Digging Deep

I have previously written about people I know who are fighting the good fight against cancer.  Three of them at this point are in good health while one is gearing up for the fight of his life.

 

He is getting ready for surgery next week and after that he enters an intense, aggressive program aimed at totally killing this sucker in its tracks.  He has an amazing attitude towards this scary situation and I admire his calm and even demeanor.

 

 

Put in the same situation, I know I would not be faring so well and I don't think I would be inspiring anyone with my raw reaction to fighting a cancer within myself.

 

From talking to my friends, they say that first comes the disbelief that your body is so sick; that your body is basically at war with itself.  Your mind and heart are racing, racing at an incredible pace and you can't catch your breath as you take it all in.  While trying to come to grips with what the doctors are saying, you sometimes detach from reality a bit and feel as though you are outside yourself.  I understand this feeling very well because in the first few months after my husband's death, I definitely was outside myself.  I think it is your mind's way of temporarily buffering you from what's happening and giving you a way to cope.

Facing pain, whether physical, mental or a combination of both, can be isolating.  There is an intense feeling of letting the rest of the world fall away as you focus with laser concentration on what you need to do, have to do, to find wellness.

 

It is now a time of digging down deep and calling upon God to watch over him.  It is a time of feeling human and vulnerable.  It is a time of pulling out all the stops to give love, support and everything else we as a family can find to throw at him as he faces and fights this dreaded, yet survivable, disease.

Thank you for being here.  Peace.
 

Angelina's Health Decision

Angelina Jolie made a powerful decision.

It's not a decision that every woman has the opportunity to make, but I stand and applaud her courage and wish her a future of wellness.

 

Faced with medical information from her doctors that she had an 87 percent risk of developing breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of developing ovarian cancer because she carried the BRCA1 gene, she decided to take control of her health and be proactive.  She decided at the young age of 37 to have a double mastectomy which means she had both of her currently healthy breasts surgically removed.

 

Jolie didn't want to wait around for the cancer to come and claim her.

 

Jolie, the winner of an Academy Award, two Screen Actors Guild and three Golden Globe awards, wrote an op-ed piece which appeared in yesterday's New York Times about her medical decision and I think every woman who read it paused afterwards and thanked God for their good health and blessings and maybe at the same time they also thought about someone they had already lost to breast or ovarian cancer or is in treatment.

Whether a mother or a daughter, grandparent, sibling, or friend, chances are very good that almost every New York Times and Cry, Laugh, Heal reader knows someone affected by fbomb cancer.

Actress Angelina Jolie and her partner, Actor Brad Pitt, with their six children

I imagine that every woman, when first diagnosed with breast cancer has two burning questions, "What am I going to do?" and "Will I lose my breast?"  As the mother of six children and the daughter of a woman who died from cancer at age 56, Jolie said she had all the information she needed to face her scary health dilemma, stare down her future and go forward.

Her New York Times op-ed is amazing and for me, her most inspirational words came in the last two sentences:

"Life comes with many challenges.  The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of."

 

Cancer can many times take us to the land of grief and, believe me, it is not a place anyone wants to visit.  But once we find ourselves thrown there, we can and must find a way to get through the tears and the pain and work to find a new way of living our lives.

 

It is about trust, and love, and being human.  And it is most of all about hope.

 

Please don't ever give up.

 

You've got the power.

Vulnerability

Photo by Lee Gant

Four people I know very well are bravely fighting cancer.  Currently, each person has a different kind of cancer and each person is in a different stage of treatment.  Through them, I have become more intimately aware of fighting this horrendous disease and I have learned a tremendous amount about developing resilience from them.  

Two of the four people recommended a book to me, "Anti-Cancer A New Way of Life," by David Servan-Schreiber, MD, PhD.  Servan-Schreiber is a scientist and a doctor who was diagnosed with brain cancer seventeen years ago and is currently in remission.  Before I opened the book, I was grabbed by the following fact printed on the book's cover: "All of us have cancer cells in our bodies.  But not all of us will develop cancer."  It blew me away to think that we are all walking around with cancer cells inside of us that could be waiting for some sort of a trigger.  Talk about refocusing your health priorities!

I am not a cancer patient but I don't need to be diagnosed to restructure my diet or pursue smarter ways of managing stress and achieving a more relaxed approach to life.  Servan-Schreiber's book is empowering.  It is chock full of nutritional and medical information and I have started incorporating small changes in an effort to be preventative.  Not that every meal has to be a series of conscious health choices but knowing that sugar contributes to cancer sometimes helps to make chocolate less appealing to me.  Notice I said sometimes.

The best parts of the book to me are Servan-Schreiber's intimate insights into himself, the power of friendship and the "music of life."  Feelings of helplessness and isolation can delay healing and block our immune systems from becoming stronger; a network of close friends or family can motivate us to fight and survive an illness.  I believe we are here to help each other but there is no getting around those times of crystal clear clarity when you know it's you and you alone left to face a disease or a loss.  That's when trust and mental toughness kick in.

Forced to confront an initial diagnosis of cancer and then a relapse, here is Servan-Schreiber revealing his vulnerability:

"I remember having one of those fleeting incidents, the kind that lead us to sense the frailty of life and the miracle of our connection to our fellow mortals.  It was a tiny thing -- a brief encounter in a parking lot on the eve of my first operation.  From the outside it would seem trifling, but to me it took on a particular significance.

Anna and I had driven to New York, and I'd parked in the hospital lot.  I was standing there, breathing the fresh air during those final few minutes of freedom before admission, tests, and the operating room.  I noticed an elderly woman who was obviously on her way home after a hospital stay.  She was alone, carrying a bag and walking with crutches.  Unaided, she couldn't manage to get into her car.  I stared at her, surprised that they had let her leave in that state.  She noticed me, and I saw in her look that she wasn't expecting anything of me.  Nothing.  We were in New York, after all, where it's everyone for himself.  I felt drawn toward her by a surprising momentum that sprang from my situation as a fellow patient.

This wasn't compassion, it was a gut feeling of fraternity.  I felt close to this woman, made of the same fabric as this person who needed help and wasn't asking for any.  I put her bag in the trunk, backed her car out of its space, then helped her while she settled into the driver's seat.  I shut her door with a smile.  For those few minutes, she hadn't been alone.  I was happy to perform this tiny service.  In fact, she was the one who did me a favor by needing me exactly at that instant. 

It gave me a chance to feel that we were part of the same human condition.  We made that gift to each other.  I can still see her eyes, in which I had awakened a sort of confidence in others, a sense that life could be trusted if it put in her path -- as it just had -- the help she needed when she needed it.  We hardly spoke to each other, but I am sure she shared with me the sense of a precious connection.  That encounter warmed my heart.  We, the vulnerable, could help each other and smile. 

I went into surgery in peace."

Two Special People

My thoughts today are filled with two special people whom I love very much.

One of them is in the hospital and is scheduled to have a surgical procedure today.  I wish I could be with her to hold her hand, tell her how special she is and how much she means to me and so many other people.  My prayers are with her as the doctors do their work to make her healthy again.

The other person, my husband, would have turned 80 years old today.  Happy Birthday O!  I know you are  in heaven  and I hope you're having a Boodles martini up with your birthday cake...or maybe it's a plum wine shooter with a creme caramel. . .