Anne SG and the Big C

Merry Christmas. Count your blessings. I have three blonde blessings sleeping like angels in my room, surely dreaming of sugar plums and Webkinz and American Girls. Life is good.

Each of the girls created mile-long wish lists for Santa.  On Arden’s list, item #2 was: “For mommy to get better.”

‘Nuff said.

I am here in the car, Jay driving, on our way back to the Mayo Clinic for a meeting with the oncologist and an MRI to take a final pre-surgical look at what’s going on with me. I’m reading Chapter 8 of Care of The Soul, photocopied and given to me by a colleague who is also a 17-year breast cancer survivor. In one section, the author writes: “If my colon is in pain because of anxiety, then the organ is not just a piece of biologically functioning flesh. It has some link with consciousness and a particular mode of expression” (163). After reading this I felt I had to sit down and write. I have written before about this mind-body connection. I do believe that I must learn to listen to my body, soul, and mind in order to create a positive, present-living existence that actually works for me. Though I have rigorously followed the tradition of those whom I idealized–other academics, superwomen, great thinkers. But, my life simply has not been working. Those rules just don’t work for me, though I have never questioned their legitimacy. I’ve just always tried to make my life work by those rules.

People often say to me, “I don’t know how you do it” referring to my so-far successful career, my almost full-time parenting duties, my sole management of our household, and my very happy marriage. What I usually say is, “I do none of it well.” They perhaps think I am joking, for on the outside I appear to be pretty successful at juggling. But my health has been fading and my heart has slowly been abandoning a career I once loved. The fact is, I cannot do it all. Maybe some can, but I cannot.

I do believe that sickness arises often in part to life’s imbalance. Of course, there are germs and genes to consider, but I think that’s an oversimplification, too easy an answer. Just recently I watched a stomach virus run through my family–it hit Elise immediately but for no more than 24 hours, but then she threw up again 4 days later. Jay it took almost a week to hit, but he was over it in a day. I never got it. My mother in law and father in law caught it after a couple of days, but when it did it felled them so completely I thought for sure they’d be hospitalized. Perhaps my body, feeling pretty satisfied with its recent onslaughts with me, protected me. Why is this? I simply don’t believe that there are any one-size-fits-all answers any more, which is why I don’t believe in Dr. Phil, the South Beach Diet, Parenting Manuals, or How-to-Make-a-Million dollars books. I never believed that there was one right way to teach writing, so why would I believe there was one answer to illness, or to how to live? It’s just too easy.

My father commented on one of my posts here that I should not blame myself for my cancer, that he is sure it is just a broken gene that has been passed along. This is surely true—I can hardly see how it can be mere coincidence that so many in my family could have been stricken with breast cancer at my age. But there’s a larger question here—how did the gene get “broken?” Why do we keep passing it on? What mind-body-soul connection could be made here? Could it really be as simple as a mutated gene?

There’s certainly no dearth of sadness, of mind-body separation, in my bloodline. Running alongside the premature gray gene are tendencies toward addiction, toward mental illness, toward destructive perfectionism. Could the gene be a broken attempt to evolve with the people it inhabited? What would “fix” the gene that science cannot address?
Maybe I wonder about this because I want to imagine that I can work on changing, or un-mutating those genes, through my actions. I mentioned before how I feared that I had handed my daughters a deadly cancer gene. But more importantly, really, is what I hand them every day. I am teaching them that what it means to be a woman is to be overextended, overcommitted, and still undervalued in many of the arenas in which she lives. It means finding what might be someone else’s way to a fulfilling life, rather than one’s own. I haven’t been creative in trying to solve the issues that face me. I have not only ignored my body, I’ve ignored my spirit.

Another reading from my colleague spoke of cancer as a gift. Also, a comment here by Trudi Buscemi spoke of my cancer as an opportunity, and a gift that would change my life. I find myself agreeing. This is better than a midlife crisis (I never wanted a red sportscar anyway). It has been an opportunity to see the beauty of the human spirit in others; to reevaluate how I can live my life in the right now (instead of in the constant forward-looking fashion that academia dictates); and how I can live a life that will feed my soul and bring something forth that will positively affect the world. And though it’s a time of destruction of part of my body, I think it’s also an opportunity to recreate the rules I choose to live by.

Next time: Whose dream is it, anyway?

I was searching for an appropos quote about the body-mind-soul connection. I have been thinking a lot about that lately. And I have also been thinking about how quick we are to ignore our soul’s aches and needs, while never giving a second thought to how we labor over our bodies’ appearance. A friend and I were talking today about how outward-looking we tend to be. We look to the sky for God, to others for approval, to money for happiness. Why don’t we look inward for these things? Why don’t we protect our souls the way we protect our hair follicles, skin cells, cuticles, and tooth enamel?

After all, I tend to think that when we neglect our spirits, they find a way to be heard. This semester has been an especially diffifult one in terms of my health. Since I had my children I and then returned to full-time work almost five years ago, I have struggled mightily to find some sort of balance between the demands of work (where there’s never a limit to the number of committees needing my help, students needing my attention, and articles to be researched and written), home (don’t even get me started), and family. I have forgotten or missed dental appointments, hours of necessary sleep, and cut corners in every facet of my life in order to try to be everything to everyone all the time. Oh, my soul probably tried to tug at my sleeve for attention, but when I didn’t listen, my body started dropping hints. First, the headaches and sore throats that turned out to be reflux; then, the stumbling-over pain of ovarian cysts. And in between, appointments with two doctors, 2 MRIs, x-rays, and a sonogram. Eventually, I just had to take out the time to find out what was wrong. And then…the LUMP. And about a hundred
MORE tests.

