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| Regina Holliday's Walking Gallery Painting: "Knowing the Score" |
In December of 1996, I left Ohio and a very fiscally appealing if not somewhat limiting job as an Obstetrical house physician intent on getting Michael Crichton's job--or at least becoming a recognized screenwriter/novelist/physician like Dr. Crichton.
I packed up a few things in the largest U-Haul trailer my Saab could pull and left for Southern California, where I planned to pedal my screenplays and musicals while supporting my writing habit as a healthcare consultant. I had a six-month MHA residency set up at PacifiCare of California, a few good connections in Hollywood that I had been fostering for a couple of years, and a belief that I could make it happen if I continued to hone my craft and remained patient.
A friend gave me a card on my departure--on the front, a child-like drawing of a simpleton wearing a goofy smile and dunce cap, carrying a flower, and stepping off of a tall cliff with ravenous wolves positioning themselves beneath for the kill. The caption read "A Romantic steps out into the world..."
I looked at the card and smiled. My friend knew me well. So I said, "Yeah, but you're assuming that the guy in the picture will fall."
Yes, I am a romantic. But I like to think that my romantic notions are not unteathered from reality, but are based on a different way of seeing reality--one that is not so dependent upon conventional wisdom or even the conventions of time and space. I am generally patient--to become a physician, you have to be well-versed in gratification deferment (even more, the developer of technical standards for health IT). So to me, even the definitions of success and failure are supremely dependent on the time frame or on how far you pull the lens back.
The story of what happened to me in the Land of Tinsel and Lies is better told another day. My point in sharing this snippet is to convey my willingness to look past the immediate and keep my eyes on opportunities that may seem improbable but worth the effort.
The story I do want to tell now is about how Kym and I started off as a couple and came to be a family...
On Millennium Eve, I proposed to Kym after knowing her for just six weeks. There were several reasons why this didn't seem all that rash a decision to me at the time. We had both been married before, so we had a sense, at least, of what we weren't looking for. We weren't going to have children, so that was a huge set of considerations we didn't have to consider. We were in our mid-thirties, so we were grown up enough to be reasonably formed into our long-term selves, having worked through at least a good portion of youthful angst and forethought-less actions.
We also shared one very basic feature that was so important to me that it took precedence over all others: we both--Kym especially--valued personal growth. Kym had no illusions that she was perfect or that she had life completely figured out, but she was deeply committed to looking inside of herself with those dark, unflinching eyes, taking personal stock of what she saw and didn't like, and doing whatever it took to work it out.
In other ways, we weren't what you would call a perfect match. I was all about music and magic; Kym, sports and success. Even in these, we found ways to be interested in one another's worlds and interests.
The one thing that scared me more than a little was what we came to call the psychiatric joke of our relationship: She had OCD and I had ADD, so she would make rules I could never remember. Her obsessive-compulsive behaviors probably developed as a response to her experience of growing up in a home with alcoholic parents and getting Hodgkin's at 17. As a result, she had a serious need to control her environment--especially related to concerns with cleanliness. I literally had to learn entirely new ways of engaging with the world, our home and Kym in order for us to share space and bodies.
Kym's experience of dealing with my ADD was no picnic either. ADD is a real two-edged sword: it makes it possible for me to connect dots that others can't even see and to create music, catchy lyrics and magical moments; it also creates real problems that can make a mess of the simplest tasks.
When the impact of those omissions just affect me, I can build the losses and delays into the cost of doing business. One of the ways I've learned to cope with my ADD is to spin lots of plates--if I'm distracted by something else I'm supposed to be doing, the net effect is productivity, even though an occasional plate gets neglected long enough that it comes crashing to the ground. If you're just looking at the net effect--the number of plates spinning at once, it looks pretty impressive. But if you happen to be one of the less fortunate plates, it feels like a roller coaster ride of near misses at best and a shattered disaster at worst.
In our relationship, it was easy to interpret some of my forgetfulness, speak-first/process-later words and actions, and mismatched stated versus realized priorities as neglect, passive-aggressive behavior, or overt hostility. Add to this the fact that extreme emotions--from both stress and elation--tend to increase my ADD-ness, and it's not surprising that our first early relationship was strongly impacted by moments that required lots of 'splainin' on my part.
So it was clear that I was going to need to work hard to make changes to my routines and way of thinking in order to make this work. From my perspective, the investment in adjusting my own behavior to share a life with this remarkable woman seemed more than worth it. She was very successful in her work as a financial software sales executive and had many professional and personal ambitions that meshed well with my own. I was in the middle of an ambitious start-up project, was writing and consulting--lots of promise but not a lot of immediate gain. So she kept the lights on while I was swinging for the fences.
Soon after our engagement, Kym moved up to be with me in Boston. Our small Brookline apartment had everything we needed, including our dining room/office, which had three phone lines and as many computers. We were just a block uphill from Beacon Avenue and all the bustle (and excellent dining options) of Washington Square, while enjoying the quiet of a well-heeled residential neighborhood. We had the flexibility to make our own schedule, though our passion for working hard for our goals eventually forced us to set business hours--we declared the dining room/office closed after 6pm, otherwise we would have worked until midnight every night.
