Chemo Camp Finale — Letters from Home

Nov. 17, 2020

I have been thinking about y’all a lot lately. Who, you say? Y’all. All y’all, as we love saying in my Neck of the woods. Do you see that stack of cards there? (more than 250 of them) The flowers? The little gifts? These things have filled my soul these past 18 months as I found myself captured in Chemo Camp.

So I have been thinking about all y’all who got me through it. Re-reading your notes and seeing your faces as I did, thinking of the emails, too, and your visits (way back when those where allowed), the food (Lord, have mercy, the FOOD!) the walks and the phone calls and the quiet moments when we sat in silence and you let me cry as I tried to take it all in. Your laughter. Your donations to Susan G. Komen and the Walk for the Cure. Your telling me I looked beautiful without my hair (though we all know I didn’t) — and now when you tell me you like my new “look”. Every single one of these things that you did for me has made my life so rich while I waited for camp to be over.

November 12, 2019

I didn’t save any letter my parents had time to write when I went to camp when I was 9. I wish I had (maybe my mother has saved the no doubt thousands of letters I wrote to her in the three short days I stayed, though if she has, she has not revealed this.) I’m sure if I had save those letters from home they would have been much like yours: We love you, you can do this, think of all the friends you’ll make and how much fun you’ll have (well, maybe not that last idea for chemo camp.)

When I thought I was going home from camp last November and then found out a week later that my mother was not, in fact, coming to pick me up, and that I would be staying for a whole ‘nother YEAR — you stayed right there with me, sending cards, calling, walking, assuring me that I could stay as long as was necessary, and then I could go home. (No more meals, but alas, I had packed on the casserole pounds in the previous year and girded with such sustenance, I soldiered on through more camp activities.)

Like target shooting.

I remember my daughter did this at her week-long camp and could easily hit the mark, so much so that when she CHOSE to become a camp counselor while in college, (she must have gotten that DNA somewhere else) the camp assigned her this post. My daughter and I have never been the kind of twinsy mother/daughter team some people think of. I spent years teaching her how not to be like me, so I consider this choice as making me, finally, a champion.

And then I became the target shooter, with only one goal in mind: Get rid of the damn cancer.

And guess what I did? I GOT RID OF IT, with the guiding lights of my doctors and the nurses at the Rex Cancer Center, who finally LET ME GO HOME last Tuesday. All by myself.

Though my old pal Tim and my nurse Hope (who hugged me, despite all the rules) wished me well, I drove away, with only the shadow of a tear in my eye.

“She’s grown,” I could hear my mother say. “You have handled yourself admirably,” my brother actually texted.

That part, “admirably,” he quoted what my father might have said, if he were to have reluctantly shoved me off to cancer camp. He is right, Daddy would have said that, but I honestly don’t quite understand.

A friend of mine who had cancer just before me has said often “cancer can’t wait.” (It’s a tagline for a local organization raising money to cure every kind of cancer affecting women, not just breast.) And this is so very true. Sorting through all my cards the other day, I found an email I wrote to my Bible study on May 15, 2019, the day I got the news. I was to lead it the next day, and I told them, so niavely, that a cancer diagnosis would not disrupt the dozens of plans I had for my life in the year to come.

How wrong I was. A cancer diagnosis does NOT wait. Within minutes of learning you have it, you turn you life over to those caring for you and though you ask a thousand and more questions, not one of them is “when?” because the answer is always: “right now.”

One of the few things I remember about real camp is the swimming test. Everybody had to take it, no matter what. I remember looking at the murky river water with the tadpoles swimming in it and asking, “when?” and they said pretty much: “Now”. And I had only two choices: dive in and get it over with, or wade in and swim from one point to the next, as best I could. No bravery. Just truth.

The same is true for Chemo Camp.

On the first round, I dove, head first, not knowing much about what it would do to me (though they did tell me as honestly as they could.) The second time, I waded in, testing the waters a bit, though I knew I’d eventually I’d have to make that dive. And I did.

But despite what some have written me, I am no hero.

My doctor is a hero. She has done the hard work of puzzle master, her fine mind taking my own curious circumstances — three kinds of breast cancer — to task, until she found the exact cocktail combination to cure me. Did you get that? CURE ME. Which she did.

