Selection Sunday

Tomorrow is Selection Sunday. The beginning of my favorite holiday. You may have read the piece my spouse wrote about it last year. For me, this is the best Sunday – better than Super Bowl, better than Easter. Selection Sunday. It brings promises of long shot victories and the sound of squeaky shoes on a polished wood floor. It is very regularly the harbinger of St. Pat’s, which while a drinking holiday for many, is always a thread of connection for me to my past and my family – that the two should co-exist will surprise no one who actually knows my family. It’s a day to celebrate names like Mahoney and O’Connor and Ahearn, and the coming of Selection Sunday means we’re almost there. This year, even better, Selection Sunday takes place the day after the Columbus Crew home opener. Selection Sunday is the start of Spring, when we emerge from our winter hobbit holes to eat wings and drink beer and place wagers on the athletic displays of 19 year olds.

In some ways this Selection Sunday will be very regular for me – I will be plotting out where I’ll spend Thursday and Friday, lamenting that it is a rebuilding year for my Buckeyes, and cursing myself for not watching more basketball as I try to pick between Nowheresville State and Saint Magda’s Home for Boys.

In other ways, this holiest of days will not be so regular for me. As with last year, my cancer treatment lines up with my beloved March Madness, though this time by my own choice. I listen to a lot of sports radio, and the commercials are very frequently directed towards men (the divorce lawyer ones are particularly uplifting). In one of these, some medical center of dubious origin suggested that the Wednesday before the tournament was a good time to get a vasectomy, because you need a few days recovery on the couch and you can watch basketball and no one will bug you.

Now, I don’t need a vasectomy, but I do need some implants placed and I do like basketball. Thank you sports radio! Surgery scheduled.

So, on Wednesday, I will have an operation to replace my expanders with implants. Remember the “breast-like spaces”? They are now fully formed, and thanks be to all that is holy, medical science has something other to place inside them than what currently resides there, which is roughly the size and consistency of a size 2 soccer ball.

Last year, on the eve of March Madness, I had a terrible anxiety attack which set off a month long period of general terror. I had just started my second round of chemo and began meeting with the surgeons. I had to choose the type of mastectomy I wanted to pursue and then think about selecting implants, all while afflicted with paralyzing indecision.

In terms of implants, my options were saline or silicone. When this started, I thought I would obviously go with saline implants. I always pictured silicone implants as water balloons with toxic sludge inside, implanted by an LA doctor with a blonde trophy wife who is secretly plotting to kill him. Obviously, one will break and I will die. Did I mention I wasn’t in the best place at the time?

But I began asking around. Everyone counseled me to go with silicone. “They feel more natural,” they said. I so appreciate the support, but I never could quite grasp that argument – what is natural about this? Reconstruction provides me the opportunity to maintain familiarity in how my clothes fit and keep a body silhouette that I generally like. But it is not natural.

My favorite quote is from a dear friend who said: “Silicone is basically sand, like the beach. Saline is tears. You don’t want boobies full of tears.” Because he’s a good friend, while I was laughing he then added, “Unless you really do want saline, and then we’ll change it to the ocean.”

Then, when the pursuit of insight brought me back to the medical professionals, a nurse showed me a silicone implant. Cut in half, the inside wasn’t liquid, but instead closer to the consistency of a jello jiggler. The doctors explained the risks and how your body mostly protects you against the silicone migrating to say, your liver and trying to hang out with some jello shots like a sad boozy Finding Nemo. Armed with this helpful new information, I decided to go forward with the silicone and my jello jigglers will be placed on Wednesday.

And so it is that this Selection Sunday I will go to church and brunch with friends, before setting up four screens in my living room so I can watch the games while recovering on my couch later this week. I will clean my house, because my mother is coming, and even though she told me not to, when your mother is coming, you clean your house. I don’t make the rules.

Monday, I have a test to see if the cancer drug I’m on has affected my heart function. On Tuesday, I get my last infusion of the drug through my port. On Wednesday, they take the port out, put the jigglers in, and I move to the next stage of my life amid the endless cycle of follow up appointments.

And due to all of that, and other things, conspiring on this third week of March, I started thinking about the word selection not only in terms of basketball but in terms of genes and evolution. My grandmother died at 40, from presumably the same genetic mutation that I have. Medicine has evolved since then, and not only was my chemo treatment much more humane, but I have proactive steps I can take to stay alive. Because we know more.

“Beating cancer” implies that the patient does something. I didn’t. I listened to my doctors, I freaked out some, I wrote, I researched head scarves…but so much of it was just chance. We live close to an amazing treatment center. We caught it early. We have access to genetic testing that helped us choose a path forward. We were born in an era that better understands how to administer and then withstand chemotherapy. I think so often of my grandmother, who just lived too soon for them to save her. We both got cancer because of chance – a mutation in an inherited sequence of proteins. And one of us lived and one of us died.

My attitude through all of this is shaped by that. I pray, but I do not ask to be cured. That implies to me that God chooses whether we live or die and I don’t think that’s true. I think chance and science and the number of psychopaths per capita have more impact on human survival. To me, God acts through the human beings who are called to heal, called to serve, called to help. I have prayed for strength and peace. I have given thanks for all that we have, tried to pay as much forward as I can, and constantly reminded myself that I must not squander this moment that chance and science broke my way.

We’ve come a long way since that opening paragraph about March Madness, no? My bad. I could try to make a connecting conclusion about the chance of a three pointer rolling off the rim in overtime, but we both deserve better. My brain is a swirling mass at the moment, filled with pre-surgical instructions and as-yet-unpacked boxes of stuff I saved from college and the impending removal of my port and laundry and nephews and what comes next.

And strong Irish women. And basketball.

#tovictory