February 20th, 2017

I finished another cycle of chemo Wednesday, which means I’m weary and have a couple of spots in my mouth that want to turn into sores but are held at bay, for now, by Biotène® mouthwash. This week I’ll be back in New York City for another set of scans on Thursday. If you feel like you’re re-reading an old blog post of mine, so far you pretty much are. My treatment lately has been a repetitive rhythm of chemo on Wednesdays and scans every couple months, always on a Thursday. This upcoming scan most likely will not be great. It seems probably that my current chemo treatment isn’t keeping my disease stable and we’ll have to change things up, perhaps switching chemo or trying another surgery or round of radiation. Maybe all of the above. Again. We’ll get the scan results by Monday, so I’ll write about that in next week’s post.

In addition to finishing another round of chemo I’ve continued slogging through the process of finding an agent to represent my books, though my disillusionment with the entire publishing process continues to grow. Just today I found an agency that requires prospective authors to first pitch their work to one of the authors they represent and secure a referral before pitching your work to an agent. In other words, you essentially need an agent just to get an agent, much less a publisher. I’m sure this is a frustrating process for anyone, but the added specter of another bad scan looming doesn’t exactly help me feel like waiting years for anything to happen with my books. If I don’t make some headway towards getting published soon I’m going to start researching other avenues, though I know I lack the resources to successfully self-publish. I’ll figure something out. I hope.

The last week hasn’t been all doom and gloom though. I’ve enjoyed the unseasonably warm weather lately, playing a round of disc golf at the local park and attending a town hall meeting for my representative, which was held outside due to the size of the crowd that showed up. It was an enlightening experience, and an encouraging one too. Seeing democracy in action up close outside of Election Day was heartening, as was the fact that a politician in this country can stand surrounded by a couple hundred unhappy constituents without any fear for safety. The dialogue was not always entirely respectful or especially constructive, but it wasn’t exactly baleful or fruitless either. Overall, it reinforced a lesson I’ve been learning.

I asked my representative about healthcare, specifically why he saw the need to scrap the Affordable Care Act and start building a replacement from scratch, rather than adjust and fix the current system. I was ready, I thought, for anything, and had thought through a dozen retorts to as many possible replies. I was not prepared for him to ask me what I thought we should do to fix it though. I don’t honestly remember what I answered – I have several ideas about healthcare, and I’ve been in contact with his office about them, meeting in-person with his District Director and, at her request, emailing my thoughts and suggestions on the most-current draft of the healthcare reform bill under consideration right now. But in that moment I was so surprised to have a question thrown back at me that I doubt I made much of a compelling case for anything, other than saying that ideally we’d all enjoy universal health coverage and this whole discussion would be needless.

It hammered home an important lesson, more than anything else I’ve experienced so far has. Productive discourse doesn’t happen when we yell at one another or when we angrily accuse others of misdeeds, however accurately. It doesn’t happen when we ask questions we hope will trap others. It doesn’t happen when we are prepared only to accuse and attack. Constructive conversations are only possible when both sides are willing to ask questions of the other, and most importantly, to listen to the answers, however strongly they dislike the reply. Sure, there are times to yell. There are times when shock and anger are the only proper response. But these instances are fewer and further between than any of us would like to admit, myself included.