Hi all,
Our dear Alison--who is constantly building and sustaining community--needs her community in the coming weeks and months. Please see her note below about her recent diagnosis and expected journey.
In the coming weeks, there will be other ways to support her. For now, thank you for your prayers and love. And for those who have asked, help with overwhelming medical bills is much appreciated as she focuses on health and healing. If donating is one of the ways you feel able to love Alison during this, thank you.
Much love and gratitude,
Alison's Care Team
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Dearest Community,
I know we and the world are holding a lot right now. This update is a heavy one, but I share it so:
(1) you will know why I am more absent in public,
(2) why I am unavailable for a few months,
3) asking for your prayers, and
4) in the event that my story might help others.
My prayer is for my and all peoples’ healing. May this experience morph into love for all who are suffering from pain, powerlessness, or dying.
Here’s what we know and don’t know for now.
What we know.
- I have stage 3 cancer based on multiple tests and frozen biopsy. (learned of this likelihood just a few days ago after months of just a sore throat, raspy voice change, and recent difficulty swallowing food and water.)
- I have a mass larger than a golfball in the back of my throat that cannot be surgically removed because it is too hard.
- The cancer I have responds well to treatment.
- I have a great oncologist that I trust and who comes with good recommendations from trusted friends.
- I have a great and organized community of care in New Orleans to help me through all of this.
- Visitors are currently limited to a small group of people taking shifts.
- I will not be responding to emails, calls, or texts with any regularity because I am not able to.
- I had a tracheostomy and am/will be breathing and speaking with the stomy for several months at least. If they didn’t do it, i would have died from a closed windpipe.
- The Oncology Speech Language Pathologist is working with me to insert and use a speaking valve into my trach.
- I have a feeding tube inserted in my stomach so that I can still get nutrients when or if eating becomes too hard. I may be on a strict diet for several months.
- I will likely have a few months of chemotherapy (weekly) and radiation (5 days a week) .
- Priority now is pain management, getting a most accurate diagnosis and treatment plan, monitoring my airway, learning how to breathe and speak with a trach, and being able to eat and drink liquids on my own. This will take about 40 days and then chemo and radiation therapy will begin.
Here’s what we don’t know:
- We don’t know the exact type of cancer until the several biopsies come back in a week from the Pathology Department.
- We don’t know if it has spread elsewhere. Petscans will come later.
- We don’t know the full treatment plan yet.
It’s going to be a long 3 months or more of living with this reality. Thank you to each of you who have sat with me these past 36 hours of a major life change.
Cancer is like weeds in a garden. The garden (our bodies) all have the potential for weeds (abnormal or mutated cells) to sprout, grow, and takeover. Most of the time, the healthy plants (healthy cells) are growing well and prevent weeds (abnormal cells) from growing. We don’t even know those weeds (abnormal cells) are there. Cancer is what happens when a weed manages to grow unchecked. It’s not that we all “have” cancer but we all produce little seeds and whether they take roots depends on the balance between the seed, the soil, and the gardener (our immune system and supports). Weeds have taken over my garden in this chapter of life and I appreciate your prayers and support as I prune, dig, and get rid of them.
Below is a poem I invite you to pray with me for the start of this new chapter. Thank you all for following this journey and for your prayers, love, and support. Be grateful for every day and as Suleika Jaouad says “live every day as if it’s your first.”
Love,
Alison
A Blessing for a Friend on the Arrival of Illness
by John O'Donohue
Now is the time of dark invitation
beyond a frontier that you did not expect.
Abruptly your old life seems distant.
You barely noticed how each day opened
a path through fields never questioned
yet expected deep down to hold treasure.
Now your time on earth becomes full of threat.
Before your eyes your future shrinks.
You lived absorbed in the day to day so continuous
with everything around you that you could forget
you were separate.
Now this dark companion has come between you.
Distances have opened in your eyes.
You feel that against your will
A stranger has married your heart.
Nothing before has made you feel so isolated
and lost.
When the reverberations of shock subside in you,
may grace come to restore you to balance.
May it shape a new space in your heart
to embrace this illness as a teacher
who has come to open your life to new worlds.
May you find in yourself a courageous hospitality
towards what is difficult, painful and unknown.
May you use this illness as a lantern
to illuminate the new qualities that will emerge in you.
May your fragile harvesting of this slow light help you
release whatever has become false in you.
May you trust this light to clear a path
through all the fog of old unease and anxiety
until you feel a rising within you,
a tranquility profound enough to call the storm to stillness.
May you find the wisdom to listen to your illness,
ask it why it came,
why it chose your friendship,
where it wants to take you,
what it wants you to know,
what quality of space it wants to create in you,
what you need to learn to become more fully yourself,
that your presence may shine in the world.
May you keep faith with your body,
learning to see it as a holy sanctuary
which can bring this night wound
gradually towards the healing and freedom of dawn.
(picture is 6am pre-surgery with my hospital gown on backwards. lol.)
Co-organizers4
Angela Davis
Organizer
New Orleans, LA
Alison McCrary
Beneficiary
Bill Quigley
Co-organizer
Katherine Crouch
Co-organizer