Feeling all those feelings

I'm feeling the urge to share what I've been going through in the last month since my return home, to Scotland. Just having all of my familiar things around is enormously comforting. But it hasn't been all joy. I started reading "The Emperor of All Maladies" during my last few days in Oregon and finished it when we got here. The book is a history of cancer, written by an oncologist, and it's up for a Pulitzer. My oncologist recommended it to me, and it's gripping, fascinating, and, at times, somewhat grim. The reading coinciding with my return home seemed to offer the opportunity to feel some of the fear and despair I pushed away as I was “soldiering through” chemo and surgery. Ovarian cancer survival rates are still grim, and I can’t pretend that they’re any different or that I won’t succumb to the disease.

I've been thinking about why heart disease and diabetes don’t inspire such fear, even though they’re ultimately as deadly as cancer. There is a known progression of those diseases and there’s a sense that one has some power over decline. Good diet, exercise, stress relief...all sorts of things are known to truly help. It’s different with cancer. A neighbor where I lived in Oregon is in her late 70’s. She has had breast cancer twice with surgeries (mastectomy plus lymph nodes) and chemo both times. She drinks alcohol like it’s mother’s milk, and her diet is crap. She first had cancer 30 years ago, and she’s going strong. Our neighbor’s wife here in Lochcarron had breast cancer in her late 50’s and enjoyed almost 10 years of remission. She ate well, drank little, and exercised regularly. When it returned, the cancer was everywhere. She was gone in a few months. There’s no rhyme or reason, which contributes to that awful reality of having no control. Plus, I think it’s creepy to have normal cells turn into “alien invaders.” Most diseases entail organs or organ systems malfunctioning. Only cancer grows as an advancing, villainous army, raping and pillaging as it goes, so to speak. So much emotional energy has been given to cancer by the popular mind, too--all of the negative connotations, thought forms, and terror. Thus it's easy to be drawn into a densely negative energy field or belief system that often includes the medical establishment.

Maybe allowing all the fears of death to present themselves has given me some space for a type of surrender that perhaps the disease itself was meant to provide. Certainly the fear of death is at the core of all of our fears. The trick for me is to make friends with it and thereby be freed of fear in other aspects of my life. And that is definitely a process, not a "happening." In a new way I've realized that there's no feeling that I have to push out of my consciousness. Everything is welcome because it's THERE. I just want to learn to dance with it all. The difficult thoughts and feelings aren't as front and center as I let them become a part of me. What’s foremost in my mind, most of the time, is that I DID have a fantastic response to treatment, and I could very well have a very long remission. It’s really another level of surrender to that Love that birthed me and knows exactly when it will be time for me to return Home. And I know I have to nourish continued compassion for myself and my limitations as a human being, which means I will sometimes feel anger and sadness and fear as I live with the possibility of recurrence. All those spiritual books about "living in the now"... Get a cancer diagnosis and you can skip the books.

The last 10 days I've had a miserable sore throat. I couldn't even swallow a couple of days. Bang! My darling husband and I were both back in those awful days when I had an ileostomy and didn't know if I'd respond to chemo. I was looking up how throat cancer presents, for goodness sake! I guess that's part of the dance I'm trying to learn. I feel a little shy about posting this, as so many of you are dealing with SO much more than I. It has helped, though, just to think this all out and write. I'm accepting that my life will never be as it was BC (before cancer). There's challenge and opportunity there alongside of grief.