A Gift

This cancer has brought many gifts, not least of which has been reconnecting with old friends. One of these, Doug Wilson, was my professor at Knox. I studied American poetry with him, and also took a seminar on Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" and the poetry of Wallace Stevens, surely one of the best classes of my college career. In January I had the pleasure of dining with Doug and his wife, along with classmate Bill Barnhart and his wife Kate, at the Chicago Literary Club, where Doug gave a talk based on research for his latest book, "Lincoln's Sword." We had a conversation about the value of a liberal arts education, especially literature, in coping with life's challenges. Afterward, he sent me the following, which I pass along as a gift to you: W. H. Auden's Preface to his long poem "The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest."

Says Doug: "This is Auden's ars poetica, a brilliant and inexhaustible poem about art and how it relates to life, science, and the great imponderables. In a way, they are all summed up in this Preface, the last part of which you may recognize as being woven from severaI of Shakespeare's key lines. So here it is:"

Preface
(The State Manager to the Critics)

The aged catch their breath,
For the nonchalant couple go
Waltzing across the tightrope
As if there were no death
Or hope of falling down;
The wounded cry as the clown
Doubles his meaning, and O
How the dear little children laugh
When the drums roll and the lovely
Lady is sawn in half.

O what authority gives
Existence its surprise?
Science is happy to answer
That the ghosts who haunt our lives
Are handy with mirrors and wire,
That song and sugar and fire,
Courage and come-hither eyes
Have a genius for taking pains.
But how does one think up a habit?
Our wonder, our terror remains.

Art opens the fishiest eye
To the Flesh and the Devil who heat
The Chamber of Temptation
Where heroes roar and die.
We are wet with sympathy now;
Thanks for the evening; but how
Shall we satisfy when we meet,
Between Shall-I and I-Will,
The lion’s mouth whose hunger
No metaphors can fill?

Well, who in his own back yard
Has not opened his heart to the smiling
Secret he cannot quote?
Which goes to show that the Bard
Was sober when he wrote
That this world of fact we love
Is unsubstantial stuff:
All the rest is silence
On the other side of the wall;
And the silence ripeness,
And the ripeness all.

Acupuncture

Several people have asked me about acupuncture, so I thought I would show you what it looks like. Here is me on the table, with a tummy full of needles. Mostly they don't hurt going in, although occasionally one does. Today Dr. Lin put a needle in my calf, and it felt like I had just been cattle-prodded. Whatever had been blocked in there unblocked with a vengeance. In Chinese medicinal theory, to oversimplify, the body's energy, or "chi," travels along 12 main routes, or meridians. Illness results from blockage along these routes; the needles unblock blocked energy, allowing the chi to flow, and the body's yin and yang, male and female, dark and light forces to rebalance and come into harmony.


The meridians are associated with various organs: lungs, liver, spleen, kidney, large intestine, and so on. Needles are inserted at various points to address specific issues. Today, for example, Dr. Lin placed a total of 22 needles at various points: a couple on my head to boost energy; one in each crook of the elbow and at various points along the inner arms for the lungs; some around the tummy to control constipation and nausea.

I don't think the acupuncture will cure my cancer, but I do believe that it is helping me survive the treatment. I go twice a week to the office in Oak Park, which is more convenient to my apartment than the one on Michigan Avenue, with its attendant parking hassles.

I had a good day today, great energy all morning, I actually felt very close to normal. Had a lovely nap from 2-4, and the rest of the afternoon tried to make a dent in the endless pile of paperwork that doesn't stop just because I have cancer: filed receipts, returned phone calls, paid a few bills. My upstairs neighbor stopped by with some frozen squash and lemon grass soup, which I will have for lunch tomorrow. My appetite remains voracious, I am happy to report.

