The Feast of St. Peregrine

I have a beaded bracelet I wear with a little St. Peregrine charm. St. Peregrine is the patron saint of cancer. I am not catholic.

I carry in my pockets, and strewn about the house, are stones and crystals given to me for luck, healing, strength. Some given to me from personal collections, others bought, a few even hand tumbled. One was given to a friend, to give to me, which she was told carries a blessing from the Dali Lama.

A Guatemalan friend's mother I have never met sends me religious memes and bible verses which I use Google to translate. Billy got off the phone with AT&T the other day to tell me, his new Hindu friend, who he met on the other side of the line, offered a prayer.

Last Friday, May 2, I had my first scan. It was good news. Original tumor "appears resolved". Liver metastasis show signs they are dying or dead.

I told my family the news. My sister-in-law told me her church was celebrating the feast of St. Peregrine on Monday.

That same Monday, the liver surgeon let us know they are stopping chemo for the moment and they are ready to operate. It was a long shot. The lesions were basically legion. While you can live with only 1/3 of your liver, there wasn't 1/3 without lesions and as that same surgeon has so eloquently pointed out earlier, "to operate on both sides of the liver, this does not support life." But being able to operate, this does support life. "Don't lose hope," he had told us.

I don't know the full extent of what that surgery looks like. I don't even want to say anything too loudly for fear some malevolent force finds out I squeezed through the cracks. I am laying low. Playing it cool. Cancer is a long game of Chutes and Ladders.

My daughter closes her prayer every night with, "please make everything work out the way it's supposed to." On my walks, I run my fingers over the smooth rocks in my pocket, each with imbued with their earthy and magical energies and recite her prayer.

A friend of ours runs an Oscar Pool every year. This year, with a little more time on my hands, I binged almost all the nominees, and for the first time I made informed choices. I still lost miserably. I did not expect to love Conclave. I went into it begrudgingly. I was riveted. The costumes, the pace, the intrigue. Stanley Tucci asking for forgiveness. The script, more tightly edited than a a Cormac McCarthy novel. Shots composed with all the intentionality of a Wes Anderson movie, but without any of the pretentiousness. I found it profoundly relevant politically and personally. In particular, this:

"..let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty...Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith."