LIGHTNING STRIKES

Lightning Strikes

                “You have invasive breast cancer.” Oct. 1, 2010

                “You have lung cancer in your left lobe.” Nov. 23, 2010

“You have a potentially life-threatening cellulitis infection.” Dec. 17, 2010

I received these three diagnoses in what seemed like a blur of bad and worse news.  Just as I was beginning to acclimate to my breast cancer diagnosis and to comprehend what the treatment regimen might entail, I was hit with the news that a routine body scan revealed an asymptomatic but lethal lung cancer.  As someone who never smoked and was not around a smoking environment, this news struck me harder than the breast cancer diagnosis. Less than a month later I faced a third major surgery to combat a severe cellulitis infection that came from my breast reconstruction.

                        

Out of the blue. Lightning strikes.  My friends didn’t know what to say to me. One actually stopped being my close friend. Yet from near and far, from neighbors to internet acquaintances, I did receive reactions to the unfolding news of my trifecta of cancer and cancer-related surgeries.  Some nourished me while others appeared to be delivered with the best of intention but missed the mark for the following reasons:

                           

It didn’t help to hear other cancer stories. What rattled me was hearing about their Uncle Joe’s horrible death from pancreatic cancer. I was deeply depressed upon hearing about their friend’s death from inflammatory breast disease and who left behind three little children. Telling me about Cousin Syd’s current third round of chemo for prostate cancer didn’t help me to either process my diagnosis or to make decisions about my own cancer treatment. Cancer Hope Network has the right idea in pairing up people with similar cancers and treatment protocols. 

                           

Really mean it when you offer to “help” the patient. I was assisted tremendously by offers to drive me to, and stay with me during, chemo treatments.  As much as some friends called on a routine basis and offered “help”, only one offered to drive me to my appointment and keep me company during the prolonged treatment.  Offering to help the cancer patient is a noble gesture, but unspecified assistance is as supportive as saying “have a nice day.”  Ask the person if s/he needs a ride, a meal cooked for the patient and family, baby-sitting, or shopping. Ask them what they might need and let them get specific. I got the feeling that most of those offering “help” did it to satisfy their consciences but were secretly hoping that my call would never come.

                              

Don’t say that God only gives us what we can handle.  Even if this is your sincerely held religious or spiritual belief, please keep it to yourself. If I followed this logic, it would mean that my three serious surgeries and their painful aftermaths were punishments for not being less able to cope. I wound up feeling momentarily angry at a God that would do this just because I was a resilient person.

                      

Put patients on prayer lists and include them in your meditations. Even though I was not of their religion, I was deeply touched that I was entered onto prayer lists of many different denominations.  We know that this has a positive effect, even if it is just in knowing that someone took the time to put me on that list and mention my name during a sacred service. My husband and I have incorporated this practice when we say our Friday night Sabbath prayers.

                                     

Be present. By this I mean to present yourself to the person with cancer without trying to control or alter the situation. Sometimes just letting me vent about my pain, or share a funny animal picture on Face book with me was healing.

I was hit by lightning. Three times. I didn’t do anything that I know of to bring this upon myself, any more than someone hit by actual lightning does.  I needed time to process the physical, emotional, and spiritual impacts of what I was facing.  I needed those in my life to be respectful of this process by both giving me space and by holding out a practical, simple, and direct hand to help.

                               

(I originally posted this on the Cancer Hope Network blog.) 

Good News/Bad News: How to Handle Them All

“Good News/Bad News: How to Handle Them All”

Anyone who has been touched by cancer or other serious illness has probably become an astute consumer of the latest findings about treatments and statistical prognoses.  This can become crazy-making, and produce unnecessary stresses during an already stressful situation. On April 14, 2014, the researchers at Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center announced that their newly created blood test can detect the recurrence of breast cancer non-invasively. The problem has been that most women, after treatment has been concluded, receive standard blood tests and imaging to assess recurrence.  These tests and imaging are usually done at the request of the woman if she complains of new symptoms such as pain, shortness of breath, or aching bones. Unfortunately, these tests and scans can produce false positives, and then the woman can be subjected to painful and stressful tests and biopsies.

This new simple test has a 95% accuracy, can be done during a routine doctor’s visit before symptoms are noted by the patient, and can help monitor a patient’s response to treatment as soon as two weeks after any necessary treatments begin. This means that the patient need not be exposed to unnecessary or incorrect chemotherapy agents.

