We don't go through life alone.

(From Dragonslayer Walk-Porltand) One year ago I stood on this very ground, for this very walk, very much desiring to be anywhere but here. Less than two weeks prior, on August 23, 2023, Dr. Kenny Gundle had diagnosed me with dedifferentiated soft tissue liposarcoma. I’d only met Dr. G once before, at my core biopsy on August 9th, though he had called my husband and me before that first meeting, to check in and introduce himself. I liked him. I knew I needed him on my team. So when his words officially confirmed my suspicion regarding the bump on my thigh, and he threw in the

curveball “chemotherapy”, I actually did not want to kill him. I cursed. I cried. I would whinny and whine, like a horse learning to take the saddle, as I would learn what it means to surrender, even if only in flashes. On the afternoon of August 23rd, I cursed after Dr G shared with me a statistic about sarcoma - the way it can return and spread,

which is why he suggested the chemo, which is why I could tell he wasn’t just suggesting it, he was encouraging it. A 30 - 50 % chance of it returning, he said. Without the chemo. We just

don’t know enough about it.

OFF WITH HER HAIR! Some dormant queen emerging in me declared. I’m an actor. My face,

my hair, my body - it’s my rudimentary tool kit. I’d gotten new headshots days before my

diagnosis. Damn right I did. Let my hair fall out, let my periods stop, my bones become brittle.

Chemo, come to me. I will take you on.

We don’t know enough about it.

AI. The two letters paired together can have a polarizing effect. AI is a threat to movie making

as we know it, but when the actor Johnny Flynn was being murdered in the boat scene in the

Ripley adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s infamous novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, he was

grateful AI could be used to depict him drowning at sea. We use it to see life like avatars of

ABBA perform Mamma Mia on the West End. We clone sheep. We go to the moon. What if we

use AI to cure diseases like sarcoma, or at least learn more about it? A quick internet search

tells me we already are. So thank you, all of you for being here, to raise funds and awareness

surrounding sarcoma and the Northwest Sarcoma Foundation so we can find a cure. So we

can learn through research, so we can further develop and harness technological energies that alert us if our spell checkers fail, if a mutation goes awry, if a foreign, malignant disease is

caught in the body.

And yet.

I’m grateful for the way it all went down. The hours, the days, the weeks, the months of pain.

Even though I didn’t want to be here last year, I knew somewhere deep down that I had to be.

And seeing a community already here, seeing my care team already here on a Saturday

morning, it gave me hope. Because in a way I felt embarrassed. Like I’d messed up. Like

something was wrong with me - there was something wrong with me. But like I’d failed. Who?

What? Why? Maybe not everything is meant to be understood. Maybe in order to get through, I began to think, I’d have to surrender to what is, and let love in. Let love be.

Chemotherapy is brutal. It’s disgusting. Downright rotten. Anxiety inducing. Traumatic. My

body was so confused, so mad at me. How is this healing us? I cried every day I had to go for

infusions. Where’s the AI that can do it for me? But no. This is right where I need to be. And it

began here with this walk. Seeing Dr. Gundle, Dr. Davis, nurses Brook and Iris, their families,

my family, friends who are family. I began to realize my luck.

I joke that if you’re going to get cancer, you might as well get it in Portland. Sure, I was raised

here, my family is here. To be treated at OHSU, within whose shadow I raised. To lie for days in a windowless room, my body wrecked from chemo, the tumor on my thigh larger than ever,

pending removal from Dr. G and his team. To lie there in the hands of nurses and staff, people

doing life saving work everyday. To lie there after blood transfusions and platelet transfusions

and other supreme pains I won’t describe, to lie there and realize it’s our job to be happy. To be relaxed, to live in peace. Even in the face of the unknown. What if that’s it? It’s that simple. To lie there and finally, on the fourth day, walk out to the observatory and absorb the miracle that is Portland in the fall - the trees, the colors - to see a woman running down below on Terwilliger Boulevard and realize, that’s me. How many times have I run down that road? I cried to my night nurse describing what I’d seen, secretly praying I’d be able to run again, marveling at how foolish I was to ever take anything or anyone for granted. We’re all reflections of one another. Extensions of one another. If only we knew this, and believed it.

To close, there are a few perks that come with chemotherapy:

1. If you go anywhere, which is highly unlikely, Henry Higgins bagels will give you free coffee if

you tell them you’re being treated for cancer. Not that you can even drink it.

2. You get to skip the line at the ER (one of the places you probably will go)

3. There is one other place. The Way Back Place. Some in the medical field want to call it

chemo fog. The thing is, I was never foggy. I was crystal clear. I was so clear I couldn’t be in

the near to close place as we know it. The chemo showed me The Way Back Place, a 5D

version of myself, my child self. There lived the bear and the wolf. They came to my side

after cycle one, to protect me, to guide me, to heal me, to dance with me, to love me.

Like all of you.

One thing chemo taught me is that we don’t go through life alone. Like the great American

writer James Baldwin said, “People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers

and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes

them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”