It’s Book Festival time of year. I love this event. I’m a reader, though less so than I was before The Internet taught me to stop reading and start scrolling through the same feeds almost compulsively for hours upon hours rather than picking up a book and getting into it. But that’s enough about me—this is about the book festival, not me.

But it’s also about me. I got to be on a panel this year, along with other contributors to the new book, “Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a U.S. City.” I co-edited this volume with Nicole King and Josh Davis. We were in the Radical Book Fair tent, sponsored by Red Emma’s, and it all felt oh so good, a dream almost. I’ve been a reader and writer for as long as I can remember, and we worked on that damn book for literally years to see it come to fruition. And here we were, talking about our work, about history, and about how it can help us think differently about how Baltimore came to look as it does, and how it could look differently.

I specifically talked about a piece I wrote with Louise Parker Kelley. I sat down with her for dinner many moons ago to ask her to tell me All Her Stories about being an organizer in the LGBTQ+ community in the 1970s and 1980s in Baltimore. It’s a history that isn’t told enough, and it was a gift to not only hear her stories, but write them down. In a book! That people will be able to read forever! What I liked about doing this project is that we wrote down not just the facts—that Baltimore passed the Gay Rights Ordinance in 1988 or that the first Pride was held along 31^st Street in the early ’70s. I liked hearing the stories about sitting on the porch on Abell Avenue on weekend mornings and watching women do the walk of pride from one house to another (according to Kelley, there were some swingers on the block). I liked hearing about the drama that has been a part of every lesbian community I’ve ever been a part of. Turns out, it’s my birthright. I wanted to hear the stories of love as an organizing strategy, and how building community is itself political work, especially when you’re building that community in a world that doesn’t want you to survive. These are the stories we are in danger of losing if we don’t write them down right now.

These were my stories at the book festival, but there were so, so many others, all of them just as urgent. My panel featured Nicole King, challenging who has a right to the city. Nicole Fabricant talked about youth activists and environmental justice in South Baltimore, and the importance of academic work that doesn’t extract from communities, but redistributes resources and power to them. Michael Casiano told the important history of a war on drugs in Baltimore that started not in the 1980s, but long before. Ashley Minner told us about the history of the Lumbee in Baltimore, and what it’s like to be from and of Baltimore when the city sometimes looks at you like you don’t belong; the psychic cost of answering over and over again, “What are you?” is heavy.

Erica Armstrong Dunbar, author of “She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman,” preceded us on stage. She reminded us that there is more to learn about Tubman’s story than a brief hagiography in a history book, and that it matters who tells her story. She is the first African American to write a biography of Tubman, and that matters. You’ve got to read and listen to understand why.

Our panel was followed by Ibram X. Kendi, talking about his book, “How to Be an Antiracist,” in conversation with Karsonya Wise Whitehead. Whitehead hosts “Today with Dr. Kaye” on WEAA, writes a regular column for the Afro, and is an award winning author in her own right. Recently named to Essence Magazine’s 2019 Woke 100 list, Whitehead is a vital voice in Baltimore, and across the nation.

And these were just a few of the panels at this year’s Radical Book Pavillion. What an embarrassment of riches we have in this city. So many people are doing so much important work. Events like the book festival remind me how lucky we are to call this city home, to be doing the work of world-ing together. Thank you, Baltimore.

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It’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month. This is the month when everything turns pink—in the grocery store, on the football field, at my gym, at school fundraisers, in every sales pitch I get over text or email, literally everywhere. Pinktober is here, in full effect.

For me, though, it’s always breast cancer awareness month. I’m always aware of the disease, all day, every day, because In November 2017 I was diagnosed with breast cancer after a routine mammogram at the American Radiology on Fleet Street. It came as a total shock—I never expected those routine tests to catch anything. But they did—an 8mm tumor in my left breast, at the 10 0’clock position, a couple inches north of my nipple. I thought I understood the disease before this happened. My mom has been through it twice, two aunts, a lot of friends, and every October I was reminded to be aware of it. But I had no idea what breast cancer really meant.