My nurses are heroes. They greeted me and all the other cancer patients as if we were the only one in the room, day after day, caring for us when some get our walking papers, and when some don’t ever. They are gracious and loving and champions for all.

And then they let me go. Tuesday a week ago. Just like that.

I was a puddle. Honestly. After a quiet day in the chemo room I was looking for the marching band. A raised pom pom or two. But when that did not arrive, I looked to Hope, who had nursed me on my darkest day, probably, when I was the most homesick I had ever been in my adult world.

“I wish I could hug you,” I told her. “I will never forget your kindness to me.”

“You are gettin’ it!” she said, breaking all the rules of COVID and giving me a hug I had not had from anyone except my husband in too many months. It was tight. And we sobbed. And I felt healed.

Back at home, family had filled my kitchen with pink. Two dozen roses, one dozen from my birth family and mother, and the other from my family by my daughter’s marriage. “Welcome home from camp,” their card said. Tickled me pink.

When you have cancer and get through treatment, you pick your ‘cancervesary’ as a way to remember it. Could be the day you are diagnosed or the day you felt healed or the day, through surgery, when cancer took leave of your body. That day, the day cancer took leave of me, was one year ago today.

So I take today to celebrate. And on this day before Thanksgiving, to be thankful to God for all of you.

I also want to honor all those who have gone before me in this camp. Who carved their initials on the scaffolding and in the bathrooms and on the the sheetrock that holds so many of these camps in place. I don’t know your names, but all ya’ll have come before me and I thank you for your service and your commitment to allowing doctors to study the disease in you, so that I might live. I honor hundreds of thousands of you, some of whom aren’t here any more, but so many of us are here and leaving our cancer days behind because of you.

I will not forget that.

Now back to the pile sitting in the picture at the beginning of this post. Thank you all for your letters and your love and for not letting go of me when I was taking the swim test at camp. I survived because of you, too, and I’m forever grateful that you cheered me on as I made it, finally, to the other side.

Much love,

Sooze

Campfires Burning, Part I

Anyone who knows me well at all has heard my camp story. It’s legend in my family, and as we head into our annual beach week, it’s bound to come up. How my parents sent me to a two-week stint at an Episcopal Church camp on the Pamlico River where my sister had gone and loved it. And how I didn’t stay. We sit around the kitchen table and laugh about how the counselors all tried to entertain me with sailing lessons and camp fires and songs and whatnot, but I was having nothing of it. All I wanted was to go home and sit at the feet of my mother.

Since it’s my story to tell, I’ll tell what I remember. And it’s a lot. I was excited about going, spending what felt like weeks packing my steamer trunk with all I needed for that whole two weeks — short sets and new Keds and books and my Bible. Towels and clean white underwear and white socks. Crisp white notepaper and stamps for writing home. Some cash money for something called Canteen. Sheets and a blanket that smelled just like my mother’s linen closet.

When the day came, I was ready, and my mother drove me, with a friend, I think, the two or so hours to the river. The counselors took me to my assigned cabin, and I dragged my trunk up the steps and into a room filled with bunks. First issue: I had the top bunk. Second issue: No private bathroom stalls, but a room filled with showers with flimsy curtains and girls everywhere. It was almost as if I was late getting there. Then we all donned our bathing suits and headed to the river for the swim test. I think I passed, because they let me in the murky water the next day.

I tried not to cry that first night, up in the air as I was with the crickets hiding in the rafters, but it was hard. I was quiet, at least I hoped. The next day, we got to the work of riverside camp life — swimming and learning to sail a Sunfish, meeting each other, taking a group picture by the chapel. I have it somewhere. I felt like I met everybody in camp that day, boys and girls, even enough to pick out which boys I thought were cute! At the time, they say, I had the memory of an elephant, and I recall some of them still. (Yes later, one of my three-day crushes joined my church. I remembered him, but he did NOT remember me. Big surprise!)

It seemed pretty fun, but I was wary, having never spent time away from home except at my grandparents house. Back then, I’d stand in front of my mother’s wedding portrait and wail. But I was about to go into the fourth grade, and I was a big girl.

But at supper after my first full day of camp, they served me milk.

