Dear Folks, Well, I was hoping the next adventure I would get to share with you would be a mad love affair, or maybe a surprise trip to Tahiti, or a Pulitzer Prize, or at the very least the triumphant completion of my book — but life has its way of serving up adventures that are not the ones you hope for, or fantasize about, or expect. So it looks like the next experience for me, and for you inadvertently with me I’m sorry to say, is cancer.
Before we all panic, let me assure you that from all I know at this point, it is quite treatable, and that so far the experience has been astonishing, full of the lessons that I most need to learn.
This drama all started about a month ago with a strange colorless discharge that I thought might indicate the beginning of menopause (I’m 48 — it could be time). Dutifully I went in for a checkup and a Pap test (which I hadn’t had for two years). The Pap test was full of abnormal cells. They were even abnormal for abnormal cells; that is, they looked like cancer cells but not cervical cancer cells, which are the ones the Pap test is designed to detect.
Two weeks ago I got a call telling me this. It didn’t upset me, I simply didn’t believe it. I had never believed that cancer was something I could get, just as I don’t really believe that I will ever die. My general attitude toward my body is the opposite of hypochondria, namely denial. My body is only a semi-real entity, whose purpose is to carry my mind around. It is not permitted to get sick. In those rare instances when it insists on doing so (I almost never even get colds), it is allowed only minimal down-time, before I force it to get up and continue working on my to-do list.
You can see I needed some real humbling. Lesson Number One. I am mortal. My body needs care and maintenance. Cancer is a real thing. It can happen to me.
The call was from the nurse-practitioner who had done the Pap test, and who is a great woman. I am discovering that she can cut like a knife through hospital bureaucratic nonsense. She is part of a subversive underground network in that hospital, made up entirely of women — nurses, midwives, technicians, nurse-practitioners. I’ve seen this network in operation for only two weeks now, but I’ve come to feel tremendously supported by it. These women are efficient, loving, clear-headed, and straight-talking — all the things I have learned over 17 years of sporadic experience not to expect from that hospital.
I should introduce the hospital — it may play a role in this newsletter for awhile. The Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital (MHMH) happens to be across the street from my Dartmouth office at the edge of the campus. It’s the biggest, best, most technically sophisticated, arrogant, bureaucratic, and heartless hospital north of Boston, or at least that’s how I’ve always seen it. My encounters with it have all been minor — checkups, sewing up small wounds, etc. — and infuriating. It’s the kind of place where the doctors are at least half an hour late, where you can sit an hour waiting to have a blood test, where prices are such that you can’t sneeze in the hall without being charged a hundred bucks, and where the billing forms are so Byzantine that even with a Ph.D. from Harvard I can’t figure them out.
Well, that gives you an idea of my accumulated annoyance with the place. In fact I have never really needed it before. Now I do need it, and I’m discovering its depths. Though all my complaints still hold ($134 for a Pap test! The oncologist showed up one and a half hours late for my appointment!), I’m beginning to unprickle and be open to the good and helpful human beings who inhabit MHMH. That’s Lesson Number Two for me. Don’t go in expecting the worst, go in open to the best.
The next step after a bad Pap test is a colposcopy, which means a powerful light beam and a kind of long-distance microscope that can peer inside the uterus and see what’s going on. That I had last Monday. It was Not Fun, but it was interesting. Having been briefed by my female network, I flaunted my Ph.D. and my knowledge of opera before the oncologist (who, I was told, is an opera fan, also a Grateful Dead fan, also a hang-gliding fan), and he was totally straight with me. He told me as he went along what he was seeing and thinking, and what would be the best and the worst outcomes. He poked and prodded, snipped and scraped, taking cell samples for biopsies.
The upshot was that he didn’t understand what was wrong, but that something definitely was. It was not cervical cancer. It was probably endometrial or uterine cancer or both. He’d have to get the biopsy results before he could say anything more.
So I have spent a week of Not Knowing. It has been a blessed week.
