God and Coincidences…or are they?

In the past, I have been a doubter. Although I have deep faith in God and that he has infinite love for every person whether they believe in him or not, when something coincidental happens, I am more and more likely to take a second look at God’s hand in the matter. Some coincidences are TOO coincidental.

For example, last Monday morning before my scan, I was telling KB that I was feeling low (actually, he told ME I was feeling low after hearing me sighing over and over and seeing me sit on the (closed) toilet seat with my head in my hands for an unusually long period of time.). I told him that I was feeling very isolated and alone, and having a bit of a hard time coping at the moment. We both know that it comes with the cancer territory.

So I’m going through my morning in this pre-scan, depressed fog. I go to my appointment, go to the changing room and change out of my clothes and into my two dressing gowns (one open to the back the other open to the front). I grab my barium smoothies and head out into the waiting room area and I almost bypassed the one with three women talking animatedly, but decided to sit with them.

They were all talking about cancer. All three of them had cancer (or had had cancer). One had recurrent breast cancer and was now stage IV, one had a sort of muscle sarcoma that had recurred and was not stage IV, and one had had bone cancer but was there to support her friend who had the muscle sarcoma. Once I heard what their topic of conversation was I piped right in and started asking questions and contributing my experiences.

It was so spontaneous. Genuine. Raw and real.

I’m not sure if you tried, you could repeat the experience.

Anyway, we all had our scans and parted with kind words. When I left, I left my dark clouds behind, too. I felt deeply peaceful.

Now the doubter in me says, this was just a happy coincidence. My faith tells me that, just as we lose no hair without God being aware of it, God meant for me to be there, to feel the support, to know that I am neither alone nor isolated.

God’s keeping tabs on me.

And he’s keeping tabs on you, too.

God’s peace.

The Gaping Maw of Death

My blog posts do not just to burst forth in a moment of thought or creativity. I start thinking about them, the topic, the content, the accompanying artwork, days or even weeks before I put pen to paper (so to speak).

A few days ago, I had just gone onto my blog to check for spelling, grammar, or other errors. As I re-read the post (which was about actual deaths) I started to think about my usual topics - death and cancer and having the knowledge that you’re going to die in relatively short order. 

Now everyone knows that they’re going to die eventually, but knowing that instead of those forty to fifty years you thought you had left to play with and in, you only have a few years, tops. And you don’t feel much like playing. So you are left, and I thought this was clever, staring into the “gaping maw of death.”

Now, I’ve been running around the Internet long enough to know that truly original ideas are very, VERY rare. As much as we all like to think that we are unique and special, people come up with the same thoughts and ideas all of the time. And sure enough, if you google, “gaping maw of death” and you will get 6300 results, which to me means that it is fairly common.

Many people with cancer and other progressive diseases are stood upright in front of death and made to truly stare into that gaping maw and consider the implications. What does it mean to be dead? Is it total annihilation of the self where we only ‘live on’ in the memories of others and the odd photo (or blog ;) left behind, or is there an actual piece of us, some energy (a soul) that leaves and goes elsewhere (heaven, hell, the eternal cosmos, absorbed into some great energy of the universe). Who has it right? Catholics? Protestants? Pentecostals? Jews? Muslims? Atheists? Mormons? Resuscitologists (see book by Sam Parnia), Scientologists (please no)?

That’s the hardest and most frightening part of death. We just don’t know and can’t know until we leap into that open, dark, slimy maw. And so we’re left with a choice. Which idea of death do we want to hang on to? Which one is the easiest for us to live with? I was raised a Christian and so that is the idea that is the most comfortable fit, although not the usual heaven as angels and harps and everyone dressed in white, yada, yada, yada. The idea of the afterlife as going home is very appealing to me.

We’ve all been away from home for periods of time long enough to feel a sort of relief upon returning to our own abode.

Letting go. Finally. Peace.

This is what I choose. This is what I hope for.

Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him. ~ Job 13:15

Sister Cranky Pants: Depression with Cancer

As much as I'd like to deny it, with cancer, comes depression. Some of it from the anger, frustration, fear, etc. that you get from simply having the disease, some of it comes from physiological changes due to chemotherapy, and some from the effects of the chemotherapy.

I have found that I have been able to handle the disease-related depression much more easily than that brought on by the effects of the chemotherapy.

I think that part of the reason for this is because my disease has only been nominally symptomatic in the last three years. I’ve really only had bone trouble. Other than pain from that, it really hasn’t caused me real discomfort. The chemotherapy on the other hand, has been a giant pain in the infused ass.