Here are a few things I’ve learned over the past couple of years that I’d like to share with folks as we “celebrate” this month. It’s not about “saving the ta-tas.” It’s about saving people, human beings. All of us have breast tissue, and that’s all it takes to get breast cancer. This month we’ll see lots of images of cheerful cisgender women who are all smiles, but that’s not the reality—people of all genders get breast cancer, and treatment does not make anybody smile.

It is absolutely brutal, and whether or not it saves you is largely up to chance. Except that it’s not, at least not altogether. It is true that there is no way to predict whose cancer will metastasize—spread beyond the breasts and lymph nodes to other parts of your body. This is something I never really understood about breast cancer: once they find the tumor, there’s already a chance cancer cells have moved through your body and taken up residence in your liver, bones, lungs, brain, or somewhere else. If they wake up and grow, you’ve got metastatic breast cancer. The chance of making it to five years once that happens? Around 25%. Some say it’s a chronic condition, but that doesn’t sound chronic to me. That sounds terminal—the end, death.

Some factors in one’s favor to not metastasize and die? Being white, and having access to advanced medical care. Black women, for example, are seven times more likely to die of breast cancer than white women, even though they are less likely to be diagnosed in the first place. This has everything to do with whose health is deemed important, whose voices are heard and taken seriously in the doctor’s office, and who has the time, space, and money for routine and extraordinary care. Having the money not only for health insurance but to cover the unreimbursable expenses from lost work, lost energy, and lost hope makes for better life chances, too. Breast cancer is a solitary experience, but how that experience goes has everything to do with larger social structures of inequity.

Here’s how my experience went. My breast cancer treatment started with a lumpectomy and removal of my sentinel lymph node—the first in the chain that leads from the breast—to see if my cancer had spread there yet. It was an outpatient surgery, uneventful, and afterward my wife and I stopped by the pharmacy to pick up my prescribed pain meds—ten oxycodone pills.

The pharmacy wouldn’t fill the prescription for some bureaucratic reason that hopes throwing up roadblocks to access will stem the rise of opioid addiction. Pain pill addiction and abuse is caused partly by the availability of the drugs, sure, but it’s also related to living in a world that pushes many of us to check out by any means necessary. And sometimes, yes, we need the pain pills for pain. It took a lot of weeping calls to a lot of after hours doctors and pharmacies for me to get the meds I needed to stay ahead of the pain, a reminder that my individual issue is part of a much larger war on drugs that doesn’t do much to change the world too many of us seek to escape.

A few weeks later I was in my oncologist’s office to hear the news that though my tumor was small, it had aggressive features, and I should probably do chemotherapy—four rounds over three months. It wasn’t presented to me as an option but as a necessary part of my care. My insurance company paid over $10,000 per round, and that was the reduced price they negotiated with Johns Hopkins. The costs are astronomical, and even if you’re lucky enough to have the costs covered, it’s incredibly expensive to be as sick as chemo makes us. My workplace took a lot of work off my plate so I could take care of myself first. I got paid my full salary for certainly not full work, a luxury few cancer patients could ever afford.

A few weeks after chemotherapy I started radiation therapy. I got a short course, two weeks shorter than most, because I’m lucky enough to live near a cancer research center whose care my insurance agreed to pay for. I had to have the same appointment time every day, and I couldn’t choose the time. They wouldn’t tell me my time slot until two days before I got started. My teaching schedule couldn’t be moved, but I couldn’t guarantee a time slot that

would allow me to keep my job, no matter how many white girl tears I cried. It’s a business, and they slot you in when they can slot you in. What if I were also managing child or elder care, or had an hourly wage job some distance from the hospital? It would be devastating, and I might even have weighed my options and skipped it altogether, increasing my risk of cancer’s return by 40%. Nothing but luck that I didn’t have to make that choice.