What great news! Scientific progress is astounding, isn’t it?

But looking behind the good news, we find the bad news: This blood test is needed because one in five----20%----of breast cancer survivors who have undergone five years of therapy experience cancer recurrence within the following ten years. Breast cancer can return at any time, regardless of the stage of the disease at the time of detection. Most of the recurrences are within three to five years after the end of treatment. Some of the risk factors for recurrence include lymph node involvement, tumor size, and the presence of the HER2 gene.

So how do you wait out the months and years without turning yourself into a tense pretzel? According to Dr. Oz and Dr. Roizen, cuddle up!

Oxytocin, that wonderful brain chemical that helps new moms bond with their babes, can help anyone, man and woman. It boosts happiness, fine-tunes communication skills, improves relationships, and handles stress and anxiety. All of these benefit those with serious illnesses, and everyone else out there as well. There is no pill or shot to receive this miracle brain chemical yet, and you don’t have to be a mom or a babe to get its immediate benefits. But there are plenty of do-it-yourself, natural things you can do to receive its benefits, and most of them are just plain enjoyable to begin with:

1-     Have more sex: This most pleasurable activity results in an immediate rush of oxytocin.

2-     Hug someone for at least 20 seconds: Give someone you love to begin with a long, extended embrace so that the pituitary gland is instructed to release more oxytocin.

3-    Get a massage: Who wouldn’t love to get a massage with no good reason for it? One study showed that a 15-minute back massage of the kind they offer at malls got a big boost in their oxytocin levels.

4-    Hold hands with your special person: Go into a silent area, turn off the TV, tell the kids to give you a short break, and disconnect from the cell phone for just 10 minutes. It’s not just the skin-to-skin contact that blasts stress. Just being there, supporting your special person and sharing empathy will do the trick.

5-    Watch a soulful movie: Yes, there is something good about those “chick-flick” movies that the raucous comedies can’t give you. It doesn’t have to be sad; but it should have something that switches on your feelings of empathy.  Go ahead and lose yourself in the story. You’ll get a huge bump of 47% more oxytocin by the time the credits appear.

6-    Sing with a group! Play music with your pals! Listen to relaxing music! Many studies have verified the relaxing potential of these activities by lowering blood pressure, and now we know that they all bump up your oxytocin levels too.

7-    Create “digital oxytocin” by using social media: Don’t avoid meeting with your friends in person, but do reach out to folks you haven’t seen or talked to in a while. Don’t post to one-up your group, but do update your contacts with events that make you feel good.

8-    Do something fun with your special person or friend: You don’t have to climb Mt. Everest. Just going to a zoo, park, museum, a new city or restaurant, all can do the oxytocin trick.

I am so excited by this list that I’m going to end this post and do one of the eight things the good doctors recommend. The news, both good and bad, will always be around. I face all sorts of challenges being a two-type cancer patient. But I can sure make the days less stressful and more joyful by stocking up on good old oxytocin,

(I first published this on the Cancer Hope Network blog)

Tending Your Garden

My book INTEGRAL HEALING comes out this October. I'm interested if any of you out there used Integral Healing practices in your own illness journeys. When I had my cancers, I felt pretty much alone in developing an ILP healing module. So many of you must have dealt with your health challenges in ways that would help countless others. I would love to have your stories to share. Our community is world-wide, and there is no need for someone to ever feel alone with a serious illness. Contact me here or my FB homepage if you would like to share a link or a story.


I have put myself forward in all of these posts and in my forthcoming book as a living human document, journeying through illness and hoping to permit others to have a slightly easier path. But now it is spring.



Renewal. Rebirth of hope. New beginnings. My life has turned the corner as has the season. 

After a dismal and challenging winter, the earth did what it is supposed to do---it turned the Northern Hemisphere warm and fecund.  Little shoots of pastels and primary colors dared to poke up from the crenelated earth, tortured by freeze, thaw, and refreeze. Oddly shaped protrusions appeared at the ends of barren branches and tiny green feathers began to populate shrubs and trees. The air had fragrances missing for a year, and noises in neighborhoods changed, too. The scraping sounds of the snow plows have been replaced by the louder drones of lawn mowers.