Lesson Number Three. I am not in control of my life. I never was, though I sure treasured the illusion that I was. Now I can’t even plan what’s going to happen next week, much less next month. My schedules and deadlines might work out as I intend them to; they might also be knocked into oblivion. But of course it has always been that way. For some reason, I find this new insight terrifically funny. I am not in control! What a yuck! How comical I have been, working so hard to prove otherwise — a determined, self-centered, proud little mite, working against the forces of the universe! This rude and unwelcome interruption to my tightly planned existence has forced an enormous letting go. I’m just along for the ride, just another Bozo on the bus. What a joke! What a relief!
Lesson Number Four. Life can be lived at a slower pace, and it’s better that way. After the colposcopy I was tender and bleeding, so I had to make every movement a kinder, gentler one than I normally would have. In fact I discovered from that new perspective that I have been living my life for 48 years in overdrive. I move fast, folks. I think fast, I talk fast, I walk fast, I do not waste a minute. I only have time for the things on my to-do list, and they had better not take very long, because I have to get on to the NEXT things on my to-do list. In the necessary slowness of this week, I realize what a forced pace I have been pushing myself to. It’s not a normal quickness, it’s a quickness forced by compulsiveness, by not Being Enough, not Doing Enough, not Accomplishing Enough to justify my existence or to earn my own approval.
So I’ve spent the week paying attention to my body and being good to it, moving slowly, even taking naps (unheard of!), and sometimes even quitting in the evening and reading or listening to music, instead of working right up till bedtime. I’ve had time to feel the softness of the cats, to look deep into Heather’s expressive eyes, to taste food, to listen to emotional undertones when I talk to people. The most ordinary things in my life are turning out to be full of amazing richness.
Lesson Number Whatever — I’ve lost count. Live in the moment. Every moment is full of wonders. Life is amazing. Like all the other lessons here, I knew this one intellectually and often pronounced it sententiously to myself and others. But I didn’t really get it, I certainly didn’t practice it, until I got knocked hard enough by the universe, or my Higher Power, or fate, or the cancer so that I had to. Thanks, universe, Higher Power, fate, cancer!
Even at a slowed-down pace, the column got written, the book progressed, items got crossed off the to-do list. The process has just been more enjoyable.
I have been treasuring this precious state of Not Knowing, certain that sooner or later it will devolve into Knowing and making decisions and undergoing processes that I probably won’t like. I’ve wanted the Not Knowing to go on as long as it can, but I have made promises about next week to people who have to be informed if I can’t meet them. (I’m due to give a speech at Yale on Tuesday and to fly to Zurich for a weekend meeting of the Balaton Group Steering Committee.) So I mobilized the network at the hospital to try to get the biopsies done quickly, even during Thanksgiving week, so I have an idea what to expect. They did, they sneaked a look at the results, and one of them called me Friday afternoon with a report.
There are malignant cells. They seem to be in the endometrium, not the uterus. (My informant said that if you have to have a cancer, that’s a good place to have one — they’re slow-growing and very treatable.) My oncologist has not yet seen the results (he’s away all Thanksgiving weekend), so this is not an official report, and I don’t know what my options are. They could range, I guess, from a localized tumor removal (often done by cryosurgery, freezing the tumor out) to a hysterectomy, removal of the uterus and/or ovaries. (One of my OA friends says to me, cheerily, well, your uterus is one of the few things you can get along without.) That’s all I know at the moment — it’s more than I am supposed to know. We’ll just have to wait and see what comes next. One day at a time.
Something else I have been granted during this remarkable week is a larger glimpse of who I am, who all human beings are. We think of ourselves as so little, sometimes, such a diminished version of ourselves. Back when I was overweight, I thought I was my fat. Then I thought I was my disease of compulsive overeating. Then I thought I was my recovery, my program of disciplines. Or maybe my to-do list, that’s what I was. Or, at best, my writing. I was the words I manage to put down on paper! Or maybe, in my moments of greatest confidence, I was my mind, a pretty good one, well educated, a finely polished tool. It was OK to me to be my mind, but all those other me’s were unacceptable, of course.