I lucked into a slot that worked for me, and four weeks later I was done. “Done.” My radiation oncologist announced that I was “fully treated.” I haven’t beat cancer. I’m just fully treated. And now I wait. I’ll know I’m cured when I die of something else. A day doesn’t no go by that I don’t think about cancer, that I don’t wonder if it’s back, or if it is back for my twin sister. She was diagnosed just as I finished up radiation. It has been shattering, and I am the luckiest cancer patient I know. Because not only do I have the structural supports that make extending my life more likely—my whiteness, my wealth, my good state job with benefits fought for by unions I’m not even in, the time and ease to schedule routine screenings—but I have the support of a middle class circle of friends and family who have made this brutally expensive disease affordable as they drove me to work every day, paid for my Lyft rides to treatment, and pitched in for food deliveries they knew my wife and I would need when in the thick of it.

Breast cancer hits so many of us so hard, but it lands a bit easier when we live at intersections of privilege. The Pinktober narrative of the plucky survivor who smiles through treatment and comes out grateful and ready to enter all the walkathons erases the background that got us sick in the first place, and the structural inequalities that determine which of us has a real shot at getting better. Racial, class, and gender inequalities aren’t just talking points. They are violence, they are premature death, and they are at the front of my mind this Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Breast cancer is a social, political, and economic disease, and pink just won’t cut it for me anymore.

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This column is supposed to be about field trips, about leaving the computer and actually going out into the world and doing actual things, an increasingly rare feat in newspapering these days. That’s a good plan until you come down with the flu while on chemo for breast cancer. Yeah, I wasn’t going anywhere. When there are headlines warning of healthy people dying three days after getting a slight fever, the immunocompromised cancer patient gets pretty fucking scared they are next.

I also wasn’t going outside because the fatigue that hit me was so very intense. “Fatigue” can’t capture the weight how I’ve felt this chemo cycle. I barely remember the first few days with the flu, a hot blur of hours spent in and out of consciousness as the “Great British Baking Show” sang in the background. I can’t say enough about this show for times of trial. After my dad was killed by an errant driver, the family gathered in the silence that follows such an event—what is there to say or do when faced with such unexpected tragedy? The answer turned out to be sitting, looking side eye at the abyss I feared would swallow me if I looked at it straight on, and watching as sweet-natured people with day jobs turned out meringues, sponges, scones, and tarts. When a baker was eliminated, everyone shared hugs and regret. It’s perfect for when everything else is terrible.

Another round of bakers lulled me through some hard days in and out of fever and worry that my developing cough would lead to pneumonia and then sepsis and then become a headline: Unhealthy middle aged woman with a wife and two cats dies, unsurprisingly, after catching the flu despite all best precautions. There are no more seasons left, so let’s hope things look up over here for the next few years.

And then the Olympics started. These aren’t quite as feel-good, what with the casual racism of our U.S.-based announcers and the knowledge that for host cities, the Olympics often herald brutal displacement and transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. I’m privileged enough to get to put that in the background and just enjoy myself—what a world, what a self. The Olympics also turn me into a rabid “USA USA USA” nationalist in spite of all I know about our brutal history and present of settler colonialism, slavery, heteropatriarchy, and capitalist superexploitation. I weep at the feel-good stories of athletes who have worked so hard and dreamed so long and here they are, living their Olympic dreams. If you can’t leave the house and you have access to cable television, nothing’s better than the Olympics.

I’ve gotten into every sport I’ve watched. Curling is so much strategy and artistry, and the time limits count down how long you’ve got to think about what you’re doing, but the doing can take just as long as the thinking. Brilliant. Luge—the fastest sport at the games, as they keep reminding us—is just death-defying, no margin for error. Biathlon asks people to ski uphill if you can believe that, and then remain a steady shot in high winds. What the fuck. Slopestyle and halfpipe are just bananas, downhill is completely out of control, and who volunteers to get into ski jumping? You start higher than the Statue of Liberty, and a few seconds later you at the bottom and 110 meters away (however far that is). No way.

I love the part of watching the Olympics where I get to share in that moment when you’ve worked so hard for something for so long, had to get over so many mental hurdles—the doubt, the fear, the despair—and you finally reach the goal. I’ll have that moment maybe two or three times in my life, but mostly life is getting up when the alarm goes off, packing a lunch, getting to work and getting back, making dinner when you’re too tired, and then going to bed to get up and do it again the next day. I love and miss the steadiness and reliability of the quotidian, but the thrill of getting that thing you’ve worked so hard for? It is such a rush. I like to feed off somebody else’s when I can, and I appreciate that it makes me cry.

