's Lonna."

Dalilah is wearing a blue knit stocking cap and a hospital gown. Her color is good--not pale. She smiles, her petite face and dark eyes looking very much alive.

"Oh, Lonna," she says in a weak voice. "I'm so glad you came."

I ask how she feels, and she struggles to answer me, swallowing often,

"The mouth sores hurt, and my throat, too."

As I watch Dalilah, I remember the sore mouth and throat I had during chemo. Empathy is a good thing, but I need to learn how to handle it. I wince in pain and blink away the tears. Behind me, Jessica and Jonathan whisper to each other and stare through the open door. I can feel Edd's eyes on my back.

"Don't you be afraid, Lonna. We will beat this cancer. Yours won't come back. I read your story, about your life. God will bless you so much more now to make up for all that you had to suffer. We will live to be old ladies together, you and me. God will send His angels to watch over us."

"I came here to comfort you, and you encourage me," I reply, smiling. "I don't want you to talk too much. Let me read for you."

I read from Romans Chapter Eight:

"What then shall we say to these things?
If God is for us, who can be against us?
He who did not spare His own Son,
but delivered Him up for us all,
how shall He not with Him also
freely give us all things? . . .

Who shall separate us from the
love of Christ?
Shall tribulation, or distress,
or persecution, or famine,
or nakedness, or peril, or sword? . . .

Yet in all these things we are
more than conquerors
through Him who loved us,

For I am persuaded that neither death
nor life nor angels nor principalities
nor things present nor things to come,
nor height nor depth,
nor any other created thing,
shall be able to separate us
from the love of God
which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

After I speak the last word, silence falls for a moment. Then I say a prayer. When I open my eyes I notice a small plastic angel--in a nurse's uniform--pinned to Dalilah's hospital gown, above the area where she first found her cancer.

"Tell Edd thanks for bringing you here," Dalilah says.

I remind her that I'll call to see how she's doing.

"You'll be home with your husband and children soon," I add. "Our two six-year-old girls will play together. You live by Costco, so I'll come see you often!"

Dalilah laughs and places a hand to her throat. I turn around and find Edd and the children waiting.
"Thanks for coming here with me," I say to Edd as I grab his arm and walk through a series of long hallways toward the hospital entrance. Jessica and Jonathan skip along next to us. "I didn't want to come here alone."

We see a boy of about seven years old walking toward us with his parents. He's wearing a small hospital gown and a face mask. He has no hair.

"I'm glad I came with you," Edd replies. We stop to get Kit Kats and soda from a vending machine, and I pick up some free brochures.

Glass doors open to the chilly evening. Edd and I sit down on a bench under a flowering tree. Jessica and Jonathan chase each other in circles around a large fountain. In the middle of the fountain rises--toward the starry night--a bronze statue of a man and a woman, dancing and holding a baby high between them. Edd and I look into each other's eyes.

"Come," he says, standing and taking my hand. "It's time to go home."
************************
Dalilah recovered from her bone marrow transplant and, five years later, still sends me Christmas cards.
I first met Dalilah in the valley, at a breast cancer support group. We were a lively bunch. Here is my first experience with them:

The "Young Women's Breast Cancer Support Group" meets at Dr. Schinke's office on the first Tuesday evening of each month. I figure I'm qualified to join this group because I had cancer in my breast.
Seven of us "survivors" gather in a circle in the office waiting room. We are diverse--dark-haired and petite, large and blonde, Asian or Mexican or white. A couple of the women wear pink enameled ribbon pins. We take turns telling our cancer stories. Only one other woman had a lumpectomy--all the rest had at least one breast and some lymph nodes removed. Some had chemo, some radiation, and some both. I didn't realize there were so many types of breast cancer.

Lori, the leader, candidly and humorously relates her children's reaction to her reconstructive surgery.
"When I wore a swimsuit this summer, my eleven-year-old son kept saying, 'Mom, put it back in.'" He didn't want anyone to see the scars."

We giggle.

"But, heck," Lori continues, "my breasts and my hair were always the two things I liked best about my body, and the cancer took away both."

It has been three years since her treatment. She tosses her long blonde hair, and from where I am sitting, I can not tell that one of her breasts was reconstructed. With her body type and personality, she reminds me of another Lori . . .