Businesses of all sorts place pansies and hyacinths outside their doors to tempt the natural urge to repopulate the ground with life, the way Noah was urged to repopulate the earth after it had been scrubbed raw by----well, use your own take on biblical writings to fill this in. My clear view of the stream behind our house is becoming fuzzy with the addition of small leaves and growth spurts of bushes and branches.  But I can hear it better at night, as melting snow north of me fills it until it can play its music for me once again.

My old stacks of gardening magazines are dusted off and placed lovingly on my kitchen table. I am ready for removal of that which died over the frigid winter, and for the planting of the new. I've been keeping in tune with winter as the time of living inside myself, of going as deeply inward as possible. The bulbs I planted last fall must have time to gestate under the blanket of snow much as I have been tending to my psychological roots and the quality of my personality's soil.


"In the long run, the success of your garden depends on making healthy garden soil. The more you can do to keep your soil healthy, the more productive your garden will be and the higher the quality of your crops.
For the best soil, sources of organic matter should be as diverse as possible."
Read more: http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/how-to-make-garden-soil.aspx#ixzz302y5tZ3l


My hope for those with health challenges is that you take the time to tend your garden.  What will be the ultimate benefit to you if you pluck the weeds, trim the dead branches by surgery or other medical interventions, only to have no bounty flourish in the spring after the snow melts?  You have mustered strength and courage during these challenges. You garnered support and praise for how well you have faced illness. And no doubt you want to feel that this episode carries some significant meaning for you. 

But what if you have that irritating sense that your thoughts and behaviors have not moved you forward in your development as a human being? You don't feel more empathetic with others who face misfortune. Your illness has been conquered so you push the entire experience into the back of your consciousness;  you have a life yet to be lived. What more can be asked of you, after all?

We are a meaning-making species. Such harsh experiences as serious illness cannot help but demand that we find something transcendent in their wake. We rob ourselves of self-knowledge and self-realization if we fail to dig more deeply into what we have endured. To fail to do so permits our garden's soil to remain unhealthy long after the illness has been weeded out.



Each of us is part of an ecology that ranges from the tiniest part of us through the Kosmos. Ken Wilber calls us holons, or whole/parts. Where do you end and I begin? Where does your unhealthy soil stop bleeding into my lawn or garden?  I have a beautiful stream running through my backyard. But the neighbors upstream permit their laundry water to be dumped into it, and I often see detergent bubbles floating by.  Our local department of public works has sued these people to stop them from polluting the stream that flows past my home and scores of others until it joins with bigger and bigger streams and rivers, and finally merges with the Atlantic Ocean.



These polluters had no interest in maintaining a clean stream for me.  Self-centered, they never thought about how the stream would denigrate my soil, and ultimately affect my flower garden.

Let's get clear about these mixed metaphors-----serious illnesses give us a sacred opportunity to look inside ourselves, to go deeply into what motivates us, and to clean up harmful or hurtful behaviors.  We have the rare excuse to examine our selves and change whatever has caused us to be unhealthy. 



It is said that chemotherapy never killed a single cancer cell. It works by changing the environment to one that is hostile to the survival of the malignancy.

Integral Healing provides the framework by which we can change our internal and external environments to make our lives more productive and with a higher quality to our functioning.

Integral Healing calls us to do more than exercise three times a week or eat organic foods. We need to address our interiors as forcefully as we address our exteriors.  But how do we change the environment of the very soil in which we grow ourselves?

Depth psychology has been urged by Wilber in many of his books.  This process is daunting and often as psychologically painful as the medical procedures we undergo. Therapy that props up our egos won't aerate that interior; it will merely put mulch to cover up the unhealthy soil.

I have learned over the years that very few undergo depth psychology.  I can attest that it is arduous and threatening work. But it frees up the energy that a person facing illness needs now more than ever to fight for health.  And it clears the path for further personal growth in ways that benefit others.  There is more caring, less fighting, more clarity of purpose, less self-defeating thoughts. Love has a place to flourish.

Writing your sacred or spiritual autobiography is another technique that is showing up in most of our hospitals today as a means of healing. What used to be considered egotistical, vain, or self-indulgent is now being supported by medical professionals as an excellent way to find the transcendent meaning of this illness in your life. Make yourself available to others as a sacred human document. Let us learn from your tears, pain, laughter, and courage in the face of fear how to be more fully alive.