In between watching the Olympics, I’ve been reading books by people dying of cancer. Let me be clear: Cancer isn’t killing me right now. I’m going to die, just like we all are, but likely not of breast cancer in the near future. My prognosis is excellent. That said, I think about dying a lot more than I used to, an abyss that threatens to swallow me whole if I look too close. It’s scary. Writers like Kate Bowler, Paul Kalanithi, and Nina Riggs offer a radical vulnerability about a time that most of us are too scared to even imagine ever coming for us, even as intellectually we know it’s coming for all of us.

Most recently I finished Kalanithi’s “When Breath Becomes Air,” a 2016 bestseller. I lay there in bed reading his words about what it’s like to live when you know you are dying but you aren’t sure when but are sure it’ll be sooner than later and you know too much to let yourself believe too much in hope. I cried. And I wished we talked more about death, that death were more a part of life. It’s the only thing other than getting born that we’re all guaranteed to share, and yet we push it away as long as we can, each of us figuring out our own paths when our dads are hit by trucks and we come down with a case of the cancer. I can feel myself shoving it in the background even as it has made its presence so materially known. And then I got out of bed, put on some clothes, and headed to the bar for a beer and some men’s double curling. I’ve got another round of chemo in two days, the world is on fire, I’m finally over the flu, I think, and hopefully they’ll open up the downhill course tonight so I can watch Mikaela Shiffrin cement her legacy at the ripe old age of 22. Life with cancer, as it goes.

The post Field Tripping: What to do with yourself when you’ve got cancer and the flu appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

I’m an identical twin. My sister is my very best friend. We talk on the phone a few times a day, sometimes just a quick call to check in to see if we’re both awake. I touch base with her via call, text, tweet, or Facebook like probably 8 to 10 times a day, every single day. Sometimes one of us is busy or out of town, and it’s no big deal, but I’m not going to lie: I feel most myself when she’s in my time zone and texting me pictures of her cat.

I’m also a person with a history of sexual relationships, and not all of them have been on board with the twin thing. I think there’s this assumption that one’s sexual partner will be one’s primary relationship, and all other relationships must be subsumed underneath it. That was the opinion of my first long term girlfriend, at least. Frustrated that I always seemed to be inviting my sister along or interrupting dates to call her back she finally set down an ultimatum: me, or her. That was a no brainer. I hung up the phone, and aside from fucking her one last time for good measure, we never spoke again. The twin sister will always win, no matter what.

And I think that’s fine. I’d argue that our fetishization of the sexual relationship does most of us more harm than good, and it keeps us from acknowledging that the desire for one relationship to meet all our needs is a terrible fantasy that sets us all up for massive disappointment. I’d like to see us spend more time talking about the great benefits of close relationships with siblings, friends, and ourselves not as signs we aren’t in the “right” kinds of relationships, but as ways to expand what counts as relating in the first place. Friendship, sisterhood, love outside the bonds of the romantic couple—these are affective ties that can’t be easily ordered and made sense of by the state. This is love outside institutions, and institutions don’t like that. Perhaps that’s why they try to convince us that to be “just friends” is a sad state of affairs.

This doesn’t mean I don’t care about sex, though. I was a late bloomer, not unrelated to the twin thing. When you’re a twin everyone is always staring at you, searching your face and body for signs that you are yourself and not the other one. And they make pronouncements—I was the one with chubby cheeks, the size of my body always the thing that gave me away. I understand now that people were just trying to tell us apart, but young me, before a lot of therapy, figured I must look like something of a monster, what with all those eyes on me all the time. And my monstrousness was coded in the excess of my flesh. Or, to put it less dramatically, I was the fat one, and we were both probably pretty ugly. This doesn’t quite set the stage for seeing oneself as desirable, for me a necessary precondition for sex in the first place.

