Hope is a Sneaky Bastard
It’s time for me to give up hope. This sounds like a message right out of Dante Alighieri’s gates of hell: “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” That is not what I mean, although there are days….
Last week I had a CT scan to determine if the last cancer, one that had taken up residence in my salivary gland, had indeed escaped six and a half weeks of radiation and gone on to colonize my lungs with the zeal of a Middle Ages crusader. Happily, that doesn’t appear to be the case. However, there’s fluid in the lining of my right lung and a thickening of that same lining and we don’t yet know why. My excellent head and neck oncologist has now turfed me over to the pulmonary department for further investigation.
Lurking in the Shadows
Two years ago I began my latest quest to heal the damage of the first cancer, which I had when I was 20 years old. It was 46 years ago when I woke up from an 8-hour surgery to hear that two baseball-sized tumors, courtesy of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, had been removed after an exploratory biopsy revealed the nature of the shadowy intruders discovered on a routine chest x-ray. I was in the hospital because I was experiencing constant pain in my shoulder due to typing paper after paper in my second year of college at the University of Minnesota. My doctor said, “Let’s put you in the hospital in neck traction for a couple of days and see if that takes pressure off what I suspect is a pinched nerve.” Thus, a routine chest x-ray for every patient entering that hospital saved my life for the first time.
After the 8-hour surgery, the next step was 42 radiation treatments with a short break after the first 20. In those days, cobalt radiation treatments were a bit like the bombing of a small city: not much precision compared to today’s advanced technologies. The field of battle was from the bottom of my sternum up to my chin. The fallout area was far bigger than that. I lost my hair in the back of my head up to the middle and vomited my way through the second half of the radiation. Scorched earth policy: kill the buggers wherever they may roam!
The Battle is On!
Once we all saw that I was going to live past the 5-year point without recurrence, my doctors started cautiously talking about this being a cure, rather than a remission. I was one of the first and few to survive this cancer (my mother died 5 years earlier of exactly the same cancer discovered in stage 4, while mine was stage 1.) The question of my being able to bear children after the fallout radiation was new and interesting enough that I was the subject of a case study by my then oncologist. I delivered my first son, Jesse, when I was 25. Up until 20 weeks into my pregnancy, we did not know whether or not the fetus was going to be healthy or horribly deformed due to the radiation. He was born with all parts intact. I had my second healthy son, Ari, when I was 29. Case closed.
But the larger case was far from closed! Years of consequences followed from the nuclear medicine that saved me: autoimmune disease, chronic shingles, bronchitis, pneumonia, a nuked thyroid and another cancer probably caused by the first radiation. It is in my nature to come out fighting when faced with lousy odds. This took the form of every kind of classical and alternative medical intervention I felt could help me. Homeopathy, Ayurveda, a beautiful spiritual practice and more. The latest one is Functional Medicine which is an incredibly comprehensive way to address health and well-being. I had a two-year period of unusual wellness since I began the protocols - no shingles, not even once! I thought: Aha! now I have finally solved the case of constantly feeling viral and inflamed and being a shingles factory. The war is over!
Spiritual Trap
And here I am again, inflamed and viral for the past 6 months and now with this unhappy lung causing slight shortness of breath. The stress of the pandemic, being unable to visit my son in the US (I live with my Dutch husband in the Netherlands) fear about taking the vaccine, fear about not taking the vaccine…de-stabilizing as hell! In these past months of having not one but two four-week episodes of extremely painful shingles on each side of my back wrapping all the way around my chest from my spine to my sternum (yay symmetry!) I have felt more and more despondent. More and more hopeless. Everything I have done, all these years of hoping for better health and it seems more out of reach than ever.
Hope is a sneaky bastard. It looks all sweet and light and positive! Positivity is the anthem of our time! Actually, it’s a spiritual trap. A seduction that invites us to hook up our well-being to a desired outcome. Then when the plan fails and it’s not certain that there is a solution to our troubles or a cure for our illness, hope drops us like a hot potato and plunges us into uncertainty and despair. Now what? Time for a new plan.
Radical Self Love
For me the new plan takes the form of a paradigm switch - a sea change. In shamanic healing practice, we never speak about cure when we talk about healing. We put our intent on possibility, not probability…aiming for the 3% window which is where miracles live. And then, crucially, we let go of the outcome. I have lived and practiced this all of my professional life, seeking that elusive window and letting go of the attachment to the outcome. Except, I discovered, when it came to my own health!
Lately it has become clear to me that I need a radical change. I need to retire the fighter in me, the 20-year old who carried the flag of hope held high for so many years. Instead I need to develop a way to do all the good things for my body as always, without hope of a particular outcome. Unconditional love for my body, this vessel that has carried me so far, with no strings attached. No more having my identity tied to working on being well or physically stronger. No longer harboring the subtle insidious self-blame inside me when I do get sick. I am beginning to step away from that trap and instead I intend to bomb myself with love and compassion no matter what pokes its head up in the next investigations.
I am on shaky, newborn legs here and the warrior girl most likely won’t give up without a few more skirmishes, but I have never met a challenge that I didn’t ultimately face, so here we go…
