Dear Folks, “Uterus — no evidence of tumor. Adenocarcinoma — no residual tumor.”
Dr. S. came in triumphantly waving the pathology report ten minutes before I checked out of the hospital. I felt like laughing and crying at the same time. I knew the report would say that, but to hear it, finally, actually, after four months of working so hard toward that goal was, well, an emotional moment. THE CANCER IS GONE!!!
The surgery went smoothly. I left the hospital, moving very, very carefully, after 3 1/2 days. The whole episode was easier than I thought it would be — in fact in some ways it was a blessed interlude.
Three friends showed up to be with me during that exquisitely tense time when they were prepping me for surgery and waiting for the operating room to be ready. The doctor was amazed at how little blood I lost during the operation and how quickly I became lucid in the recovery room. He says that when I came out of the anesthesia I was smiling. (Little did he know that, taking a cue from Bernie Siegel, I had been telling myself firmly all morning, “Don’t bleed. You’ll be fine. Wake up happy.” This mind-body stuff really works!)
My first memory of the recovery room was of Dr. S. telling me that my ex-husband was there and asking whether it was OK to reveal my condition to him. I laughed (it hurt to laugh!) and said sure, tell him anything. When they wheeled me all groggy into my room, Dennis and Suzanne were there, and two other friends came by just to sit there and be with me. Dennis performed an excellent service by getting a medical report and calling friends and relatives with the good news.
What I remember of that first day is dozing off and waking up to the sound of loving voices as my friends talked quietly to one another. Flowers parading in the door and arranging themselves around the room. Dennis trying not to make me laugh, but inadvertently doing it anyway (I don’t think it’s possible for Dennis not to be funny). Gentle nurse’s hands putting ice chips in my mouth and helping me to roll on my side and sponging me off with a warm washcloth. A symphony of newborn babies crying. (For some reason they put me in the obstetrics ward. I loved it. When I could get up and hobble around, I visited the babies and held some of them. For me it was great to be there, but for women getting hysterectomies under other circumstances it must be a cruel trial.)
The first night I happily mainlined morphine with a pump I operated myself. After that I used no painkillers, not even aspirin. The pain wasn’t bad; I much preferred it to the mental haze from the painkillers. By the second day I could toddle around a little, pushing my IV rack in front of me, and I was working hard on getting my body functions back. Every time I managed a new achievement (drinking, peeing, passing gas, eating solid food — our aspirations are very humble in the hospital), I was rewarded by the detachment of another tube from some part of my anatomy. That was a fun game. By the second night I was tube-free and flipping out not on morphine but on a new CD of Marilyn Horne singing Orfeo ed Eurydice.
For the next day and a half I just enjoyed myself, surrounded by flowers, listening to music, waiting to see who would come in the door. I entertained a steady parade of visitors. Some were interns and med students coming to admire my beautiful incision. (I am not a connoisseur of these things, but from the ohs and ahs I assume that the slit across my belly is something special!). Mostly my visitors were old friends, plus some new ones. It was a lovely time, primarily, I guess, because all I had was time. Time to talk, time to listen, time just to be, without any agenda. “No one to be,” as one of my favorite Stephen Levine meditations says, “Nothing to do. Nowhere to go. Just now. Just this much.”
Being no one, going nowhere, I participated in some wonderful conversations in that hospital room. It’s as if my friends had been waiting to catch me flat on my back so they could share themselves with me — or as if I never really offered them the opening until I was flat on my back. Anyway, there’s my life-lesson coming back to hit me again. Another “total waste of time” that will remain in my memory as one of the most precious times in my life.
My friend Priscilla gave me a great present (I recommend it, if you ever want to do something nice for a friend in the hospital). She hired a massager (masseur? masseuse? you can tell this is a new world for me) to come to my room and work over my non-tender parts. I had never had a professional massage before. It was very heaven. Every cell in my body glowed in appreciation. I wished I had thought of this during the hard time when I was having radiation and my body needed all the encouragement it could get. I think hospitals, especially cancer clinics, should include massage as an integral part of therapy. I am going to go on having them, not as an indulgence (which is how I would have thought of it before) but as a standard part of my new Health Program — about which more later.