A latecomer to our group, Delilah, sits shyly next to her husband and every so often wipes tears from her eyes. A petite Mexican-American in her early thirties, she wears a short blonde wig which reminds me of the one I used to wear. She was recently diagnosed and does not understand exactly what kind of breast cancer she has or how it will be treated. Her husband, looking uncomfortable, murmurs something about picking Delilah up later--and leaves the office.

After sharing breast woes, we talk about husbands.

"When I was going through chemo, I was mad at my husband," I confess. "I blamed him for my cancer, and I thought he could have helped me more somehow. He seemed to withdraw from me . . ."

"It's common for husbands to withdraw from their wives who have breast cancer," Lori informs us.

"My boyfriend didn't want to make my depression worse by joining in," Renee says. An elegant Asian woman, she wears a brass-buttoned navy suit. "He thought that if he ignored it, it would go away."

"Well, my man and I are still close," Jeanne giggles. She shows us her quarter-inch hair under a baseball cap. "We go out for steak dinner, have a little wine, and then go home and snuggle."

"You eat red meat, drink, and have sex?" Delilah asks, amazed. "I've been avoiding fatty foods and alcohol. And I'm afraid to get close to my husband . . ."

Jeanne borrows my little notebook and writes out a prescription for Delilah to giver her husband:

1. Hamburger
2. Margarita
3. Sex

Delilah blushes and smiles tentatively, a tissue still held in one hand.

After Delilah leaves early because of her three children waiting at home, Lori explains to us that when Delilah's family visited from Mexico, they wouldn't sit next to her for fear of catching cancer.

"'She's going to die,' her sisters whispered to their children. Can you imagine what this woman is up against?" Lori asks us.

I ask the group if they experienced anxiety attacks or post-traumatic stress disorder. Kim (who has been mostly quiet) turns to me and admits,

"I still have nightmares about the cancer returning. My treatment ended just over a year ago. I was so afraid that the cancer would return that I was feeling my breasts all the time."

We all nod our heads, understanding.

"I'm lucky I had just a lumpectomy. I'm trying not to hate or fear my breasts but be glad to still have them. I've come up with a plan to do a breast exam only once a month--to cut down on the paranoia," Kim continues.

Her long dark hair (she didn't get chemo) half hides her face as she speaks, yet I can see her hazel eyes under their lashes.

Lori shares news on upcoming breast cancer events, and I decide I'll come back to this group.
****************************
Another meeting went like this:

Before our group gets officially started, an elderly man walks in to tell us that his wife died of cancer.
"Oh, I thought this was the other group," he says shyly, his shoulders stooped a little.

"You must be thinking about the H.O.P.E. (Helping Other People Emotionally) group that meets on Wednesday nights," Lori, our leader, gently informs him. "That group is for any type of cancer. This is for breast cancer."

"Yes, I guess it did meet on Wednesday nights. They were such a help to Mary, and I wanted to let them know about her passing. Since she left, I've been bad about keeping my calendar straight . . ." he drifts off, lowering his eyes. "Anyway, sorry to bother you," he adds as he puts his hat back on and starts to leave.

"We're sorry about your loss," Lori says in a low voice. She and I look at each other as the man walks out of sight, down the hallway toward the radiation room and the back exit.

"Poor man," she comments. Our group stays silent for a moment.

Then Wendy, wearing a blonde wig instead of a dark one, tells us how she singed the bangs on her other wig while she was baking cookies.

"You can't get too close to the heat," she advises us. "You should have smelled that burnt fake hair!"
We laugh, boisterous again. Lori tells about a former member who, surviving two bone marrow transplants, is doing very well. We have two visitors, a woman named Debby who may have to get a double mastectomy and a woman named Anita who starts her first chemo treatment this Friday.
I share with Anita some of the side effects she may have, and she leans toward me, intensely interested in my experience. I hand her my business card.

"Call me if you have anymore questions or just want to talk," I suggest.

Lori makes us coffee, and I eat two sugary white cookies.

Lori, her usual outgoing self, entertains us with funny stories about the Policeman's Ball she recently attended and her job at a middle school cafeteria. We tell jokes and anticipate our new year, cancer-free.
While the others laugh, I get up and head for the bathroom. Dr. Schinke's office is empty and dark. The radiation room is also dark, its large white backlights for illuminating x-rays blending opaquely into the wall. Down the hall I see The Chemo Room--peaceful and quiet now, abandoned, waiting faithfully for tomorrow and the people who will walk through it. I can barely make out an I.V. pole standing like a sentinel beside the open door.
*************************
I'll end this chapter with another breast cancer support group story, a City of Hope experience that I heard a few months after visiting Dalilah:

At the breast cancer support group tonight, Dalilah looks good. Her hair is growing back. She smiles in her shy way and tells us all that she's doing well. Marie, a heavyset woman with a short black wig, tells us about her recent bone marrow transplant experience at City of Hope.

