Year 2: The Psychological Healing Phase
I have spent the last year dealing with the cancer primarily on the physical level. That need for physical healing trumped all other concerns.
Perhaps I need to spend this second year, which is just beginning, dealing with this cancer primarily on the psycho-spiritual level? There is much work to be done….
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We are entering the time of anniversaries. On June 7th, it was the one-year anniversary of my first noticing that my breast was oddly red. I thought it was a bug bite. When the red area didn’t immediately send little rivulets of red poison racing up my breast and into my body, I forgot about it. Until June 20th, when I realized that not only had the redness not gone away, it had gotten a bit worse.
That’s when I called Nancy, the first person who saved my life. She told me that it sounded like inflammatory breast cancer and that I needed to research it on the Internet and get to the doctor on Monday. This year, on the weekend that is the one-year anniversary of that event, I’m going to be in Charlotte at a cancer survivors’ conference.
If you had told me, a year ago….
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In the last few weeks, I have been frequently drawn into the Ritual of the Kleenex. It’s a ritual of sympathy and caring, I think, that may be unique to modern Western culture, where certain individuals have taken on the role of being professional carers. It goes something like this:
For one reason or another, I begin talking about the depression and anxiety I’ve been feeling in the wake of what has just happened to me, what did happen so many years ago, and what could happen again in the future. I get upset…I start to choke up, to tear up, or to frankly sob.
At this point, someone reaches for the box of Kleenex and hands it to me. They don’t pull out a Kleenex and hand it to me. They hand me the entire box.
Like all rituals, it’s a two-way affair. The expected response from me is that I will take a Kleenex out of the box that is proffered and, at the very least, hold it in my hand (if not use it to dry my tears or wipe my nose). So I do.
On a purely practical level, the Kleenex does little to help me. It doesn’t last long against the onslaught of body fluids generated by my distress. And most often I don’t even try to use it that way. I just hold it, wadded, in my hand, as if it were a life preserver that has been thrown out to me, drowning in my anguish, by a would-be rescuer.
And in fact, I guess that’s what it is. A tiny little security blanket against the demons I am facing.
I note that many of my friends never offer me Kleenex. They may reach out and pat my arm or, more often, hug me. They physically connect my grieving self with their own bodies, holding me, patting my back, and trying to breathe consolation and new life back into me. But if I want to wipe my tears and blow my nose, I have to go in search of Kleenex on my own.
It’s only the professional carers who so consistently offer the Kleenex. The people whose professional ethics usually prevent them from expressing their caring in any other way. They cannot hug. It just wouldn’t be right. So they offer Kleenex, instead.
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I’ve now been back at work for two weeks. It’s going well, I think, though I’m frustrated that I’m not up to working more hours. Most days I come home from work and from participating in the exercise/biofeedback program for breast cancer survivors (Get Real and Heel), and I have to take a little nap before I can get anything done. On Friday I came home after finishing a busy week and had to take a three-hour nap before I could muster the energy to feed the critters. Clearly, this is “going back to work” thing is going to take some time.
I hope I *have* the time to give it. I’m going to run out of shared leave soon (to code for those hours when I can’t work), and if I can’t get more, I’m going to be in trouble.
It’s really good to be back. To have a job to go to. Someone or something that needs my attention, that has nothing to do with cancer. It’s good therapy.
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I’ve been reading a lot more here lately. Trying to understand cancer as a disease process, and trying to understand those who choose to make their careers working in medicine, especially in cancer care. Trying to understand their world and their way of thinking, which is clearly so very different from the one I brought to my cancer experience.
If I have a recurrence, one day in the future, I want to engage the medical profession on slightly different terms, if possible, than the terms on which I engaged them this time around. They were not always very good at meeting me in my world, from my point of view. I tried and tried to explain what I needed from them. I begged them over and over again, literally and figuratively, to please understand me. But they so often just didn’t hear me, and too often they chalked it all up to “difficult patient” instead of “patient with a traumatic medical history.”
Once again I’ve tried to make it clear to them all, here recently, what my medical history has been, from a psychological perspective. And what that means in terms of how I can best receive medical care today. How I can feel safest in meeting my needs for medical care. They have responded positively to my offering, and that comforts me.
