Say yes

Today, Bruce, the girls, and I headed to Demopolis for Leah and Tyler’s wedding. Leah is the young woman from The Alabama Project who was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 18, the youngest survivor I’ve ever heard of battling this disease.

The wedding was simple and beautiful. And though Leah and Tyler are quite young–Leah’s 20 and Tyler is a tad younger–they’ve lived through aspects of life that plenty of older couples can’t imagine. They seem very, very happy.

One exciting bit of news is that Leah will be featured on the show Say Yes to the Dress in the fall. The producers already shot the footage, and an owner of a bridal shop in Atlanta who is herself a breast cancer survivor helped Leah find the perfect dress.

Leah looked lovely.

Leah and Tyler sharing their first dance as a married couple

“Yes” to this beautiful dress

Throwing the bouquet

Forever Young

The latest issue of Cancer Today is now available in digital form.

The following link will take you to the photoessay “Forever Young,” highlighting four of The Alabama Project women: http://cancertodaymag.org/Spring2013/Pages/Young-adult-breast-cancer-survivors-photo-essay.aspx

I’m not sure if I’m more excited to see the story in print or to see that interviews with two of my idols–Siddharta Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of Maladies, and Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks–are included in the same issue! Regardless, you’ll want to read the magazine cover to cover.

On a sadder note, while Jessica Gorman will still be working with the magazine from her new home in Bermuda, she will no longer be the executive editor. I’m going to miss having her at the helm, though I’ve no doubt her indelible touch as a writer, editor, and cancer advocate will be unmistakable in future issues.

Cooper Green on the big screen

Last night, I picked up Edwina for an outing to the IMAX. Students from a colleague’s Ethnographic Filmmaking class screen their documentaries on the big screen at the end of each semester, and one of the shorts this time around centered on the woes at Cooper Green since it started scaling back services and sending indigent patients to other hospitals in Birmingham for care. Care, that is, that the population visiting Cooper Green can’t afford.

I tried to explain to Edwina what the IMAX was–she’d never heard of such a place–and how the images and sound in the theatre would surround her. Unfortunately, the screening for the students’ films used just the front of the screen so she didn’t get a taste of the “IMAX Experience.”

As people featured in the Cooper Green documentary started to file into the theatre before the screening, Edwina nudged me.

“I know that lady,” Edwina told me. “She down there at Cooper Green. I bet she in this movie.”

Indeed, she was. In one of the first scenes, “that lady” reported that her appointment with her primary doctor, who was leaving Cooper Green, had been moved from March to June. Then, she received notice that it had been changed again, this time to September.

“I guess that’s okay,” she said to the camera, “‘ssuming I don’t die before then.”

On the way to the theatre, Edwina and I had been talking about her own experiences of late with Cooper Green. Her primary physician was also leaving, so her appointment was in constant flux.

“Plus,” she told me, “I out of my blood pressure medicine and got just a few of my pain pills left. They keep tellin’ me to call this number for prescriptions, but they don’t call me back.”

Turns out that shutting down one division after another at Cooper Green hasn’t “fixed” the problem of how to treat sick people without health insurance or resources to pay steep medical bills. Go figure.

As we left after the screening, Edwina told me she loved “all of them shows–they just weren’t long enough.”

“I wanna go back for real, Miss Rayan,” she said. “See one of them other movies,” referring to the IMAX films advertised along the entryway to the theatre.

“Okay, we’ll find a time to go,” I said as we climbed back into the car and headed home.

Birthday wishes

Today is my brother’s 53rd birthday. It’s a weird feeling, knowing that he’s out there but no one in my immediate or extended family is in touch. Even his best friend has turned his back.

We’re all operating on the notion that if we give an inch by contacting Joe, he’ll likely take a mile by calling repeatedly to sling insults and distorted truths our way. We’re scared to let him back into our lives when he is dangerously unstable and refuses to get help for problems he claims don’t exist.

