Forgiveness

I do tarot readings for myself periodically; at the beginning of each year, and whenever I'm feeling particularly prickly about life and need some perspective. I find the process of centering myself, shuffling the cards, cutting the deck, and slowly laying out the spread, one card at a time, to be calming and illuminating, often profoundly so. I am regularly stunned by what I learn about life, the universe and everything, in the process of this ritual. These readings in specific are part of what I rarely write about here, because the emotions they trigger are often too raw, and the ideas too eerily prescient. I feel as if I'm having conversations, and not necessarily with my own subconscious. The tarot does inform the blog, though, by helping me continue to open my mind, my spirit, my heart.

My reading for the year this year was chock full of cups, the suit representing the emotions. A reading I did just the other night started with the Three of Cups, Overflowing, crossed with the Devil, suggesting that I had a lot of pent up emotions that were going to be coming out, and that I was going to reach a new level of clarity about my existence.

I know things are fermenting and simmering throughout my being—I recognize clear connections between my various parts. How sadness exhausts me. How dread often leads to migraines. How physical exertion, particularly with horses or climbing walls, makes me joyfully immortal. But my general state of being these days, my status quo, my default, is unrest.

This hasn't always been true, and so I am bothered by it, which can add to the unrest if I am not careful to remember my lessons—live in the moment, be grateful, walk the dogs, hug Ian.

It's not surprising that I am experiencing existential unrest, of course. But it is not . . . restful. I would like to find rest again, and not simply by pushing unrest aside for a while. And so, I question, and I do my best to listen. I talk to people wise in all sorts of ways—those who keep my structure healthy, those who keep my chemistry in line. Those who ask me questions that I may not think of, even through the tarot. Those who push me to test my physical courage, the limits of my strength. I open my heart to grief as well as joy. And I am learning rest again, through these teachers and lessons of life.

My teacher today was Dan the Witch Doctor, who seems to leap forward in intuition and skill between each of my visits. Today started out as normal—I brought in pills to test (a new liver support—why leave out the liver when the kidneys, bones, brain, lungs, and heart are all getting special care?), and we chatted about what had been happening since I last saw him, back before Christmas. He asked, seemingly casually, about my dad, how old was I when he died (19, a baby, half my life ago), bee sting, right? Anaphylactic shock? No warning? He'd been stung before? Wow. Crazy.

"Your holiday stuff," Dan said then, "I think that was more about your dad. I think you're angry at him for not being around to take care of things. I think the stuff that happened this year is mostly just an annoyance to you. I think what you're feeling is way deeper than that, and what you really need to do is forgive your dad."

He then touched two points on my head, one on the back left, one on the upper right. Both were painful to his touch. "Okay," he said, "now think these three things and we'll work this out for you. First, think 'I forgive my dad for anything he did to hurt me.'" I started to cry, and Dan grabbed me a Kleenex and put his hand back. "Now, think 'I allow my father to forgive me for anything I did to hurt him,'" he went on, and, finally, "'I forgive myself for anything I did that might have hurt my dad. Anything I might have done to hurt him.'"

Dan kept his fingers on my head for a few moments, repeating the last one: I forgive myself. Finally he said "Okay! There! That's much better!", and took his hands away. "That last one was hard," he told me. "You are definitely your own worst critic!"

I lay there, dabbing at the tears that had run down my cheeks and into my ears, and a consciousness came to me. "I should probably forgive myself for getting cancer," I said, and started to cry again.

"Yes, that's a good idea," said Dan. "Let's see what we can do," and he brought his hands up to two more pain points on my head.

Awareness and care are a good start.

How Do You Choose?

We're heading off to Hawaii on Sunday to spend a week staying in a house in Kona with Ian's family, including our 2-year-old niece. We're very excited to have several days with her and really get to know her. Ian's parents, who, much as they love us all and are looking forward to the week, also love the Napili Kai resort on Maui, and so they left yesterday morning for 5 days there first (Ian and I drove them to the airport at 6:00AM, which is to say that Ian drove and I marveled at being up in the middle of the night), after a night at our house.

From what I have seen in the last ten years with Ian, his parents are like no other people on earth. They are very sweet and interesting and active and appear to be decades younger than they are, and I love them dearly, but their habits are not necessarily always what one might expect. Perhaps it's simply that they're better at knowing what they like and doing those things, and certainly there's no harm in their choices. But Ian and I were both entertained that they brought their sleeping bags to spend the night at our house, and even though we had the bed all made up downstairs, they insisted that they would rather just use their sleeping bags. At least they slept IN our house—several years ago, they stayed the night with N&K, and insisted on spending the night in their (own) Eurovan parked in the garage. They considered it to be the height of luxury—familiar beds, yet a perfectly flat surface to park on and complete blackness. But I think N felt that he wasn't really doing right by his parents.

Anyway, J, my MIL, asked a valid question about my blogging, and I thought you might all (lots and lots of you, still, it turns out!) like to know. A bit of a metapost, this will be. And so: J wanted to know how I choose what I'm going to write about.

