Relaxing Into Hopelessness

I have written the last two posts with the knowledge that they are centered around an optimistic time with the two cancers that have crept into my body's functioning. I dodged the bullet of impending death and hopelessness, so to speak.  I wanted an uplifting Oprah-esque narrative that told of hope in the face of despair which would coincide with the holiday and natural cycles of reborn light.

Yet I am keenly aware that this dodging of the hopelessness bullet was an illusion, and I must continue to work with the truth, rather than the temporary illusion. I turned to Pema Chodron's When Things Fall Apart to reorient me to both death and hopelessness as the motivation for my awakening in the hospital:

"When we talk about hopelessness and death, we're talking about facing facts.  No escapism...Giving up hope is encouragement to stick with yourself, to make friends with yourself, to not run away from yourself, to return to bare bones, no matter what is going on.  Fear of death is the background the whole thing...But if we totally experience hopelessness, giving up all hope of alternatives to the rpesent moment, we can have a joyful relationship with our lives, an honest, direct relationship, one that no longer ignores the reality of impermanence and death." 

That is precisely what led to my spiritual experience and resulting peace....

Today and Wednesday I return to Sloan-Kettering.  These visits have dominated my life for several months and will continue to do so.  The first time I heard of S-K it was in the context of an acquaintance going there for treatment who later died.  I associated anything to do with S-K with death and suffering.  It was, to me, the building of the walking dead.  Whenever I heard that someone had cancer, it was usually whispered, perhaps with the same underlying fear and panic that the inhabitants of the pre-modern world associated with lepers, and which the 1980s associated with AIDS sufferers.  The response from the recipients of the news of diagnosed cancer in someone they knew would be a bowed and shaking head followed by the muttered "poor bastard."

The first time I walked into the Valley Hospital Cancer Center in Paramus, NJ I dissociated.  This isn't my place, I silently affirmed as my body leaned away from the front entrance.  Not me, not here, I am not meant to have this health problem...Yet once inside I met caring, sweet, emotionally validating nurses, staff, and physicians.  I felt that this was not a charnal house, but a house of hope and promise.

My next stop was S-K and Dr. Sacchini who offered a second opinion about the breast cancer.  S-K was well beyond my imaginings.  It is decorated so welcomingly with waterfalls, soft oils and lithographs, and a color scheme reflecting the necessary polarities of hope and despair.  Too cheery with tropical colors would offend me if I were receiving a terminal diagnosis; too bland would pull me down into fretfull ruminations of bad news  Each floor has Internet, beverages and snacks, and a staff that is super-competent.  Their IT is incomparable....I went for a sophisticated biopsy only to have Dr. Sacchini reading me the results within the hour. The physician at Valley was awed when I told her this; she said that such a reading would have taken 3-4 days. 

My allegiance switched permanently to S-K, and for the 2 hospital stays and the biopsy I was cotninually astonished by the superb care of my body and mind, if not my spirit.  From tea and cookies served by a uniformed food service worker at 4:30 to the extensive and yummy meal selections, from the spacious hiospital rooms to the wondrous 15th floor activities center with 2 story windows overlooking York Avenue, from the nurses and physicians to the lady who emptied my garbage can, I could not have asked for more attentive or caring staff.

But consider where I was for those two hospuital stays---where women were recovering from surgery and then released....I never saw a death, never encountered a terminally ill patient.  The ICU is on another floor.  So for a while, a stay at S-K came to mean an average hospital event, except that everyone there has cancer.  And that also numbed and reassured me.  If everyone has cancer, it becomes the norm of your experience.  No more walking dead.  We all face the same peril.

This next time, which I will find out about on Wednesday, I will be on the 6th floor with other lung cancer patients.  When I told the nurse that my lung cancer was at Stage Ia, she teared up...She had never met anyone with beginning earliest and treatable stage lung cancer before.  So I know that I will be amongst very sick cancer patients, and my lessons in hopelessness will be even more grounded.

"Death and hopelessness provide proper motivation---proper motivation for living an insightful, compassionate life....We're always trying to deny...getting old, getting sick, losing what we love---we don't see those events as natural occurances."

Yes, I have dodged the cancer bullet.... for now.  That says nothing about what I can  hold onto, what the possible addiction to "my good luck" can lead to if more cancer is detected.  The awakening that I experienced must not be pushed aside by any temporary mindset of victory.

"Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hiopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time----that is the basic message."