cancer – day 193
I’ve been pondering it for a week . . . I was supposed to teach a grad class in San Francisco starting the first week in January (that’s something over an hour east of Sacramento without traffic, which is about two hours east of my place in the national forest, so, even if I’m staying in Sacramento, we’re talking about a fair amount of time in the car on top of the in-class teaching hours, and driving all the way to SF from home, well, that would be just plain dumb); I’d be starting really soon after radiation finishes, and I’ve been worrying that I won’t really be up to making the drive in to SF every Wednesday night for four months and that it would just wear me down too much when I’m still trying to recover my energy from treatment. I could tell in my mom’s voice when I mentioned the class that she wasn’t pleased that I was planning on teaching one night a week in San Francisco starting in January. Moms know us so well . . . and worry so much. . .
Anyway, I finally decided last night to ask the university to let me teach just the cyber (online) section of the course and not have the SF section or else give the SF section to another professor. The nice thing about the cyber section is that, being online, I can do the work in little pieces and on the weekend to spread it out more and not wear myself out with it. Problem for the university being that I wrote the course for GGU and have been the only person teaching it since ‘05, so trying to get someone else up to speed in a short period of time could be fairly onerous. So, after hanging the mouse pointer over the Send button for probably twenty minutes this morning, making sure this was really what I wanted to do, I sent an e-mail to the department coordinator telling her I was concerned about all the drive time and my health following treatment. She replied with a nice note agreeing that my health was the first priority, and she forwarded my message to the department head to see what he wanted to do. Then I got a really nice note back from the department head saying they’ll cancel the SF section and that he’s glad I can teach the cyber section, and, here’s the teary part for an emotional cancer patient, he wrote “Cynthia, we care for you and we value your participation in our department. Take good care of yourself and keep in touch.” 🙂
I never really expected a company or a professional organization or an educational institution to “care” about me so much. I mean, family, yeah, everyone’s going to be really concerned and asking frequently how I’m doing, but the response from people I know professionally has been seriously eye-opening. It probably shouldn’t be . . . I’m involved professionally with people I’ve known and respected for more than ten years now and many of them are great friends even though I only see them a few times a year at best, and I’d be very concerned about their health, but I just have a hard time realizing how many people are really concerned about me and reading my blog and writing little pep talk notes to me to “hang in there,” and sending cards, and that sort of thing. It’s seriously been really comforting and made a difference; it’s so easy to feel all alone in something like this, living it day after day.
That’s one thing Mark is really exceptional at – being comforting.