Ch 12 - This Witch is Healing Her Cancer
"I walked, waking an arm with vital breath, while stones watched, and wings rose soundlessly...Rimbaud
Last week’s meltdown - too many voices in my head, too much do this, do that, research this, research that, and I don’t want to do this anymore. Life was, is, shouting at me.
6 am, Get up! Take first set of pills! Wait a half hour, take second set of pills, eat, take 3rd set of pills, and it’s so damn cold - inside, outside, my car. The burns, the god-awful sound of the radiation machine, and due to nausea I’m unable to follow protocols and will it fuck up what I’ve accomplished so far? No metastasis in 6 months is unheard of for my kind of cancer and I did it.
Sculpting my insides and my outsides, abstract shapes and interconnecting shades of terror, toxic resentment, exhaustion, and an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. Who exactly is the artist here? The healthiest thing I could do was loose it last week.
I hold true that every human being is a perfect microcosm of Nature - feelings are our weather. All I saw in the eyes of those I was lashing out at, was infinite compassion, but sometimes you’re hurting so bad you simply can’t accept it. You’re hurting so bad it’s everybody else’s fault and by God you’re gonna let ‘em know. You don’t want comfort, you want to yell, to break things and fuck all. You’re trying to manage me! Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Thurs, March 6, 2024
The day after the meltdown, showing up for treatment, living, breathing concern in the eyes of Queen A, Queen B, Katie, Annetta, Suzanne with a Z.
How are you? I am asked by each member of my team.
Better. I’m sorry about yesterday. (p.s I wasn’t sorry, and I didn’t feel one iota of guilt, but mother was poking at me – “Clean up your side of the street, Kathy,”)
Pat answer from all, but clearly deeply felt and true: You have nothing to be sorry about. With what you’re going through, you’re entitled.
“I’m going to need some painkillers,” I tell Queen A. “My urine, my poop are like battery acid, it hits the burns, and I scream into a towel. Why haven’t they figured out how to neutralize number 1 and number 2 so you’re not writhing in agony?”
Queen A slips her arm around my shoulders, helping me down the hall.
“Ask Annetta for a script, she says. There’s no reason for you to suffer like that.”
—
What painkiller do you want? Annetta asks.
Tramadol.
Why Tramadol? Dr. V wants to know.
I googled a painkiller that wouldn’t screw with radiation that other people were taking for the burns.
Ok, he says.
I’ll call it in, Anetta says.
—
Laura tells me Dawn hadn’t called her, meaning Laura got a wild hair that something was going on, and sent a hang-in-there text. Lying on Laura’s table, stuck full of needles, curtains of sun. Flashing on Dawn telling me about her trip to Mexico. Clearly, the distraction was enraging me even more. Didn’t faze Dawn in the lease, which made me (in retrospect) smile. Dawn could pretty much talk anybody off a ledge and they’d have no idea.
—
Called pharmacy on the way home – the script wasn’t ready. Found Sheila in her dining room putting together a jig saw puzzle of historically, famous feminists. She’s a new member of a competitive jig saw puzzle club. She thought it would be easy, given the fact she’s an artist and knows her way ‘round shape and design, but it’s not easy at all.
“I get antsy,” she says, waving her hand over the puzzle. “How are you?”
Jig-saw-puzzling looks wonderfully meditative.
“My script for Tramdol’s not ready.”
“I’ve got some, left over from my hip replacement.”
Women my age, we never finish the entire script, and hoard what’s left over. A friend in Jersey used to say, “I have a medicine cabinet that would make Elvis weep.”
I did take one of Sheila’s tramadol’s and I slept like the dead. The tramadol DOES help with the pain. If you’re working on a pain scale from 1-10, 10 being the highest, and you’ve been living at 10 for 3 weeks, to find yourself at 8 is heaven.
Friday March 8, 2024
Good morning beautiful Katie,
Good morning, Katherine, how are you?
Rocking in the free world.
She giggles.
Suzanne with a Z comes for the woman in a wheelchair. She’s in her 80’s, and I’m not sure if it’s her son or her brother who brings her. He’s a big guy. Heavy accent, Eastern European. She’s two people before me in the radiation line, followed by a little, grumpy, skinny man who reeks of cigarettes. I flash him a peace sign.