I have hated milk since I was a baby, and my mother used to add chocolate or sugar and vanilla just to get me to drink a whole glass at supper. But I gagged at the thought of drinking a carton of plain milk.

Chocolate please? None here, they said.

What about water?

Nope. Milk it is or nothing.

So I began to cry. And what these kind people had no idea about was that when I started, there was just no way to stop it, as the Broadway song goes. So I cried and cried. And cried some more.

The next day, the camp assigned me my own counselor, a cute young college kid who took me sailing and tried to talk me out of my misery. (Many years later, I would sit in front of his sister at church. All Eastern NC roads lead to other Eastern NC roads, but I digress.)

But even on a bright day with the wind in my face, there was nothing he could do. By afternoon, they let me call my mother, just to speak, but I pleaded for her, screaming, to come and get me.

On the third day she finally relented, and I waited on the steps of my cabin, my trunk packed, until the station wagon pulled up, my sister riding shotgun.

And this is where the legend really begins.

We walked around camp, and I showed her everything I’d done in the past three days. I held on to her, afraid she would sneak away from me, until I heard the words: Ok, go in the cabin and get your trunk.

Joy! Relief! I was going home! Forged by this news and super human strength, I dragged the trunk out onto the sandy soil, only to see my mother’s station wagon driving out of the camp gates in the flurry of dust. I ran behind her, sobbing, stop! STOP!!!! And just before she reached the arched entryway, her brake lights flickered.

I can’t imagine what went through her mind as she set her foot on the brakes, or the conversation in the car, or when she saw me run into the cabin. Or in my sister’s, as she witnessed the three-point turnaround to flee — though I would learn later that she begged to take my place. (Here with me a few days ago, she still can’t believe our mother made the decision to leave me.)

I don’t want to cast my mother as cruel here. She is not, and she was not then. I think she was trying to break me of my dependence on her, trying to make me stronger, as she had tried so many times in my short, almost 10-year-old life.

She drove me home that day saying I’d be grounded for the full two weeks I would have spent at camp, and I was ecstatic! I never returned to camp until I took my own second grader to a camp all the way across the state, and I cried the entire way home.

I’ve thought about my camp story a lot in the past few weeks, as I have begun a new kind of camp, one where there is no going home, no matter how much I wish my mother could rescue me. This time, she leaves me standing in the middle of that swirling cloud of dust and sand and her taillights never flicker.

And I’m the one who turns around and heads into the cabin and opens the trunk to see what she has hidden there for me.

Just after Mother’s Day I was diagnosed with breast cancer. In the weeks since, I’ve heard it called a journey, but it feels more like a kidnapping, so I’ll stick with that as I move through it. A journey to me is something you choose, like a pilgrimage or a river cruise and a trip to the Grand Canyon, something vast and inspiring, and one you hope will change you. Not that this kidnapping won’t change me — it already has — and though it’s come with lots of colorful brochures, it still feels a bit like I’m stuck on the top bunk in a place I really, really don’t want to be.

But in these weeks, I’ve found that my cabin is full of amazing women who didn’t want to be there, either. But they navigated the murky waters from that top bunk where newbies like me land, to the door where they have welcomed me, heavy-laden trunk and all.

So Chemo Camp has begun, and for the next few months I’m stuck here as the Red Devil, as they all it, seeps into my core and does its work, trying to kill what’s in me without actually killing me. So far, my days have been spent meeting some beautiful faces — almost all of them women — in my church, in my neighborhood, on my care team, in the hospital — and this time, my camp days seem almost bearable. I’ll tell you about them in later posts, as I this kidnapping drama continues.

I realize I’m mixing my metaphors here. Camp and kidnapping are not at all the same thing — for most people. But I’m finding out lately that I am not most people, at least in the kind of cancer I have (two kinds — Triple Negative and invasive ductal, in the same breast. UPDATE: 3!) Typical me, that.

But I promise not to be unique in the way I navigate it. When I first began sharing with friends, I wrote that there was no way through it except through it. A few weeks later, a friend sent me a book of daily meditations, and there it was in Psalm 21: “‘Lift up your eyes it the hills’ and go forward. There is no other way.”

I won’t be writing only about my cancer on this new blog. That’s not fun! But I will be sharing the gifts that come an almost daily basis. One friend, diagnosed last year and not yet 40 — just as she was about to give birth to her fourth child — wrote to me that she wished people would treat each other all the time like they do when they hear the word cancer. (She is cancer free after a year, with a beautiful healthy year-old baby boy!)

She is right. It’s been like having a birthday, almost every day for the past two months. Cards come, presents, flowers from gardens, food and visits. I couldn’t have told you the last time a friend stopped by for a real visit, until this happened to me. It’s been wonderful to feel so loved, and it’s humbling. To know that so many are thinking of me and praying for my healing is beyond measure. And I’m learning how to respond when I hear — and I will — that someone else around me has been kidnapped as well.

So I thank my mother, both for taking me home that day, but instilling in me that some things you just have to get through. You have the tools, and you will help others as you use them. She has done a lot of that in her life, and knowing that her youngest child has to go through this might be the hardest for her yet.

But I am not alone. I have my family, my faith and my cabin mates. And I have my trunk. And I know my mother packed it well.

+++

ps: Years after Camp I was on a book tour for Nags Headers, signing books in Elizabeth City, NC, when a woman asked me to sign a book for a child whose last name was Spence. “I knew a Penny Spence from here years ago at camp,” I said. From way down the line I heard a voice: “I’m Penny Spence.” She didn’t remember me, but I did her. I have a picture of her by the door of our cabin.

Susanbyrumrountree.com is the original work of author Susan Byrum Rountree. It is copyright protected and may not be used without permission of the author.

keep the sparkle

note: i know, i know... i'm terrible at keeping this thing up. but i finally found a story yesterday when i wasn't event looking. so there.

i called my mother yesterday. it was her wedding anniversary, the third one since my father died, and i'd forgotten to send her a card or a flower. we get busy in our lives, i know, and as i thought about the note or the flower, i realized that the one thing she wanted i couldn't give her. my voice would have to do.

how are you? i asked.

'tired,' she said.

from what?

'i washed the windows today,' she said.

windows?

my mother is 88 years old. she lives in a beautiful home filled with windows that let the sun in, in the morning, where the moon casts a soft glow over the living room rug at night. and she does not like a dingy window — never has. 

'

i thought i'd start with the front bedroom window and just go along, one or two at a time, she told me. 'but you know me.'

don't i. i have a lifetime of knowing  the woman who would remake my bed if it didn't suit her, whose linen closet i used to stand and admire for its geometric organization, the same woman who scoured the whole house spring and fall so when we came home from school you could

feel

the sparkle. 

18 windows, she said. and she just kept going along until she had cleaned practically every window in the house, almost by accident. (her sunroom is literally filled with windows. to be fair, one window is safely out of reach.)

18. 

on a recent visit to her house i scanned her fridge for the latest comic, since there has been one there since my childhood. tacked close to one featuring a character not being able to hear was an article suggesting that a clean house for the elderly has a direct correlation to their mental and physical stability. as if she needed proof that all her years of home keeping was finally worth the work. 

she used to say she never needed to exercise because she vacuumed every day and that was plenty. and it was.

my mother's house is ever ready for company: flowers on the kitchen table, beds made up with soft sheets, pillows piled high and towels hung, waiting. even my son says it's the most comfortable house he's ever slept in. i don't know about you, but i will hope my imagined grandchildren will feel the same about mine.

do you know what day it is? i asked her before hanging up.

'yes,' she said. 'keeping the windows kept my mind busy.'

busy with memory, surely, of the years she and my father sparkled— and there were almost 61 of those.

my mother no doubt slept hard last night, as we like to say where i come from,  climbing between her own soft sheets, knowing her hands had touched every pane in that house and left it gleaming.

a lot has happened since my father has been gone. grandchildren married. great-grandchildren born and too many hoped for lost. we could have used his wisdom in the time since, which at times seem like years and others like just days. i'm sure it feels like that in every loss.

but my mother, as always, provides perspective. there still is a bit of sparkle left, even in my father's absence. for one full day she polished her windows to a spit shine, no doubt remembering as she washed each pane, the life she spent with my father, remembering their sparkle in the sheen.

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

it's a wrap

the lady walked up to the giftwrap station at Pittman's, the small department store where i was spending the better part of Christmas vacation wrapping presents, and handed me her bag. i peeked inside, finding a dozen or so pairs of tighty-whities and another dozen pairs of white athletic socks.(the trims were different colors as i recall.)

i know i blushed. was she the mother of a boy from my class? lord i hoped not. underwear was not a discussable item in my house in the 1970s — well not now either, come to think of it. (politics, yes, as long as you voted for Nixon), but not 

underwear, and certainly not tight-whities!

in my family, underwear was a utility item, bought on a summer saturday when the last pair had holes in it. Christmas was for surprises and wants, not for needs.

but back to the job at hand.

as the lady stood by me, i pulled out a two large boxes from the pile and some tissue, planning to place the whities in one and the socks in another. i probably huffed a few times, too, though i don't recall that. i mean, couldn't she have bought them cargo pants or a jean jacket, or brogans, something cool? (all of these things were available at Pittman's.)

wrap 'em separately,  she said. 

really? all of them? i glanced at my watch, calculating the time it would take me to wrap two dozen small boxes before closing, which in my memory was only minutes away. my church youth group was putting on "The Homecoming" that night, and i'd have to head home, grab a bite and dress for my role (my stage debut!) as Mary Ellen Walton. there was not time in my life for 24 boxes of briefs and socks, wrapped and bowed. 

but.

i had a job to do, and Edna Earle, (yes, really, that was her name) — Pittman's ever-present clerk, hovered to make sure i was efficient.

once i got over my embarrassment, i set to work, trying not to imagine who'd be opening these particular packages on Christmas morning.

+++

it was a rite of passage for the girls in my town to pay their dues behind the wrapping station at Pittman's. my sister, Pamula, had loved the work, and even now when she gives me a package i can see the results of her hours logged there as a teen. sides tight, ends as perfect as my mother's hospital corners. bow pert and beautiful.

not so much me. that exercise in learning how to estimate how much paper i needed (no wasting, please), or how to rip it away from the giant roll leaving a perfect edge, to fold the corners exact and flat and keep the tape straight, well, this was lost on me.

thank goodness i found another career.

+++

in a week, it will all be over, but there is wrapping yet to do. these days i don't have anyplace else to go except to sleep once the wrapping is done, yet i avoid it. 

though i try to fold exact corners and tie a fancy ribbon, my packages look like they were wrapped by that anxious teenager, weary of the job of wrapping dozens of tighty-whities for some unknown stranger. (thank heavens for small favors.)

but with the FAM coming in on Sunday, i could avoid no more, so i set up my wrapping station on the kitchen island, turned the bose to my Pandora Christmas and set to work. 

though at first the memory of Pittman's and all those socks yet to wrap hovered for a little bit, something else came through my thoughts that i hadn't expected. our first Christmas in our small house in Atlanta, and my husband had found a jazz station on the radio, playing Christmas music like i'd never heard before. (we weren't all about that jazz where i came from. mitch miller, sure, or even perry como, but this? lyrical, but without the lyrics. it was fine.)

soon i was lost in the memory ofpre-Christmas 1984, seeing my (much, much thinner) self wrapping the set of blocks my daughter would get for her first Christmas, tying a bow at the neck of the wooden rocking horse (SO impractical for a baby of one, but what the who?) and wrapping the few but carefully chosen gifts for my family, all in plain brown paper and plaid ribbon. (you can take the girl out of the country, and all that, but...)

i remember that night feeling so full of love for my small family, excited to celebrate the best gift we'd received already that year — the baby who slept just down the hall.

+++

music, of course, is the bridge to memory. 

as Christmases passed, i bought cassette tapes, then CDs of many of my jazz flavor favorites, practically wearing them out from Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve in the car and at home. among the melodies is a string version of

"Of the Father's Love Begotten,"

that brings me to tears every time i hear it.

tonight i think about all that's wrapped up in this particular Christmas memory, grateful 

for my not so young family, 

for gifted musicians, and for those years long ago when i worked at a job that taught me about serving others even when i didn't feel like it — and wasn't particularly good at it.

and, by the way, though my mother is probably cringing as she reads this, we are boxer people. 

no 

tighty-whities here, though i do wrap them separately from the socks.

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.