Category: Healing

Listening to History, Looking Out for the Herd: Everyday Magic, Day 1000

Listening to History, Looking Out for the Herd: Everyday Magic, Day 1000

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Denise & Judy Back When We Could Go to Pastry Shops

It only took a few seconds of looking at the NYTimes map of the pandemic Saturday night for me to start hyper-ventilating and crying. At that moment, I didn’t yet realize I needed perspective, big-picture, deep-time, and wide-angle views to not just calm myself at the moment, but forge a more informed path forward. After taking a Lorazepam, drinking some water, vowing to self-isolate from regular bouts of Coronavirus news, and breathing slowly, I called my friends Judy and Denise. Both poets with miles of life experience winding through great wisdom, they gave me the gift of such perspective.

“I think of us as part of the herd, and now we have to do what keeps the herd healthy,” Judy said. Although we’re socially distancing, we’re actually coming together to support our collective health and life, giving each other a wide berth to ensure our safety as we roam the sometimes narrow trails of our homes and yards. I think of a Washington Post article I saw last week about staying home and apart not primarily to protect ourselves (although of course that’s essential) but to protect others who might be far more vulnerable that we are to Corvid-19.

“Think of what our parents and grandparents went through with World War II and the 1918 flu pandemic, which started in Kansas” Denise reminded me. We talked about the very long arm of what we know of human history — all the wars, pandemics, and natural disasters that patchwork a large story of perseverance. “Humans are wired and evolved for resilience,” Denise added.

Since then, I’ve been pondering the histories of my ancestors — the pogroms and the Holocaust that killed many but not all, the wars that turned daily existence into insecurities of scarcity, danger, and loss — as well as the generational stories of others I know. What was it like for one of my German friends who was born in early 1945, just in time to be piled in a wagon with many household items, because her family’s home was now destroyed? How was it for my grandparents to live through WWII, even though they were safe in Brooklyn, not knowing if Hitler would take over the world or if their relatives back in Poland, Russia, and Romania would survive (they largely wouldn’t)? During the 1918 pandemic — one the most deadly pandemic in human history — was it so much like living in a war zone that many were enveloped in fight/flight mode for months?

Denise and Judy reminded me that most generations have to deal with something overwhelmingly threatening; this is ours. Yes, it has its distinctions just like any disaster, but there’s a lot in common with past threats. We don’t know when it will end, who it will sicken or kill, what our economy will look like, how the herd will change, and then there are dozens of ifs that can wake up a person at 5 a.m. We don’t have control over ending this quickly, although we can do our part to hasten that ending. We don’t know a thousand and one things about the time ahead or the time we’re in right now.

I don’t mean to minimize suffering, death, mourning, and terror around the world. At the same time, despite this age of collective anxiety and fear (surely bred into our bones from past generational traumas, and reinforced by viral wolves at real doors), we go on like so many other species still vital. Just like the herd of shy deer edging the woods where I live, the squirrel families racing across the roof, the crows landing in the field to find something tasty or shiny.

We have history on our side and the herd to tend, so tend it we will, extending care and affection (without touching), attention and intention toward those we love and those we don’t even know, guided by what’s imprinted in our DNA about the herd and history. I leave you with this call to courage and love from Valerie Kaur of The Revolutionary Love Project: “This pandemic will test who we are, as a people. Will we succumb to fear and self interest? Or will be double down on love? Will we let social distancing isolate us? Or will we find new ways to reach out, deepen our connections, step up community care, and tend to the most vulnerable in our communities? I believe this is is a time to love without limit.”

Scans For Life: Everyday Magic, Day 956

Scans For Life: Everyday Magic, Day 956

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With my oncologist, Dr. Sharon Soule

Years ago when I was in the oncology center waiting room for an appointment following my bout of breast cancer, two women made me cry. One was in her 70s, and the other was her middle-aged daughter, both clinging to each other and having a hard time answering questions because of their sobbing while they checked in to hear test results. I was soon called back to see my oncologist, and so were they, but I saw them again on my way out, both of them laughing and crying at once, still clinging to each other. A nurse who escorted them out hugged them and said, “I’m so happy for you.” They arrived in terror and left in joy.

