When asked if he’d ever been lost Daniel Boone replied, “I’ve never been lost, but I was mighty turned around for three days once.” I’ve been turned around myself – might have even called it lost:

• Ended up in the parking lot after hiking six miles in a hail storm. Had a map. Needed a compass.
• Went up the wrong chute on Lucy’s Foot Pass last summer and couldn’t get over to the other side. Had to bail and hike back down.
• Hiked around Red Devil Lake instead of directly to it inciting panic in my husband when he found me missing.
• Followed a creek eastward for about a mile alone on an after dinner saunter only to look up and face the western setting sun. My first thought: God moved the sun, not that the creek curved.

Other times to prevent getting lost I’ve gotten hints of intel from others, like the time a ranger atop Kearsarge Pass told us which side of the creek was easier to bushwhack through in Gardiner Basin. I’ve used Secor’s book, High Sierra Peaks, Passes, and Trails to plot many a cross-country Sierra adventure. Other times I’ve wandered lost in a dense mountain forest following others I’ve trusted. (Thanks Rolland for introducing me to cross-country hiking.)

I’ve even taught map and compass lessons to my clients. My most valuable lessons: Stay found. Know where you are. Know where the trail goes. Know where the water is (it’s in the low places just like in the bottom of your water glass). Keep an eye on what to expect and note it as you pass. Know which general direction your car is (baseline), so you can get back to it. Know your drainages (handrails). Like Muir said, “The creeks and rivers are the streets of the Sierra.”

But I’ve never stepped onto a tail or path or into the wild with neither a map OR compass, an idea of where I would be going, what to expect, or without friends for support and to argue our way toward the correct route.

This path through cancer is new territory and I have no map OR compass. Even though this is a recurrence of the original invasion from twenty years ago, which was also uncharted territory, metastatic cancer (I hate to even be associated with the words) is a whole different animal. You can’t just cut out the tumor, radiate the lymph nodes, and fry the rest of your body with chemo and hope you got it all. (Been there. Done that.) It’s all over. It has to be managed like a smelly tent-mate you can’t get rid of and you hope he doesn’t stab you through the heart in the middle of the night.

Afraid of the information I’ll find, I try to stay away from the internet. I’ve even told my doc that I’m too scared to know some of the statistics. I don’t want to know how steep and rocky the passes will be, how terrifying the stream crossings, how harsh the dry spells, or how this trip will end. What I do have are the creeks and rivers of my heart that I follow with confidence and friends and family to support me as I bumble my way along. (Thank you all for the cards, emails, texts, phone calls, food shopping, and surprise watermelons!)

Where does one learn how to navigate the landscape of their life? I don’t know. I suppose there are those who are taught by loving parents. In my late thirties I found myself as a blob of mud on the riverbank – formless, rootless, and more than a might turned around. Over time I fashioned myself with hands of love and compassion into the shape I was meant to be. I found myself most comfortable without a roof. I discovered that more than anything, I wanted to wander the Sierra. I found that being myself was my greatest gift (who knew!?), that friends were gold, that being gentle with myself was my path, and that my heart was my northern star.

I did not learn this from my mother.

My mother, always the martyr, would tell me things like, “Yah, I was in the hospital six months ago with a heart problem.” I’d respond in shock, “Why didn’t you tell me!?” her answer, “Well, there was nothing you could do.” In her eighties at the time, I knew my mother. I knew she muscled through her heart adventure alone and afraid, no map, no support, and saved up the telling for just the right moment, when she was guaranteed the biggest reaction. I was aware that this was a dance. I was tired of it AND I was hurt that my presence and support would mean nothing, that my shocked response was more important, was the attention she craved. The more shocked I was, the more she felt she mattered.

I have since wondered what neglect my mother suffered as a child that made her come to believe that shocking people with news of past drama was the closest she could feel to connection. Of course, in me it only created a momentary reaction that quickly turned into hurt, anger, and despair at my impotence over past and future events – probably everything she felt as a neglected child growing up as the “surprise gift” to older immigrant parents, over-worked and overwhelmed managers of a nineteen twenties speak easy in the Midwest. And no map provided except for what the nuns taught her: fear, shame, and suffering. If she survived by manipulating people into making her feel that she mattered, well, one does what one needs to in this big scary world to feel found.