But then I went to college and became a lesbian, and everything changed. I don’t want to act like lesbian cultures are all rah rah body positive, because surely they are not. I’ve never been in a straight woman’s world, though, and that just looks so terrible I have to believe we’ve got it better over here. In college I turned myself and others on because I was smart, because I was funny, and with some practice I started feeling more and more at home in my body—and nothing’s hotter than that.

There’s been a lot of necessary talk lately about enthusiastic consent, and while I don’t have anything significant to add to that robust conversation, I did want to take this column to say we can’t give enthusiastic consent until we do the work to get comfortable in our bodies and with ourselves. And sometimes that means stumbling through sexual experiences that upon reflection we aren’t sure we’d do again. For me it has meant learning what I want, learning how to articulate that, and learning how to test and set boundaries. It’s not easy work, but it’s work worth doing.

And it’s never really done. I am right now in my life profoundly uncomfortable in my body. I have cancer, and I’m in active treatment right now. Chemotherapy is not at all like what I was expecting given what I saw in the movies. I am lucky that I haven’t spent the last month with my head in a bucket, puking my guts out, but that doesn’t mean I’m anywhere near at home with my body.

Here’s what it actually feels like, for me: On the first couple days of the cycle I’m hopped up on steroids, my skin almost literally crawling as I race around in search of something to take the energy away. And then the steroids are out of my system and the chemo’s doing its work—killing all the cells in my body. My mouth tastes like a chemical plant, and nothing can make that go away. They give me a drug that forces my bone marrow to overproduce white blood cells, so by day four my bones ache—if you don’t know what that feels like, consider yourself lucky. The chemo kills the linings of my mouth, esophagus, and stomach so I start to feel like an old leather bag full of bones. I get a rash, the beginnings of thrush in my mouth; my eyelids twitch nonstop, my hair is gone, and I’m so tired. Guess what? I don’t want to have sex. This is not my body even as it is mine all the same.

Cancer is changing my relationship to my body, but because I know that feeling at home is work no matter what, I know that I can work on this relationship, too. And not so that I can feel sexy with my partner, but so I can know what I want, so that I can enthusiastically consent to whatever it is I want now. This particular body is a temporary situation, but making my own relationship to it? That’s forever.

The post Getting to Know You, Getting to Know All About You… appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

It’s the Booze Issue, and I gotta say, I’m the least likely contributor to such a thing. I didn’t have my first taste of alcohol until my mom force fed me some champagne the night of my high school graduation. I was one of those straight edge teens, but not cool enough to be straight edge, so really mostly just a total dork. I’m a rule follower by nature, and back then, if it wasn’t legal, I wasn’t doing it. I kept my head down, my nose clean, and my grades up, assuming that was my ticket out of Boise, Idaho and on to bigger, better things.

And then I hit college. Everyone was boozing it up, and I was the one my dormmates called when somebody seemed too drunk to get home from whatever frat party they stumbled into. I remember getting a call at 3 in the morning one weekend, somebody begging me to help get a friend home. I threw on some clothes, hopped on my moral high horse, and swooped in to save the day. I ended up covered in alcohol others spilled on me, but none got in my mouth, and everybody ended up safely back to the dorms, heads in the toilet while I invisibly patted myself on the back for my Good Choices. Because I am a nostalgic motherfucker, I still have a square from that alcohol infused sweater, cut out and kept in my scrapbook, a memory of before I started getting into the hooch myself.

That started at the end of my first year. I hit the spring party and I don’t remember what I drank, but I do remember waltzing around the Intrepid down at the Chelsea piers with my skirt pulled up to my neck yelling, “WHY WON’T ANYONE LOOK AT ME???” Friends assured me later that yes, people were looking at me, and I felt gratified. Oh, so that’s what alcohol is for.

And then I was a drinker, sort of. I spent weekends at the Night Cafe, a dive bar on the corner on 106^th and Amsterdam, where I was never asked to prove my age and got my first introductions to other things my high school self promised never to try: public sex, weed, and cocaine. Oh, college, the memories!

