Into the Tunnel

I am approaching two events with much trepidation: Friday I must return to Sloan-Kettering for a biopsy under local anesthesia of a spot on my lung discovered in a body scan some 2 weeks ago.  My oncologist, Dr. Graham, is not terribly alarmed, since 70% of these spots are benign.  But then again, I was told that 80% of people with my mammogram do not have cancer.  Statistics really do nothing other than tell me what a group of "others" tallied, and do little to speak of me individually. 

I fear the years with my family when my father chain-smoked.  We would drive for days during our summer vacations with me gasping for breath in the car as he smoked away.  I recall my doctor when I was 10 showing me an x-ray of my lungs and seeing that they looked like a patch-work quilt of whites and deepening shades of grey.  He exhorted me never to smoke, since my lungs were already so damaged, and I followed his caution.  But today 2nd hand smoke kills hundreds of thousands.  Will I be one of them?  After 5 years, the survival rate for lung cancer is 15%.  I am sympton-free, and this spot never showed up on any x-ray; does that auger well, or is that a neutral fact?  Can lung cancer ever be caught "early enough" to have a positive prognosis?  I have returned to the cancer roller-coaster at UncertainPark, where every ride is a lethal risk and the finish line is either safety for a few more years or a death sentence with a known terminus.

I have a grandchild or two safely nested within my daughter, so I learned on Thanksgiving.  Will I be alive long enough for this child to remember me, or will I be the grandma who is too ill to play with, a woman haggard and drawn, lying on a sofa, until she passes, and the little one fears seeing her?

Death is on my mind, again.  I cannot see into the fog to get any clear sense of my destiny.  I am soooo way past "why me" that I see balanced scales that can tip either way.  I am not immune, no magical thinking will help me escape even long enough to accept the "you'll be just fine, I just know it" from friends.  Even they have moderated their hopes for me recently by sayuing they will be praying for me; and I am no longer shy about asking for their prayers.  PLEASE pray, I am scared, I can do nothing to aid myself beyond what I am doing, and I so value the community's support at this time.

I wish I could cut-paste portions of the forum at cancer.org.  It appears to be a safe venue for women to express their open and authentic feelings.  One woman actually laughed and directed us to read her chipper and upbeat blog, and then remarked that this was the only place where she could be her real self, and could vent her fear, pain, and honest questions.  One woman, an Orthodox Jew, told us that although she has worn a wig since the day she was married, she still had a terrible emotional reaction to losing her hair.  There is a venue on the site for Stage IV cancers, the women with Treya's diagnosis, and some of them are still alive at this point after 5 years.  The statistics speak of no progress with Stage IV, but even these survivors give all of us a whisp of hope, wherever we might be on ther cancer grid.

What am I doing during this time of not-knowing, which is a bit more serious than the normal state of not-knowing?  I have worked so hard over the past 3 years to recover from life-long PTSD.  I have confronted my own personal nightmares, freed up energy for more Persephonic (how is THAT for an adjective??) dives into the underworld of my own creation.

Last night my fear of having lung cancer unearthed a felt-sense of a familial tie.  First I had connected the dots between the breast cancer and the toxic aspects of my maternal lineage.  Then last night my insight revealed that my dad and his unanswerable grief over his life has been lodged in my lungs.  When I felt into that terrible and lonely grief, I felt a wave of hot, hot energy begin in my 5th chakra and radiate up, filling my head and exiting my crown chakra.  That was followed by great quiet and emptiness...

I continue to dig.  I continue doing vipassana with the Witness, on a moment by moment basis.  I continue reality-chcking my personal story line, my self-created narrative, and seeing into the pervasive negativity.  This permits me to reframe as I did today with my hopelessness, which has been my personal salvation against chronic disappointment and crippling suffering throughout my life.  No one who knows the full extent of my life has ever denied that it has been one of personal, generational, and cultural suffering.  It is hard for me to look that totality head-on, but I have been counseled to do just that.  No spiritual bypass this time.  LOOK INTO IT ALL.

Yet with all that duly noted, I am free, freed from the nightmares, accepting of the  responsibility for my own stubbornness in refusing to comply with the authorities' inane demands on me at work.  I had lunch with 2 school friends today, both now retired.  We shared stories of the "old boys' club" functioning, of the scared fragile "little men" who run the place and the departments, who are so obviously at very low stages of ego development that they see any move by the females to work for the betterment of the school as a direct attack on their "power".  It appears to be endemic throughout the school, and I wonder if the same pattern repeats throughout much of k-12 in the US. 

Check out 12/1/10's Tom Friedman's Op Ed piece in the NY Times today----he has a marvelous satirical piece on what a WikiChina dump of cables between their embassy in D.C. and Beijing might read like.  See, it's all about our appearance rather than our reality, he notes.  Obama gets trashed by Palin and Huckabee for not acknowledging our national exceptionalism, even as it evaporates as quickly as the Alaska ice sheets.  Congress knows what is true in the LL and what should be enacted in the LR, yet refuses to do so lest they fail to be gifted with the corporate billions that permit them to buy more airtime so they can tell more blatant lies about their opponent than their opponent can launch.  We can't get out of Afghanistan which costs us $170 million per day because then Obama and the Dems will be labeled as wimps and will not get the cotrporate billions to throw away in the next election cycle.  So let me get this straight-----they cannot DO anything, really, because it might risk their ability to get corporate billions to throw away on their attempt to get re-elected and continue getting corporate billions for the next election cycle so they can return to Congress where they cannot do anything substantive or else they will not get corporate billions......  Hmmmm.

The marvelous book Idiot America says it best: we are fighting all the wrong battles...Nothing of substance can ever be debated rationally any longer.  We are again in a raging period of anti-intellectualism, except science can indeed reflect certain parts of reality with far more truth thaqn ever before, and instead of moderating it with valid UL and LL wisdom tradition offerings, we get magical thinking and pre-rational beliefs touted above science or conflated "as" science..

So biopsy Friday, I either have lung cancer or do not....Then Monday I begin chemotherapy and begin losing my hair which grieves me as well.  Then Tuesday a return to S-K for a shot that will result in severe bone pain.  That will be followed by my body's idiosyncratic reaction to the toxins sent in like LF's SWAT team to track down errant and out of control cells that escaped surgery. 

I haven't even gone into the whole breast reconstruction issue.  That will come after I get through the next week.

I AM thankful that I had the mammo that led to the biopsy that led me to S-K that led me to a great surgeon that led me to a great reconstructive plastic surgeon that led me to a caring oncologist. Consider the alternative, Rick reminds me.

So what are the themes of this post? 
Authenticity and how difficult our culture makes it for us to reach self-truth. 

Meeting the truth-claims of all four quadrants, and the cultural inability or refusal to reach rational and/or post-rational analyses. 

The difficulty of holding onto worldcentric perspectives when our institutions are governed by those with egocentric world-views.