I know those feelings pretty well. Since those dreaded “you-have-cancer” words first entered my orbit in 2002, I’ve been on the scan bus, making more stops than I would have expected because I was also diagnosed with BRCA 1, one of the breast cancer mutations. Add to this that my father and uncle died young from pancreatic cancer, and MRIs entered the mix. Then there was the ocular melanoma last summer, and now, post-treatment for that, I’m a regular in our hospital’s radiology department.

Last Friday, I had my second seasonal (every three months for many years) scan to make sure what was in my eye didn’t travel. Because this type of cancer, when it has legs (and I pray it doesn’t), usually shows up in the liver and sometimes in the lungs, I had an abdominal and chest CT scan (used to be called a CAT scan, although there’s little purring, involved), and some blood work. I was scared beforehand but not as scared as the first one last fall, and far less scared than the parade of of scans last spring. In the week before the scan, I had a few seconds here and there of full-body terror that makes me feel like I’m both thoroughly embodied in terror and also on the outside looking in. But I’ve learned fear storms are just another kind of weather that moves through: keep breathing, drink some water, tell yourself it’s just a strong emotion that will ebb, and eventually, the sky clears.

With Melissa, the wonderful CT scan technician

Getting scans to see what’s happening under the hood is something many of us endure. I know so many people living with and recovering from many health challenges, all of which require showing up on time, sometimes drinking strange fluids or having dye injected into us, and then being ferried in and out of large, sometimes (in the case of MRIs) outrageously loudly-clanging machines. There’s also other tests of trepidation many of us go through that show whether we’re in the money or up shit’s creek. My scans and health history aren’t more challenging than what many others go through, and I have a lot of “there but for the grace go I” moments when I hear of friends who are facing degenerative diseases, chronic pain, and terminal diagnoses (although life is such a diagnosis). Then again, comparison of our learning edges and life challenges is a futile activity.

I’ve learned and am continually learning to stay calmer, working through my phobia of being restricted in the grips of a machine. Last summer, my wonderful oncologist Sherri Soule gave me a prescription for a lot of Lorazepam, a low dose anti-anxiety drug. I wondered why she prescribed so many, but now that I’ve had that refilled twice, I know sometimes we need a little pharmaceutical help. I also have a GABA spray I highly recommend for moments that activate our fight or flight response. Like many of us, I practice slow, deep breathing, listen to music (especially during scans, and I’m sure Enya was invented for MRIs), and bring along Ken and sometimes other support people.

For this last scan, I found extra support in the technician, a lovely woman named Melissa who remembered me from last time, talked over the singers I was listening to my iPhone during the scan (Brandi Carlile and Carrie Newcomer), and treated me with such energetic tenderness that she put me at ease. Then there was the wait for results, best spent not speculating — we distracted ourselves by getting brunch at Wheatfields, reveling in the glory of bread. I’m so grateful that my oncologist doesn’t play the phone game (a call if all is fine or a “you need to come in right away” if it’s not) and meets with me a few hours after the scans. As she came in smiling, telling me all was well, to my surprise I started crying, but that’s pretty common with scans.

Each scan is another tumble with seeing how mortal we are. Recently, my therapist and I realized that it wasn’t the scanning machines — CT scans, MRIs, and Pet scans — that freaked me out as much as what the scans might read. At the same time, the whole process makes me fall more in love with this life, enough to spend a long and healthy lifetime grappling with what I keep discovering here.

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Panic Attacks, Anyone?: Everyday Magic, Day 985

Panic Attacks, Anyone?: Everyday Magic, Day 985

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Remember the sky

It’s 5:47 a.m. when I wake, trying to figure out how to fit my laptop into an antique desk that’s falling apart. My worry about the dream desk starts galloping into many manner of other worry, from the sublime (climate change) to the ridiculous (having to wake early for a gig next February, and what if I didn’t sleep well the night beforehand?). I steer my mind as best I can away from the tar pits of habitual anxieties (“don’t think about the kids, don’t think about the kids, don’t think….”) and thoughts catalyzed by the shock of cancer and trauma of treatment. But still.

