When Your Brain Feels Like Ham

Monday, under the delightful, easy fog of sedation for a procedure where they inserted radioactive microbeads into my liver to kill the largest lesion, I spent a few hours exploring all sorts of ideas. One in particular I turned into a short piece. In my head I shaped it word by word, paragraph by paragraph. But like any good dream, like most thoughts I have these days, I turn my head to do something about them, and they are gone. Like, GONE. My brain feels like ham. It might have once been a squiggly little piglet, rooting around with a keen sense of smell, digging up precious truffles. But that little piggy got caught in a medical snare on its way to the market and it got sliced up, scooped out, hammered thin, seasoned with fillers, and pumped full of nitrates. That bag of watery cancer causing ham slices in the fridge? That’s my brain. Gotta use it up before it goes all the way bad.

I had a dream the other night that Wren was a toddler again. I couldn’t find her. And I could not for the life of me remember where I saw her last or where she was supposed to be. Was she supposed to be with a nanny or in day care? Was she there now and I was panicking for nothing? Was she at home at this moment and I just forgot about her and left? I pulled out my phone to call Billy but couldn’t remember his number. I couldn’t remember where I lived or when I’d last been home. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Wren. But she wasn’t with me and I didn’t know how to get back.

I haven’t had chemo since the end of October. The holidays were a wonderful time to feel like a real person again. I made batch after batch of cookies that were eaten faster than I could get them out the door to people’s houses. I started thinking about what’s next. Planning. Old habits die hard.

I didn’t do a lot of reflection in preparation for this year. I don’t have to think too hard about what happened this last year; the good, the bad. I was there for all of it. I don’t need to rehash it. It will take a lifetime to incorporate what I have learned here today. There is no rush. And honestly, I don’t look ahead to 2026 a whole lot differently. I know what’s coming. More procedures, more appointments, more chemo, more anxiety. It will be what it will be. There will also be good things. It will all happen. On New Year’s Eve I did not sit surrounded by magazines, hunting for images to represent what I want to happen or how I want to feel going forward. There were no paper scraps, double sided tape dispensers, or scissors strewn about. I did not start a new journal. I did not set goals. Last year I did not put the words “Cancer” up there, yet here we are. I did however have an image of Hawaii up and spent a week in Maui in August with my dear friend who invited me to join her. You lose some, you win some.

The work of being human is best done moment by moment, not year over year. It’s not about capturing the butterfly so you have something beautiful to look at each day. It’s that astonishing moment the butterfly darts in front of your face, all on its own, and snaps you out of whatever thought you were having. We never know the moments that will tattoo themselves on our hearts when they are happening. It takes time for memories to harden, set up space, and turn their light on. But imagine if you could. Imagine, not that you go back in time to that moment to appreciate it, but to be in the exact moment for the first time and be able, right then and there, to Feel. The. Fullness. Of. The. Emotion. Full. Stop. And, in that exact moment, where there is no time, where there is no past or future, just now, just this. Again, and again. Tap, tap, tap, as you guide the nomi in an ancient rhythmic motion, tattooing each second into the delicate skin that holds your heart.

A few years after my mom died, I got a tattoo: a winding flower vine goes up one side of my back and around to my other shoulder. A bird cage hangs from the vine in the middle of my back. The door to the cage is open and three little birds fly free, one for each of us; me, my mom, and Wren. My mom asked me years before she died, when she probably thought I was a bit too rebellious, “please, the one thing I ask is just never get a tattoo.” But I figured since she was dead, she probably wouldn’t mind. And maybe she’d even understand now. It took 2 3-hour sessions. One for the outline and one for all the shading. It was intense to sit with the drone of the needle for 6 hours. 6 hours of recall. The good, the bad. The things we’d won, what we’d lost. Tap, tap, tap. I breathed in. I breathed out. Just this moment. Then the next. And the next after that. And that’s how you get through hard stuff. My brain was about ham by the end of it. But externalizing the pain healed something in me.

Trauma changes you. We are biological beings. Biology demands that we adapt or die. The universe and everything in it has been adapting or dying since the beginning of time. It’s as much work to adapt to dying as it is to adapt again to living. Both take the kind of time that is outside of time, as well as the kind of time that is bound by time. When you hear you might die, you learn to take up time in a different way. You realize there is a whole lot more to a second than a second. There is time within time. When you get yanked back to the land of the living, it’s easy to forget. And you start to skip ahead. Make plans. Think about making dinner before you’re done with breakfast. Plan for Christmas and it’s not even Thanksgiving. You don’t get handed a medal for surviving cancer as much as you do a grocery list. There’s something holy about the time within time. And something holy about the things that shove you into that space. Why does dying feel more holy than living?

I sit at the start of this new year with a keyboard in my lap. No plans and no idea what to write. Tap, tap, tap. Breath in. Breath out. Just this moment. Then the next. It’s also a really interesting way to get through the good stuff. Especially when trying to remember makes your brain feel like ham.