Gratitude

It's been a long while since I've been here. When I first started to write, the memories and feelings associated with my cancer and its treatment were like birds banging in my head, desperate to be uncaged. The more I've written, the less intense is the urge to free my thoughts. I began to feel a need to put my cancer 'behind' me, to make a break and quit talking about it. But I continue to deal with cancer-related issues. Maybe it will never be behind me. And this past week, as I've felt the foul breath of discouragement breathe on me, I am reminded how therapeutic it is to write about it. Interestingly, yesterday my pastor preached on ... gratitude. How dare he, when I'm so satisfied wallowing in my disappointment? Sarcasm aside, his words made me remember something. I cannot control my circumstances, but I can control my state of mind. It is my choice. If I choose to allow resentment to fill my heart, the only person that impacts is -- me. If I choose to live without joy, that not only cripples me emotionally, that affects my whole family. And if I choose to live without gratitude and allow a complaining spirit to fester, well, that impacts everyone. So this is my exercise, my search, my attempt to find the spirit of gratitude.

I want to share what I've been dealing with, because there must be other cancer survivors out there who are dealing with similar issues. I take Tamoxifen, as do thousands of other pre-menopausal women who've had breast cancer. I am dealing, long-term, with side-effects of the drug that are so painful and private, I cannot even put words to what I'm experiencing. But I will say this - sometimes the situation completely derails me. I sit and cry tears of bitter frustration and self-pity, and I truly want to throttle someone. The problem is, there is no one to throttle, there is no one at fault. There is nowhere to direct this overwhelming emotion, so it just floods over me. It is a reality of my cancer.

Then there is the mental fog that has been with me since I had chemotherapy. While I was having chemo, they told me there is a name for it - Chemo Brain. Unfortunately, for me, it has never truly gone away. For instance, the other day, I was holding a bottle of pills in my hand. I couldn't remember if I had just taken them, and was putting the bottle away, or if I had just reached for the bottle and had yet to take them. However, I was able to do the mental gymnastics required to remember the day the prescription was filled, dump all the remaining pills in my hand to count how many were left, subtract that number from the original amount, and thereby come to the conclusion that I had taken the pills. The action of taking them had been just a moment before, yet I couldn't retrieve it. It was ... gone. It is a reality of my cancer.

And then there are my teeth. I went years without a cavity, yet since my cancer I have had about ten fillings. Chemotherapy demineralizes the bones and teeth, and thins enamel, so I am still dealing with decay sneaking its way into my teeth. My last cavity turned into an infected tooth, with an abscess in my jaw, and resulted in an emergency root canal. Although I am fastidious about oral health, all the brushing and flossing in the world doesn't seem to have an impact. Because I don't respond well to local anesthesia (it is hard to make me fully numb) I feel queasy with anxiety when I think about my dentist going back into my mouth and finishing the work. This is a reality of my cancer.

Well, complaining about things is very easy, and it actually feels good to dump these problems out into the ether. But what about the spirit of gratitude? How do I find it?

Now, I know many of my readers do not walk the Christian walk with me. But I hope you can respect the fact that I cannot divorce my faith from my experience, and so, unsurprisingly, my answer to my search for the spirit of gratitude lies in God's Word. I really believe that He listened to my griping and complaining, and then brought me to these words of Jeremiah, who lived a life full of sorrow.

Lamentations 3: 19-25  Remember my affliction and my wandering, the wormwood and bitterness. Surely my soul remembers and is bowed down within me. This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope. The Lord's lovingkindnesses indeed never cease, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is Thy faithfulness. 'The Lord is my portion,' says my soul, 'therefore I have hope in Him.' The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the person who seeks Him.

My hope must lie in the Lord, not in the physical things of this world. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning - and therein lies the spirit of gratitude, in the fresh and refreshing, constantly new mercies of the Lord.

The Breath of the Almighty

I have said before that cancer came and went, but the specter of cancer came and stayed. When I had a cancerous tumor in my body, I wasn't even aware of it. It is possible that my cancer developed while I was pregnant with my youngest child. Microscopic mutated cells were rapidly multiplying, clogging the milk ducts of my right breast, and I was blissfully unaware. I knew that when my babe nursed, she would fight and struggle on the right side, but happily nurse on the left. I was aware that my milk production on the right was diminishing, while the left side was keeping up with my little one. I knew that when I tipped my head forward and looked down, my silhouette was becoming increasingly lopsided because of the imbalance in milk production. But with my typical laissez-faire attitude, I never really thought about it. It never once crossed my mind that something could be seriously wrong. 


Yet...


My doctor found the lump. The lump was malignant. The malignancy had metastasized to my lymph nodes. And although those little mutating cells hadn't yet caused me any real harm, the specter of cancer loomed ahead like the Grim Reaper threatening to take me from this world. Thus, my doctor and I did everything possible to stop it, and the real harm started, in the form of life-saving therapy. How ironic that we refer to poison pumping through one's blood as chemotherapy. And burning a person with light at a frequency high enough to knock electrons out of their orbit is radiation therapy. And the drugs I still take everyday to block my estrogen and starve the cancer is referred to as hormone therapy. Come on people, a spa day is therapy - this stuff is just nasty. And I now realize, three years out of the gate, that all those therapies, along with massive doses of antibiotics and eight surgeries in three years will take their toll. I still struggle - not quite where I want to be, not quite on my feet, not quite well. Some days I feel terrible, some days not so terrible. I use natural means to try to conquer the general malaise, hopeful that at some point in the near future I will again be truly well. And so the specter of cancer no longer looms, but instead quietly haunts me with its presence.


And yet, as I ruminate about all these things, I am reminded that those therapies were life-saving, not life-giving. The gift of life comes from somewhere else entirely. The book of Job says, 'The Spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life.'  


The breath of the Almighty ... gives life. O God in Heaven, breathe on me.

Fight Like a Girl

This is my final post as a guest blogger at Pine Country Feed. Thank you for going pink in support of breast cancer awareness month!

I don’t know how the phrase ‘You fight like a girl,’ became a classic insult. But after fighting breast cancer it has taken on a whole new meaning. Cancer treatment is like hazing for a sorority no one wants to join. I sometimes refer to others who have had a breast cancer diagnosis as my ‘sisters in the fight.’ But I recognize that I have sisters all around me who are engaged in the fight against this disease, including those who haven’t had that personal diagnosis. There are those that walk, raise money, get the word out, and encourage their friends to consistently do self-exams. And there are those who gather around the weak and wounded, and lift them up.

It was in the month of October – breast cancer awareness month – that I had to go in for a consultation with a radiation oncologist. I had already had a bilateral mastectomy with lymph nodes removed, and I’d gone through six rounds of chemo. I was unprepared for the news that I would have to have radiation. It was like reaching the top of a mountain after a long, hard hike, only to lift my head and realize I wasn’t actually at the summit – I still had miles to go. My appointment was on a Tuesday, a day I normally went to a local moms group I was involved in. My appointment was scheduled for early afternoon, so that morning, I went to my group having told no one about the appointment or how I was feeling. I was so discouraged – I felt heavy, and weary, like I was trying to walk through life with forty-pound weights on my feet.

But something amazing happened that morning. I walked into a room that had gone pink. In solidarity with me, and in support of breast cancer awareness month, everything was decorated in pink. Several of the girls were wearing pink bandanas. One was handed to me as I came in and I tied it around my bald head. A dear friend had done a photo shoot with me a few weeks earlier, celebrating my life, even celebrating my scars which stand as mementos of my survival. She had made a collage of the pictures, and the women had filled it with their signatures and words of encouragement. About fifty women stood around me as I was handed that gift. And later, in a small examining room in the hospital, as the doctor explained how vicious my cancer was, it wasn’t just my husband and me facing the road ahead. I sensed that group of women, standing behind me, cheering me on. This, for me, epitomizes what it means to ‘fight like a girl.’ Throughout my fight, I was surrounded by women who supported, encouraged, connected, babysat, cooked, cleaned, held my hand, cried with me, took me to the hospital for treatment, spent the night at my house, made CD’s of beautiful music, loaned me movies, gave me books, etc, etc.  They chose to become my sisters in the fight. They helped me survive.

So go ahead, tell me I fight like a girl. I couldn’t think of a nicer compliment.

Choose Life

I originally posted this as a guest blogger at Pine Country Feed on October 22, 2010.