"They gave me so much morphine for my mouth sores that I was completely out of it. One night, I took my big white panties off and hoisted them to the top of my I.V. pole. Then I walked through the halls stark naked. The nurses told me about this later; I don't remember a thing. I guess I was waving my white flag of surrender. I'm glad to be here now."

We can't help but laugh at Marie's story, and I guess we're all thinking the same thing:

we can either give in to the cancer or fight.

And so, gathered in a circle like a female version of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table, we plan our strategies for this year's Breast Cancer Awareness Month and Walk for a Cure.

I go through periodic episodes of paranoia (I think I have good reasons). Here is a journal entry I wrote about a year after the end of my chemo treatments:

Sometimes I'm afraid to hope for good things.

I still think about accidents when I put the kids in the car. I think about kidnappings when I shop at Target. In the middle of the night, I wake up, stare at the crisscrossed ceiling, and think about radiation.
How much radiation does that computer monitor put out, anyway? Jessica sits in front of it at least a couple of hours a day. Will I open the computer room door one day to find Jessica gone, swallowed into a virtual world?

And what about the T.V. and the microwave? I can't forget those chest X-rays I had as a child . . .

As dawn slips through the bedroom curtains, I think about what we put in our bodies. How many hormones and other additives taint the milk and meat we eat? What kind of danger from pesticides sinks into fruit and vegetables? How can peanut butter cause cancer?

What have we created in this winding-down Twentieth Century, the great Age of Technology, that can destroy us and our children in new, clever, and unseen ways?

When Edd massages me, I hold my breath. I'm afraid to touch my body for fear I'll find another lump. When I get overheated, I worry that I'm starting those strange fevers again. I feel the inside of my mouth, where I first got a "lymphoid polyp," and wonder if that bump is a ligament or a lump. Terror grips me like a hand. All reason leaves, and I can hardly breathe as thoughts avalanche my mind:

If I find a lump, I'll have to
tell Edd
get a referral to a surgeon
wait for an appointment
get a biopsy
wait for the results
conference with doctors
endure a bone marrow transplant,
two months in the hospital,
and maybe die . . .

I dread the thought of leaving my family to stay in the hospital. I'm afraid that if I go in, I will never come out. I would get lots of rest, though. Suddenly even hungry cats with litter in their paws look like a blessing. I'll try not to complain . . .

I'm afraid of the morning, of having to get out of bed and face a new day. I want to stay in my nightgown, under the blankets, curled up in a fetal position, crying out to God,

Please keep me safe.

How can I get up and vacuum the house when I think at any moment our family could be torn apart?
How can anyone live with a threat like cancer hanging over her--a threat that could strike like a hidden rattlesnake?

I've got to stop lying in bed at night and thinking

What else will go wrong?

If God means to send the cancer back to me, I cannot run; I cannot hide.

Yet deep inside I feel He means to spare me.

God has protected me many times, on so many journeys that I can't even count the number. Why should a few really difficult events make me afraid of the future?

Unable to sleep, I get up and read. The newspaper reports about killer bees spotted in Palm Springs and headed our way. I imagine the kids and I, on one of our twilight walks through country lanes, attacked by a swarm. I can see all those fuzzy, winged creatures on Jonathan's two-year-old skin and hear his screams . . .

Now I know I'm getting paranoid.

I understand the term phobia. What is the official name for lump-phobia and cancer-phobia?
Wait a minute. Why am I afraid of killer bees? Didn't God make bees? Couldn't He keep us safe on our walks? And if He wants us to die by killer bee stings, worry won't stop that. I'd sooner take my chances with bees than cancer, anyway.

I open my Bible and flip through the New Testament, finding the first book of John:

"There is no fear in love;
but perfect love casts out fear,
because fear involves torment.
But he who fears has not been made
perfect in love.