Facebook can be cruel, unintentionally cruel, but cruel none the less. It seems like every morning Facebook presents a “memory,” usually a picture from some previous year of me out hiking with friends. I look at the picture. I see where I am, who I’m with, what flowers are blooming – and I say to myself, “That’s when I was healthy.” I haven’t seriously hiked since I went up Mt. Diablo to Juniper Campground on Burma Road January 14. The downhill painfully jolted my spine and I figured it was from my ice skating fall the previous week. I didn’t find out it was due to the possibility of something else until January 19. I say possibility because I didn’t believe the cancer marker test result I’d just seen in the John Muir Portal while sitting at my desk, alone for the weekend; or the repeat test. It wasn’t until I saw the bone scan on my doc’s computer screen – a skeleton lit up like the Milky Way with fast growing invaders, that the truth of the matter broke through my denial. I still asked my doc, “This isn’t from an injury is it?” She said, “No,” and I collapsed.

I’ve been trying to compare and contrast my new life and old life along with reconciling and accepting the change, even as my situation is fluid and changeable daily.  This time last year I’d wake up around 6 am on Tuesdays, get dressed, have breakfast, and head off to meet hiking friends at Peets Coffee in Walnut Creek before our 8 mile round trip, 2800 foot ascent and descent of Mt. Diablo on the steepest trail in the Bay Area, Burma Road. On Thursdays I’d do the same preparation and at 8 am meet friends at the Old Briones Road Trailhead here in Martinez for a ten-mile loop in Briones Regional Park. Friday would find me joining the Friday Hikers at some East Bay Regional Park that Larry Fong would pick and lunching with them afterwards. Occasionally, I’d join hikes on Mt. Tamalpais across the bay. Even during the Covid-19 quarantine, many of my hiking friends are still doing solo hikes or hikes with the correct social distancing.

On the other hand, at present I wake up at some undetermined time, depending on how well I’ve slept, stroll over to the kitchen, eat some Cheerios (now that I can eat) to keep the “morning sickness” at bay from the anti-estrogen shot I get once a month, and go back to bed and stare at my phone. I make sure my stomach is settled so that I will keep down my main anti-cancer pill and then wash it down with a few more Cheerios. After lazing around my eyes will get heavy and I’ll take a nap for an hour and a half. By now its noon or later. I’ll get up, wander around, and work on my next big job of the day:  bathing. Often I’m too weak to stand for a shower so I’ll take a bath. Afterwards, I’m so exhausted that I head dripping wet to the towel I’ve laid on my bed. After a while I’m up and dressed, having lunch and looking out the window to the back yard, contemplating a walk among my blooming poppies and lavender. Sometimes I just sit on the edge of the deck and take in the colors and feel the warm sunshine on my skin. Other times I walk around the back and sit down watching the bees. Today was a big day. In the evening I held onto Rick’s arm as we strolled to the end of the court and back. This is my day. I completed 20 bouts of radiation a week and a half ago and they tell me I’ll get better.

So it was in the spirit of comparing and contrasting my two lives that I found myself thinking about my nights and how I now tend to wake up nightly in a puddle of my own sweat. I like to think that these night sweats are due to intracellular toxins released by dying cancer cells, not hormone shifts from the Faslodex injection I get once a month. Having been dropped into menopause by chemo for my first bout of cancer twenty years ago, I never experienced hot flashes and night sweats. I’d rarely had them with the flu or when a fever broke but never every night, and not to the point of needing to sleep with a towel.

The whole idea of waking up soaking wet stirred a memory from the summer of 2016 when I woke up drenched in my sleeping bag in the backcountry, usually a very bad thing.  It was a special trip with friends – special for the first reason because it was a mistake. I requested the permit from Inyo National Forest six months in advance but mistakenly put July as the entry date instead of August. But a wilderness permit for ten out of South Lake on the east side of the Sierra should never be wasted so I sent out an email to a bunch of friends: “I am in possession of a wilderness permit out of South Lake and into Dusy Basin for July 19. Who’s with me?”  The emails immediately started pouring in:  “Count me in!” “Hell, ya!” In no time the permit was full and the trip was on.

Now, July in the eastern Sierra is a magical time and place. There’s still snow in the peaks, the sapphire lakes are “warm” enough to swim in, the wildflowers are at their peak, and the mosquitoes should be abating. Most of this group had roamed this cross country area before and in the whole 400 mile long range, it’s one of our favorites. This was to be an easy trip, a stroll.  I’d just completed a twenty-two day trek of the whole John Muir Trail with my sister the week before and, while I was still acclimated, I could use some rest. So for me, rest on this trip included carrying my pack over 12,000 foot Bishop Pass and a cross-country wander among granite boulders and wide open fell fields around flower-dotted crystal clear lakes with my tribe of hiker trash. There were no big mileage days, no exploratory loops into points unknown, just strolling and swimming and sunning on big granite slabs like lizards and catching up with each other.