For as long as I can remember, my brother has wreaked havoc just about everywhere he goes. The drug addiction and alcoholism that began when he was a teen only intensified his behavior.

Now, at 53, the years of bad habits and unchecked anger have landed my brother in a bad place–one that I’m not sure he’ll ever escape. My wish for him is a day of relative peace.

Going home

House in Pratt City, Ala. where Edwina grew up

Shop in downtown Pratt City owned by the family of the man who raped Edwina

Spot where the pay phone stood

Edwina and I made a trip to her old neighborhood this afternoon. She’s told me a lot over the years about growing up in Pratt City and moving to Ensley when she discovered she was pregnant with Steve, and I asked her to show me where all of the things she’s shared with me took place.

After a quick lunch, we drove out to the house she lived in as a kid. It’s one of the few buildings not boarded up in the area. Pratt City is a poor community and the tornados that came through in 2011 demolished much of what was still standing.

She also showed me the store, still open for business, run by the family of the young man who raped her when she was just 15. It’s a moment that changed her life forever–in part, I think, because she felt as though there was no going back in time. She’d been violated in a way that changed the way she looked at herself, and men.

Then there was the storefront where a pay phone once stood, and where Edwina was standing when the man, more than ten years her senior, grabbed her and dragged her to his car.

As painful as the memories of home must have been, Edwina told me she was more uncomfortable visiting Ensley.

“That where I did drugs,” she said, as we drove quickly through the part of town where the house she lived in with baby Steve once stood.

“My momma die in that house, too,” she reminded me. “‘Member I told you it just her and me when she pass away.”

As always, Edwina didn’t mince words. It was admittedly a complicated homecoming, but I caught Edwina smiling once or twice as she tried to paint a picture for me to show what her life had been like many years ago.

Play money

Being financially secure is a relative thing.

I’m often reminded of how differently Edwina and I look at money. For her, there’s never enough for the basics–food, gas (assuming whichever car she happens to be using/borrowing is in working order), a much-needed prescription.

It’s been a long time–since grad school, at least–when I had to worry about covering the basics. That said, there are plenty of months when money is tight, sometimes coinciding with an unexpected expense: a trip to the garage, a household repair, or a pricey fieldtrip one of the girls tells us about at the last minute.

From where Edwina sits, though, people like me don’t appear to have any money woes. She figures that I must get paid for every article I write (not true), that someone who teaches at a university must make a big salary (definitely not true), and that I must have plenty of cash piled up just waiting for the next big thing to come along (nope). She and I have talked about money issues before–I’ve attempted to explain that my money, like hers, is used up each month with family expenses, while she tries to educate me on the ebb and flow of funds at her house.

At the end of the day, we trust each other to be upfront. If Edwina has a spare box of laundry detergent in the closet, she’s not really out. And if I write about an experience Edwina has shared with me and I happen to get paid for the story, I make sure she gets a portion of the profits for something she does need, when she needs it.

 

Research and butterflies

Yesterday, I gave the keynote speech at the Sixth Annual UAB Undergraduate Research EXPO, an event including more than 200 undergraduate research posters and presentations with close to 300 participants in all. Ever since I received the invitation to speak a few months ago, I’ve been thinking through what to say to this diverse group of students and their mentors from the sciences, arts, and humanities. After all, what words apply equally to emerging researchers and scholars in fields ranging from chemistry to epidemiology to history to English to bioengineering to physics to mathematics? The program demonstrates the exciting kinds of work in which students, many of whom show up in my writing classes, are engaged:  2013_Expo_Program

Amid the flurry in the exhibit hall, I began to experience some butterflies. But when the time came to present ”The Way You Say the Things You Do: Research, Community, and Conversation in the 21st Century,” I felt right at home talking about the awesome responsibility we all have to be informed about the procedural and communication conventions in our own and others’ fields and to be prepared to pursue conversations that intersect what we know, and what we don’t.

Talking to more than 250 friendly faces from across the university seemed a lot like the kind of teaching I do every day.