Team Work and Tattoo

The next Wednesday, while working in Santa Fe, I received the “we have results, please come in this afternoon” call – that’s when I really knew I had cancer. Realizing that the results would probably come in that day and that it could be difficult, I planned accordingly and packed my, hold onto for dear life and only take in emergency, supply of valium. They were so old that only chunks survived; no novice would have been able to identify them in a PDR. I chose a chunk that looked to be about 1/3 of a pill and swallowed. I’m stoic, to a fault, and rarely need such indulgences (which is good because when I need them they work great in small doses) but I decided to make it easy on myself that day. I felt the Valium kick in while driving to the radiology clinic and breathed a sigh of relief thinking, “Okay, I can do this now.”   

A woman I hadn’t seen before ushered me into a reception room and she sat down with me. It took a while for the Doc to arrive. I felt sorry for the woman knowing it must be her job to handle freaking out patients. The radiologist came in sat down and said, “The results are in and they indicate something we never want to hear.” It was a bit of a blur  but what stuck out is, “stage 3 with positive lymph nodes, this is curable, you will have this team of doctors, if this were happening in my family, this is the medical team that I would choose.” As he finished he looked at me and said, “You are taking this calmly.” I felt a bit guilty not sharing about the valium but instead said, “Well, it’s no surprise.” He said, “I guess not.”  With that they ushered me into another room with a lovely nurse navigator (a title, being healthy, I had never heard) who handed me a small garish orange with sport print flannel pillow and packets of information on breast cancer. She had made or was in the process of making appointments with an oncologist, surgeon and oncology radiologist as well as for an MRI and further testing on the biopsy sample.

After that, I was so busy there was little time to think. I saw my oncology radiologist and he asked me if I had fallen in the past several months, “Weird question,” I thought. I said yes, I fell three times last weekend. His eyes got big and he asked the circumstance and when I explained that I had been skiing steep bumps he laughed; he’s a skier too. It turns out that they ask you if you’ve fallen because clumsiness is an indicator that your cancer has invaded your neurological system – the brain. He let me know that I will have a 30 or so consecutive days of radiation after my surgery heals for a couple of weeks. On to my surgeon who was great as he let me know that I would become a uni-boob while enjoyed a full mastectomy (he really was wonderful, as they all were, compassionate without being patronizing.)  Then I drove to meet with my oncologist, Dr. Sidhu (whom I adore.) She had the hard job.

Dr. Sidhu sat me down and started going over the actual cancer data. “You’re Her 2+,” she said, “that’s bad, but we'll use Herceptin. We will start you on Adriamycin and Cytoxan every 3 weeks for 12 weeks and then you will either have surgery or start the next series of Taxol and Herceptin. I want to get some Herceptin in you before surgery.”  Then she said, “ We need to have a port surgically implanted in your chest ASAP. You have to have a MUGA (heart function test) before starting chemo because it is cardio toxic. Oh, and by the way, you will lose all your hair.” (and they mean ALL your hair!) I was told we would schedule the first chemo for next week’s Friday.  She asked me if I had any pain and I said, “Not really, but I do have some off and on pain on my back behind the right scapula, nothing unusual.” I should have kept my big mouth shut because then she scheduled me for PET and CAT scans. (The scapula area showed clear.)

Here’s an excerpt from my journal on that day:

The Tattooed Lady

Today, after visiting the surgeon I thought about how I always wanted to have eyeliner tattooed and now was the perfect time since loosing my eyelashes would mean eye makeup wouldn’t stay on. And, I can't do it after starting chemo (from now on referred to as nectar or alchemy.) I called a friend of mine that had it done and asked, where and how? She hooked me up with her girl and there was an opening for tonight.  I'm early for the appointment and there is a Taco Cabana right in front, it's been a hard week and I know they have 2-dollar margaritas so, what the heck. I decide to go in and have a margarita and read my book.

I’m not much of a drinker and easily effected by alcohol....  I go in. The tattoo lady and I chat about what I want and she says, what about your eyebrows and I say, “Well, I hadn't thought about that. I guess so.” So she did. Holy Shit, the next two hours were pure hell, excruciating pain, like why do they do water boarding when they could get info easy this way.

Finally, she has me sit up to look in the mirror and it was even HOLIER SHIT!!!  My largely natural hardly ever-plucked eyebrows are black as coal, arched lines that look like the joker's in batman but with black shoe polish. Or, have you seen the skinny old ladies who hang out in bars smoking cigs with these eyebrows they've painted on with the black eyebrow pencil that comes in the cheap read plastic?  That's me now. Tattoo lady is very sweet (Michelle) she can tell I'm freaking and keeps assuring me that it will fade. It still really hurts. (The eyebrows ended up being great.)

Lydia the Tattooed Lady by Groucho Marx -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVBBxptpSY8

Pre Diagnosis

Proud Mary is my theme song. In the summer 2009, burnt out from over 20 years of working as a counselor/therapist in schools, prisons and public and private inpatient treatment programs, I left good jobs in the city where I’d been working for the man. Several years before I began studying with a writer, healer and teacher in Los Angeles who had a retreat center in the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico and the land needed a caretaker. Though terrified beyond belief, I chucked it all to start over, post 50, on a little bit of savings and a willingness to take the risk to have a more meaningful life.