Good News, Bad News

Am emerging from a couple of foggy, foggy days. Monday was radiation, acupuncture, and this stunning view from my back porch. The plantar fasciitis is coming along slowly, thanks to aggressive home PT and all the kind suggestions from fellow sufferers. But by Monday afternoon I was dragging, and on Tuesday morning I woke up queasy, depleted, and decidedly sore-footed. After radiation, went up to get my blood drawn, and labs showed that I was dehydrated and low on magnesium, something you don't want to become, I assure you. So they popped in an IV and sat me down for a couple of hours for some fluids, magnesium, antinausea meds, and dexamethasone, my new best friend. Then I limped across the street to the dermatologist's to have the stitches removed from my biopsy, by which time I was reduced to tears. The good news is that the biopsy showed the rash was nothing more serious than inflamed hair follicles, and it's well on its way to disappearing. Inflamed hair follicles on my CHEST? What are hair follicles doing there?

More bad news is that I had to go into the hospital again today for 4 more hours of magnesium infusion. The good news is I feel a WHOLE lot better than yesterday. Appetite's fine, nausea's under control, and although I have to be on a bland diet for another couple of days, I should be AOK by Saturday or Sunday. They tell me I can reasonably expect more of the same, if not worse, after my next two chemos, so I guess the honeymoon's over. But for today, all's well that ends well. Speaking of which, I endedTuesday watching "Harold and Maude," thanks to Netflix. If you haven't seen it lately, I highly recommend it. That, too, reduced me to tears, but the good kind.

Gaetano has been a prince, his self-portrait notwithstanding. He has been here since Sunday, extraordinarily helpful, kind, and very, very funny. He was great kibitzing with the radiation therapist, bringing lunch when I was being re-magnesiumed, patiently waiting through hours of acupuncture, IV infusions, bureacratic snafus, cooking beautiful dinners, shopping, tidying up, knowing when to be quiet, and just what to say when he wasn't, and generally a joy to have around. Bless you, my prince!

Fasciitistas

In the last 36 hours I have discovered the following people have all had plantar fasciitis: my upstairs neighbor, friends Bob and Ken, Nancy's sister Sue, Leonard B, my meditation teacher's wife, probably one or two others who have escaped my aging memory. They have offered various bits of advice (freeze a water bottle and roll your foot over it; write the alphabet with your toe before getting out of bed; pull your toes back to stretch your calf when driving long distances). Yesterday I iced my afflicted foot four or five times, did two rounds of PT at home, and gulped ibuprofen as prescribed. The upshot was that I could get dressed this morning without a cane - progress! So thanks, fellow fasciitistas!

Plantar Fasciitis

Last Tuesday a.m. (chemotherapy day) I awoke with an intense pain in the bottom of my left foot that required me to use a cane to get dressed. About ten minutes before my cousin Phil (blessed be he) arrived to drive me to the hospital, it eased enough for me to lose the cane and get to the hospital just leaning on Phil. It got better as the day went on, we did the chemo, and then went out to dinner. After dinner, I stood up and the excruciating pain was back.

Long story short, today I was diagnosed with plantar fasciitis, an inflammation of a strip of tissue at the bottom of the foot. Some chemotherapy drugs cause the plantar fascia to tighten up during the night, and then when you take your first step in the morning, you injure it. So that's probably what happened to me. Treatment is to stay off it as much as possible, ice it, ibuprofen it, and do some exercises at home. If those don't work, PT. The handout from the foot doc says symptoms should stop "after several weeks." We'll see.

I never was fond of fasciists.

Boxes within Boxes

What started my current train of thought was a little round box of tiny pebbles of ocean-smoothed bottle glass from Hawaii given to me for my last birthday by friends Ken and Linda. This box was contained in another box of beechwood and inlaid mother of pearl, a reproduction of a IV-Vth century Egyptian piece, from the period when Egyptian life moved from Pharaonic to Arabesque. Marked by geometric, sometimes curved patterns, the new style made its way into art forms from building decorations to jewelry--and onto my bathroom windowsill, where it now holds the pedestrian little proxibrushes used to prevent bacteria from doing too much damage to my receding gums.