—
It's Friday – Anetta is taking my vitals, which are of course perfect, and Dr V is very pleased with my progress.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you, Dr V.”
“You have no reason to be sorry – you did nothing wrong – you were feeling!”
And he was off – explaining all the reasons I shouldn’t feel be upset over my meltdown. Finally, I flash the football signal for ‘time out.’
“I hear what you’re saying Dr V, but do you accept my apology.”
He threw his hands into the air.
“You are my favorite patient!”
Sunday, March 9, 2024
I am shutting down. There’s no way I can get through the next week without consciously shutting down. Show up for radiation and acupuncture and don’t think. The pain has hit new levels even with the Tramadol. The relief of 8 is no longer. The only time I don’t hurt is on Laura’s table.
Remember etch-a-sketch? I loved etch-a-sketch. Drawing away, deciding I didn’t like what I’d drawn, and all I had to do was shake the little red sketcher, to erase what went before, and start over.
After radiation I feel like a part of me has been erased. Only you can’t see it. I look the same, but something has been erased. Over the last 6 weeks much of me has been permanently erased. I’m disappearing, even if others can’t see it. Any pre-existing context re: everything I ever held true, is shattered. The brain fog and exhaustion unlike anything I’ve ever known.
My friends are excited that this is my last week of radiation. I can’t touch into it – all I can focus on is consciously shutting down to get through the next week.
Monday March 11, 2024
In early sobriety (1987) one of my sponsors ordered me to make a gratitude list. I’d tell her the three things I was grateful for on any given day and that was supposed to make the churning agonies (for which I had no name) inside me disappear. No reason to churn – look at all you have to be grateful for!
I was a trooper – if my sponsor said working on my gratitude would dispel the churning inside – I was more than willing to give it a go. Once I started my gratitude lists, I did have days when I felt better, but the churning agonies lived on, no matter how many 4th, 5th, and 6th steps I did.
“Just ignore it,” I was told. “It’s old tapes and defects of character.”
“Like hell,” Wise Joe said. “Those feelings, the churning, there’s gold to be mined there.”
I was 40 years old.
—
The process of staying with my feelings was an anathema for me. I’d been taught by spiritual teachers and gurus, that my so-called negative feelings were defects of character and creating my reality. I was told, it-happened-then-it-is-not-happening-now-so-move-on. There is no compassion for self in this kind of teaching, feelings become the enemy. Compassion for self is intrinsic to self-love; when there is no compassion in the teaching, healing is absent, and the work of consciousness devolves into fixing. The minute you are looking at yourself as someone or something that needs to be fixed you are out of the realm of your own humanity and genuine self-love is virtually impossible.
In many ways I am very, very lucky. To have cancer now, when there are so many alternatives with hard science to back ‘em up. Facebook pages put together by cancer patients for cancer patients have been a life saver, as has google and patient stories on you-tube. I have friends who show up, who text, who read my work, Marci – my favorite medium - and my other brother Hugh, who without fail sends me something funny every day. The friends I don’t see a lot, we pick up immediately, as if we just saw other yesterday.
I have a snap card so I’m eating, Medicaid pays for my Medicare, and when this all started in late August, a dear friend sent me a sizable check, meaning I’ve been able to afford certain alternative choices. My team at Fox Cancer Care are composed of angels.
Queen A, Queen B, and Suzanne with a Z are my radiology nurses. They are soothing women, genuine, with a healing touch. Periodically Queen A or Queen B are sent over to Cooperstown and a nurse from Cooperstown is sent to Oneonta. The nurses from Cooperstown (with the exception of the women in Pet Scan) reminded me of the nurse who gave me the first Cat Scan. Over the top positive, loud, and that conversational beat off that sets my teeth on edge.
Katie’s is the first face I see, when I walk in the door in the morning. She is the hub of the wheel of the radiology department, treats everyone with courtesy and respect, and when she asks how you’re doing, she really wants to know. I’ve never seen her lose patience or cop an attitude. Anetta, tiny, Russian, is Dr. V’s nurse – You are good? You need anything? Regina the nurse navigator who has knocked herself out for me, scheduling, re-scheduling and canceling. Dawn, my social worker has been 100% supportive of my choices as had Dr. V. The only choice he ever fought me over was an extra week of radiation.
