August, 2024: I’m coming up on the tenth anniversary of when I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and nine years since active treatment (surgery, chemo, radiation) ended. Since then I’ve been taking tamoxifen to suppress estrogen in my body because mine was a hormone-sensitive cancer.
In the early months and years, I feared that I would spend the rest of my life constantly aware that I was under the shadow of death in the form of recurrence. But that awareness faded sooner than I’d expected. Perhaps humans aren’t equipped to be constantly considering our own mortality.
Most of the time I didn’t think about cancer anymore. When it came up, I had a rote patter that I would go through: “I had breast cancer x years ago, it’s been x years since active treatment ended, and at the five-year mark it was considered cured.” As my routine checkups dwindled from quarterly to annually, I had fewer reminders.
I began wearing glasses for nearsightedness at age eight or nine – I was the classic kid who couldn’t read the blackboard, back when children were not as routinely tested for vision problems. My vision got continually worse over my lifetime; I was accustomed to needing new glasses every year. At least my near vision was okay – until I hit middle age when, like everyone else, I also began to lose the ability to focus close up (presbyopia). Around 2008 I began wearing progressive trifocals, which gave me clear vision at a range of distances. It was never perfect correction – I had trouble reading street signs while driving, for example.
I had long been under observation and treatment for high pressure in my eyes, to make sure that this didn’t develop into glaucoma. For many years this was controllable with eyedrops, but after a while any given formula tends to stop working. My ophthalmologist tried me on several different kinds over ten years, but my choices are limited by a severe allergy to one whole family of these drugs – I spent about a month wanting to rip my eyeballs out to stop the pain and itching before we figured that out.
You’re at a tech conference, one that you are attending as a tech professional with interest and expertise in the subject matter. You’re standing talking to a man – perhaps he’s a speaker whose talk you just heard, or someone with influence in your field, or you have any other professional reason to speak with him. There you are, deep in conversation, when another man suddenly swoops in and starts talking to the man you are talking to, about a completely different topic, as if he didn’t even notice you were there.
Usually, he is allowed to completely disrupt the conversation you were having. Your original interlocutor may not even notice that you were interrupted. If he does, he may throw a sheepish look at you, while going on listening and responding to the interrupter. You wait patiently until the interrupter finishes and goes away (possibly without ever acknowledging your presence), then finally resume your own conversation. No one thinks anything unusual has happened.
By a combination of circumstances, somewhat my “fault”, my University of Texas roommate Robyn ended up living quite near me in Europe: she has long been in Neuchatel, Switzerland; I lived for 17 years nearby in Italy, first in Milan, later on Lake Como. So we used to exchange visits fairly regularly. We especially enjoyed going up there for the local wine festival every September. It wasn’t an internationally-famous event, but did draw visitors from outside the region.
One memorable year, we stayed late at one of the tents, sitting at long, communal tables, eating good, rustic food and drinking the more-than-decent local wine out of plastic cups. Buxom, middle-aged Swiss farm wives danced the Macarena on the tables, and a good time was being had by all.
In 1976, after a period of unemployment in Connecticut, my father accepted a job with Save the Children (US), as country head of their operations in Bangladesh. He and I and my stepmother Nancy moved to Dhaka (then spelled Dacca) around October, 1976. We didn’t take much with us. Our furniture, dishes, etc went into storage in the US. I took a few treasures – some board games, my plastic animals – and whatever warm-weather clothing I owned at the time.
Before leaving, we all got lots of vaccinations, and the dental work that we hadn’t been able to afford for a while – Nancy proved to have a mouthful of cavities.
I guess we flew from the US east coast to the west coast and then to Korea, where we were hosted by the Korean arm of Save the Children as an opportunity for my dad to learn from projects that the organization was carrying out there.
