What Has Happened

I'm back at Arlo and Marina's Eugene house. Marina has her first big, real, teaching job after graduating U of O. Its in a nice charter school in Newport, lovely Newport, on the coast. Arlo spends as much time over there as he can. Aren't they lovely!

What happened, in August, is that I got sick so bad and so fast that a moment never felt like the one I could take to talk to you all. Only those I specifically called for help knew what was going on.

It was pain. I have a great deal of respect for pain, long have had from a nursing point of view, and now its personal having experienced some of the effects of constant unrelenting pain, not only unrelenting but increasing on a daily almost hourly basis. Pain management advises getting on top of it and staying there, because playing catch up once you're out of control is a battle won only after major scrimmages.

Knowing why one is in pain helps determine the approach. One might expect a cancer patient to immediately expect and explore new tumor growth. Instead I immediately said well it probably is not that because I'm doing all these good things and have high positive expectations.

I was invested in being well and continuing to do the things that I have wanted to do. I'd written to friends and professional contacts with the information I'd be coming back to New Mexico--in September or October. I was leaving open for myself the idea that I'd return to a retreat setting for further healing. I corresponded with the New Mexico Women's Retreat--a wonderful place where women teach, learn, and share, healing and building homes, among other planet loving activities in one of the most beautiful places on earth.

Unfortunately, pain and other indications of ill health led me to believe that I had some other problems that, frustratingly, I would have to deal with here and now while I am in easy contact with my long time physician, Dr. Cordes, and with others in the medical community, as well as with many of my wonderful friends, sisters and brothers and guides along the path.

Subsequently my various theories surfaced, were considered, treatment instated, and after a hopeful day or two, the repeated result: this is not working. We considered a gastric ulcer, post shingles neuralgia, liver disease, compressed discs, pain from a long time post surgical umbilical hernia. I saw a pain specialist, Martin Kloss, who agreed to advise me and my doctor though he didn't officially see me--I'm on medicare only. He was very very kind and good and suggested the compression fractures which were subsequently found on a new xray the next day.

I was on various medications specific to those possibilities, doing back exercises--passive, positional-- and wear a back brace when I could stand it.

One weekend it all came to a head. I went to stay with Tricia and Paul who said, "You go to bed and do nothing, we'll do everything. OK?" On the following Monday, I kept an appointment made weeks before to explore the possibility of repairing the umbilical hernia. I arrived at that baffled doctor's office vomiting in his waste basket and clawing the paper of the exam table. Dr. Dickinson walked in took a look and said, "...and What are we here for???" Clearly not his patients' usual presentation!

The good physician however did exactly what had to be done. He called my oncologist, who was out of town, but arranged with the Willamette Valley Cancer Center to do a new CT Scan that very afternoon. The contrast material didn't work out well for viewing inside the stomach because I was retching, but the photos were sharp and revealing: New lesions scattered down behind my sternum, one sitting on the adrenal gland, others across the waist, and one big old grapefruit hunkered in tight behind and between my liver and my stomach.

Dr. Cordes gave me the word, held my hand, waited for it to sink in, discussed the options, got me on real pain medication, got me an appointment the same day with the on call oncologist, Dr. Caton, at the Cancer Center, and sent me on my way with a healing hug.

These tumors had grown very very fast. Barely a month earlier a scan had indicated a tiny possible something-or-other that we had decided to "watch" and a further scan had been scheduled but was not yet due when all this happened. Its terrifying to see something like that in my body. But I did see it, clearly, on the films in Dr. Caton's office. And had "seen" it during a recent middle of the night melt down with my sister. Gwenda, holding me while I cried, asked me what the pain in my abdomen looked like. I said, "...it's...a...cantelope".

The short of it, and hopefully not the long of it, is that the large tumor on the liver was in a position to stop my life fairly promptly and of a very unpleasant shut down liver and subsequent necrotic liver disease. I chose not to opt for that, and the option available, the only thing known to be fast enough, is chemotherapy.

I've had the first of my second round of chemo now which consisted of weekly sessions, once a week for three weeks. I have a "break" this next week to allow my bone marrow to recover, and other damage to recover. Then I go back for another three weeks of sessions. After that the cancer doctors will do a new Scan to see how much we've been able to destroy.

Chemotherapy we know, does not only target cancer cells, the way it does identify the cells to destroy is to destroy the fastest growing cells, so that a cancer, generally growing faster than the rate it takes to maintain a healthy body organ, is targeted in a scattershot kind of way that also destroys other fast growing cells that we constantly need for renewal--nerves, heart, skin, various repair jobs, bone marrow, bone. We walk a narrow line--using a damaging toxic substance and betting on the body's system renewal mechanisms to repair the collateral damage.

That is the important bet: That my body can celebrate the removal of dead damaged material, repair and replace necessary healthy tissues, and return to its natural state of vibrant health. This is my strongly held belief.

Morgen, Day, Rose, and Rebekah

Cancer is a formidable foe. My son, Day, who is visiting me here right now, met a man on the train coming up through the Cascades. The man is living with and soldiering against cancer--he called cancer a "magnificent" enemy. Not sure of that term, but bein' as the man may be a soldier, a warrier, then probably approprieate for him. What bopped me on the head this time around was the mere fact that "my" cancer did not turn tail and run with the very first clobber with a big stick. I really thought it had. I'd turned happily to my alternative therapies and though I'm less disciplined than I ought to be I believed I was succeeding.

I'll tell you more about the alternatives I am using in another post.

Having this setback, and serious enough that I chose another go round with chemotherapy brought out in me deeply conflicted feelings. I've been sad, mostly. Disappointed. I've also felt I've been naive, and that I really did not "get" the seiousness of this disease and its lessons for me. Those lessons are beginning to come and they are good, and I still feel some unnecessary shame for being so difficult to teach. But mostly even that shame is nothing beside the depth of insight that is occurring in me.

When I am well, when I look back on this phase of illness and treatment, shining through it will be a thread of bright illumination, happiness and gratitude for the deep deep gifts that are beginning to transform my life.

What an adventure.