But drinking was never really my thing. I drank to gin up some courage on occasion, and to fit in, but I didn’t really develop a taste for it, preferring the sweet taste of nicotine instead. I was a smoker, totally committed to a pack a day. In order to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day—that’s 20 cigarettes in maybe 16 to 18 awake hours—I had to smoke whether I was drinking or not. I’ve always been more anxious than depressed, so cigarettes fit my personality better anyway.

I left New York City for the Bay Area for graduate school, where sophisticated graduate students drank beer with flavor and eschewed the rail drinks of my youth. I went through a few bouts of wine tasting and attempts at that snobbery, but it was way out of my price range. When I quit smoking (still got cancer, oh well) my taste buds came back, and I got really into tasting whiskeys. They tasted so good on my refreshed tongue. OK, maybe I could get into booze.

And then I moved to New Orleans, broke up with my girlfriend, and went on a multiyear bender. New Orleans is known for its food and its drinking, but mostly we weren’t drinking anything fancy. I drank more Miller Lite in those years than most of y’all did in your entire college career; I drank enough of it to get drunk on the stuff—no easy feat. And then there was that Mardi Gras when I got my front tooth knocked out by beads, dumped by a Coast Guard pilot when she saw my new grill (“Sorry, I’m shallow”), and drank so much Jameson that I woke up in an emergency room, no idea how I’d gotten there. It was the last time I drank during Mardi Gras, or much at all, for a very long time.

It’s a funny story now, but here’s what happened: I drank a lot, left the bar with a man, and ended up falling after he pushed me against a car and started doing I-don’t-remember-what to me. I hit my head so hard on that car that I had a concussion, and mine was the ambulance blocking up traffic in the French Quarter that night. Nothing funny about it, and the losing side of boozing it up so many of us end up on.

In Baltimore I have become a social drinker, still usually with the cheap beer and rail drinks, because I’m old enough not to care what other people see me drink. My go-to is Charles Village Pub, where on weekdays you can get two-for-one vodka sodas from 3:30-6:15. I’m a cheap date, so one round of those and I’m as tipsy as I want to be. On classier days I can be found with the $5 beer-and-a-shot at Cultured in the Mount Vernon Marketplace with my work wife. We will occasionally make poor choices and have a second whiskey with our beers, and those are the nights I end up in a car home.

And then I got diagnosed with cancer, and now I don’t drink at all. Like, at all. I had two sips of a delicious mimosa at Clavel last weekend, but that’s all I’ve been able to get down. I mean, I could drink, but it just feels wrong—I have CANCER. I’m lucky that this doesn’t feel like a loss, because there are times in my life when it would have felt just like that. For now I’m one of those teetotalers, though I’ve dropped the judgment, adopting my dad’s life philosophy: different strokes. Drink up, Baltimore, and give me a call if you need a ride home. I’ll just need to borrow your car.

The post My life with booze—a teetotaler’s drinking diary appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

I’ve lived in lots of cities as an itinerant academic without a permanent gig, and in each one of these cities there is an entity or two whose size and scale translates to an even more outsized influence over development patterns in the city. I say “outsized” because when we build our cities and distribute our resources to meet the demands of institutions and not people, a whole bunch of people find themselves bulldozed over—both literally and figuratively. In Baltimore that entity is Johns Hopkins.

Johns Hopkins University is the largest private employer in the greater Baltimore area, and Johns Hopkins Health System comes in third. Taken together, Hopkins is massive, and it has massive influence on how the city is organized. Its nonprofit status means Hopkins doesn’t pay taxes, and that’s a lot of money out of city coffers. Sure, Hopkins pays taxes indirectly to landlords when they rent out property and on things like properties used for non-exempt purposes, parking and hotel taxes (for dorm beds), and payroll taxes for its thousands of employees. But if their properties remained on the tax rolls, Baltimore would have a lot more cash on hand. No amount of consumer spending by low-wage service workers at Hopkins will make up for that.

As I learned more about the history of Hopkins in Baltimore, I learned more and more ugly stories about the effects of the institution on communities of color in the city. The story of Henrietta Lacks, finally well-known, is just one case of muddled research ethics at the campus. And then there’s their development of Middle East, now known as Eager Park, the plunking-down of shiny new condos and shops and private security into a neighborhood laid bare by decades of planned displacement. It’s an ugly history, and one that repeats itself in this city as time after time our collective monies are poured into institutions and neighborhoods already awash in relative wealth as the rest of the city starves.

This has been my understanding of Hopkins since I moved to Baltimore, an analysis deepened by the work of writers like Marisela Gomez, Lawrence Brown, and D. Watkins as well as bike rides across the city week after week for years, noting the both very slow and very fast changes in neighborhoods bowled over by Hopkins.

And then I got cancer, and Hopkins became a very different place. It’s taking me a minute to figure out how to make sense of this newest field trip, given all that have come before.

I found out I might have cancer at the beginning of November when I was called in for a second mammogram. I’m in my 40s, have great health insurance, and am a rule follower with a family history, so I’ve been getting these screening tests for awhile now. This wasn’t the first time I’ve been called back, so I wasn’t worried.

I went back for a follow-up and an ultrasound, and the radiologist told me I would need a biopsy. I asked if it was an emergency, or if it could wait until I returned from my work trip to Chicago. She said it could wait, but I shouldn’t wait long. My twin sister had just gotten a biopsy and it was benign, so I went to Chicago, had a wonderful time, and decided I’d figure out the biopsy when I got back. When I got back I looked at my actual report from the radiologist. It said “BIRADS 5,” which is the scale they use to rate the chance of what they’re seeing on the screen being cancer. I googled it. Ninety-five to ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s cancer. Everything changed. I was already a patient at Hopkins because they take my insurance and I can get to the community clinic on my bike in 10 minutes, so I emailed my provider and asked her what to do.

And the answer was to stay at Hopkins. I was quickly shuffled to the Greenspring location for a biopsy that showed I indeed had cancer, and then the Hopkins system took over. I got an email from the breast surgery center in the very East Baltimore campus I’ve side eyed for years telling me to come in for a consult. Then they called to schedule surgery, and a few days later made appointments for me with a medical oncologist and a radiation oncologist. By the time this hits the paper, I’ll be a week out from my first chemotherapy infusion, three more to go. Johns Hopkins is running my life not just in the structural ways it runs all of our lives, determining how development dollars get spent and who lives where, but in the tiny minutiae as it turns my body into a toxic waste dump in order to save it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to square the critiques of Hopkins with the reality that the hospital is also saving a whole lots of lives. The cancer-related rooms I’ve been in over the past two months have all been packed. So many of us have cancer or love people who do, and we all want to get through treatment and get on with our lives. Hopkins is helping loads of people do just that, even as doing that means pushing people out of their neighborhoods and sucking up huge swaths of our collective resources to do so.

Mostly what I’ve felt, though, on a totally personal level, is lucky. I’ve got great health insurance through my state job that means I’m not worrying about paying for this care (mostly—I still worry because the side costs are bananas). I’ve got flexible work hours and a workplace that is taking tasks off my plate so I can focus on my health and still get paid. I have a partner and wider community that is doing all it can to shoulder some of the cancer burden. And a world-class hospital that will give me the care I need for a good prognosis (which I have).

I feel lucky, but I also know it’s not just luck. The same structures that push people out of Middle East to make way for Hopkins produce this particular care for me. It’s complicated, and everyone should get the level of care I’m getting, and not just in cancer treatment.

The post And then I got cancer—navigating my health and Baltimore’s Hopkins history appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

I love riding my bicycle.

I love the sense of freedom, of getting from place to place unfettered by appalling bus wait times or the worry about finding a parking spot. I love the feel of the wind on my face as I speed down hills and the steady breath as I pedal back up. I love riding a bicycle in

Baltimore especially, because I love saying “how you doing?” to my neighbors, getting to most places in 30 minutes or less, and exploring this city that changes block-by- block. If you’re in a car, these blocks are just the stuff that gets between you and your freeway or ramp. In a bike, the ride is a joy all in itself.