I remember, years ago, being invited to a house in the Colorado foothills. As we drove up the driveway, my impressions were all negative. There were spindly little trees, and dirt, and the house itself was nondescript. Entering the home, it had a shabby, run-down feel and everything was brown. I wondered how these people could stand to live here. Then, I was invited out onto the deck. The back deck of the house overhung a small cliff, and from it I could see the entire city of Denver, and miles and miles out onto the eastern plains. The view was extravagant, breath taking, and completely unexpected, and I felt my perspective shift. I now understood exactly why they wanted to live here.

A similar thing can happen when we choose to manage our thoughts and our speech, instead of allowing words to run rampant through our mind, unchecked. Words did not help me survive my cancer, but they dictated how I was to survive – with grace and joy, or with regret and bitterness.

When I received my first dose of chemo, everything went wrong. I spiked a fever, and the chemotherapy decimated my white blood cell count, which meant my immune system was non-functioning. I was hospitalized – the fourth time in two months. This was my second infection, and I was placed on I.V. antibiotics, and put in isolation. The level of physical agony I was experiencing was extreme – more intense than anything I had ever felt. And as I lay there alone in that hospital bed, these words came unbidden into my mind. “This is how it feels to die.”

We have the power to choose life or choose death. That may sound extreme, but every choice we make either leads us toward abundance, and life, or away from it. So, in my total misery, I said, “Today, I choose life.” I drug my thoughts forcibly away from death, and into a place of thanksgiving, thereby changing my whole perspective.

I live in the age of modern medicine, and the antibiotics are doing what my immune system can’t.

Thank you.

If my immune system had crashed while I still had a staph infection, I’d be in I.C.U., clinging to life, instead of here in this bed with the ability to fight. Thank you.

In spite of the brutality of the treatments, they will ultimately save my life. Thank you.

I have a husband who loves me, not in spite of my scars, but because of them. They serve as precious reminders to him of what was almost lost, and he never takes me for granted.

Thank you.  

I have people around me, to love and care for my children when I am unable to be there.

Thank you.

I chose to live that day. I chose to turn from anger, death, misery and suffering, and looked instead at thanksgiving, life, strength and victory. We can all make these choices, every single day. Where are you looking, today? Where are your thoughts taking you? Today – choose life.

I Own my Joy

This post originally appeared as a guest blog at Pine Country Feed on October 15, 2010.

There are many things cancer can do. It is a thief and a destroyer; but I found in my own battle with this beast that there are things that belong to me, and me alone. Cancer has no right to them. For instance, I own my joy – cancer cannot steal it from me. The only way I can lose my joy is if I willingly give it up.  Now, let me be clear.  I’m not talking about happiness here – that feel good feeling we get when circumstances line up in our favor.  Nor am I talking about spiritual joy, a much deeper and abiding thing.  I am talking about daily joy – that knowing that we get that ‘in this moment’, and ‘in this place’, things are right.

Now, this all sounds good and well, but in practice it’s a bit harder.  This is how it would go for me during breast cancer:  Here I am in bed, I’ve had parts of my body amputated, and I’m still full of pain, unable to even lift my baby.  I’ve had three surgeries, two life threatening infections, and now I’m so sick with the effects of chemo that I can’t even get out of bed. And I would say, “God, how exactly am I supposed to have joy here? How?”  I was so beaten and battered, and the road toward self-pity was a far easier one to tread than the road toward victory.  I couldn’t find my joy – it was somehow hidden from me.

And then something would happen – usually something small – and I would recognize that I was ‘in this moment’ and ‘in this place’, a moment and place filled with abundant, undeniable blessing.  I remember my two-year-old girl coming in with a board game. She climbed up on the bed, set up all the pieces, and we proceeded to play – completely disregarding all the rules. The game involved treasure, and my little one found the treasure every single time. Her face would light up with pleasure, and in that sweet face I found my joy.

Then there were times my nine-year-old girl would say, “Mommy, can we do something?” Well, there weren’t many things I could do, so we would perch side by side and watch movies chosen by my child – crazy, kid-friendly movies that would make her laugh out loud. I don’t remember the movies, but I remember seeing the stress slip away from her, and I knew that what I was really doing was giving her the sense that everything was going to be all right. In that simple act of mothering, I found my joy.

I have heard it said that joy is peace dancing, and peace is joy at rest. I found my joy in mothering, and in connecting. My husband would take my hand, saying nothing at all, and I would sense peace dancing about us.  I would mother my children, giving of myself when I felt so empty, and peace would dance.  Where in your life does peace dance? Where do you find your joy?