We love Him because He first loved us." (1 John 4:18 & 19)

If God loves me and knows what is right for me and my family, He will guide me along the best possible path. I've got to emerge from this cocoon of fear and learn to trust God's love.
********************
I also learned about fear when I was hiking with the kids in the mountains, the place where we visited and longed to make a home. Two years after my chemo treatments, I wrote:

Today I take the kids hiking. We follow a trail through mossy Rainbow Creek, stepping on stones to avoid getting wet in the shallow water.

"Look, a waterfall!" Jessica, age 6, points.

Jonathan, age 3, follows her gaze briefly and then charges across the bridge.

The trail follows the side of the mountain and gradually leads downward, showing views of rocky cliffs and tree-filled valleys. I barely notice that clouds are starting to gather above us.

I wish I had brought the camera. Jessica looks cute in her new red and blue backpack, her pink hat over her long auburn ringlets. The leader of our expedition, she pauses occasionally to consult her map and check our progress.

"So we don't get lost," she tells me.

Jonathan, following her, is not much bigger than his own backpack which droops to the back of his knees. He pauses occasionally to get his squirt bottle out of his backpack and spray the trees, a bug, a rock, and the back of Jessie's neck.

We pass a rockslide area.

"Poor mountain," Jonathan says, peering over the edge at the granite boulders and tree stumps.
"Don't get too close," I warn, grabbing his hand.

"What would happen if all the trees got cut off the mountain?" Jessica wonders. "Would the mountain fall down?"

"Maybe," I explain. "Actually, the trees help hold up the dirt so that it doesn't all slide down. The trees give the animals, birds, and insects homes. Wouldn't it be sad if there were no more trees?"

"Yes," she responds, and I think of my science fiction novel, "Like a Tree Planted."

We hike further. The clouds are thicker, and now they're turning a dark gray. We hear a distant roll of thunder. Jonathan doesn't seem bothered by the sound, but Jessica looks at me with pouty blue eyes.
"I want to go back now," she states. She has always been terrified of thunderstorms. We turn around. It's harder to walk up the trail, and I hold Jonathan's hand (despite his protests) on one side and Jessica's hand (gladly) on the other.

"Look! A Western hemlock, my favorite tree!" I exclaim, reaching out to touch the graceful, furry branches.

"I can figure out the trees for myself," Jessie says. "Please hold my hand, because I'm so scared of thunder."

We hike past the tree and underneath a cave opening that I didn't notice before. Tall and shadowy, it reminds me of a dream I had last night. I've dreamed often since I had cancer. The dreams are alike: I enter a cave where my worst fears live, etched against damp stone walls. I see lumps of cancer in people's lungs, bones, brains. I see the chemo room and the bone marrow transplant ward where people lose their hair, turn pale like ghosts, and get sores inside their mouths. I see mounds of earth in the corners--graves for the cancer patients who did not survive. I hear the sobs of children who don't understand. I smell the dusty mold of death and feel the cave's icy breathing.

My heart starts racing as blood rushes to my head.

"What's wrong, Mommy?" Jessica asks, staring.

I'm lost in the cave. Surely--somewhere--there's an opening where sunlight shines through like a beacon.
Another thunderclap sounds--closer--and I realize I've stopped in the cave's shadow and am standing in the sudden rain.

I must walk forward--past The Chemo Room, past cancer.

And then I remember. During my last chemo treatment, I wrote a Bible verse in my journal. It returns to me now:

"The night is far spent,
the day is at hand.
Therefore let us cast off
the works of darkness,
and let us put on
the armor of light." (Romans 13:12)

Another rumble breaks from the sky, and Jessica jumps and trembles beside me, digging her hand further in mine.

"I'm not brave, not brave at all," she laments.

"That's okay. I get scared, too," I admit, wondering if the cancer will return, if I will live to see Jessica and Jonathan grown and with children of their own. "Sometimes I feel like a lost little girl. But then I remember that I must be strong and keep hiking. We will find our way home. The Lord will protect us."
I start moving past the cave. The thunder quiets to a distant mumble, and the sky starts turning blue again. The path ahead doesn't look too rocky. It rises toward the clearing sky, bordered on each side by pine trees.
************************
I also have Survivor's Syndrome, which I wrote about in this:

Kristen flies down from Washington to visit us for Spring Break. On the way home from the airport, less than a mile from the offramp to our valley home, we become involved in a freeway accident.
It's very dark (after eight). I notice a couple of cars have pulled over to the shoulder, their taillights on. I pull over and stare ahead. At this section, the freeway has two lanes for each direction, with a wide sand divider in the middle. No one has put out flares or even a flashlight, but I discern the dim outline of a van. Tilted on one side across the fast lane, its underside faces us. Before I can think what to do, I see a large white truck, which was following me, whiz past, still going about seventy miles an hour. He obviously doesn't see the van.

"Oh God, he's going to hit the van!" I cry.

The truck crashes into the van. Gray smoke rises into the night air.

"Oh God, I hope no one was in that van," I say, envisioning a family of five, with children in carseats, meeting a fiery death.

"I've got to check," Kristen says, beside me.

We both jump out of the car, though by now Jessica and Jonathan, confused and frightened, are crying.
"Stay out of the fast lane!" I yell at Kristen's back as she rushes to put her Nursing Assistant training to use. Her long blonde hair swings to the right as she makes a sharp left turn toward the center divider.
I reach under the carseat and grab my fluorescent flashlight (Edd teases me for collecting so many flashlights). I turn on its bright light and hand it to a man named Dave who takes it and runs into the fast lane, yelling at approaching cars:

"Stop! There's been an accident!"

"What happened?" Jessica sobs.

"The white truck hit that van," I tell her. Amazingly, I feel calm, as if God's hand covers us all on this freeway.

A friendly trucker named Roger parks his semi in the slow lane so that no one can plow into my car. Another trucker parks next to him, blocking the fast lane. Their blinking amber truck lights act as flares until the flashing blue and whites of the Highway Patrol arrive.

When the fire engines park on the center divider, I set out to find Kristen (Roger watches my car). I see her near a dazed-looking Mexican who sits on the bumper of another truck, in the dirt divider. Near him I see a young man rubbing his shoulder and staring forlornly at the white truck he had been driving, which is completely smashed in front. Tools are scattered all over the asphalt.

"What happened?" I ask.

Kristen looks at me, the flashing emergency lights reflecting in her eyes. She grabs my shoulder and starts walking toward our car, explaining on the way:

"When the young guy in the white truck hit the van, it spun 360 degrees around and ended up in the slow lane, tilting over into the ditch. The guy in the white truck had only minor injuries--his shoulder strap bruised his shoulder but saved his life. He kept repeating how his boss was going to be mad about the ruined truck. After I made sure he was okay, I got him to crawl down in the ditch with me and look inside the van to see if anyone was in it because nobody seemed to know. Nobody was in it. We found out that a truck was towing the van when the trailer broke, and the van flipped on its side. After the accident, the man who was towing the van just sat on his bumper in the center divider and did nothing."

"Amazing. So nobody was seriously hurt."

"Right. The van was pouring gas all over the freeway, too."

"I'm proud of you," I say, patting Kristen's arm as we reach our car. "You must have been terrified running toward that van in the darkness, not knowing what you would find."

She gets in the car and puts her seatbelt on, and I do the same.

"I just kept thinking that I had to help whoever was in that van," she confides. "I didn't have time to feel scared."

Dave walks over and hands my flashlight back to me since the police now direct traffic. "I was on the phone when I heard the truck hit the van," he tells us. "Ten people must have used their cell phones to call 911."

I must have been the only one without a cell phone--and the only one with a flashlight.

"Thanks," I say as I take my flashlight and put it back under the seat. I start the car and move in line with others, slowly passing the accident scene.

"Welcome back to California," Kristen murmurs to herself.

As we drive past the van (still on its side), I wonder how I can stay calm in emergency situations yet freeze in terror at the thought of cancer.

Tonight I dream I'm driving alone on a dark freeway. A black van suddenly appears, blocking my lane. I slam on the brakes and stop inches away from the gleam of metal in the dark, shaking, my hands gripping the steering wheel. In the silence after screeching brakes, I begin to hear another sound, high-pitched, at regular intervals.

The sound is my own voice, screaming. I look to my left and right and see other people crash into the van.

Why did I escape? I scream through my dream, my hands still stuck to the steering wheel.
******************************
Of course, I realize that mine is an American Tragedy. I have a lot of beauty and blessing in my life, too. I didn't grow up in a country where poverty and politics prevented me from getting my next meal, obtaining health care, going to college, marrying for love, raising happy children, ice skating, going to church, buying a computer, or writing a book. I should move to Afghanistan and live with the refugees. Then I would have a better view of tragedy. But for now, I am a: