Recovery and the Red Sox
October has been the hardest month of my recovery. And that’s saying a lot, considering I’ve made it through memory loss, surgery, and five of twelve chemo sessions. What’s so hard now is, ironically, learning to deal with being healthy.
Or specifically, being healthy after being scary-sick. When you’re sick, it’s easy to let your fight be what you concentrate on—or avoid—all day long. For me that meant talking things out with my family and doctors or taking in yet another Law and Order mini-marathon. Nothing mattered but recovery.
It’s not enough, though, to beat cancer and get back to your pre-cancer version of 100%. Illness makes you feel especially mortal; recovery makes you feel especially blessed. So all of the sudden it’s not acceptable to yourself to be 100%. You have to be better than your previous self, to make the best use of what feels like a second chance.
For me that means figuring out how the hell my fiancee and I are going to be in the financial position to protect and comfort our future kids as our parents have done for us these last few months. That impulse builds into dissatisfaction and a little regret: how do I turn a Communications degree and an M.F.A. into a life for my kids that’s better than what I’ve been given?
On top of this—and part of the same struggle in my mind—is the fact that cancer-survivor Jon Lester is starting Game 4 of the World Series tonight for the Red Sox. The Sox, behind only my friends and family and docs, helped me get through these months. Clay Buchholz’s no-hitter on September 1 is the first vivid, undiluted memory I have since getting sick. And watching every game since then—attending two myself, watching them clinch the A.L. East, sweep the Angels, stun the Indians—has become such an important routine and part of my recovery that for the first time, though I’ve always been a huge baseball fan, I don’t know what I’m going to do when the baseball season is over. Heck, even the end of my chemo roughly coincides with pitchers and catchers reporting to Spring Training next year. . . . with the Sox entertaining me every night, Lester starting the potential clinching game tonight, and chemo ending with Spring Training, I finally understand how wrapped up the life-long residents of my adoptive city gets into the rhythm of the Red Sox. And I really don’t know what I’m going to do without baseball besides going back to the top of this post to address the issue of what more I can do in the meantime. It’s impossible not to feel like I owe my family, my friends, my fiancee, my doctors, my employer, Law and Order creator Dick Wolf, and the entire Red Sox organization not only a full recovery but a better self.