The previous April I’d been sitting in a lawn chair around our group’s campfire in Yosemite Valley when I blurted out to my two young friends: “So when are you guys getting married?” The future mother-of-the-bride sitting next to me playfully swatted me with her hand and then conceded, “You can say that but, I can’t.” I knew that. I took full advantage of my unique position and put it right out there. Regina responded with a frustrated: “I’m waiting to be asked!” while Banning slunk in his chair, lowered his chin and quietly redeemed himself with, “I have a plan.”

Well, the night before we left for the Dusy Basin trip, Banning phoned my husband and warned him that he would be proposing on the upcoming backpack trip. We didn’t know when or where but it was going to be on the trip and it would be a surprise.

Our second backcountry lake was a high nameless one at 11,400 feet, that I call Big Beautiful. With a swimmer-friendly granite entry surrounded by some of the Sierra’s highest peaks, we had all swum and sunned; our pink, naked, hairless, bodies all splayed out in contrast on the sharp granite. Dinner was cozy in a granite amphitheater overlooking the lake. There had been circulating the notion that the question was to be popped after dinner when we would all go for a walk, with our cameras, toward a peninsula that jutted out into the lake, ostensibly to capture the sunset. We all kept our distance and set up our tripods for “the sunset” as the couple wandered toward the peninsula. Then suddenly, with gasps from all of us, the knee hit the granite, shutters clicked away, and the globe rocked a bit on its axis. That’s the second reason that this trip was special.

We were way above treeline so I slept on my pads in my husband’s tent and not in my hammock, like usual, (no trees to hang it from). But, not before we stayed up to watch the full moon crest the peaks to the east and spread spangles across the lake. The next day, I suggested we drop down a few hundred feet into the trees so that I could sleep in my hammock.

By now, you’re probably wondering what this story has to do with night sweats. Well. it’s a long winded walk down memory lane to when I experienced the one and only time that I thought I’d, unbeknownst to me, peed in my sleeping bag overnight – another kind of waking up in a puddle. Even in summer, high altitudes in the Sierra can get cold at night – really cold, frost-on-your-bag, and ice-in-the-puddles cold. Especially because I’m swaying in a hammock, surrounded by air, hanging in the Universe under a spray of stars, I can be colder than the others even if they’re cowboy camping on the ground. To mitigate that I’ll often boil water in a pot on my stove and fill a plastic one-liter Platypus water bag with the hot water and place it in my sleeping bag like a hot water bottle. This is what I did that night. For twenty years this method had kept me toasty without one leak. Well, I awoke warm and cozy in the morning sunshine, but damp. Had I peed myself? A quick look at the Platy revealed an empty vessel. There was relief of a sort that I didn’t need the Depends that I thought I might, but also a deep worry because if this had been a very cold rainy day coming up, I might not be able to dry my sleeping bag out. As it turned out it was another hot, sunny day with more swimming, sunning, and drying out of the sleeping bag.

So, the lesson in comparing and contrasting my present and past life is that, no, they aren’t so different, after all. Maybe if I can just pretend that my night sweats are as annoying as a leaky Platypus in the backcountry with a sunny day ahead to dry out, I’ll feel better about the whole thing. Just thinking about this memory makes me happy. I have a LOT of those kinds of memories in the bank and instead of seeing them as a cruel reminder of a happy past, I’m committing to treasuring every one and counting myself blessed to have lived them.

I haven’t posted in awhile because I’ve been waiting to feel better before I simply whine all over the page. It’s been a hellish two weeks suffering what I call the torment of the damned. My throat and esophagus were so burnt from the radiation to my spine that I could barely dribble down some water and no food. Rick dutifully collected all my little spoons and bowls of odd soft foods that I’d attempt to eat and then abandon all over the house. Jell-O hurt. Milkshakes hurt. Applesauce hurt. Water hurt. Burps hurt. I told them that radiating someone’s esophagus should be outlawed. I ended up receiving IV hydration at the hospital Monday through Friday last week. The pain was like a hot pipe inserted down my throat all the way to my stomach. It felt like the little chartreuse green radioactive brick that Homer Simpson tossed out his car window on the way home from work at the nuclear power plant ended up in my throat. If my esophagus looks anything like the radiation burns down the center of my back, it would explain why it hurts so bad. The pain keeps me up but before it wakes me I have two favorite moments every night. The first is that delicious fleeting moment upon rising out of sound sleep when I’m barely conscious but there is no pain. The second moment is the one that immediately follows: just before I remember that my body is riddled with cancer.

