Human beings create stories. We make stories, or narratives, to explain the world to ourselves in matters great and small. There’s not a whole lot else that I’ll attribute to “human nature” than that, but I suppose that’s actually plenty.
My question to all of you today is this: What story have you created for yourself in relation to having cancer? Put another way, what answers have you given yourself to the (ultimately unanswerable) question, “Why me?”
My own explanation is a hodge-podge from a variety of sources, only some of them technical/medical. I’ve partly drawn from David Servan-Schreiber’s Anticancer: A New Way of Life, about which I hasten to add that my interpretation is not necessarily authoritative or complete. I do recommend the book, which is insightful, provocative, and yet practical; here, I can only share a few tidbits.
I’ve also learned from a work that Empower Ink recommended in this space some time ago, Bone: Dying into Life, written by Marion Woodman, a Jungian psychologist who had her own encounter with uterine cancer. (Thanks, E I, for that suggestion.) My thinking about the matter is also undoubtedly influenced by my experiences with Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine over the past couple of years. Here too I must disavow any real knowledge about the theory and practice involved in these paradigms, since I am neither a scholar nor practitioner of these disciplines, only a grateful beneficiary.
I suppose they all have a commonality in that they do ascribe a certain degree of control over the condition, albeit not always conscious or deliberate, to the person who has cancer. This is in itself a controversial position for a couple of obvious reasons. For one, it minimizes the presence and impact of external factors, especially the carcinogens that seem to have an increasingly negative effect on our health. Environmental toxins are real and dangerous, and downplaying their significance is wrong. (Let me add here that Servan-Schreiber is very outspoken on this point and insists that a healthy environment for all is a necessary goal for anti-cancer activists.) I don’t know whether I’ve been exposed to any extraordinary levels of environmental toxins, though there is some good evidence to show that BPA-based plastics, virtually ubiquitous for some time, have an estrogenic effect that may well have contributed to the development of my own cancer. For another, it is very easy indeed to slip from a discussion of what one can do by way of prevention or care to a perspective that “blames the victim” for her condition. I’ll do my best to stay on the more compassionate side of that line both in writing my account here and in living out that story in my everyday life.
The key insight from Servan-Schreiber is that we each create a “terrain” in our own bodies that is more or less hospitable to the growth of malignancies. It appears to be accepted knowledge at this point that our bodies do regularly create “rogue” cells that can coalesce into cancerous tumors if left undisturbed, and that most of the time there are mechanisms that safeguard us by eliminating the anomalous cells before they can do harm. Servan-Schreiber promoted the idea, already fairly widespread in non-allopathic medicine, that the physical, emotional and spiritual environment that we create for ourselves can also be more or less hospitable to the anomalous cells: that is, the “terrain” (roughly, the “growth medium” in which we live, in a very comprehensive way) is to a large degree subject to our input and influence.
This claim had a great impact on me, since I could see years of examples from my life in which I was totally inattentive to the “terrain” I was creating for myself. I have disparaged my poor self-care habits in previous diaries, regretting the years on the run when I slept badly and not long enough; neglected to get any exercise or even any fresh air; ate at odd hours and depended on 20-oz. bottles of Coke and small bags of Fritos several times a week to keep me going. All these, in my mind, were symptoms of serious and chronic stress, to say nothing of chronically low self-regard, which I thought I had no way to address let alone undo.
Medically speaking, the years of stress I had lived through wound up adding about 40 pounds to my formerly-fit body as I entered perimenopause, a hormonally-fraught time even in the best of cases. Between the extra estrogen my fat cells generated and the chronically high levels of cortisol that my chronically over-stressed lifestyle produced, something serious was bound to happen. Why it was cancer of a reproductive organ instead of a heart attack or stroke is part of the story that is not amenable to medical explanations. For that, I have to refer to my as-yet limited grasp of more metaphysical explanations, as Woodman does for example in Bone. The old traditional paradigms of health (Ayurveda and TCM) have suggested to me that early trauma and neglect suffered by that region of my body made it more vulnerable to illness than others appear to have been.
In other words, according to multiple paradigms, I created a “terrain” that was becoming increasingly stripped of the nutrients I truly needed to survive. Little rest; little peace; little pleasure. Excess stress; excess worry; excess grief.
Since my diagnosis almost two and a half years ago, I have been attempting to create a more sustainable terrain. Of course, it is impossible to say whether those efforts have any real impact on my relatively improved health vis-à-vis the cancer. Maybe at this point it’s ONLY the Megace that’s keeping the cancer cells at bay. I suspect not, obviously, otherwise I would not be expending as much time, energy, and money in adopting other treatments and approaches. But in any case, I would insist that the quality of life I have now is significantly better than what I’d had three years or so ago, and that improvement has nothing to do with hormones. I’m more balanced, I’m calmer, and I’m less anxious, though I still have a ways to go in all these directions. I generally eat better and support my body’s need for exertion better. I do not consider having cancer to be a “gift” in any way, but I do think of it as a wake-up call to me.
In reviewing this text, I see there's one more part of the story I want to include. For a long time, in a response that I imagine will be familiar to many here, I was furious with my body for failing me so badly. Cancer! Without any real family history to speak of! How could this be? Part of my story now includes a theme of being kinder to myself in all dimensions, including a sincere effort to forgive my body for its "betrayal." I have to remind myself that under all circumstances, we do the best we can, the best we know how. Yes, sometimes that is not enough--but blame is not a productive response either. If I can consistently cultivate this attitude, a profound change in habit for me, then I will have achieved something significant.
I realize that this is potentially an uncomfortable topic to discuss, so I hope that you will not push yourselves beyond your own levels of comfort as you consider sharing parts of your own cancer story.
Let me ask you to consider one other rather delicate matter while you’re here tonight: how we will know if something were to happen to you. I hesitate to name names in this regard, but I have not heard from or seen Commander Retired on the site for several months now, and I am concerned about him, especially because he said his condition was deteriorating the last time he was part of a diary thread. Many of us here have fairly precarious health at the moment, and in any case having cancer doesn’t protect us from other causes of death. (I know, that still strikes me as cosmically unjust. I kid, but only partly.) So are there any arrangements that you would want to make to let us know if you are failing or dying? No obligation; I’m just wondering and thought I'd introduce the subject.
Thanks for whatever you want to contribute to tonight’s discussion.
Monday Night Cancer Club is a Daily Kos group focused on dealing with cancer, primarily for cancer survivors and caregivers, though clinicians, researchers, and others with a special interest are also welcome. Volunteer diarists post Monday evenings between 7-8 PM ET on topics related to living with cancer, which is very broadly defined to include physical, spiritual, emotional and cognitive aspects. Mindful of the controversies endemic to cancer prevention and treatment, we ask that both diarists and commenters keep an open mind regarding strategies for surviving cancer, whether based in traditional, Eastern, Western, allopathic or other medical practices. This is a club no one wants to join, in truth, and compassion will help us make it through the challenge together.