Why me? Why now?

p. 43: "And the point is that the meaning of that sickness---negative or positive, redemptive or punitive, supportive or condemnatory---can have an enormous impact on me and on the course of my disease; the sickness is often more destructive than the illness."

One of the first questions I am asked during all the screenings I have had is whether I have been under severe stress recently, which is cause enough for a rueful laugh.  My safe place, my area of intimate connection with Others, with whom I could act and inform and transform and open them wide to wonder and awe....the 3 men stripped me of that.  They stripped me and berated me and defamed my accomplishments there, my reason to be alive.

So shall I take in hatred against the 3 men whom I had just recently consigned to memories past, who at last were banished from my nightmares after 3 years?  How do I work with that energy, how do I manage not to take meaning by returning to the position of victim, of betrayed one, of the wounded one?What archetype do I utilize now?

Being a good teacher, a teacher who could actually midwife transformation in her students, that role kept me sane and grounded for 23 years.  I have always had a difficult time trying to rationalize why I should even be alive, and being a good teacher gave me reason to continue to wake and go off to work each day.  Being a parent whose child loved her and was thriving in the midst of chaos gave me justification to convince myself that I had standing in the world to deserve to continue to live.  There had been those times before I became a parent when all I wished was to get life over with, let me live til 60 and then let me go from this place of living nightmares.

Now consider this "connect the dots" irony, this karmic joke: the very week that my daughter is going off the pill in an attempt to get pregnant, the very day I return home from surgery with a breast removed that she suckled upon eagerly as a little one, that gave her nourishment, protection, and love.  And I want to be alive to see her give birth; I want to be strong and healthy to play with my grand child(ren) because I will be a magical grandma. 

After my own struggle to understand that I am a beloved child of the Kosmos who does not need a reason or a talent or a book published or a position in an organization to justify continued blessing of life, NOW I must struggle to stay alive.  Now I must avert my face from hatred and return to Kosmic support by the Divine, where I will be in a state of not-knowing what the result of my surgery will be...will ther cancerreturn?  Will it metastacize in my lungs? bones?

p. 44: "...the less the actual medical causes of an illness are understood, then the more it tends to become a sickness surrounded by desultory myths and metaphors..."
We do not really know what causes cancer or the one I have.  Was it the stress? environmental toxins?  What myths will I take up and perpetuate, like condemning the 3 unwise men who harassed and tormented me?  I would have to do a 4 quadrant analysis to create a list of infinite possibilities.
What attitude will I embody towards the illness? the sickness?

How far over to the UR and LR will I go for desparate reassurance or fright?  I probably have a cancerous lymph node...and then how many others? how many cancer seeds have already begun their swim with transformed DNA to parts of me unknown?  what ae the statistics for 5 year, 8 year survival?  am I now a statistic?

We are far removed fromTreya's time in responding to breast cancer, but it is still no walk in the park for the aggressive type she had.  Chemotherapy is vastly improved in targeting the original tumor, and the effects seem less stressful on the body.

But Ken is right when he talks about how little the doctors can speak to my prognosis, to my survival.  I am learning their deflecting words..."we'll wait and see"...."this will be a chronic disease for you"....

As for the alternative methods, which I am trying and will continue to work with, Ken's point of view is still valid: most of the sites out there, the books I have purchased or skimmed through, speak of testimonials, not double-blind studies.  So many sound like the quack publications where "they" (the drug/medical/governmental structure "don't want you to know the truth about cancer cures because they will lose money and power."  Pre-rational religious drivel.

pp. 48-49:  Ken writes a pretty good analysis of how different religious/spiritual agents describe illness and sickness.

But yet----I am not throwing all of them away any more than I would discount a shaman's vision.  Wilber-Combs Lattice, anyone?  I will be writing much more about the kernels that seem to lie in trans-rational healing modalities.  At this moment, how do I find meaning in this new ordeal?  Treya faced an identical dilemma:
p. 50: "Perhaps, after all these years of rather anxiously looking for my life's work, coming down with cancer contained the seeds of this work, if only I could recognize it?"

Bitter irony...I had finally found my life's work, and as in every single endeavor inmy entire life, some "outside" agent comes in to interrupt, to poison, to make impossible the continuation of whatever work I am doing with great love and passion.  What is that all about? Am I being given a Kosmic swat on the knuckles to remember how transitory everything is?  to just let go of my striving, that at times has had heavy egoic pressures pushing it, but now is effortlessly and joyfully emerging from within my soul?

I have made right hand path decisions, but have come to very few left hand path decisions.  The time is coming this week.  God bless my support system.