The retreats sometimes include fire walks and after walking on fire New Years Retreat in December 2012, I noticed the balls my feet were red (No one at the retreats have ever been burned or injured but sometimes a little redness occurs that correlates in reflexology to a certain area of the body.) The inflammation was gone in the morning. A few days later on a hike with a friend, after about 2 miles, the ball of my right foot began hurting to the point that it was hard to walk – I joked that I was going lame.  Thinking it a fluke, a few days later I did the same hike and experienced the same foot pain.

Then late one cold dark Saturday night in January after seeing the Hobbit in a theater, I lay down in bed on my right side. Ouch, I wondered at soreness that I hadn’t noticed before and rolled to the other side. I had spent the last several months preserving a bounty of apples gifted by the trees on the property where I live and over the past week I had finally finished the last bushel by making a huge roaster of applesauce. Needing time before the final processing, I had struggled to lift the bulk into the refrigerator and had used my side, under my arm beside my right breast, as a leverage tool. It actually hurt at the time, enough that I lifted it down and tried to find another position to get the big thing in. The next morning, when it was still sore, I remembered the applesauce and thought I must have bruised something in the struggle.

It had been an intense year. Two Christmases before, I had flown back east to visit my mother who, at 88 was still living on her own and driving. The year before it was noticeable that she was getting forgetful and having trouble with her medications. This year it was much worse. I noticed that she had several cups of coffee poured and then, several bowls of cereal, forgetting that she had prepared the ones before. By the time I left I was very concerned about her driving and living alone. Through the following winter and spring her condition worsened as I worried from across the country about what we were going to do.

My daughter, Emily, was graduating from law school in Washington, DC that May and Mother said that she wanted to attend the ceremony. Brad, my brother agreed to take charge of her but during the graduation festivities it became clear that mother could no longer live alone. To make a long story short, my sister, Lynn, said she wanted Mom to move in with her and her husband, Roger, and, a month long saga ensued of how to get our fiercely independent, spit fire, dementia ridden mother who we had seen physically attack our father; as well as us; kick out the windows in our house and become an angry hysterical high pitched banshee at slight provocation to quietly leave her beloved home and move 4 hours away? We were terrified of her, and with good reason! The three of us had grown up under a cloud of potential and actual violence that left us hyper vigilant and walking on eggshell. Interestingly, we had all become “helping professionals,” Lynn a social worker, Brad an acupuncturist and me a counselor, where we could turn our ability to read people and situations, an empathic gifts honed in childhood as a mechanism of self-preservation, into something useful to others.

Finally, we made arrangements to meet with her family doc and have an intervention. Thank goodness for the doctor who finally said, either you leave voluntarily or Adult Protective Services will get involved and give you no choice. So, off we go, with Mother’s bedroom furniture and personal items in a U-Haul, through the mountains of West Virginia to her new home.

Other things were going on as well. In reaction to a twenty-pound menopausal weight gain I had began off and on again stringent dieting. This accompanied raging candida flare ups coinciding with sugar/carb binging. My serial long distance monogamous relationship pattern continued (enough said) and though the relationships felt comfortable they did not provide real intimacy. Finances continued to be less abundant than I would have preferred and I had finally taken a part-time school counselor position after having sworn never to do so again. I won’t bore you with more, though there is, but obviously there were some stressors both emotional and physical. While I loved life in New Mexico and felt in many ways as if I had come home, it had its challenges.

The next day I noticed the pain under my arm was not generalized but associated with a small lump – I knew it was a lymph node. Then with in a few days my right breast turned red and sore.  I had no health insurance. I knew something was going on that required medical attention but also knew that I couldn’t afford to pay for the diagnostic tests out of pocket. When the symptoms had not alleviated by the end of the week I decided to go to a walk in medical clinic to be checked. The doctor thought it was an infection and put me on a round of antibiotics. I paid the $150 and left to fill my prescription. The antibiotics did not work.

Introduction

During the fall of 2012, a dear friend and gifted intuitive told me that something big was going to happen in my life mid winter 2013. Excited, I thought, something to look forward to! Little did I know how exciting it would be; imagining something lovely, the prediction soon left my mind.

More details to follow but to make a long story short, in February 2013 I was diagnosed with breast cancer, stage 3 with lymph involvement. My something big was cancer and not a simple case. Life changed with many challenges and blessing; one of the many blessings was my continued journaling and participation in a weekly writer’s group. I wrote copiously enjoying a great benefit of stepping out of fear and feeling victimized into experiencing wonder, gratitude and joy – of course not all the time. In the pages that follow I joke about my little cache of Valium whose small doses were indeed helpful a few times, but no psychotropic medication could have helped (in fact it would have stymied) me step into this experience more calmly, facilitating clarity and peace, than writing.

It seems that cancer, breast and prostate in particular, have become epidemic. My doctors say I don’t fit into any of the risk groups, no real family history, good diet and healthy lifestyle. There has been some environmental exposure but who hasn’t and others who don’t have cancer have been greater than mine. The bottom line is, I don’t know how my body developed a cancer. The most important thing to me is using it as an opportunity for healing. Of course, physically and integral to physical healing, I want to heal emotionally and spiritually. I want this experience to be a catalyst, an alchemical process propeling me toward becoming a more whole, integrated person or universal being. I want to mine it for gold! 

This blog is document of my process through the journey. Perhaps it will inspire some, even those without out of control rogue cells that need to be corralled and transmuted, forced to straighten up or be kicked out of our incredible miraculous bodies.