Right around my birthday, Francine presented me with a small box of rocks, this handmade of paper, with a handpainted lid and beaded handle. It was made and given to Francine to give to me by a woman named Barbara, whom I've never met, but to whom Francine told the story of my cancer, and who was moved. Francine and our friend Lynn were asked to pick some stones for me from Barbara's extensive collection. The largest is a Chinese flourite, a defending stone. Three smaller ones are garnets, to be given to people who have touched one's life. There's a blue topaz, all about calming and healing, and a moonstone, representing the Divine Feminine (Kanzeon again: see January 17).

I started thinking about how old these stones are, and how long it took the ocean to wash that bottle glass smooth on the Hawaii beach, and how interconnected we all are, and everything is throughout space and time, and the beauty of it all. Then I looked around my place and noticed all the other decorative boxes in my possession, some of which came into my family before I was born.

There's a wooden, wood-burned, hand-painted box that holds two decks of pinochle cards. On the bottom it's signed "Sofia Lanius, October 1944." There's a gorgeous silver cigarette box, intricately carved with Mayan decorations, complete with matching (and monogrammed) lighter and ashtray, from my parents' 1945-1947 stay in El Salvador, where I was conceived. There's a black laquered cigarette box brought by my father from Okinawa, where he was doing something mysterious for the U.S. government in the early 50s, sinking deeper into alcoholism, but always thoughtful, with a good eye for craftsmanship and beauty. Cigarettes and playing cards -- the McLenighans were a fun couple, until they weren't.

In my bedroom, two more wooden boxes from the El Salvador days or earlier, both beautifully covered with paper in Art Nouveau style, one holding a couple of decks of cards for bridge, another holding some silver jewelry. A handpainted oval papier mache box from Nepal, given to my mother by one of the attorneys in her office, which now contains seeds from a plant that my upstairs neighbor Michael, may he rest in peace, called "Snow on the Mountain." A handmade box from Kate holds my most frequently used jewelry; finally, two ceramic boxes from Mexico, one inherited from my beloved friend Dorothy Tollifson, who died at the age of 95 holding my hand.

In my living room there's a rectangular wooden game box with a wooden handle, presented to me by my Zimbabwe family on the trip when I first met little Gladys Valjean, then a delightful 4 years old. The box closes with a little strip of leather that slips over a tiny nail. Inside the bottom and the lid are 32 egg-carton like depressions, where 62 seeds are dispersed according to rules I never understood. The object is for one player to move all his seeds to the other side by capturing oppponent seeds--again, according to rules I never mastered but having something to do with leaving three seeds in a cup at any given time. It's a game of strategy, not unlike Go, and Martha (Gladys Valjean's mother) is very good at it.

These days probably the most important box in the house is my box of 28 pill boxes. This, too, is the Buddha, another manifestation of Kanzeon. It is industrial plastic, with seven columns, one for each day of the week, and four rows, two yellow (for morning and noon pills) and two blue (for evening and bedtime). This is hands down the least attractive box in the house, but it's functional and durable, and what can you do. It holds the chemicals that are trying to save my life, and I am grateful, if not aesthetically satisfied.

Be Not Afraid

I've had two conversations today with friends who said they had been afraid to phone me, essentially because they're afraid of my cancer. They did phone nonetheless, thank goodness. I told them both that I'm not afraid, at least not right now. My practice is to stay in this moment, and as I have been doing that, I have noticed that there is no fear in this moment. Sometimes there is grief and sadness. Much of the time there is contentment; sometimes, joy. But there has not been any fear for two or three weeks, I think since about halfway through my first chemotherapy, when I noticed I wasn't throwing up or having any of the other dire consequences I read about in "Chemotherapy and You" and "Radiation and You."

So, friends, be not afraid. I need you in my life, and I want you in my life, and I don't want fear to keep you out, or on my side, to shut you out. In fact, I don't want any negative energy around this illness at all. I'm looking for positive, healing energy, and love, love, love. I'm very much alive. I'm just as much me as ever. And I need my loved ones, worry-free.