There are actually lots of particulars that I think about when planning a post. For one thing, I don't want people to be bored, and so even though I frequently have episodes of anxiety, or mild nausea, or frustration, or deep sadness, or continual surprise that I need to sleep more than I used to, or (recently) extreme annoyance at the Insurance People, I don't write about it much. It's tedious enough to live with—who would want to read about it all the time? And so, I can't be bothered to put it into words very often. Also, my superpower is Full Disclosure, but even so there have been one or two things that were too painful, or too difficult, to share in this kind of forum. Of course, at the moment, I can't think of what they were. Maybe they were simply too scatological.

There are also a lot of things that, on the other hand, I do want to write about—I do want to share—and that day-to-day life (and travel) get in the way of and I run out of time . . . and then I forget what they were, even though I'm sure they were VERY insightful and wise.

But occasionally, I think about things that are VERY insightful and wise, and I have the right amount of time, and I'm not in some tropical or horse-infested paradise, and I sit down and write them out.

I'm not so sure, after all, that this was one of those posts.

How do you Regain Faith?

I was lying in bed last night, having had a pretty good day—stable MRI, rock climbing, driving the fun new Mini Clubman, SNOW (alas mostly melted away now), and my left breast started itching. It was just a normal body itch—we all get them occasionally—some weird firing of the nerve endings, nothing sinister about it. I wanted to scratch, and yet, my reluctance to touch my breast—to risk feeling an unwanted lump—was so great that I lay for several moments, steeling my nerve, before I had enough strength of mind to touch myself. Finally, heart rate elevated, holding my breath, I scratched my breast. It was a relief to obliterate the itch, and when I was done, I steeled myself still more and really felt myself up, doing a thorough breast examination. I found nothing unusual. I never have in the left breast. It's always been healthy, and yet I found myself picturing a second mastectomy, and what I would do after that. Get two prostheses? Go braless and boobless? The problem with going braless and boobless is that women's tops are sewn specifically to enshroud a bosom, and they look empty without one. So, go braless and start wearing only men's tops? Stop trying to minimize the effect of my permanently radiation-thinned hair and give up all semblance of femininity?

Rather than relax and go to sleep, my thoughts then roamed over my body and alit on the lymph nodes in the left side of my neck, which developed into several hard little knots over the summer of 2007, after my mastectomy, while I was traveling in Europe (instead of moving to New Zealand). They began hardening during an intense cold and upper respiratory infection that Ian and I shared—the exciting kind where you cough and hock up loogies the size and texture of banana slugs. I clung to the possibility that my lymph nodes were merely stiff with cold recovery . . . but the knots didn't go away until a year later when I finally started Taxol for breast cancer again. To this day, it's an internal battle just to touch my own neck—which, I can say tearily because I just made myself palpate my lymph nodes, seems to be perfectly healthy.

Ian and I just finished watching Long Way Down, a documentary that Ewan MacGregor and a friend created of a motorcycle ride from John O'Groats in northern Scotland overland to Cape Town. At Victoria Falls on the Zambezi between Zambia and Zimbabwe, the friend, Charlie Boorman, and one of the cameramen, went bungee jumping. I cannot imagine myself ever doing such a thing. It's enough of a challenge to grit and willpower simply to live in my body. I don't need to create situations to cheat Death.

Don't get me wrong—I love my body. I love my strength, my athletic abilities, my wit, my creativity. But I am far from trusting that those things will be with me as long as I am aware of them. Most of us are born having an innate faith in our bodies, in our abilities, in our fundamental health—because, for most of us, those things aren't tested for decades.

When they are tested, though—when we have a serious illness, and instead of succumbing we regain so much ability and health—how do we regain faith in that? Is Faith possible in the face of Knowledge, or are the two mutually exclusive? Does this kind of Knowledge necessarily end in Fear? I hope not forever, but that's where I am right now.

Knowledge can be liberating. But it can also be very, very hard.

I Not Dead

Hello Joel, my (perhaps) last remaining reader. It's been a busy life, my life, during the recent . . . well . . . always; but maybe a little more so in the past couple months. Happy busy and sad busy, joyful busy and heartbreaking busy. Busy overseas and under equators, and busy up in the living room or down in the basement. I want to live a full life—and it's full, boy howdy.

Anyway, a new year does spur one into new/different/revised/resumed habits, and here I am, blogging away again.

I was supposed to begin the new year with an MRI last week Tuesday, to see what may have been going on in my brain while I was standing upside down on the bottom of the planet . . . but Ian got a new job that began early in December (yay Ian!), and that meant we got new health insurance. The combined forces of the holidays, bureaucracy, and the US Government somehow failed to share with us any of the information we needed about that insurance so that I could go on with my day-to-day life as a full-time patient.

When I called GEHA on 3 January to find out what my membership number was because I had an MRI—an important MRI—scheduled for the next day—they informed me that Ian and I were not in the system, and that the MRI would need preapproval anyway, and that I should probably go ahead and cancel my appointment. Grrrr. Much time was lavished around on hold, by both me and by Ian, before we got things worked out, and my MRI had to be postponed (to 7:00am this morning . . . which is early for me these days . . .). But we are now officially members of a new health insurance plan. And, more importantly, my MRI was stable—so, nothing new showed up in my brain.

So, ultimately, YAY!

And then I went rock climbing.

A Gift for my Trip

I'm sitting in the clinic right now getting my loading dose of Herceptin (extra big dose) because I chose Tropical Paradise over Herceptin three weeks ago (duh), so I'll be here for a few hours. I'm doing it on Wednesday, too, instead of my usual Thursday, and in the morning instead of the afternoon, because of the schedule for VAustralia, the Virgin family's trans-Pacific branch of airline. MS and I are flying out of Seattle, destination: Antipodes, this evening, with a trip to the airport at 4:30pm (thanks, Ian!).

Anyway, my MRI last week was stable (confirmed by Nurse Sarah on Saturday after the official report came in), and just now I received a copy of my blood test results from last week and it seems that Xeloda (or something, but likely Xeloda) is, in fact, doing its job: my tumor markers are 32, back in the normal range by 5 points, and down 8 points from last test!

Even though I wouldn't go back and change anything that's happened in my life, I'm not sure I'm yet to the point where I'd enthusiastically add another 11 1/2 years of the same sorts of experiences just for the soul growth, so I take all this as good news, and a blessing to go out and experience more of the world.

Thank you, Universe.

Realization

Today is my 38^th birthday. On my 30^th birthday, I announced that my 30s were not going to be about cancer. What I meant was that cancer was a thing of my 20s, and that I was done with it, and that the changing of the initial numeral in my age was somehow going to signify a change back to pre-cancer days.

What I discovered today is that, in fact, my 30s haven't been about cancer after all, although not in the way I intended.

This morning I had a therapy session, over the phone, lying on the couch in our living room, dogs snoring softly near my feet and a mug of coffee next to me on the table, and in the context of sharing with Nancy some of the compliments I've received in the last few years from various medical personnel, she asked me a question.

"You may have heard and deserved those beautiful things, but wouldn't you not have chosen this if you could go back?"

"Well, of course," I started to say, because who would choose this? Who would actively choose to fear for her life, to the point where each body twinge or tickle is ominously suspect? Where certain options that most adults can pick from aren't available? Where life is structured, unsought, into three-week segments? Where every day involves five different pill sessions, and not a single dose wrapped in tasty treats like Spackle gets?

But I paused, and really thought about it.

For a long time, I've recognized that I've appreciated the lessons I've learned from my cancer and been grateful for the knowledge, but even so . . . I would rather have come about that knowledge in a different way. But today, this morning, when asked if I'd go back and change things, I realized this:

I like the person I am now much more than I like the person I was before my cancer. I was more selfish, less empathetic, at times heartless and mean in my self-interest. I also put up with treatment that I didn't deserve, while occasionally treating others in ways they didn't deserve.

"I am a much better person now than I was before the cancer," I said to Nancy instead. "I like myself better. I like my life better! I get to do amazing things, with amazing people." I lay here on the couch and thought about that, what it meant. "I would not go back and change anything, after all," I said, surprised.

Last night I had my legs sugared again (preposterous practice), and I was chatting with my aesthetician about having just been in the Seychelles with my husband who has this ridiculously awesome job, and taking off in a couple days for Australia and New Zealand with a friend for horseback riding in the Southern Hemisphere. "I am so lucky!" I said. "I just . . . I'm so lucky. I have this great husband, these amazing opportunities, I feel like no one else in the world can possibly have such an awesome life!"

Rrrrrrrrip went the hair being yanked from my shin. "Honestly," I said, "I feel sorry for everyone else!"

DeAne burst out laughing. "You need to get that on a t-shirt," she said.

Stable

It's nice to know that, in the eight days that I have left before I head off to the other side of the world for my horse riding trip with my friend MS, I will not have to be freaking out about spots in my brain. I had an MRI this morning (the nurse who accessed my port said "Didn't I just see you in here???" Answer: of course.), and everything appears to be stable. Not only that, but Dr Jason admitted that he was expecting a different outcome, i.e. the spot from last time would have been significantly larger and/or something else would've shown up, all of which would've meant changing (definitely) 1) my treatments, (possibly) 2) my travel schedule, (undeniably) 3) my peace of mind for the next month. But, instead, Stability! And so I get to travel with the relief of that.

Also, saw my eye doc yesterday, and the fluid mass that's distorting the vision in my right eye is reducing, so evidently the 30-second laser treatment helped!

And, today it's beautiful fall sunny outside, and so I'm heading out for a couple hours to attempt a fix on the yard. Which means I will pull out everything that died over the summer.