I’ve been quarantined except for hospital visits for two weeks now. I cannot afford to get Covid-19. Rick has bleached all washable surfaces – counters, door knobs, handles, my car’s steering wheel. IBrance knocks down white blood cells and red cells leaving my immune system weakened. This mountain woman has rarely thought of herself as fragile. Alas, I am only human and this mortal flesh is getting heavily bombarded in the name of extending my life. I’m currently on my second ten-day stretch of radiation, this time where the tip of my hip screw is screwed into a cancerous chunk of bone in my pelvis and an especially painful lower right couple of ribs. They’ve assured me that the beam through the hip is not hitting any painful internal organs and the zapping of the ribs is a tangential glancing blow across the bow. I keep trying to remember that I’m investing in my future – a future where I can play with my grand babies, watch them grow and become their own unique people, and witness my children’s pride; a future where I sit by a mountain lake sharing a meal with friends; or sit in the sand by our cove in Mexico sipping a Margarita with Julie and Marty.

The radiation has left me exhausted. I can walk about 20 steps. I walk to the kitchen and put my head on the counter. I walk to the living room and toss myself onto the couch. I nap three times a day. Where is that woman pushing her way up Lucy’s Foot Pass in Kings Canyon last August? The danger in being a Clinical Lab Scientist (married to a PhD in Biochemistry) is that I know a lot of things that can go wrong and I pester my doctor about all my hunches to explain things. Thinking the exhaustion is due to frying my thyroid while zapping my spine, I had a TSH done. No, it’s fine. Thinking my red cells got too low, I had a CBC done. No, my hemoglobin’s an 11, fine. Crap. I guess I just have to weather this.

So, bottom line: I’m now able to eat some and drink, although it’s still an effort and a fight against pain. I nap my day away and wonder if this is my new normal. On a stormy ever changing sea, I’m trying to see what this journey ahead will be like and I get worried that this is it. With the preciousness of life never more evident, I feel like I’m wasting it.

But, one thing’s for certain, the cards and texts, flowers, calls, emails, and even homemade cookies! have sustained me and put a smile on my face. Thank you all. Banning and Regina, and others, are shopping for us. People are supporting Rick in ways that I don’t even know. And Rick has been there from badgering me to drink to holding the bucket when I lose it. I could not have done this alone. And even as the stock market crashes, what’s really important has never been more evident.

The Short of It:

Diagnosed in late January with metastatic breast cancer: spine, ribs, pelvis, shoulder blades, spleen, liver. It can be managed but, at this point, not cured. I will have good days and bad days. This is a big mountain I’m climbing with no summit.

Rules of Engagement:

Do not ask me, “How’s YOUR cancer?” (I’m not taking possession of these wayward cells. I’m trying to get RID of them.) DO say, “How’re you doing?” “What are they doing for you?” I’ll give you as much detail as you’d like or no detail at all.

Do not ask me how long I have to live. (I don’t know. IBrance is only 6 years old. )

DON’T say: It’s God’s will. God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.

DO send cards, texts, emails, phone calls.

DO tell me about your trips and adventures.

Be prepared for hearing how shitty I feel and don’t try to fix it. (They keep telling me I’ll feel better.)

DO let me cry if I need to cry. Hugs are welcome.

DO ask if there’s anything you can do. Mostly staying in touch is the best medicine.

I thought I kicked breast cancer 20 years ago with a mastectomy, chemo, and radiation. Apparently, at least one cell survived and has decided to party. I’ve lead a very healthy active life since my initial “cure” and this diagnosis has filled me with shock, sadness, and a bit of anger.

Scans, tests, and a liver biopsy later, I’m on an Estrogen blocker and IBrance, a cell cycle disrupter for E+, Her2 – disseminated breast cancer. I recently had my spine radiated for 2 weeks to remove the ice pick of pain out of my back. Unfortunately, my throat was in the way and now I can hardly eat or drink. Imagine Chernobyl in your esophagus. I’m getting an IV of fluids here as I type.

My doc is wonderful. She remains “optimistic” and says I have years. I want at least 30.

My husband, Rick, says that our failed attempt at Lucy’s Footpass in Kings Canyon last August cannot be my last backpack trip, although there’s a spot in my pelvis where a screw tip for my titanium hip will have to be radiated, and grow new bone first. The Grand Canyon rafting trip is off. Doc doesn’t want me breaking vertebrae in the bottom of the canyon. Darn.

While calls, cards, emails, and texts are my lifeline of connectivity, this will be a good place for current updates and insights on my journey – medically, emotionally, and spiritually. I told God during the initial bout that I was willing to learn ALL the lessons I needed to because I was NOT going to do this again. Well, apparently there is more to learn. Follow along. It’s gonna take a village.