The operation was Tuesday morning. Sylvia and Heather came to bring me and my flowers home on Friday evening, just a few hours before Dennis delivered my mom from the Boston airport. She came from Oklahoma to mother me for a week, which turned out to be a brilliant idea. I was a hot-shot, springing myself from the hospital early, but in truth I was weak as an overboiled noodle, and I needed lots of help. Mom made veggie soups, kept the woodstove going, watered the flowers, did the laundry, answered the phone, fetched and carried, and shielded me as much as possible from the exuberance of my friends and housemates — especially my two-year-old housemate, who did her best just to hug me and not bounce, but gee, that’s really hard when you’re only two and a fit of exuberance comes on.
That was a good week too, especially the opportunity to be with my mother under no-one-to-be, nothing-to-do circumstances. We had some talks, some cries, some rememberings of good and bad times in the past. Mom enjoyed plunging through my library, she coped pretty well with my communal household, she liked listening to music with me, she made friends with the animals. It was a time for us to get in touch once again with how much we love and respect each other, and to express those feelings as best we could, though they are too deep to be fully expressible and we both get embarrassed trying. But that’s all right; we know what’s not said and what’s beyond saying.
So Mother administered Mom-therapy, Basil supplied lick-therapy, Simon and Poppy were there with purr-therapy, friends delivered phone-therapy and visit-therapy, there were plenty of flowers for beauty-therapy. We had a spell of brilliant weather, all the snow disappeared, and a brave purple crocus put up the first outside bloom — spring therapy!. Suzanne and Dennis helped Sylvia and Don crutch and pill the sheep in preparation for lambing (crutching means shaving their nether regions so we can see what’s going on and intervene if necessary; pilling means giving them worm pills so they don’t transfer parasites to the babies). My noble housemates kept the woodboxes full, the animals fed, everything functioning. They have held this place together for three months with almost no help from me — that has been the ultimate therapy!
Now it’s two weeks later, and I can feel all the therapy working, though it will be awhile before I’m up to full speed. I can start and care for seedlings (planted 48 tomato plants today), dig parsnips from the garden (yum!), prune about three fruit trees at a time, or sit at the word-processor for an hour before getting tired. It’s a time for patience now. The curing is done, there’s nothing left to do but heal.
One thing I have gotten from this illness is a new idea of what healing means. It has nothing to do with one’s medical condition; it has to do with how one leads one’s life. My friend Joan Davis got me started thinking about this when she commented one day over the computer (she lives in Switzerland; we talk every day through computers connected by satellite) that she’d know society was really healthy when no one took vitamins because everyone ate such wonderful food; when medical or psychological therapy was rarely needed because everyone lived sensible lives. (Don’t worry, doctors, we’ll still need you for accidents and genetic diseases — you just won’t have to mop up the results of stupid living.)
During the last few months I have been devouring the literature of healing — the “flaky” literature on meditation, visualization, prayer, love. There is a degree of flakiness that goes too far for me — I am a scientist after all. But on the whole I am convinced, partly from my own inner experience, partly from the the fascinating new research on the neuropeptide connections that link the immune and endocrine systems with the central nervous system (so your liver really does know when you’re having a happy thought!) that one has a mindbody, which heals as a whole. The authors I like best are the few who can span the whole range, doctors who practice leading-edge curative medicine AND who guide their patients to spiritual sources of healing. I spent far too much time during my own curative course caught in the antagonism between those two schools, when what I desperately wanted was the best of each.
Finally I’m learning how to use both without rousing the anger of either against the other. Now that I’m done with the curative side, except for continuous checkups, I can go full-tilt toward Healing. I’ve scheduled myself for a week of meditation and massage at an Ayurvedic healing center in Massachusetts next month. I’m determined to work out a healthier diet and much more regular exercise. I’m going to have massages. I’m going to do some dancing — any kind of dancing. I’m going to meditate more, play the piano more, goof off more.
I’m not going back into my workaholism. The week I was diagnosed with cancer all my priorities rearranged themselves, and I’m going to keep them where they are now. Money, accomplishment, fame, the opinion of the world, even CHANGING the world, all have gone to the bottom of the list. What has come to the top is love. Being good to myself and my friends. Having fun. Admiring the daffodils and petting the cats. Breathing in the good, wet, alive smell of mud season in New England. Living life every moment.
Thanks to the illness my calendar is beautifully clear, and I’m going to keep it that way. I’m not going to succomb to plans other people make for me. I’m not going to accept a single speaking engagement or board appointment or committee membership during 1990. I have two books, a newspaper column, and a farm to work on, and that’s enough. You all have permission to remind me of these brave words, any time you sense that I’m slipping.
Hurray! Dana is finally coming to her senses!
