It’s like they threw me in a blender at the end of June and I’m being poured out just in time for a new school year. Cancer, man, it’s a trip. I had a skin sparing double mastectomy on July 19, and the following couple weeks are a blur. And then it was all appointments, waiting, stripping that one drain that wouldn’t let up, and wondering if I’d have to do chemo. I found out on Monday that I won’t be doing it this time around, and my relief, overwhelming. I’ll do it again if it is important to extend my life, but I have never felt so detached from my life and whether I lived or died as I did when I was doing chemo. Happy to not go back there.
But there’s still a lot of healing to do, and more surgeries and treatments. I’m still fatigued. If you don’t know the difference between being tired and fatigue, ask one of your friends recovering from surgery, living with fibromyalgia, or doing pregnancy. I don’t know what my body will be up for each day, and when it turns off it really turns off. I can’t really put into words what it feels like, but believe me, it’s a rough go, and all the sleep in the world can’t fix it. For me, it’s my body’s way of telling me to slow down, we’re still healing, take it easy.
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I’ve been out of town, in South County St. Louis, for a couple of weeks, no bike in sight. It was good to be there with family, especially since part of what we were doing was saying goodbye to my wife’s grandmother. Gma was much beloved, the kind of grandma who took every grandkid on a solo date before school started, for food and a show. A devout Catholic who said the rosary every single day, she was delighted to have two queer granddaughters and their wives join her for Christmas Eve mass last year, her only request: “No kissing!” 
Wednesday’s ride was incredibly ordinary. I spent the first few blocks deciding whether to go south on Guilford, west on Lombard, or to go west on 27th, south on Maryland Avenue. I decided on the second so I could spend the bulk of my morning in the safety of the cycletrack, even though M. got hit by a car there on Tuesday, a reminder that nowhere is safe when car drivers are around. 
Today was a beautiful spring day–sunny, not too hot–and I had my penultimate radiation session at Hopkins. I rode my bike the way I ride my bike to the hospital, down Barclay, a left at the Tool Library, across the street and another left at the cemetery, a right, a left into a terrible bike lane, and a right into a slightly better one. I locked up outside on a rack that’s not bolted down and grumbled about that in my head before spinning through the doors to the elevator down to the basement. It’s amazing how quickly routine becomes routine, and this has been mine for the past month.
Today’s ride took me over to Johns Hopkins east hospital campus, as per usual. Today is the start of my second week of radiation treatment, and I got up plenty early to ride my bicycle for that 8:15am appointment. The promise of 70 degrees and sunny made me almost too excited to sleep.
I’m six weeks out from chemotherapy, and I cannot even begin to express in words what a difference it makes to be six weeks out from and not six weeks into chemotherapy. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like I’d been living in a perpetual present, unable to look outside of my immediate physical self or beyond the precise moment. I’m in a different present now, one that reaches beyond the boundaries of my body and connects to the world again, just a little bit. And I’m starting to make plans for the future, and they aren’t about cancer. I feel so much better. It’s astounding. 
What I Saw Riding My Bike Around Today 