Lately, this human has been easily tipped into tiny or not-so-tiny panic attacks, usually in the middle of the night (their breeding time) and sometimes, out of the blue, mid-morning for no apparent reason. Realizing who the little man is behind the curtain is — the after effects of the cancer diagnosis most likely, come out to roost in prime time now that I’m through so much of the recovery — doesn’t help all that much except to remind me that this is a common kind of thing. I work enough with people living with serious illness to recognize how, months after being spit out on the beach from the whale of chemo, surgeries or radiation, the terror catches up with us.

At the same time, as a person prone to anxiety (I come by it honestly given my family and ancestral history), I’m not unfamiliar with my friend, the panic attack. I say “my friend” purposely here because I’ve learned it’s best not to run and hide, call the panic names or otherwise diss it, but get present enough to breathe, name what’s happening, and remind myself of some logic (hey, there’s nothing I can do to reform Mitch McConnell, so let it go). It’s helpful to tell myself that  it’s just anxiety talking, and all will be sunnier in the morning. Yes, I have meds to take proactively or as needed, plus this great Gaba (an amino acid that helps calm the brain) supplement to spray into my mouth, and a lot of breathing and relaxation practices. I also know that in the middle of that panic gripping the center of my belly, it’s likely I’ll forget everything I just named here, so I lie in the dark, and aim my thoughts toward remembering how to breathe and what to think.

Remember the river too

I’m also far from alone. Friends and family often reply, “me, too!” when I tell them of a recent running of the bulls in my body and mind. Maybe it has something to do with a particularly energetic full moon lately, the reality that we are in the sixth age of extinction (200 species vanishing a day, Greta Thunberg recently said, and yes, she’s right), and so many people and other species experiencing so much avoidable suffering born of oppression, greed, arrogance, and ignorance.

Perhaps it’s also a natural response at times to the reality of being human. When I was talking with Neela Sandal, my integrative physician, last week, he told me an old story from India that included the question, “What is the most amazing thing in the world?” and the answer, “That everyone is dying and no one believes it.” Mortality is a kick in the ass, and it makes sense that given how much we live in a death-denying (and at times defying) culture, that sometimes the space between a sense of control and the reality of life’s fragility and mystery fills with adrenalin.

So for all of us who occasionally experience any size panic attack in any nook and cranny of our lives, it’s good to know that we’re in good and honest company. Sometimes there’s a quick fix, and often there’s not, but there’s always time, turning us from the temporary into the next moment, then the next. Like now when I write this to you on the porch, breathing easy and appreciating the wind, the first leaves falling, and the occasionally monarchs migrating through on their way to somewhere else. I tell myself now and also in the middle of panic to  embrace some measure of gratitude: remember all those I love and who love me, remember the sky, remember the river, remember the wind and how it’s always moving and changing.

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Counting on the Other Side of Cancer: Everyday Magic, Day 984

Counting on the Other Side of Cancer: Everyday Magic, Day 984

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When life feels out of control, I start counting. I first noticed this habit/neurosis/coping mechanism when I was in labor for my oldest child. I was in too much pain to count the seconds of each contraction, but between them, I couldn’t stop counting. My mind was immersed in a world of ascending numbers, which made me realize I had been counting seconds in quiet moments throughout the pregnancy, maybe as my way to prepare for the Olympic event of birth.

It’s no wonder that many days, especially closest to the eye cancer diagnosis and surgical/radiological treatments and long recovery period, I’ve been counting. I counted (first days and eventually in hours) out how much time passed and would need to pass during those five long days between when the tiny gold bowl of radiation was implanted under my eyeball and when it would come out. Since there, it’s been how many days since the diagnosis, first surgery, and second surgery — a way to measure the immeasurable thunderbolt of initial fear, then the stretch of road unfurling around surprise bends and drops toward healing.

Today it’s 133 days since I heard those dreaded you-have-cancer words. It’s 87 days since the first surgery to initiate Operation Tumor Melt and 82 days since the second surgery to remove the bolster rockers (radiation implant). But just this morning, I found myself counting forward, not backwards: it’s only six days to the three month anniversary of beginning treatment, and by December 14, it will be six months past, by which time I see myself (so to speak) even more healed and healing, especially since the medical treatment takes a while to resolve and dissolve that tumor down to just a wispy scar of itself, inert and of no danger to me.

