Cancer Group

So the idea was that we try out this new cancer group; it was all about mindfulness and alternative approaches to self care. We got to sit down and hear about aromas and glorified foot massages and how flowers vibrate and heal the blackening monsters within you. Ya, it’s true, we donned our chairs, smelled scented oils passed out on our palms, let big brass bowls vibrate on our bellies.

We started by each chanting our own mantra’s of disease and treatment, of loneliness. Maybe that part was indirect, maybe nobody talked about loneliness right out straight, but I see right through. It’s why we are here right? Caregivers, you feel like something is slipping away and you want to hold the hell on. Survivors, remissioned and currently treated, your isolated, I can taste it in the room. People treat you with a different side of their face now, now that cancer has planted it root. They treat you with pity perhaps, afraid to know the real person who might just fade away at any moment. Maybe it’s the public’s way of defending their fragile psyche, and undoubtedly it works as a wonderful short term excuse.

The problem remains that cancer affects us, and lives with some of us for the rest of our lives. It’s strange to know that even though this silent crawling menace has let me be for the meantime, has not spurted its sap nor bloomed its varicose buds in my glands or organs, it has still touched me; truly it will sit with me forever.

Hand me some bottled water, throat gets tight with so much doom in the room. Ms. G has but one breast, Ms. B, but a mere fragment of her large intestine/colon. Ms. K you just found out what’s new and happening with your body, what that lump was.

I just want to hold everybody, caretakers and coordinators, bowl brushers and oil pourers. I want to tell you something wonderful and dramatic, something that can teach you to put down being sick and disenchanted. I want do something more than “Caregive”. I want to sob into my sleeve until all this pretension to disease fades into a speckled history and to heave tears into my shirts musty cotton cuffs until cancer gets sad enough to leave the room too.

Maybe that’s just what support groups are all about…

mad march

Wheelchairs and air tanks,
Johnnies and gurneys,
Patient lifting belts,
Bedpans and IV’s
These are a few most commonplace things…

Chirping of nurses,
Chiming heart monitors,
Buzz of an x-ray,
Whir of a centrifuge,
These are a batch of most ominous things…

Bone scans, and spinal taps,
Probabilities and PSA graphs,
Limb reconstructions,
Letters and epitaphs,
These are the thoughts of the most morose of things…

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A beat can consume you. It can play in your mind, out of muscle memory and a tracer of fired synapse. Maybe it would go to a healthy 2/2 rhythm, one and two and, one and two and, one and two and… It can eat up a whole day before you know it.

Now syllables. Can – cer, one and two and, can – cer, one and two and. It’s like the downbeat of a drummer’s anticlimactic ending, cymbals a clashing. Bang, boom, one and two and, can – cer, one and two and.

So now it’s a real song your head, and it’s your own song about everything. It’s your life now.

“Conductor! Conductor? Yes, it’s just that I’ve broken another string on my tired instrument, and I’m having a difficult time continuing this piece with only half my stings now and…”

- SILENCE-

“Conductor??”

And the band played on and maybe faster than ever. You sit fingering your instrument, making up for those missing strands by playing from the heart. All this just to catch up, to walk along side of the rest of the world. No time to practice, no time to step out of the circle. Mom and Dad are watching, so get the hell to it!

One and two and, one leg – two leg, Can - cer, one and two and…

Suddenly you realize they were playing your song all along. Tuba tap… The mortality section, pipe in and shoot us a fitting piece, a jazzy little riff.

Doo – Wap,
One and two and,
Can – cer,
Woop – e – doo

Now its in a 4/4 beat, can you keep your sheet straight? Hot damn… The girls do the Boogy Woogy on the corner of the street, legs are getting you beat, but you keep dancing. Legs raw with tapping your rhyme, and keeping time.

The music stops, and it hasn’t done a damn thing to the monster under your skin.

I feel helpless watching. Yet you march so intently. But remember you don’t have to do it all alone, who loves ya baby.

“Conductor!? I’ve done it again, another string, I’m hoping all over this one goddamn string, jumping frets like leaping stones.”

AND THE BAND PLAYED ON…

Overachievers Anonymous

I met a young woman at our support group a few days ago. She seemed approachable though quiet. Something about her made me think she was stronger than someone her age should be. I placed myself in the circle so that we could be partners. This is her story. Her name is Ella.

When Ella was 7 she went to her brother’s last homecoming football game. She stood frozen and shivering, nursing a 25cent hot chocolate, watching 17 year- old girls be escorted out of beautiful cars, one adorned with a sparkling crown. She started referring to them sarcastically as “put together” girls, though she secretly wanted to be one when she grew up.

Ten years later, Ella stepped out of a car on that same football field. This time she stood frozen with anticipation and shock as they placed the crown on her dyed purple hair. As they drove her off the field she saw a young girl waving and she wanted to say ‘run away. Run far, far away’. She thought to herself, maybe I will be put together tomorrow.

Ella decided that she would go away to college. She thought a football queen needs a football town, so she packed up her room and moved away from home. Skepticism was abound - what was a small town girl going to do at a big school with 40, 000 people? Ella said I will be number one when I graduate, and left doubt behind.

She studied far more than she ever partied, but was somehow known among many circles of friends. She always had a relationship that appeared to be doing well, and heard many times that she was the cutest half of everyone’s favorite intellectual couple. She worked with kids in the summer and volunteered in the winter. The awards and scholarships started rolling in and everything seemed to be in place.

Ella graduated number one, walked first across that stage with tears in her eyes. Everyone thought it was because she was happy, but Ella knew the truth. She had failed. She wasn’t anymore put together than that 7 year- old girl with pig- tails and crooked teeth. (Her therapist later in life would tell her it was because she lacked the ability to believe external recognition and needed to internalize her success.)

After graduation Ella moved further away, off to pursue some new age concept, tired of stuffy academic circles. I wonder if she did it to run away, so no one could figure out that she didn’t have it together. Either way she once again excelled. Instead of feeling proud of her success, she joined our support group.

Ella was articulate and told her story like she read it off the back of a blockbuster video. I wondered why she didn’t like attention or love the chaotic drama that she always seemed to come out on top of; so I asked as we put on our coats and they turned off the sterile fluorescent lights.

She looked at me and without the natural warmth and empathic tone in her voice said “do not go into the streets, emotions are a communicable disease.” I stood confused as she walked out the door and crossed the dirty street.

Two days later, early in the day, I saw her at the hospital, laughing on her cell phone in the parking lot. She looked confident and self -assured, and wore a shirt that said STRANGE across the chest. I smiled and thought it must be nice to be young.

Later that day, I saw that shirt again in the radiation wing of the cancer center on a delicate girl named Libby. As I wheeled her out of the treatment room she was crying softly. I asked her what she was thinking and she said she might never be able to have children. I asked what she would name a child if she had one and she looked at me without flinching and said “Ella”.

That roller coaster ain’t got nothing on me.

I felt overwhelmed and lonely, perhaps depressed and inadequate, maybe giddy and overcompensating. I offered him a drink of my water. He gently declined. And I said with a smirk “Baby, you can’t get cancer from a straw.”

Let’s face it, I was pretending.

I felt anxious and awkward, perhaps irritable and self- conscious, maybe frozen and numb. He said “what is wrong?” And I said “I have cancer baby” loudly enough for the whole café to raise their eyebrows and dismiss me as a drama queen.

Let’s face it, I was a bitch.

let your hair down

At the bathroom mirror, running a few damp fingers through her dark brown hair. It volumizes and groups together, like wet fronds of ferns. Only gentle fingertips kneading her hair into shape, into full form. The perfect haircut everyday, no split ends or even a lost hair in the sink. No shampoo bill at the end of the month, threatening to shut off your supply.

The muffled beat of a Ani Difranco song, played somewhere in the background, behind a half open door. Linoleum and toothpaste marks, booming the song in vibrato. A toe tapping weakly every second or third measure, like the cymbals in leisurely marching band. She takes another look in the mirror. All seems rather normal...

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It would be ideal if healthcare professionals could treat only the areas where the cancer is present. Unfortunately, that's not always possible. Because healthy tissues also may be damaged during chemotherapy, treatment can cause some unpleasant side effects. Such side effects vary from person to person, and may be different from one treatment to the next. The good news is that most side effects are treatable.
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And the good news is...

You have to wonder if life choices are somehow just a way to chase side effects. The hunger of the belly, loneliness without a partner and the purge of the loins, all a dance of withdrawal; of habit causing substances.

Yet somehow, you have come all this way. Somehow you can smile every morning at me. You still find the strength to help plan a future. You continue to love with warm blue grey eyes.

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Pain is your body's way of telling you that something is wrong — so don't ignore it. Tell your doctor how often you are experiencing pain and how severe it is. To help you talk about your pain, remember these terms that describe the different types of pain:

• Dull ache
• Sharp stab
• Burning
• Throbbing
...

And the good news is...

There are a few things missing off your list Doc. You left out Helplessness, fatigue oriented Disassociation, Disorientation... I could name a few more emotions that don't yet have a pharmaceutical cure, just so you don’t forget. Let’s talk about human costs, and human effects.

In the hushed dark of a emptied operating room, ill gather with you in the white jackets and alabaster scrubs, and listen as you metamorphose into human piloted bodies. You’re out of your masks, and leaning into each other like amazed children. Your playground song;

Allouette, frele Allouette,
Alouette je te plumerai,
Je te plumerai la systeme lymphatique...

Among it all, you shake your linen covered faces and say she is a fighter. "The kids got heart; the kids got heart"...

Sometimes Rainbows Disappear

What does it look like to be so amazingly grounded one day and so emotionally out of control the next?

Stuck in a chair in the middle of class, dazed as friends offer an outstretched hand and walk you to the car. Sobbing uncontrollably as they open a bottle of water that your hands can barely hold. Wreathing in pain as you reach for the phone just to hear your partner say “Are you there?” Wondering how you had honestly convinced yourself that you were really ok with this.

(No one is ok with this. Why is that so hard to understand?)

What does it look like to rebound from this mental overload and realize that it never ends?

Still. Heavy spirit, disconnected body. Vision foggy. Constriction. Vessels empty where red blood cells should be oxygenating. B cells mutated and multiplying like gremlins. Severed. Glued to a chair as one of my most respected teachers tells me he has it too. Digging claws into the floor, thinking it will somehow scratch the person in charge of cancer distribution.

(And inside your head the little girl holding her favorite teddy bear whispered, “even super heroes are not invincible.”)