Born, Again

In the ICU, after surgery to remove a tumor from my spine, I have never felt more helpless in my life. I cannot move my legs. In a hospital bed, I am helpless as an infant. Instead of crying, I press the red call button for the nurse or the black button for pain. At 48, I had felt competent and in charge. Two weeks before, I was driving my car and engaged in normal adult life. Now, like the game of Chutes and Ladders, I had headed down one of those long red sliding boards back to earliest childhood. It is frustrating and embarrassing at first, although the nurses are quite kind and have seen every level of human limitation and suffering.

But then I realize something I have not felt since infancy. This is a sense that the world is good and that the universe is protecting you, caring for you, meeting your needs. It is a sense of being held in the hand of God. I live by grace, relying upon the goodness of others, the compassion that created hospitals, the kindness that brought me here. We lose sight of this feeling in our day-to-day activities. We feel so competent that we fool ourselves into thinking that we are doing it all. We think we are in charge. But we all live by grace.

Now this illusion of control is stripped away. It is a remarkably wonderful feeling, the certainty of a protective hand. Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. I settle in to this cradling hand, this comforting reality, this assurance that God will never leave my side. In the weeks and months ahead, I will learn to walk again, regain control and move farther from the innocent trust of infancy. But for now, I see the world with newborn eyes. In a very literal sense, I am born again.

Vodoo Doll

Whoever has the voodoo doll inflicting sudden pains at random moments, could you kindly return it? Or at least, pull out a few pins? Thank you.

Coda

No one can take anything from me.

I am completely emptied out like a deep exhale. I inhabit the pause of woodwind musicians turning the page to play the coda. Empty, every breath I take becomes sweet like honey, intoxicating like wine, refreshing like the laughter of mountain water tripping over waterfalls.

I could have died when I was first diagnosed with cancer more than two years ago. I could not eat. I had lost 30 pounds. Death was not far off.

Consider that I died then. That means every day since then has been a gift. More than 800 days and counting. This day, this moment, sitting in Starbucks listening to music, reading bedtime stories to my daughter, waking to help my teenage son get an application out, hearing my wife laugh about the antics of our crazy St. Bernard -- all a gift. I have lost nothing. I have gained it all.

I am not counting down the days. I am counting up the moments that I have been blessed to live in such grace.

Swimmingly

What's the hardest part of swimming a mile? The first 15 laps. At that point, the whole mile stretches ahead. It seems impossible. Your breath is short. You feel you need to stop. Each lap is the same so there should be no difference -- in fact the later laps should be harder -- yet the test is not for the body but the mind. The mind looks at the whole mile and balks at the road ahead. But you swim one stroke, one lap at a time. By the time you reach 50, you have a flow and it is hard to stop until you reach 72.

Cancer is daunting. It is not a sprint but a marathon, a triathlon, just when you finish biking and running, you find yourself swimming. One stroke after another. One day, one second, one moment: the now. Keep your head in the right place and the body will follow.

Greg Anderson says cancer is not a thing but a process. You don't "have cancer," you are "cancering." You need to participate in the process, like swimming. One stroke after another. There is nothing else except this next breath of air. Touching the side of the pool and turning around. Churning through the blue water, I remember taking swimming lessons at the Y as a kid. I am grateful to my parents for teaching me how to swim. How could I have known what this would mean so many years later in this pool?

I think of my mother swimming back and forth in summer across the iced-tea-colored cedar water of Bellplain Park in the pine barrens of New Jersey. Then I see her face and she says peacefully: "I died, so maybe this is your time to die" -- then she adds with a familiar flash of her eyes, a mischievous smile reflecting her inimitable humor -- "or maybe not." I smile in a way that gives me great hope, and my tears suddenly mix with the purifying chlorine, unseen in the pool where many others fight their unknown battles, swimming again their personal tides, moving forward one stroke at a time.

I cry, but do not miss a stroke. The road ahead is daunting, but I keep swimming. As long as I can do this, I am alive. My body and mind are strong.

So, how am I doing? Swimmingly.

My Vietnam

Cancer is a struggle with guerrilla forces scattered in the jungles, like Vietnam. Cancer lives among peace-loving civilians, like insurgents in Iraq. Such wars are difficult or impossible to win by conventional means, although we try. There is bound to be collateral damage. In Vietnam, we dropped napalm and Agent Orange to defoliate the jungles, so we could bomb villages and rout out the enemy forces. It was a technological solution to a distinctly human problem. And it didn't work. It devastated millions of civilians, destroyed societies and ripped at the fabric that was needed to create whole communities, taking years to heal, if ever.