But I do not necessarily believe that if I had to start receiving active treatment from them tomorrow, what I told them today would make much of a difference in how they approach me. One of my take-away lessons from the last year is that I can’t rely on getting that kind of engagement from them. So the arrow of understanding needs to move in the other direction, if I am to have any hope of finding peace in my cancer treatment experience.
I need to try to better understand them in their world, from their point of view, rather than hoping that they will be able to understand me from mine. And I need to develop that understanding now, when I’m not also trying to deal with the emotional fall-out of having the rug pulled out from under me because of my diagnosis. My latest attempt to do this is via Theresa Brown’s book, Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between, recently published by HarperCollins.
Brown was a professor of English who decided to go back to school and become a nurse because, as she says, she wanted a job in which she was expected to care about people, not instruct and grade them (p. 9). The people she chose to care for are cancer patients, and she writes eloquently of what it is like to be a nurse for people who all too often are destined to die.
The first chapter of her book grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go. It was about a child “with attitude” –– a “difficult patient” –– who began having trouble breathing. The story struck home for me immediately: child, difficult patient, cancer, shortness of breath. There it was, all rolled up into one anecdote. All of my issues.
But this time I wasn’t living it; I was reading about it from the care provider’s point of view. “I care deeply for my patients,” Brown writes, “and I loathe their suffering and disease. Patients love the idea of being treated and cured, but they hate how those treatments can wrack their bodies more horribly than their disease ever did….No one can fight for their life without having some suffering mixed in, at least not the way we practice medical oncology right now” (p. 10, 11).
At this point, I had to put the book down and have a good cry. What would I have given to have heard these words spoken to me by my care providers over and over again during my treatment?!!! To know that they were *not* determined to live in Happy Cancer Land no matter what I was going through (which is how it seemed to me), but that they fully appreciated the horror of what I was going through and could **join with me** in grieving and being angry about not just the cancer, but the cancer treatments, too!
I remember so clearly the day in February this year when Dr. L, the radiation oncologist, said (with some exasperation and feeling) that he was really sorry this had happened to me, that I had cancer. But the radiation treatments they were giving me were the best they had to offer for my type of cancer, and they were as safe as they knew how to make them.
I was stunned to hear him say that he was sorry this had happened to me. Nobody had ever said that to me before, in the entire eight months I’d been a patient there. He wasn’t just expressing his confidence in and joy over the treatments he had to offer, as my medical oncologist had done while I was sitting in my hospital bed suffering from a serious treatment side effect. Instead, he was expressing his regret that he had to offer these treatments to me.
While not an overt acknowledgement of (or apology for) the brutality of modern cancer treatment, it was the closest any of my care providers had yet come to (seemingly) being able to see what I was going through from my point of view and sympathize with me: I had cancer, and he was sorry that I was going through all of this treatment stuff.
I remember that after that, my questions about what radiation therapy was doing to me didn’t seem like they were burning so hotly to be answered. Maybe it was because another fundamental, burning need that I had, had been addressed?
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Brown also writes about what it is like to die, as a cancer patient. She describes the phenomenon of “air hunger” –– the patient’s inability to get enough oxygen, no matter how much is being pumped into them. In fact, the patient’s inability to breathe figures several times in the stories she tells throughout the book. Clearly, this is a significant phenomenon as a cancer patient slowly dies of their disease.
“Patients with air hunger feel terror at a primary level,” she writes. “They are, literally, suffocating” (p. 32). The treatment for air hunger –– administering morphine –– doesn’t really alleviate the suffocation…it only “tricks the brain’s oxygen receptors out of panic mode, giving the patient some relief from that feeling of suffocation” (p. 130).
This is not comforting to read. But at least Brown is telling it like it is. I have found that most people don’t like to be confronted in plain language with the truth of what is happening.
I called hospice a couple of weekends ago (before reading Brown’s book) to get answers to the question of whether I’m going to feel short of breath when I’m dying. The answer is, if I get mets to my lungs, I will. (And breast cancer likes to come back as lung mets.) They tried to down-play it, saying that they will give me meds to make me feel more comfortable. When I pressed for what that means, it basically means that they will use morphine and anti-anxiety medications to (1) slow my breathing down to a rate that my body can support when I can’t get a deep breath any longer and (2) make me sleepy and drugged so that I don’t experience the anxiety that normally comes with the feeling that you can’t breathe.
The nurse on the phone and the one who came out to visit me both tried to sugar-coat it, but when I broke down what they were saying in just that way, they didn’t –– couldn’t –– deny it. For many people, dying involves a measure of suffocation –– of slowly coming to not being able to breathe. Their job is to make you as un-upset about that as possible, when the time comes.
The office nurse at hospice called me back a few days later to see how I was doing…and I said they’d answered my questions about the end of life perfectly well. That I now understand that I will indeed slowly suffocate. That’s how you die. But they will offer me drugs so that I’m happier about it –– so that I just won’t care.
You could hear the catch in her attitude toward me. Her turning away. She couldn’t deny the blunt truth of what I had said, but she didn’t like having to face the truth that head-on. Sugar-coating feels better. After hesitating, she said, “Well, OK. We just wanted to check on you and see how you’re doing today.”
I said I was fine and needed no services yet. And I thanked her for calling.
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Someone from the BC Mets listserv that I belong to wrote the following. Though I am not Stage IV, it sounds true to me.
With each new diagnosis and escalating treatment, I sometimes think that having this disease is like dying very slowly. First you lose a body part, then one piece of your quality of life goes out the window, then another. Then I realized that everyone on the planet is in fact dying slowly. We stage IV cancer patients are just going a bit faster than everyone else, and we are forced to face our own mortality in a more conscious way.-------------------
Paula in Boston
As I said, I’ve been doing a lot of reading here lately. Another book I have devoured is Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery. I see myself all over those pages, in multiple ways. Where it talks about the patient’s relationship with the therapist as she works through the trauma…I realize that when I got cancer, I intuitively expected my doctors to be my “therapists” to help me get over the earlier trauma by how they treated me this time around, in my engagement with them. But they didn’t meet my expectations, which has only served to re-traumatize me.
According to Herman, there’s one expectation that trauma victims typically have of their therapists: They come to expect their therapists to be perfect expressions of the caring and comfort that they lost when they were traumatized. And if the therapists fail to meet this need, there is massive distrust of the therapist as a competent healer. An inability to trust that the therapist knows what they’re doing.
Yup. That sounds like what has happened.
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I’ve been very upset during my treatment because my doctors never gave me any treatment options. Yet I notice on the BC Mets listserv that women are being given treatment options to choose from all the time.
Is the reason I wasn’t given options when I was diagnosed because the team was doing the best protocol they knew how to do for IBC, and there were no alternatives to that?
When the time comes that one begins to get options, is it because one has become Stage IV and they don’t expect to be able to cure you, and no one knows what to do, for sure, so options are then trotted out? What a discouraging thought!
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I wish I were facing this catastrophe in my life –– and my possible death –– with more grace and nobility. I wish I were serene and calm and poised and the model of what it means to face a life-threatening illness.
Sadly, I am what I am, instead: Frightened and angry. Appalled by much of what I see and hear around me.
What is wrong with me? I look at the women on the BC Mets listserv, facing death, talking frankly about their conditions and whether they are approaching the end of the line…and I think how calm and noble they seem. How they are approaching their soon demise with dignity.
Me? I’m pitching a royal fit. Objecting to the fact that the treatments are themselves only slightly less dangerous than the cancer. Objecting to what I am forced to submit to, in order to try to cure the cancer –– the additional health conditions and risks I have to take on. Objecting to the idea that my shortness of breath, when I die, will only be masked, not prevented. Thinking that this is outrageous.
This is all just so outrageous! So fundamentally evil…yet I had to submit to it and might have to, again. There is no recourse.
What is wrong with me? Why am I not like the BC Mets-ers, so brave and noble in facing certain death?
Clearly, I am not a noble soul.
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One of the things I have begun doing, as a part of trying to re-frame the events of the last year, is to look at my mastectomy scar and think, "This is what cancer did to me," instead of thinking, "This is what Dr. N did to me."
It's been hard for me to do that...I've been so underwhelmed with what modern cancer treatment has to offer. And having to accept it, in all of its inadequacies, has really torpedoed the safe little world I had built up for myself (in my mind, at least) over the last five decades.
I still find that when I think of the possibility of becoming short of breath as a result of radiation treatments, it's hard for me to think, "This is what cancer did to me," instead of "This is what Dr. J did to me."
But I'm working on it. Shifting my perspective. Not forcing the shift, but trying it on for size. To see if it seems fair to me. Or fairer than laying all the blame at my doctors' feet for the barbaric treatments I've undergone. Laying the ultimate blame, instead, at the feet of the cancer.
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Meanwhile, I have asked through Patient Relations to be able to speak with The Resident who assisted with my surgery in December. I have been denied that opportunity. Apparently the folks who made that decision are in Risk Management and Patient Relations.
I don’t know whether to laugh or get frustrated about this. On the one hand, the thought that I might be traumatizing the folks who first traumatized me (the medical establishment) does have its satisfactions. Who knew I was that powerful?!!!
But on the other hand, what I’m really after is not revenge (not a legal suit, as I have repeatedly tried to assure them) but personal peace of mind and a chance to re-frame the events of the last year by coming to understand them better. Being denied the opportunity to find answers by talking to all relevant parties to the events in question makes that more difficult.
In fact, it makes me angry. It feeds the lack of trust that I’m trying to work through. I keep having to take a deep breath and try not to fixate on what it is that they’re attempting to hide from me by not letting me talk to everyone involved. It makes me want to lash out at them…and the means I have for doing THAT are pretty limited and not something I want to engage. Which leaves me powerless, in the end.
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I told one of my medical care team members this week that I had discovered that my first oncologist, Dr. H, helped write the guidelines for breast cancer surveillance that ASCO uses –– the ones that say there’s no point in doing any kind of active surveillance of a breast cancer patient who’s finished treatment, because finding a recurrence sooner rather than later won’t make any difference in the outcome. They can’t cure it, the patient is going to die, so there’s no point in finding a recurrence early.
No wonder I felt he was someone I couldn’t count on if I got a recurrence! I mean, I have to be the queen of looking at the dark side, but I do think that in this matter, Dr. H has me beat! What a fatalistic attitude he has!
Surprisingly, the team member knew that Dr. H had helped write the guidelines…he offered the man’s name when I said “Guess who helped write them,” and he offered it without a hint of surprise in his voice.
What bothers me is that he didn’t act indignant for me. Appalled with me. Or as if he understood and appreciated my feelings. He just quietly allowed me those feelings and statements of outrage.
How can he not be appalled, himself, that the guidelines say if you get a recurrence, you’re dead anyway, so why bother finding it early? How can that EVER be OK?
I really do hate Dr. H and all he stands for. I became his patient at the best time, if I had to have a relationship with him. I caught him when I was a fresh, new breast cancer patient that he thought he could cure. Thank God I was Stage III! He thought he could cure me, so he directed his best efforts toward me.
If I’d presented as Stage IV, like the shell-shocked woman I encountered in the pre-infusion room that first time who had also been assigned to him as a patient, I don’t think he’d have fought to try to save me. He’d only have done what he thought he needed to do to try to control the spread of the cancer and to make me as comfortable as possible until I died.
Trouble is…that’s what most oncologists do with Stage IV breast cancer patients. Dr. H is far from alone. And as a patient, I find this fact leaves me feeling very alone and vulnerable.
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This week I talked to Dr. S, the anesthesiologist who worked with me for my surgery. Ironically enough, though she is the doctor with whose conduct I’ve had the fewest concerns, she was very defensive and hostile toward me when we began our conversation. I began by thanking her for talking to me, and I emphasized that this is not about litigation but about peace of mind for me as I try to do cancer survivorship stuff.
She was not at all warm and fuzzy. She was, in fact, hostile. She wanted to know if I thought I could do anesthesia better than she could, with the years she has put into studying how to do it.
I told her what I remembered of the anesthesia procedure. I explained that when I asked for one miniscule dose of Versed, at that point I totally lost control of everything. I asked her how much Versed I’d received during the operation, and she said icily that I knew how much I’d received. So the info I was given on the day after surgery was correct. (And clearly, she had been prepped for this conversation. She knew that I knew.)
I asked her if she had brought me a copy of the anesthesia notes from the surgery, as I had asked her to do, and she fixed me with a steely stare and said no. I think this failure to bring it was deliberate. Not an oversight.
She said that she had left the OR at the time of my surgery to get an alternative CD player for me, because mine wouldn’t work and she knew that listening to my surgical CD was important to me. She got one from pediatrics –– a yellow Sponge Bob CD player. I said that I didn’t remember that at all, and it must have happened after they had given me the Versed.
(I was totally unaware that I had gotten to listen to my CD at all. I wonder if that is why I woke up so calm and relaxed about the whole thing, from an anesthesia point of view? Because I did in fact get to listen to the CD, and it calmed and reassured me?)
I told her that I appreciated how she had allowed me to control the anesthesia process all the way up to the point where I got the Versed, but how unsatisfying I have felt it was to ask for a miniscule dose of Versed and wind up waking up 3 hours later having received 9 mg.
I asked her what a normal dose was, to put a patient out, and she refused to answer me. She said there is no one normal dose, but it depends on how the patient reacts. Some people will go right out with a very small dose, others will have a paradoxical reaction to it where they become agitated and move around unconsciously, others will get chatty and seem to be aware but not have any memory for what happened later. They have no way of knowing how any patient will react and how much they will have to give until they are in the situation.
She said that she had not been in the OR with me the whole time, because she had other things to attend to, and that my anesthesia was managed by a nurse anesthetist who had been informed about my desires regarding sedation. I can’t help but wonder how *well* informed she was. Because she seemed to overthrow my requested sedation plan pretty damned quickly once I requested one dose of Versed. Did she just do what came naturally, from that point forward, and drug to me sleep?
For that matter, I wonder if I had any kind of intubation, after all. When I woke up, my mouth was so dry I could hardly stand it. My mouth is not normally that dry when I wake up from a normal sleep…so what went on, on that operating table, to make my mouth that dry? I suspect that more went on than she is telling me, which is why she didn’t bring a copy of the record I asked for. She doesn’t want me to see it and know the truth.
She repeated several times that her job was to keep me “safe” and pain free. I finally managed to convey to her that while her idea of what “safe” meant was one thing, to me, with my history, it meant something very different. And I didn’t get that, during my surgery. To me, being out of control of my anesthesia was not safe, at all, but very stressful to me.
I explained about my hospital experience when I was a child. I said that as a result of that treatment, being able to be conscious and aware during a procedure instead of knocked out and non-participatory was what I needed to feel safe. I emphasized several times that it was very important for me to feel in control and like a participant, not like a victim. Even if the extent of my participation was just to lie very, very still!
I acknowledged that she had told me in our pre-op consult that if I had any Versed, I might well not remember anything at all. And that is indeed what had happened. Nothing happened, during the surgery, that she did not warn me might happen, when we had our pre-op consult.
But I had hoped, when I asked for the Versed at the start of the surgery, to be made just very mildly loopy…to receive a “twilight” dose of the drug, which is what we had discussed at the pre-op consult. Not to be completely put to sleep. Yet at the moment that I asked for it, although I had only been given whatever sedation I requested before then, control was completely taken away from me from that moment forward. I was given 9 mg. of the stuff, and I was rendered totally unconscious.
And that, I said, is what I found problematic. I was rendered unconscious when I wasn’t ready to give up consciousness yet. I just wanted some relief of my anxiety…not relief of pain so severe that unconsciousness was desired.
I indicated that in the future I’ll only ask for fentanyl for pain and if I need anything more, we can discuss it when the need arises. She said it wasn’t practical to have that kind of conversation in the moment, because it causes delays and the need for more sedation may arise at a moment when the surgeon cannot stop and wait for the anesthesia decisions to be made.
I said that making the decisions on the table is not what I meant, but having made a set of contingency plans ahead of time (during the pre-op consult) for what would be done if the lower-level sedation plan wasn’t working –– and then getting my consent to take the plan to the next pre-decided level, before doing so, when in the OR –– could be done.
I said that what happened is my own fault. I now know that Versed makes me go totally to sleep, so I will not allow it to be used in the future unless I am in pain and there is no more of any other kind of pain relief that can be given to me. I will only ask for it in the context of last-resort pain relief. That way, when I wake up, my last memory will have been of pain and the Versed will be what relieved me of that pain. This will make the subsequent amnesia more acceptable. I will not ask for it in the expectation that it will “take the edge off,” and then wake up unhappy because it put me completely to sleep when all I wanted was a little relief from my anxiety.
She said that I should try to re-frame the situation. I was, in fact, very much in control of my anesthesia. I had an anesthesia plan that was very different than what they would have chosen for me. I had a para-vertebral block, when Dr. N does not like using them and she (Dr. S) has never done a mastectomy with less than general anesthesia before. I was awake for the block, instead of sedated for it. I was allowed to ask for the sedation I wanted, as I wanted it. I was allowed to take my own equipment (the CD player) into the OR, when normally that is not allowed. I was, in fact, very much in control of many factors that most patients don’t ever question or want any input on.
By the end of our conversation, she was less hostile. She was never really warm and fuzzy, though. She said that we could try something like pre-op Ativan to ease my anxiety, rather than my hoping that Versed would do that for me. Of course, I thought (but did not say) that Ativan puts me to sleep, too. The difference being that it doesn’t induce amnesia!
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I have been having waves of anxiety wash over me periodically over the fact that my surgeon lied to me when she said she would not let students cut on me during my surgery last December. I have been busily working to make it seem otherwise, because I *want* it to be otherwise. I want to trust.
In order to allow myself to do so, I have created this rationale for the fact that she violated our agreement. I have invented this idea that perhaps she did the most skillful things during my surgery, although those may not have directly been the “cutting” things. So that, in effect, I kind of got what we agreed upon, in spirit, if not in the actual letter of what we had agreed upon.
But I think this is a lie I’m telling myself, now.
Here are the incongruent things she has said to me, so far:
* She told me she would not let students cut on me. (September and November 2009) But she did. (December 3, 2009)Let’s face it. Dr. N lied to me and has continued to do so. She has been coached on what to say to me. When we met on May 25th, she brought up every “talking point” that I had told others I wanted to cover with her, before I could bring each one up. And she offered me an apology so quickly and readily, I immediately suspected she had been strongly advised to make the patient happy by doing so…although she invoked her Christian faith to say that she had not been so advised. Which is, I suspect, another lie.
* She told me that she forgot what she told me back last fall/winter. (May 25, 2010)
* She told me she remembered what she told me back last fall/winter, to such a degree that she told the resident on the day of surgery that he could go and send in an intern, because she was “taking this case.” (May 25, 2010)
* She told me that the resident only did the opening incision and she did all of the rest of the cutting. (May 25, 2010)
* She told me that she was busy dissecting nerves and veins and arteries within my body and holding them up and out of the way, so that someone else had to do the cutting. (May 28, 2010)
In short, she is telling me anything that she thinks will make me happy. I haven’t been having honest conversations with her; I’ve been having heavily scripted ones.
She is not 100% reliable. She’s technically skilled, no doubt about it. But not 100% reliable in the truth-telling department.
And this makes me very anxious. I tried so hard to arrange to have the kind of surgical experience I wanted and needed to feel psychologically safe and secure with what was happening. But look at what happened. So what happens if I have to face surgery again sometime in the future?
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A friend sent me an article about how exposure to radiation causes breast cancer. The title is, “Study shows how radiation causes breast cancer,” and you can find it at http://www.naturalnews.com/z028959_radiation_brst_cancer.html. Here’s what it says:
Exposure to ionizing radiation can cause genetic damage that gives rise to malignancy. That’s why people are enjoined by places like Cornell University’s Program on Breast Cancer and Environmental Risk Factors not to allow “unnecessary” radiation exposure. The catch is, it seems that “unnecessary” is in the eye of the beholder. The exposure from getting a mammogram is dismissed as not being a cause for concern.
Some new research about radiation exposure and cancer is disturbing, though. “Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have discovered that radiation exposure can alter cells' microenvironment (the environment surrounding cells). And that greatly raises the odds future cells will become cancerous.”
The researchers used human mammary epithelial cells (HMECs), the cells that line breast ducts, where most breast cancers start, and subjected them to a single dose of ionizing radiation similar in power to what a woman might receive in CT scans or in radiotherapy. Exposure to these levels of radiation “could represent sources of concern,” according to the researchers.
I have just finished crying my way through six weeks of radiotherapy. I cried many days as I lay on the radiation table, because I felt that I had no choice but to do this, because the Medical Establishment tells me if I didn’t do it, my chances of beating the cancer were not as good. Crying, because it felt wrong to me to be doing it –– as if I were putting myself at further risk for cancer, rather than reducing my risk. And here we have the Medical Establishment (or one corner of it) telling me now that I may have been correct.
So, which “truth” is the truer truth, and which one is closer to a lie? Was radiation therapy more useful for me than harmful to me? Or is it the other way around, really? In 25 years, will they look at the kind of radiation therapy I submitted to as the radiation equivalent of thalidomide for pregnant women with morning sickness –– a bad idea that should never have been?
It’s these kinds of issues that made it so extremely, extremely difficult for me to submit to my cancer treatments, in general, this past year. And make it difficult to contemplate doing it all over again, if I get a recurrence.
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Well, it’s that time of year again. The time when H.E.R.S. (the Higher Etheric Reincarnators’ Sanctuary) becomes a tadpole farm. Last year’s crop of home-grown frogs began feeling “frisky” early this year –– even while my parents were still here in early March. We could hear them croaking away out there, despite the chill in the air. They were so loud sometimes that it could be hard to hear the TV over the, if you’ll excuse the expression, horny toads. And now all that sexual energy has been transformed into tadpoles, which on the whole are much quieter!
I don’t know how many of these myriads of tadpoles make it to adulthood. Clearly many do not, or I’d be visited with a plague of frogs of biblical proportions every year! But enough do make it to re-populate the flower bed in front, wherein lies the tiny decorative pond that is their birthplace, and the garden area in back.
This population boost attracts the black snakes, one of which swished rapidly past me one day a couple of weeks ago while I was doing some watering. Thanks to living with my son’s pet snake, Zeus, for many years, I am no longer pathologically terrified when I see a snake. When this shiny, black creature dashed out of the ground cover and past my feet, I was only mildly startled…and not at all dismayed. Black snakes help to keep away copperheads and other more poisonous snakes.
It’s the gift of the tadpoles.
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It’s also humming bird season now. I have two feeders –– one in front of the house, just outside the window that I look out of when I’m working at the computer. The other is just outside the kitchen window in the back of the house. Today I had two sightings at my feeders –– but only one was of a hummer.
My first sighting was a male hummer at the front feeder, alighting briefly on the rim and drinking in the sugar water (ah, sugar! lucky devil!), then taking off again and flying straight toward my window! The late afternoon sun caught the red blaze on his tiny chest and made it look like he was wearing a brilliant, sequined bib. I mean, it literally sparkled in the light. It was dazzling! Iridescent!
The second sighting was of a simple wren at the back hummer feeder. I couldn’t figure out what this clearly confused bird was doing, pecking at a feeder full of sugar water. Then I realized: The ants, which seem to be everywhere this year, keep taking over the feeder in back. I try to put up ant barriers, but so far I’m not having lots of luck. My failure, however, is the wren’s opportunity to catch a nice, juicy morsel to eat.
The food chain.
My therapist says that yes, my observation that life here is cheap is accurate. It has to be abundant, because it’s so cheap. Or maybe it’s cheap, because it’s so abundant? Hard to say.
But, she said, life here is also incredibly aggressive. Try to stamp it out, and it struggles to come back, no matter what. Anyone who has ever had a garden to weed can attest to the truth of that observation, too!
I suppose this is true. Cancer tried to stamp me out, and I have struggled to come back, no matter what brutal things I had to do to my body to enable this. The question is, is the cancer that I tried to stamp out struggling to come back, too, no matter what?
If it does, this all starts all over again. And I can hardly bear that thought.
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