We were enjoying our lives and each other. And while we were in no particular hurry to tie the knot, we knew it would happen eventually, so we didn't much stress about it.
It's part of the punishment of the cancer survivor: you're always waiting for the other shoe to drop, so you have to be diligent about every sign and symptom and "check the box" to be sure it's nothing to worry about. Kym was the picture of health--she was very careful about the food she ate and how it was prepared, what supplements she took and the kinds of exercise she did. And she listened to her body. So when Kym started having night sweats and some other troubling symptoms a couple months after we were engaged, she promptly connected with her oncologist in Connecticut who ordered a C/T scan as a precaution.
The evening she came back from Connecticut, I remember running from our living room to the hall to greet her, doing some silly imitation of Edith Bunker welcoming Archie home. Kym's jaw was clenched and her eyes sullen. I can't recall her exact words, but her countenance said more than words could express.
Ever effective in the art of persuasion, Kym had managed to get the radiologist to, against protocol, give her his reading of the film rather than make her wait for it to come from her oncologist. He said, "I'd prepare for a recurrence if I were you."
Recurrence. That meant Hodgkin's Lymphoma, which meant chemotherapy. Kym had already had radiation nearly 20 years before and had had an exploratory laparotomy and splenectomy. So chemo was an almost certain fate. And the prognosis for a recurrence was not good.
More than once, someone has told me that they could never see themselves marrying a cancer survivor--it's just too scary. I never really thought about it that way. Life is what it is and we don't have guarantees of anything. How can you know that anyone you marry won't have problems or an accident. I once met a woman whose husband died in a shark attack while swimming on their honeymoon. Being "healthy" is no guarantee.
So we put our energies into getting as much information as we could and putting ourselves in the best position for a positive outcome. "Be prepared for the worst; hope for the best" was something Kym liked saying a lot. Having just finished my informatics fellowship at Harvard Medical School, I was able to quickly get Kym connected with a doctor who had literally written the book on Hodgkin's at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
After two weeks and around $10,000 worth of tests, including a gallium scan, the verdict was in. Kym didn't have cancer. Her symptoms were probably caused by something else and her initial diagnosis was likely the result of an overzealous reading of her C/T scan that really showed nothing more than scar tissue from her prior radiation. Had the radiologist been able to access her old films, all of the pain and cost of those age-inducing weeks could have been avoided.
We took it all in. We had dodged a bullet, for sure, but it gave us pause. Life is short--even a life with a longer-than-average lifespan. We decided our best response was to say, "Let's make every day matter." Which for us meant getting married as soon as we could pull it together.
Our wedding took place on Summer Solstice 2000. At sunset. On the beach. In Kaua'i. It was so beautiful our wedding pictures look fake--like an Olan Mills backdrop that could have been swapped out for library shelves with the pull of a cord.
And then, as we would soon learn, we got pregnant on the same beach about six hours later.
As with the year before, I wrote Kym a Christmas poem a la Seuss, that pretty much sums up in seven stanzas what took me over 1500 words of prose...
Oh, the year we have had! with its jostles and bumps
We’ve been high on the Rooftops! And down in the Dumps
Just when we thought that our future was clear
We’d turn 'round a corner and Change would appear
With his old pal Uncertainty one step behind
All the This-Way-Then-That-Ways became quite a Grind!
Just writing a poem about this year’s events
Creates quite a story that’s rather intense!
We started the year with the Best New Year’s Yet
I popped the question and you said, “You Bet!”
We partied all night at a Y2K ball
And, according to F.J., your gown beat them all!
We moved you to Boston to start a new life
And prepare for the day we’d be Husband and Wife
But our hopes for the future were dashed when we learned
That your Hodgkin’s, so long in remission, returned
For two weeks we viewed your prognosis with terror
When finally we found that the test was in error!
A lesson emerged from that troubling event
Each day must be lived to its fullest extent
We made a decision on that very day
That we should get hitched without further delay!
A few short months later we flew to Hawai’i
And, witnessed by loved ones, were wed on Kaua’i
But wait! That’s not all that occurred on that day!
For that very same night we conceived Taylor Jay!
Talk about Changes! These DINKs 'til their day’s end
Were suddenly thinking of Pampers and Playpens!
And Sippy-Cups! Strollers! Au Pairs and Papooses!
Barneys and Pokémons! Potters and Seusses!
Our image of just you and me quickly faded
We “Saabed” on that fateful day Cloe got traded
But no doubt, this all will be worth all the Fuss
The day we see Taylor’s eyes looking at us
There’s just not the room to depict all our plans
Of Start-Ups that didn’t and Möbius Bands
Of Legal Frustrations and Selling Sensations!
Of New Jobs and Old Saabs and Small Tribulations
And next year – Look Out! We’re just getting started!
We may move from Boston to places uncharted
But one thing remains – be there Change or whatever
My love for you grows every day we’re together
And one other thing remains Certain, my wife –
I still cherish the night you danced into my life
The story (at least this chapter of the story) wraps up in my next post...
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