I think that we (or at least I) tend to think of the body as discrete sets of systems–the brain, the digestive system, the reproductive system, and so on. When one acts up, we go see a specialist–psychiatrist, ENT, opthamologist, priest. The truth, I think, is that that they’re all interdependent and all require some sort of balance. And balance, perhaps, is achieved through listening quietly to our spirits for guidance–from God, from the cosmos, wherever. The point is, the answer isn’t on Oprah and it isn’t in our role models, who probably have problems of their own. the answer is most likely within us somewhere.

I have had a couple of those moments of peaceful conversation within my soul. For me, they were moments when I felt God spoke to, through, from within me. The first was shortly after I found out I was pregnant with my elder daughter. I have spent much of my academic research life interested in questions of power–who has it, who doesn’t, what people who don’t have power do to make their way in the world–and then, in a casual moment, I realized what true power is–it was right there within me. What can be more powerful than holding life within the body? What can be more miraculous than that? As my friend and I talked about this today, we brought the comparison of the celebration of the Christ child to the reverence we hold for new life in general, and she commented that if all the world for just one moment could feel the this power, which is manifested, paradoxically, through the complete surrender of personal power to the potential of new life, then we might remember what really matters for just one moment.

So I am promising myself to do a better job of balancing my life once I get through this cancer thing. This time, I’m going to count myself into the balance and figure out what works for me–not based on what anyone chooses to do, but on what feeds and nurtures my spirit, as well as my body and mind. Otherwise, I won’t be around long enough to be much of a mom, wife, teacher, daughter, friend…to anyone!

It’s like Christmas….you know…..it’s not really about the presents.

All my thanks and appreciation to my Digital Rhetorics class–and BRAVO for putting Digital Rhetoric in action with this video and piling on the pathos I miss you guys and I can’t wait to see you all graduate!! Just think, you will all be famous and known nationwide for your rhetorical skills at each of your professions, and *I* will be going on Oprah to talk about each of you

Have a wonderful Christmas/Holiday season/New Year. THANK YOU. You made my day!

Dr. SG

Today we were back in Jacksonville for more tests (chest x-ray, EKG, urine, blood, etc.) and to meet with the nurse educator. I was fine, really fine, and ready to get the show on the road. I was handed a new schedule (back next week for MRI and then to meet with the oncologist, plastic surgeon, and general surgeon after that) and discovered that I won’t know when my surgery will be until the 17th at least, and it can be anywhere from a few days to a few weeks after that date. Since we’re getting frightfully close to Christmas, it may well not be until after the new year until I have the surgery. Between now and then I have lots to look over and think over.

Ever since I found out that this was probably cancer I have been desperate to have the surgery and just get these poisonous cells out of my body. Like Lady Macbeth, I just want them OUT! I’ve also had so many questions in my mind, like: what did I do to deserve this? Is this some cosmic payback for throwing that dictionary at my sister in 1977? I realize that, of course, it’s most likely a genetic thing in my case, but still–I have imaginary blood on my hands, as it were–guilt for not eating well enough all these years (though I eat so little red meat and a generally healthy diet, except of course for all that ice cream), for not exercising enough in my 30s, that sort of thing. Although as a professor I live in the world of ideas, the intellectual life, my body is calling attention to itself and calling me to account now. What good is a brain without a body to move it around from place to place?

But the other side of the coin is that proceeding with the surgery makes it all too real. As the nurse educator kindly explained procedures and options and showed me line-drawings of them, I found myself breaking down. Those who know me will have just fallen out of their chairs in shock, so we can wait for them to get up again and keep reading . . . .

I am not A Cryer. In fact, I’ve always had very little patience with Cryers, suspecting them of using tears to manipulate people. I come from a long line of Episcopalian robots who don’t cry (see the video clip, it’s one of my favorites). When I sobbed at my grandfather’s funeral a few years ago (in Richmond, VA, home of the WASP), everyone looked at me like I had utterly lost control and I am surprised no one dragged me off in a straightjacket.

But the fact is I found myself with weepy eyes, reaching out for Jay’s hand and then clutching it in sheer terror. I am going to have part of my body cut away. Then I’m going to have to recover. Then more drugs and/or radiation will assault me and I will have to recover from that. So I’m terrified of proceeding, but also terrified of not doing so. Those cells are inside my body right now, and my best–my only–chance of surviving this for any meaningful length of time is to get them out relatively fast. My academic schedule is inflexible–I can’t exactly ask the University to push back Spring ‘08 semester by a few weeks to accommodate me–and Christmas is pretty much gonna arrive on 12/25, like it or not. And my body will continue to destroy itself, bit by bit, if I don’t let them do something pretty soon.

So, pretty much, today was Feel Sorry for Myself day. I wallowed, I sobbed, I gazed off into the distance, a thoughtful and I hope attractive look of introspection on my face. Tomorrow, I will gird my loins and be ready. I have to. When we got home tonight Elise threw up again.