This week, without the slightest effort, through no decision of my own, just by giving in to forces around me that I don’t understand in the slightest, I have been much bigger than all those puny self-definitions. I have been Serenity. I have been Courage. I have been Gratitude. I would never have applied those words to myself before. Over-excitement and abject fear is what I would have expected of myself under these circumstances. I don’t know where the calm and acceptance are coming from. I can only guess that they have always been there, ready to be tapped, part of me, part of all humanity.
(I am reluctant to go on here. My intellectual self says this is getting much too sappy and I am way over my head. But in the interest of true sharing, there’s one more part of the story.) All week a kind of mantra has been circulating in my mind, strengthening me and uplifting me. I don’t know where it came from. This is what it has been saying:
You are lovable.
You are loved.
Your purpose is to love.
Nothing could be more alien to my mind than these words. I have never thought them before, not in this combination, not at the level of any genuine belief. A more normal chant inside my head would go like this.
You might be lovable if you lost 10 more pounds and did something with your hair.
Some people say they love you, but they wouldn’t if they Really Knew.
Your purpose is to finish your to-do list.
Well, explain all this as you will, I’ve stopped trying to. I am just hoping that whatever happens next, I will never forget the lessons of this week. I’m hoping that if in the difficulties ahead I fall back into fear and petulant self-diminishment, I will be able to bring that mantra back as a reality. I am not my to-do list. I am not my column. I am not my mind. I am not my bank account, the clutter in my basement, my book deadline, or my cancer — though those are all parts of me, and revealing parts at that. What I am, though, most basically, is lovable, loved, and here to love.
Wow! What a week!
Meanwhile, back at the farm, we are making sheep-babies. We have a new ram named Ferdinand, who has a big woolly head and a gentle nature, and who is doing his job, we hope. We took nine of last spring’s lambs to slaughter early this month and sold the meat of eight of them (keeping the last for ourselves), which brought in a welcome burst of income just before the December property tax is due. Down in the basement there are nine lambskins spread out on the floor, salted down and drying before we send them off to be tanned. They come out beautiful, soft, and woolly, and most of them are dark brown, unusual in the market. They are another sellable product from the sheep. The third is the wool, which I now have to pack up and send off for spinning into yarn (keeping out that I want to spin myself).
We are tightened up and ready for winter. There’s lots of wood put up, the root cellar is full, Anna has closed off every little nook where a wind might try to enter the house. I’ve been clearing brush around the garden fence (this involves tussling with sumac, locust seedlings, and aggressive, thorny blackberries). This week the pond froze and the first snow flurries made the ground white.
We had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Our whole farm family was here, plus Sylvia’s sister Binky and her partner Tim, plus Suzanne and Dennis. Anna was in charge of the turkey, stuffing, and gravy, Sylvia in charge of the pies, Binky and Tim brought homemade rolls and milk from their Jersey cow. Suzanne and Dennis supplied wine and cranberry sauce. I was the veggie-cook — squash, Brussels sprouts, creamed leeks. All the bounty of that beautiful table came from our farm, or Tim’s and Binky’s, or farms near us that we know personally.
Suzanne and Dennis brought their half-grown golden retriever, who bounced all day with Basil. Heather had stars in her eyes — we’re having a PARTY! Binky had stars in her eyes — she’s expecting a baby in February. It was the first time I had been with Suzanne and Dennis since their wedding last August (for new readers of this letter, Dennis is my former husband), and it was wonderful for all of us. Those two are dearest friends of mine, always have been, always will be. Dearest friends are people who, when you see them — even though you haven’t been together for ages, even though you have done things to hurt each other — you pick up a conversation of openness and honesty, as though you were never apart. That’s how it was for us on Thanksgiving.
The house was cozy with woodfires, it smelled delicious, it throbbed with adults and children, puppies and dogs, cats and kittens, it was filled with love. That’s just what this big, ungainly old farmhouse is for. And thanks to this amazing week, I knew it was what I am for too. I savored every minute of that day. I couldn’t have been more thankful.
Love, Dana