I feel nauseated. I have a headache. I feel bloated and disgusting. My brain has trouble keeping up with conversation. As a result, I get cranky when I can’t understand what someone is trying to say to me. So I have a group of people, especially KB, who are doing all these things to help me out and I respond with cranky faces and barbed retorts. When I see the looks on their faces,  I end up feeling terribly guilty. I end up feeling like I don’t deserve to be treated well, that I should just be rejected by all of humankind and left alone to wither away, or barf up my guts, whichever comes first. I feel like rolling up into the fetal position and disappearing, and that my disappearing would be the best thing to happen for everyone.

Complete self-pity, I know.

Which makes me loath myself even more.

It’s a horrible circle that I have to talk myself out of. I also know that I have to control my nastiness. Some people have told me that it’s understandable, that I should take it easy on myself, etc. But I have always believed that you can’t use cancer as an excuse to be a douche bag, and I still believe that. I still have self-control and choice and I need to exercise it, despite how I feel.

It's time to give Sister a swift kick in the Cranky Pants.

Roger Ebert and Me

As most people already know, Roger Ebert recently died of cancer. He’d had it for a long time and although disfigured by it, still maintained his public persona.

I saw Roger Ebert once.

 

Living in Chicago, you see celebrities from time to time. But I didn’t see him on the street, or in a deli, or even at a movie theatre. I saw him at the hospital.

 

It was the week after I had been diagnosed with something – they were still trying to figure exactly what. I was in the basement having just completed my PET scan. They were wheeling me back up to my room and they wheeled me right past an older mand and a women with big-ish hair who were talking with a doctor. The man was wearing a hospital gown and hospital footies. The woman was looking earnestly at the doctor, presumably listening closely to what he had to say.

I thought the man looked familiar and once it dawned on me that it was Roger Ebert, I almost turned around to the orderly pushing my gurney to say, “Hey! Do you know who that was?!” See him there made me feel a little more certain about choosing Northwestern for my treatment. If Roger Ebert who, presumably, has a great deal of money and could go anywhere for treatment chose to come here, then perhaps it’s trustworthy. 

And I used this story. At the beginning of this cancer thing, my mother was trying to convince me to go to a cancer center like Sloan-Kettering and I guess there’s one in Florida near where she lives. I understood that she wanted me to get the best treatment possible, but I didn’t want to move or travel for treatment. Once I told her that I had seen Roger Ebert and that he was getting treatment where I was, she understood and dropped the subject. 

When I tell people my Roger Ebert story, many of them ask me, “Did you give him two thumbs up? Hardy harr harr!” I have to say that, no, I didn’t give him two thumbs up. The man was (half) dressed in a hospital gown and presumably had gone through some sort of scan. I doubt he was in a “two thumbs up” sort of mood." I know after I have a scan, I'm certainly not.

I am sorry that his time had come. He was inspiring to many people – both with and without cancer. I hope both he and his family are at peace.

Needy Baby, Greedy Baby or Is Your Cancer Making you Narcissistic?

Cancer has a way of making you focus on yourself like nothing else I’ve ever experienced. Your life, whether you admit it or not, is at the mercy of the whims of your treatment and disease. You think about it. You talk about it. You write about it.  You become hyper-aware of discomfort and pain and think, talk, and write about that. Friends and family offer support and encouragement and as a result, you start to feel a little entitled to a certain level of sympathy and attention.

We become needy babies, greedy babies.

Case in point, I met a woman online. She’s around my age and has the same cancer and diagnosis as me. We have exchanged some emails and they have all, without exception, been about her. She will outline her symptoms, treatment plans, side effects, whathaveyou - without even a simple greeting of, “Hey! How ‘ya doin’?” It’s just straight to her business which, I might add, goes on and on and on and on, which I get - sort of - and then closing with an, “I’ll keep you posted.” Not a, "Hope you're doing well," or, "Best wishes," Nothing. Simple manners are out the window – because of the cancer.

I think we, the cancerous, need to be very careful of the people we are becoming as we deal with our illness. We cannot come to think of ourselves as special people requiring special attention and due special privileges simply because our cells have gone haywire. Although it may seem different when you’re showered with attention and concern by family, friends and medical people, it’s not all about us. Assuming we’re well enough to function in society, we need to continue to engage in the give and take of relationships – perhaps even more so considering what some people do for us.

So here’s my clarion call for dropping those infantile tendencies and maintaining good, adult manners and concern for others despite our cancer.

It's not that difficult. Really.

My Cancer is No Tragedy...

and neither is yours.

However, the mass murder of children, in whatever form, is.

I encourage you to lift them and their families up to whatever form of God you believe in.

Advent, Cancer & Hope

I work at a private Jesuit university and I love it. Every year, the university holds the nine-month-long "Spiritual Exercises in Everyday Life" which was created by St. Ignatius Loyola himself. Participants meet weekly with a group and then alone with a spiritual adviser.  In 2011, I decided to give it a try as a way to assuage the anxieties that come from having late stage cancer. I needed comfort and I was hoping to find it. My experience went well and this year, they asked me to speak at an Advent service for people who are in the program this year, and share my reflections of my experience with The Exercises. What follows is the transcript from that talk. Advent is about hope. In Cancer World there is also a lot of hope, some of it downright desperate. My wish for all of us with cancer is that we are able to, by whatever means we choose, find our own hope. This is how I find it:

Before I started the Exercises, I had been pretty estranged from God, as well as most of my family. I had come to believe that the only thing or person that I could truly count on was me. So when I started the Exercises, it was more of a utilitarian venture than a spiritual one. About a year prior to my Exercise experience, I received a diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer. As for many people, my diagnosis was a shock. I was very young for this type of cancer, only 44 at diagnosis when the average age was 70. Also, I had done everything right, eaten well, exercises regularly, did not smoke, drank only socially - there was absolutely no cancer in my family background - but there I was. I had cancer.
            And so to deal with the shock of it all, I did what I usually did and read. I read books about death. I read books about cancer. I read books about death from cancer. And in those books I learned that when people get a serious diagnosis, they overwhelmingly turn toward spiritual things for comfort. And so that sort of gave me the permission I needed to seek God - for comfort purposes - and so I committed to the Exercises.

My first clue that the process was not going to necessarily provide comfort in the way I assumed came from the Prayer of the First Principle and Foundation, “Lord God, let nothing ever distract me from Your love...neither health nor sickness, wealth nor poverty, honor nor dishonor, long life nor short life.” I remember thinking, “Really?”. Because frankly, it mattered to me very much whether I had a long life or a short one and knowing that I was likely going to have a short one was indeed a distraction from God’s love. Or at least my perception of His love. This started coming up in my meetings with my spiritual advisor, Father Bob.

Excerpt from my Exercises Journal:  10/19/11 - I met w/Father Bob yesterday and part of the discussion was on how I’ve been doing with the exercises. I told him that before I started, I was doing pretty well as far as my dealing, psychologically, with the cancer. Since I’ve started however, I’ve felt a little knocked off my pins. After some thought, he suggested an explanation that I had only touched on. Here I am moving closer to the Entity who gave me the cancer and it’s causing some trouble. As soon as he said it, I knew it was spot on...Today’s readings were basically about opening yourself to God, but how do you open yourself to God when He’s given you a deadly disease which will ultimately cause you suffering and early death? How do you trust that?

            So after some further reflection, for me the Exercises became instruction on learning to trust God enough to not be distracted from His love.

             It was around this time that the readings focused on Romans 9:20-21:

“But who indeed are you, a human being, to talk back to God? Will what is made say to its maker, “Why have you created me so?” Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for a noble purpose and another for an ignoble one?”

For whatever reason, this passage stuck with me and I thought about it a lot.  I began to think that God had added cancer to my vessel and that was a challenge - but it did not mean that I was less of a vessel, nor were God’s expectations of this vessel lowered. Recently, I had been living alternatively as an ‘angry vessel’ or a ‘pity vessel’ but this would not do. I was not a God-trusting-vessel. God had made me for a purpose and I needed to live up to that purpose.

As we know, the Exercises serve as a way for us to get to know God more thoroughly and intimately. It is through this intimacy that we gain and grow trust and love.  Ignatius teaches us that to find union with God we should use those things that help us lovingly serve, and to let go of those things that don’t. If I wanted to trust and be intimate with God, I was going to need to be the type of vessel that finds ways to lovingly serve, regardless of my cancer. Anger, fear and self pity weren’t helping me to lovingly serve and so, as much as possible, I asked God to help me let them go.

            In their place, I filled my pot with relationships and volunteering. I worked on my relationships with my estranged family members that culminated in a celebratory family reunion this past summer. I started regularly volunteering at several places in my neighborhood. I became involved in some of my parish ministries which led to me make more friends and find more spiritual support and more avenues of service. At work, I worked on the Ignatian Day of Service planning committee and helped organize a new outreach program in my department. Although it has not been simple, and it has not always left me feeling comforted, I feel like I am living on purpose and with purpose, and living well.

            This is all a work in progress, of course. I still have times when the angry, fearful and self-pitying cancer vessel shows up.

            But I am truly glad for my experience with the Exercises. It has  helped me to reconcile - with God, with others and with myself. And it has strengthened me. More valuable than physical healing, I believe that I experienced a spiritual renewal. Cancer happened to me, it happened in me, but it also happened for me, and for those around me, I think. Regardless of my prognosis and the progression of my disease, my hope is that I will continue to be the good vessel, filled with, carrying around and pouring out God’s love and service.

Sometimes, People with Cancer are Douchebags

In my investigative reading about terminally ill people with cancer, there seems to be a fairy-tale type of quality given to those who have life-threatening illnesses. They can be considered calmer, more serene, and even wiser. People don't seem to write about the people with cancer or other potentially terminal illness who are major douche bags.

I loved Lance Armstrong. There was rarely a bicycle race that he was in that I didn't watch, glued to the TV wondering how in the world such a good-looking person, who had battled and presumably beaten stage IV testicular cancer could ride so fast and climb those mountains so nimbly - he was super-human.

Duh.

He was doping. And running a doping ring. Shee-it.

My point is that it isn't healthy for people to see people with cancer as exceptional because, #1 they're not, they just have cancer and #2, if they think of people with cancer as exceptional, then they are blinded to any possible douchebaggery that they might engage in and that others could get hurt by.

People with cancer are just people with cancer.

And Lance Armstrong is just a douchebag.

David Rakoff is Dead

A person whose writing I adored. Whose use of the English language I envied and admired. At 47 years old. Cancer.

It's an odd thing when someone you didn't really know, but followed in one way or another - or someone that you once knew, but haven't seen in years, dies.

Suddenly there's a hole. A piece missing. Something is not quite right with the fabric of the world.

His writing was phenomenal.

I will miss him.

The Wicked Witch and the Hourglass

There has been a lot going on lately. In my personal life, there have been a lot of family events. My youngest daughter came to visit with her family, my niece was married (for the first and hopefully the last time) and my oldest daughter had a daughter – her second. As a result, there has been a lot of time spent with family and it has been great.

In Cancer World, a lot has been going on, too. There has been some good news, people responding to treatment and having the last of their surgeries – excited to get their lives back to normal. But there have also been a fair amount of bad news. People, diagnosed around the same time as me, are not fairing so well. Some have been doing really well when one regular trip to the oncologist or quarterly scan shows that the cancer is back on the march. One person is now on hospice. It makes me wonder how much time do I have left? I was pondering this when a scene from The Wizard of Oz popped into my head. You know, the one where Dorothy has been captured by the Wicked Witch of the West who, because she can’t get her hands on those coveted ruby slippers, grabs a huge hourglass with ominous, blood-red sand, flips it over and pronounces, “This is how long you have to live!” Dorothy, much to the relief of anxious children watching, is eventually rescued by her friends.  

Like Dorothy, I feel like I’m living with one eye glued to my own hourglass – only I can’t see how much sand I have left. And there is no foreseeable rescue.  Cancer has become my own personal wicked witch and although I can keep her at bay for a while, the blood-red sand continues to pour…

                                         Drawing courtesy of Daughter Amy

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim and in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves -- goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came


I say more: the just man justices
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is --
Christ -- for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

~1918, Gerard Manley Hopkins

Back Story - The Short Version

I've always been a pretty healthy person. Never smoked, drank only a little socially, I ran, watched what I ate-low fat, high fiber, lots of green leafies. Last summer, I notice a little groin pain when I walked and a LOT of groin pain when I ran that would not go away, no matter how much I babied it. I made an appointment with a sports doctor thinking that I had pulled something. She did some range-of-movement exercises and gave me and x-ray and an MRI thinking that I had a compression fracture. What she discovered was some sort of metastatic tumors in the neck of my femur and pelvis. After spending a week in the hospital have scan after scan after x-ray after scan, the doctors tell me that I have advanced adenocarcinoma of the lung. Further scans found two small metastatic tumors in my brain.

After undergoing hip surgery to repair my femur, gamma knife surgery to zap the brain metastases or 'mets' as they are called in the cancer biz, and 10 sessions of radiation therapy to assorted bone tumors, I now await VATS surgery (Video Assisted Thoracic Surgery) to obtain a biopsy that will tell my oncologist what DNA strain is affected and whether or not I can receive an oral-type treatment along with chemotherapy. Chemotherapy is set to start before the end of the month.

The projected outcome for my type of cancer is rather bleak, I'm afraid. Through the shock, terror and mourning, I have discovered that there is room for humor in all of this. In fact, there have been moments of great ridiculousness and hilarity that beg to be shared. The intent of this blog, in addition to be cathartic to me and perhaps comforting to any possible readers, is to share the honest ridiculousness and humor of cancer and cancer treatment. It is important that we all keep our sense of humor. If we can keep that, I think we can face whatever comes our way.

God, I hope so.