We approach cancer the same way, dropping chemicals across the jungle, and using surgical strikes and radiation to flush out the insurgents. The first chemotherapy arose from war technology, experiments with mustard gas in World War II. Maybe there is a time for this -- could something so many people believe in be wrong? -- but conventional war did not work in Vietnam and seems unlikely to be effective in Iraq, where our concern now is to leave in a way that minimizes the damage we have done. Just as people believe in war, they believe that we can use violence to destroy cancer and set the stage for health. I respect the power and industrial efficiency of these approaches, but do they recognize the true richness of disease and healing? Do they look for short-term gains - mission accomplished -- while ignoring the long-term implications? Each battle destroys infrastructure and trust, inciting future revolutions, setting us up for the next war.

Perhaps modern technology is not the solution. Perhaps napalm and bombings will not bring about the healing that we seek. Perhaps cancer is personal, and we must meet our own raw karma, one on one. Not General Patton but Mahatma Gandhi.

I walk through the jungle. There is real danger here. It is clear that there are forces trying to kill me. I am no fool. I recognize this. I am sick. I am tired. I am hungry. I face death at every turn. But the cancer is not outside myself. It is within. It is my Vietnam. It my heart of darkness, the meeting with Mista Kurtz in a jungle that redefines you or consumes you. There is no substitute for the journey, no shortcuts, no unmanned vehicles to fly above the fray. You need boots on the ground to come face to face with yourself in the stark horror of real life. This is not a war. It is a crucible we must pass through on our way to either death or new life.

War and Peace

"I've spent too many years at war with myself,
The doctor has told me, it's no good for my health."
Sting

Cancer is war, or so I thought. I was a boxer, in the ring, blocking body blows, going to the mat, and standing up for the next round, angry, defiant, in a deathmatch with a threatening rival. But then I met Jim at lunch in the cafeteria of Cancer Treatment Centers of America and he says: Cancer is not a fight; it is a surrender. And I realized that cancer is also a surrender, a letting go, a love for your entire body, your entire life, cancer and all.

Although there may be a time for it, war is the failure of diplomacy. Fight is one half of the stress-producing response of fight for flight. Stress breaks the immune system, encouraging cancer. Cancer asks us to make peace, to forgive, to relax, to let go, to surrender, to change.

Cancer is not war or peace. It is a knife's edge between life and death, pain and serenity, good and evil. All of this is inside ourselves. We are a mix of black and white plumage like the magpie. We are tresspassers and tresspassed upon. Tresspass often leads to war, and cancer with its squatters city setting up camp in a healthy body appears to be itching for a fight. But we learn to say, "Forgive us our tresspasses as we forgive the tresspasses of others."

I will show courage, strength, fortitude. I will stand firm in the face of the oncoming hatred, like Martin Luther King, Jr., but I will not go to war. And, deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day.

Fasting and Cancer

Since I am on a bit of an enforced juice fast, I thought I'd see if it might have some beneficial effect. Part of me thinks that perhaps starving the body could starve the cancer, and I've long had an intuition that it might help. It seems logical but not everything about cancer follows logic, as you know. The results are mixed on whether fasting (water or juice) helps or hurts. The official word from the American Cancer Society is that fasting could be dangerous to your health, and can actually promote the growth of some tumors. This is based on available medical evidence, which I don't think is extensive.

Now that the official word is out of the way, there are some interesting research studies and anecdotal evidence. First, a fascinating study reported in WebMD found that fasting for a few days before chemotherapy may improve its effect while shielding healthy cells. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research speculated that "starved healthy cells to go into a hibernation-like mode that produces extreme resistance to stress. But cancerous cells don't obey those cues and remain stuck in growth mode." This protects healthy cells and might allow for higher doses of chemo against the cancerous cells. These results are still preliminary but quite interesting because the starvation appears to target healthy and cancerous cells in different ways.

Moving further afield, there are some anecdotal reports of success with fasting, including a story by Sammy Hoffard who claims to have been cured of stage 4 ovarian cancer as a result of a 10-day juice fast, as well as prayer. Three of four tumors disappeared and the fourth was then surgically removed, and Sammy remained cancer free, although it is uncertain how long. This information is on a site by Ron Laquerquist who has a book Fasting to Freedom on the beneficial effects of fasting, and claims that "fasting will break down tumors." This statement is completely unverified, as far as I know, but I have not read the book. Laquerquist recommends a specific approach to fasting combining water and juice fasting for up to 40 days, something many medical experts would consider dangerous. But certainly Gandhi went for as long as three weeks, and others have done long fasts for spiritual reasons, and survived. Chemotherapy, surgery and radiation are not particularly good for your health. Among the other claims about fasting are that it alkalizes the body. More to come as I find it, or feel free to comment if you know anything about this.

In the meantime, I am going to assume that my body in its infinite wisdom does not want me to eat now for some reason, perhaps physical and perhaps only to purify my soul in the time-honored tradition of fasting. And, of course, now I am an experiment of one so I'll keep track of how my "fast" progresses.