The Lark: Vol 2, Issue 15, November 2022 Special Edition

INSIDE THIS ISSUE:

• SPOTLIGHT/THE MEMOIR: A Little Souvenir of a Terrible Year Or How Knitting Saved my Life by Tina Hass and Ruby Slippers by Diana Grady

SPOTLIGHT: The Memoir

A Little Souvenir of a Terrible Year
Or
How Knitting Saved My Life

by Tina Hass

When the calendar year turned to 2018 I felt a foreboding. Januarys had usually offered a sense of newness, a sense that winter had settled in and it was time to find some semblance of hibernation in my full life. The fear that year was real though, and I knew why. We had placed my father in a nursing home in December and I had begun to watch his sudden and rapid decline since summer. This would most likely be my last year with him and the sadness was overwhelming. My dad died in February, on a day of bright sun and brittle temperatures. I was right there, and sent him off with a kiss on his bald head and a squeeze of his hand. My new year prophecy was realized. I grieved and mourned and began to know life without him.

Spring came, and I took on more responsibilities at work, perhaps in an effort to bury my loss with busyness. My days were filled with the rigors a school demands, and even more so. I said yes to everything, and found myself mired by it all. By the time June rolled around I was zombie like, and happy to have the summer off to replenish.

In the world of educators, the hope is always that when late August arrives, one is ready get back on the hamster wheel called school. I did, with both the excitement and dread a new school year always brings. My father used to say that June and September are the most stunning months but always a bit tainted for teachers. Beginnings were always draining, and I was feeling more exhausted than usual that fall. A new crop of students to understand, curriculum tweaks, endless meetings – a continuation of the fast pace of the previous spring.

It began with back pain. I was having lunch with colleagues in the school’s dining hall one day and I was seized by the most curious kind of pain; not the usual ouch from a wrong twist, but something more insidious that would become more frequent. I endured it. I didn’t have time for pain, I was too busy with the spokes of my life to give it too much thought. One day, in the office I shared with Kathy, my friend and fellow teacher, the back pain began creeping into the tops of my legs. “You should really see your doctor” she firmly said. I made an appointment for that day, after school, with another doctor in the practice since my doctor was fully booked. He ordered a few X-rays, which I dutifully did late that afternoon. “Probably a muscle or tendon or sciatica” he thought. I’ve had sciatica, I’ve had muscle and tendon strains; this didn’t feel the same. I went to sleep that night, with that same flame of foreboding that had visited me in January.

The doctor called me the next day while I was at school. I had a few students working at the table, and it was hard to have privacy. “I really don’t see anything except a little shadow on the base of your spine – no smoking gun here.” Ok, I thought, since the gun isn’t smoking then I should be fine? At the end of that school day, I packed up my things – books, laptop, folders, all my teacher gear – perhaps with an unconscious premonition of what was to come. It was my last day at school for nearly 5 months.

The gun was smoking; in fact it was on fire. My own doctor called me that night to say he didn’t like the look of the X-ray and I needed an MRI – immediately. My husband drove me to Cumberland on a cold, wet November Friday night, the week before Thanksgiving, where I had a long and uncomfortable MRI. My doctor called me at 11pm that same night and said that there was a large mass wrapped around the aorta in my abdomen. It may be cancer, or it may not be. He wanted the radiologists at The Miriam to look at it, but it wouldn’t be until Monday. One often hears about waiting for results, the anguish, the fear, I was awash in it. We decided not to tell our children until we knew what we were dealing with. In the meantime, I cried, a lot. It seemed like the only thing I could constructively do.

Sure to his word, my doctor called me on Monday with interesting news. It doesn’t look like cancer, but they can’t be sure until we do a biopsy. And then a new word came into my vocabulary, one that would become so familiar and that even now I trip on. The radiologists at Miriam believe that it’s Retroperitoneal Fibrosis. Spell that for me, please, I asked my doctor. A mass taking up residence on the main artery of my body in the peritoneal cavity. So rare, there wasn’t even one case in all of Rhode Island. Perhaps all the accumulated sadness and stress had caused this. It was my little souvenir of a terrible year.

This is where the knitting part comes in. I never considered myself a knitter, despite having grown up with a mother who was always clickety clacking her needles and creating some magic with yarns. I grew up with it, admired it and benefited from it, though my skill level was low. All this was about to change, because how else was I supposed to channel my worry now that I had something really big to worry about.

I’d knit. I’d knit and knit and knit. I knit when I waited – waited for doctor appointments, biopsy appointments, insurance call backs, more imaging, blood tests, the whole soup of a poor diagnosis.  I found tremendous pleasure in running the wool through my fingers, creating cables, creating ribbing, finding small bits of straw from the sheep’s back. It distracted me in ways that I could not even have imagined.

I was put under the care of a doctor at Mass General Hospital whose expertise is world renowned. A specialist in RPF, as if it’s a known thing. “You will need infusions” he told me on my first visit. This mass meant business, and it was too dangerous to reach for a biopsy let alone surgery. My doctor said we’ll try to shrink it with cancer drugs. I limped through Christmas, hugged my children a lot, thanked my school for being so supportive and understanding, reconnected with a therapist I knew, and yes, knit.