Every Day Is Your Birthday
Celebrating this newsletter's anniversary the only way we know how: half-assedly.
Two things I don’t like: birthdays and social media. Where these two things have met, historically, is that I am notorious among my friends for having the intentionally wrong birthday listed on Facebook, so what happens is every year on some random day I get a bunch of texts along the lines of, “I know this isn’t your real birthday but happy birthday anyway, asshole!” And this suits me just fine. It’s like I get to protest both things at once, and conscript my friends into doing so, too. Win win.
But oh how things change. Because exactly one year ago, I decided to start the newsletter you are now reading, to chronicle my battle with cancer, and I figured if I was going to be putting my very limited energy into this thing each week, then I might as well try to promote it, which meant (sigh) sprucing up my socials. And so now a few things are true: 1. I’m relatively active on social media in a way I never was before (bigger sigh); and 2. Somehow, my real birthday found its way onto my FB profile in the process.
Oh, and I guess I buried the lede there: It’s the one-year anniversary of Healings.
Wait, did I do that wrong? Lemme try again: It’s the one-year anniversary of Healings!!!
Party.
I suppose if I were better at social media and promotions generally (and if I actually liked birthdays), then I might have made a bigger deal out of this. After all, I’m sure there are stats out there showing how some large percentage of newsletters—just like some large percentage of new relationships—never make it a year. A year is a long time to spend with someone—it means you must at least kind of like them. A year is a long time to spend on a writing project, too. It means you must at least kind of like it.
But the size of this accomplishment notwithstanding, I’m not very good at social media, or promotions generally, so instead of making some big to-do of this milestone, what I’m actually going to do is…take a couple weeks off. That’s because a year is a long time to be working on a writing project, and I need a short vacation.
I won’t be gone long—just next week, on 4th of July. And we’ll still be doing Healings FAQs on Sundays, and as it happens we have some really great ones coming up, so please stay tuned for those.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a proper anniversary post without a couple of acknowledgements. Huge thanks to all of you who’ve been along for the ride since the beginning, especially those of you who signed up for paid subscriptions, which have allowed us to donate several hundred bucks to the Patient Advocate Foundation, as well as pay some of the folks who help each week (more on them in a sec). And thanks as well to the newcomers: We’re sorry the quality has tailed off just as you’ve arrived, but we promise to address that in the relative future.
Also big thanks to Tommy Craggs for editing and general advice, Ayana H. Muwwakkil for art direction and social media assistance (it takes a village for me to post to IG), and of course to my partner Danielle for reading and cheerleading, and for pointing out when I have screwed up the basic facts of our lives.
To close, I’ll leave you with a selection of highlights from our first year. How it started is a year ago I had cancer the size of a cauliflower in my abdomen, and was on my second of six chemo treatments—was bald, deathly thin, and occasionally wheelchair-bound. Plus Danielle was pregnant with our first child. And then how it’s going is I’m in remission with a six-month-old baby girl who smiles ear to ear when I come get her in the mornings, and one of our favorite things to do is walk around the backyard garden and talk about everything growing there, and just the other day she ate a strawberry that I grew myself, and this was literally my dream from over a year ago. I am actually living my actual dream. No matter what Facebook says, most days it’s not my birthday. But most days, these days, it might as well be.
And now, some highlights:
Today, June 27th, back in 2022, Joe, the love of my life, and I shared some very tender moments before getting up out of bed. Some five hours later, Joe set out on a long bike ride. At 6:19 pm, he called to tell me that he was close to home. 30 minutes later, he arrived. An hour later, I called 911. Joe was no longer breathing and had no pulse. The paramedics cardioverted his heart and inserted a ventilator into his throat. At Hoag Emergency, the cardiologist on staff told me, "Joe is going to die soon." I sat at his bedside for another 16 hr. At 2:03 pm, June 28th, he responded to my "Joe, I love you," with a tear rolling down his cheek and then he died. Big ouches today....
Happy one year bday