One of the main articles of contention between the body-technicians and the mind-technicians is the story one tells about an illness. My doctors would account for what happened to me by saying that a few cells in my endometrium just randomly made some copying errors. My environmentalist friends would search for all the chemical and radiological assaults that caused that cell-division error. Bernie Siegel would ask: why did you need a cancer in your life right now? (a question that infuriates some people, who say it’s blaming the victim). Having thought about all these ways of telling about a cancer, I’ve come to the following, which is as much bullshit as any other story, but which works for me.
A cancer, I think, is caused by a combination of inner and outer causes. Mistakes in cell division happen all the time. Our modern world has probably increased their natural frequency by many orders of magnitude. I don’t have to look very hard in my life, if I want to find an external cause to blame for my cancer:
– 15 years of daily exposure to the electromagnetic radiation fields of computer video display terminals,
– A lifetime of eating peanut butter (aflatoxin contaminant, a powerful carcinogen),
– Working for the Atomic Energy Commission at the Argonne National Laboratory in my early 20s, and living on-site,
– Sloshing around happily in organic solvents during lab work back when I was a chemist,
– Living for 18 years within 60 miles of an operating nuclear power plant,
– DDT spraying all around me in my childhood,
– Travel all over the world, especially to places like Eastern Europe and Asia, where chemicals are still widely mishandled and pollution is endemic.
– and so forth.
There are so many possible external sources that I believe we all harbor cancer cells all the time, just the way we always harbor cold viruses. Mostly our bodies’ immune systems can destroy those cells or keep them under control. I may have had that endometrial cancer doing a slow simmer for years — or maybe not. The question is, what breaks down the internal control system and lets loose the exponential growth of the cancer?
Well, I can come up with a lot of theories to explain that too:
– A lifetime of feeling un-self-confident, sexually repressed, and fearful,
– Working too hard, holding up too-high expectations for myself, taking on too much.
– Severe emotional upset due to divorce, resignation from Dartmouth professorship, moving away from farm, or all the above,
– Gaining 50 pounds as a result of emotional upset,
– Losing 60 pounds through determined effort in a 12-Step Program,
– Wanting an unarguable excuse for not finishing my book on time,
– Not loving my body, not loving myself, not letting in the love of others, not letting out the immense waves of love I feel for others, for the world, for the miracle of life.
And so on. Not a pleasant list, because a self-castigating one, and what I don’t need now is any more self-castigation. But an empowering list, because it tells me what to work on — and that’s what Bernie Siegel’s talking about, not blame, but empowerment. This is the list that tells me where in my life there is something to heal. It seems that I learned of the cancer and began to work on curing and healing before the exponential growth was too powerful to catch. Other people aren’t that lucky. But whether or not there’s a cure, there can be healing. Curing is beyond my power. I have no control of the outcome of the disease. I only have control of whether I heal my life.
So my job is healing now and for the rest of my life, however long that will be. I finally see that that healing is not a detour from the Changing the World work I’ve been doing for decades. It’s right on the path. Just as the mind is in no way separate from the body, so my internal state is absolutely connected with my outward effectiveness, and so the Health (in the very large sense) of every individual is inextricably linked with the Health of the economy, the Health of the environment, the Health of the society, the Health of the world.
Let’s hear it for the Health of the world!
Another Stephen Levine meditation: “May I dwell in the heart. May I be free from suffering. May I be healed. May I be at peace. May all sentient beings, to the most recently born, be free of fear, free of pain. May all beings heal into their true nature. May all beings know the absolute joy of absolute being. May all beings be healed. May all beings be at peace.”
On Foundation Farm the ewes are large with lambs, due the first of April. The crocuses are opening. The brook is swollen with melting snow. The bird-chorus now includes robins and red-wing blackbirds and phoebes. There’s mud everywhere. Heather manages every time she leaves the house to sit in a puddle. The geese are parading around, nibbling at the first greening grass. The chickens are laying like crazy. The maple sap is running. The bees are flying. The weather is March-changeable, stormy and sunny. My bedroom windows are crammed with little green seedlings. Everything is just the same as always, but I suspect for me nothing will ever be quite the same again.
Love, Dana
P.S. If you’re interested in some of the books I’ve found helpful, here’s a list of the ones I like best:
Bernie Siegel, Love, Medicine, and Miracles and Peace, Love, and Healing, especially the second.
Deepak Chopra, Quantum Healing.
Stephen Levine, Meetings at the Edge, Who Dies?, and Healing into Life and Death.
Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness.
Pat Rodegast and Judith Stanton, Emmanuel’s Book.