What I believe in is beyond the reach of numbers, but healing is like that. Eventually the physical reminders and tiny irritations, the prednisone eye drops and dilating eye drops (to blast scar tissue off the lens of my eye) will be as distant as any visceral memory of the pain of contractions. The lessons of all this will come into view over months and years in ways that name or don’t name themselves to me: what it means to be mortal, the power of love, the mystery of healing, and how vast and uncontrollable time is. What I mean by the latter is how much we all get to learn (unless we die quickly and unexpectedly) about how the future is not what it’s cracked up to be or what we get to map out in numbers or letters, although intention, prayer, and contemplation help.

As I move toward seeing myself as generally okay, out of pain and danger, and healthy, I notice I’m not counting as much. Instead, I’m sitting here watching the last few raindrop slough off the gutters and into the flower beds, so overgrown from three months of no weeding that it’s not worth even beginning to find the ground beneath it all. I’m listening to the soft  and whirling waves of the crickets as well as to a jazzy version of “Jet Song” from West Side Story. I feeling the subtly moving air on my arms. I’m counting on such arrivals to where I actually am, breath by breath instead of number by number.

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When Life Reboots You: Everyday Magic, Day 980

When Life Reboots You: Everyday Magic, Day 980

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It occurred to me recently that I’m in the middle of a big life reboot. Thanks to the eye cancer, treatment, and recovery time, I’m in a different season of my life than summer would have led me to believe. But that’s what life reboots do: they strip us down to the essentials of staying alive, then re-orient us to see and even be in the world a whole new way.

I realize that all of us get rebooted in our lives, and usually more than once, catalyzed by a medical diagnosis, a big loss and plunge into grief, or an old dream dying or dead. But everything can and does change with seemingly happy things too: falling in love big-time, finding the job of our dreams, or moving to our seemingly forever home. What we thought was the life plan, the itinerary of our own invention, or the trajectory we were supposed to live turns out to be a dry husk of a once high-flying insect. Just like when we reboot our computers, we have to shut down the old ways, wait for a new start, and enter some kind of password or otherwise invoke magic words or deeds to begin again. Unlike the computer, when the screen comes online again, it doesn’t often have all the same icons staring at us.

For me, the reboot started April 28 when the ophthalmologist told me I definitely had a tumor in my eye. It continues and will likely still keep unfolding over the coming months as the radiation treatment plays out its tumor-dissolving magic. Late spring and summer have become something else indeed.

Instead of going swimming two or three times each week, driving to meet friends for lunch or wander through Kohls to see what cool shirts are on sale, and going here and for gigs and meetings, I’m home, watching what is usually high summer move through me like the wind through the trees, also rooted here. The gains are more abundant than the pain (just about all gone), fear, and anxiety. Each night, we make time to sit on the porch, and in the dark, listen. We can usually make out at least four different kinds of katydids interrupted by the the tender and mournful call of the barred owl. Daytime, like right now, I’m also on the porch, hearing swirls of wind topple through the osage orange trees while a bird I cannot see pierces the waves of cicada humming (or roars). The soundscape continues to open up.

My work in the world — and I don’t just mean how I make a living — opens up too. For the last year, I’ve been considering ways to make a living without leaving the house as often, and boy, is that coming true with a vengeance. Some of my coaching client are coming here now, and over watermelon on the porch, we talk through new essays, website copy, and what a poem truly wants to be. The urgency that has driven the rambling hippie school bus of my livelihood for years is no longer onboard, and that bus is parked somewhere in the back 40. Instead, I’m letting come to me more than ever what my best ways are and could be to grow Transformative Language Arts — the ways we can use writing, storytelling, theater and more to enhance our lives and world (yup, and the Patreon campaign is part of this).

But there’s another closer-to-the-skin layer of my work: to listen more, be stiller, and trust more deeply that what’s mine to do will make itself evident (while resisting what’s not mine).  Every chance we’re given to see our storyline — what we thought we were living, who we thought we were — fall away is a gift.