My Inner Cowgirl

October is a month dedicated to raising awareness about breast cancer.  For the month, Pine Country Feed, a local Colorado store, has gone pink. They have also invited me to guest blog for four Fridays, celebrating the fact that I am a survivor. This is the first of the four posts, and over the next few days I will include the rest. Please visit  Pine Country Feed to read more encouraging posts.

Okay – so, I drive a pickup.  And I can saddle a horse, and ride.  But I’m no cowgirl. I do, however,  know what it means to ‘cowgirl up’ – I learned when I was 38 years old, with two young daughters, and I was told I have breast cancer.  My friends, trying to be encouraging, said interesting things, like this:  “It’s not a death sentence, like it used to be.”  Another said, “I know someone with positive lymph nodes, and she’s just fine.”  But I knew it wasn’t quite like treating strep throat – I was facing serious and hard decisions.  I also knew of women who had lost their battle and died of this disease, in spite of following their doctors’ recommendations.  So what was I to do?  Cut the cancer out, and radiate the breast?  Cut the breast off, and be done with it?  Or, have a bilateral mastectomy, just in case?  Cutting off healthy tissue, ‘just in case’, seemed unbelievably barbaric.  At first, I refused to consider it.

Then one day, my husband came home from work, and told me a man he worked with had asked him to tell me something.  He said, “Tell your wife to do everything she can.  My wife had a single mastectomy, and five years later the cancer came back and took her from me.”  But even hearing this didn’t make the decision for me.  The clincher for me was when my eight-year-old daughter took my hands in hers, looked me in the eye, and said very seriously, “Mommy, please do whatever you can so that we don’t have to go through this again.”  We.  That hit it home for me.  I alone didn’t have cancer.  My whole family had it.  And I wasn’t making decisions for myself only.  I was deciding what lay ahead for everybody who loved me.  So I ‘cowgirled up’ – I had the bilateral mastectomy.

It was only later – after surgery - that we knew I had done the right thing.  Once the doctors could see my cancer ‘up close and personal’, they knew that it was aggressive, behaving in an unpredictable manner, and moving quickly.  In spite of being a very, very small tumor (smaller than a pea), the cancer was already in my lymph nodes.  Surgery wasn’t the end of it, like I thought it would be.  I was facing months more of treatment.  But instead of being terrified, I felt only a sense of resolution.  I was resolved to do whatever it took to fight this beast and survive.  That was the day I discovered I was tougher than I thought.  That was the day I discovered my inner cowgirl.

The Unhealed Part

Well, it's been a while since I've been here.  I have no reason, except that the summer got away from me.  But then, for this month of breast cancer awareness, I've been asked to guest blog at Pine Country Feed - and I knew they were going to link to this blog.  As my niece so eloquently put it, "Maybe this will help you get off your butt and write again."  So here I am.

Today, I will bare my soul in a way I never intended to do when I started this blog.  But several things have conspired to convince me that I should share my whole story, even the most painful parts.  The issue today is rarely talked about because it's intensely personal, and it requires emotional courage.  I'm digging deep today - I've cried all morning just thinking about writing this.  The thought that my father, or my pastor will read this gives me heart palpitations.  Today, I become vulnerable in a way that is extremely uncomfortable.  So, if you have no desire to read today's post, I'll understand.  But, if you have the courage to step into my life, then do, and participate in an experiment in empathy.




I understand that most people have a total disconnect between breast cancer and its effects on intimacy.  I understand this because I myself didn't get it - not until my own personal war with cancer was fought, and I was left to experience first hand the wounds it left.  When I was diagnosed, a very kind friend linked me to an article titled "Intimacy After Breast Cancer."  After thanking her, in my naivete, I rolled my eyes and tossed the article aside.  My husband and I had been married nearly 14 years when I had my cancer surgery.  We had a very natural and easy relationship, and I figured it was no one's business how we dealt with personal issues.  We would work it out.  I didn't want anybody's advice, because I didn't think I needed it.

I am not an emotionally driven person.  Because of this, emotions tend to sneak up on me.  I can go for days, thinking I'm perfectly fine, and then the emotion will overtake me like a storm, and it has to run its course.  When I had my cancer surgery, a bilateral mastectomy, I had immediate reconstruction, so I woke up with a silhouette very similar to the one I'd always had, and heavily bandaged so I couldn't see the wounds.  I was warned to prepare myself before I looked at my scars.  Did I want to be alone, or with someone?  Where did I want to be?  But when I looked, it was no big deal.  I felt ... nothing.

