About This Week’s Post

Fellow readers,
As someone who used to carry a bit of hubris with her health, it’s been an adjustment setting up shop in a world that revolves around scans and lab work and a forever intake of thyroid medication, all rendering me liability and last-pick on the dodgeball zombie apocalypse team. 
What hasn’t changed but would say has grown exponentially is my love and my gratitude for community. 
We’re in this together, and it’ll be my continued joy and honor to plant and grow community wherever I can and to feed my loved ones (hence the picture marking a blowout soiree featuring a nine-course meal of homemade Italian dishes).  
To that end this week’s creative post is a first-blush musing on the moments adding up to the discovery of my thyroid cancer, and how getting to the knowing of our ailments so that we can heal is just as much an act of community and -if we let it- a hallmark of our shared and necessary interdependence with each other.  
Much love,
CW

**********

From the technician’s wand
That discovered the benign nodule
On my mother’s neck 

To the traditional healer
Who gave me a sound bath 
On my 34th birthday,
Warning me of the bad energy
Inside my neck 

To the kind, attentive clinic employee
Who called me from Incheon
After I had just moved to Cairo,
Pleading me
To see a doctor 

To a colleague and friend who had shared
Her experience with the same 
Cancer and surgery and diagnosis only a
Year before- 

The discoveries of our maladies
Rarely come from a
Single clinical instance;
They spring from a
Collection of Moments. 

May no malady ever turn me
Illiterate to the universe’s
Many signs and texts that read:
Our path to healing
Is never done alone.