Usually. I’ll admit this is a bit of pollyanna talking, because when you’re on a bicycle in Baltimore you are also dodging the drivers who wish you weren’t there, the radical pedestrians engaged in their own resistance to the rules of the road, and fellow cyclists not as interested in a friendly bell ring and “on your left” as I am. Riding a bicycle for me means being constantly aware that I could be maimed or killed at every intersection and driveway by someone whose mode of travel does not demand and require the same attention mine does.

This might sound a bit paranoid, but it’s not. Baltimore is seeing increasing casualties on the roads. Just this year our bicycling community has lost several folks to cars. Aaron Laciny was hit and killed while riding on Charles Avenue, and we still don’t know who hit him. Jeremy Pope was hit and killed riding his bicycle out by the airport. The driver faced no charges. The MVA reports show an increase across the state in crashes involving bicyclists and pedestrians, and this mirrors national increases. Traveling by bicycle or on foot is dangerous, and it’s getting more dangerous. The dangerous part is the cars and their drivers, and they are all less safe than me, despite appearances.

So, what do we do? Well, we have to start from the assumption that walking and riding bicycles are both forms of transportation we want to collectively support. That’s a no brainer for me. A third of the city doesn’t have regular access to a car, and all of us need to get places too. That means we need support for alternative transportation—public transit, walking, and biking. Given the constant complaints I hear about traffic and parking, I’m guessing drivers don’t want the rest of us to get cars and add our clog to the road either. And really, are we all in this together, or not? We can say we aren’t, but we are, and the refusal to prioritize the needs of others, even when they aren’t our own, lessens all of us.

Cars are an overwhelming priority in transportation funding and planning. The resources given over to automobiles is mind boggling if you think about how much of our region is asphalted over to secure easy access for cars. We assume those streets are shared resources, expect the state to repair them, build more of them, salt and plow them in winter. Sidewalks, on the other hand, are private property, each square the responsibility of the homeowner whose stairs happen to end there. One absentee landlord or vacant home and the travel lane for pedestrians can be truly fucked for weeks. Sidewalks are a shared resource, and we should take care of them as our collective responsibility.

Bicycles need bike lanes, and this is a much harder argument to make to drivers than pushing for better sidewalks. That’s because the bike lane takes up room from cars, and nobody likes giving up what they’ve already got, even if giving it up is part of what justice looks like. Bike lanes make us all safer, though. They slow traffic, they encourage more bicyclists to get on the roads, and if designed well, they make a barrier between cars and bicyclists that decreases the chance we’ll get hit.

Baltimore is just getting started in the bike lane game, with protected lanes on Fallsway, Maryland Avenue, a few blocks on Mulberry and Franklin, and most recently Potomac Street. Other lanes are striped, including the first east/west routes. Things are getting better in many ways, thanks to the work of Bikemore and other city advocates for complete streets that enable all of us to get where we’re going more safely.

All this movement has also given rise to what advocates call “bikelash.” People don’t like change. They don’t want to lose the parking spot in front of their house or have to merge out of the bus/bike lane heading downtown for work. Our streets feel like common sense, like they’ve always been the way there are, and always should be. But street design changes all the time.

MLK Boulevard feels like it has always been there, a freeway in the city cutting West Baltimore off from the rest of us. It opened in 1982, a hiccup away, historically speaking. In a few years our bike infrastructure will feel like it has always been here, and for all the panic and anger that accompanies new bike lanes, we will all be safer.

But safety while riding a bike isn’t just about cars. In the past several weeks there has been a huge increase in attacks on cyclists on the city’s bike paths and routes. It’s scary stuff, and it’s complicated. There’s no easy solution to stopping violence in its many guises—street-level crime, systemic crimes of racism and enforced poverty, to give just two examples—either in the short or long term. But here’s what I think as I pedal my way through the city: Everyone should be safe to walk or ride their bicycle to school and work. If we built a politics around that basic argument, we would have to redesign streets and sidewalks, support healthy neighborhoods, make sure parents had the time and resources to support their kids, and so much more. The world as it is is not as it has to be, and redesigning our infrastructure equitably can help make all of us safer in the larger ways we imagine “safety.” This, much more than roads, is our collective responsibility.

The post The ins and outs of bicycling in Baltimore and the need for more bike lanes appeared first on Baltimore Beat.