Unfortunately, due to a staph infection, the surgical implants had to be removed, and for the next 14 months, my chest was caved in on each side where my breasts used to be.  I am amazed now to think about how many showers I took, how many times I applied lotion and got dressed, without ever looking at or touching those scars.  I would instinctively turn my back to my husband when I changed my shirt, never once thinking about what I was doing or why.  I was not facing what had happened to me - I was happily existing inside a little bubble of denial.

Then one day, after I had started chemo, after my hair had fallen out, I was in the shower letting the water run over my bald head.  And this thought just came into my head - if an evil person wanted to shame a woman, he would cut off her breasts, shave her head, and toss her out for all to see her ruin.  And with that thought came an overwhelming grief.  It caught me totally off guard, this intense, discomforting emotion as it swept over me.  I ended up in a ball on the floor of the shower, and as the water poured over me, I wept out all this stored-up pain that I wasn't even aware existed.  Then, very slowly, I placed my hands on my chest and felt the contours of my scars.  And then I looked.  One word filled my mind --- ugly.  They were so ugly.  But I was spent by my grief, and I thought it would be alright.  I had poured out all this emotional ugliness, now I could begin to heal.

But those ugly feelings would continue to sneak up on me.  I wore a camisole all the time, except in the shower.  I would take it off, step into the shower, dry off and put a fresh one on.  Without it, I felt too exposed, too vulnerable - insecure and unsafe.  I would wear it to bed.  One night, after the lights were out, my husband reached over and laid his hand on the skin of my stomach, under the camisole.  He very gently slid his hand up, and touched my scar.  It was a sweet and affectionate touch.  Yet my response was visceral.  My eyes filled with tears, my body tensed and I fought the nervous response of my body that wanted to push him away.  I was desperate not to hurt my husband - he loves me and I am absolutely safe with him.  So I willed my body to relax, and I calmed my breathing.  But even that was a betrayal of sorts, because I was presenting something to him that wasn't authentic.  I felt the tiniest wedge slide between us.  I felt I had caused it, and only I knew it was there.  The conflicting emotions inside me were such a tangled mess, I couldn't even put a voice to them.  So I bit my lip, and let the tears fall silently on my pillow, and prayed that God would fix this unnamed thing inside me that had broken.

Post-mastectomy patients form a sorority of sorts.  In this sorority, women share dark and painful secrets that they would never share with others.  Because of this, I know that some women never get over the feelings I've described.  They don't know how to approach it, and this unnamed and un-talked about thing grows between them and their spouse.  It steals their joy.  It throws their relationship out of balance.

Thankfully, I've come to a place of healing and acceptance where I don't feel those things nearly as often.  The first thing I think when someone says "describe yourself" is no longer ... ugly.  But in spite of this, issues relating to intimacy still impact me.  In the last couple of years, I've developed increasingly troublesome symptoms of aching, occasional sharp pain, and general discomfort which most women can probably adequately imagine.  I finally went to the gynecologist about it.  Although she was really wonderful and absolutely professional, and a woman (thank you, Jesus), it was still so humiliating to describe to a total stranger, in minute detail, the most personal details of my life.  And when I was through, she said, "It's your cancer medicine."  I take a cancer drug every day.  I'm 2 1/2 years through a five-year regimen.  I had suspected that the medicine was the cause, but in researching it I had found nothing that was similar to what I was experiencing.  She said the issues I was having were not technically side-effects, and that's why I couldn't find information.  But she was certain that the cancer drug was the cause.

So I asked my oncologist about it, and she confirmed that the problem was my cancer drug.  And there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.  Discontinuing treatment is not an option.  I got the 'talk' - all about my risk level for recurrence, and the fact that I have young children to raise, etc., etc.   So I continue to take the drug, and I continue to struggle.  Sometimes, when my husband takes my hand, instead of love and joy and security, I feel a low-level anxiety.  That thing in our marriage which is supposed to bond us, which is supposed to be an expression of love, has instead become a source of pain.  We love each other, but the natural rhythm of our love has been destroyed.  I am broken - this part of my life is broken, and it has been broken by breast cancer.  How do I fix it?  I can only pray that God will open my eyes to a solution, or simply touch me with His hand.  But for now, this part of me remains unhealed.