The sun shining over all of this entire process is Laura, my acupuncture person. I wouldn’t have made it without Laura – she’s been my lifeline. And that is not hyperbole.
So yes, I am enormously grateful for the blessings I’ve had along this cancer path, and I genuinely feel the prayers and the healings sent to me by my beloved friends and clients. But I will not say, I have this, so it’s ok I don’t have that. ‘That’ being a modicum of inner peace and trust which will no doubt come later, but right now I can’t even smell it.
—
A lotus grows out the mud, ugly, gunky mud. Beauty (the lotus) has her roots in mud, she draws the sustenance she needs to grow, to become, from the ugly, gunky mud. Thus, the ugly gunky mud is integrated, transformed becomes part of the growth that is beauty, that is the lotus.
Monday March 18th, 2024
The last day of radiation – it was quite the party. I bought the team thank-you-gifts because I’m Southern and that’s what we do. I meant those gifts, took my time choosing each one. Gary is somewhat verklempt by how much I can hate people (You couldn’t stand those nurses!) and turn around and love ‘em later. I pointed out to him he probably hasn’t been reading my blog or he’d understand the underpinnings of the switch.
After you finish chemo and/or radiation it’s standard practice in Cancer Centers to ring the bell. I asked Gary and Sheila to come because it’s kind of a big deal. I love my friends – they’re noisy, entertaining, and high energy – my friends walk into a room and things start to snap, crackle, pop. The waiting area fill with my team, introductions being made - I’m Queen A, she’s Queen B. Dr Varsos talking to Sheila and Gary, Katie smiling, handing me a card that each member of the team had signed wishing me luck. Anetta – you need anything? Lot’s of hugging. Queen A whispering in my ear – it’s going to be brutal for the next couple of weeks – it always is when you stop radiation.
I’m present, physically present, but I’m not there. I rang the bell hard, three times, bending timelines. Gary and Sheila walked me to my car, and I left for acupuncture.
—
Before I got married, I went into therapy for the first time. It was 1980.
“Why are you here?” Nina, the therapist asked.
“Because I’m getting married, and my mother is coming, and I want to be present for my wedding.”
“I’m not sure I’m following.”
“In the presence of my mother, I’m not here. I look like I’m here, but I’m not. I want to be present for my wedding – it’s supposed to be a happy day, and I’d like to be part of it, rather than a dust mote in the breezy sunshine of her devastating criticism.”
“Why does it matter what your mother thinks?”
I burst into tears. “I’ve got no fucking idea!”
I was present for my wedding – Nina’s therapy, good scotch, a loft, a fire in the fireplace candlelight, Moet, a string quartet, gorgeous food, tables covered with dark green tablecloths, silver candelabras, poppies, delicious food, and a square dance band, taking over for the string quarter, after the ceremony, helped. My friend Jimmy found the square dance band, playing in the subway. My future husband wanted an Ella Fitzgerald type singer. I said, it’ll put everyone to sleep. (I still hear from people about what a great wedding it was.)
My mother was overpowered by the number of people surrounding her singing my praises and the praises of my new husband. Out of her milieu she could not spoil mine, and I’d a new understanding of safety in numbers.
—
I learned to shut down because of my mother – it was a survival mechanism – and kudos to my inner child for figuring that out. To this day, I hold true that sometimes you have to shut down to survive – to make it through to the other side. There are choices in life that you’re going to have to make – choices you don’t like - and you gotta do what you gotta do to get to the other side.
I was there - but I wasn’t - my last day of radiation. Everyone was so excited and happy for me what with radiation being over, but all I could think was, now what? This is so fucking far from over.
—
Another way I’ve been lucky – bumping into people, sometimes random strangers, who are more than willing to honestly share their experiences with me. This is what will ultimately destroy Standard of Care. The people looking elsewhere for something that works and doesn’t completely destroy their body in the process. Only 60-64% of people diagnosed with cancer who receive Standard of Care will be alive after five years. That they are alive is considered a treatment success. This ‘success’ does not take into account quality of life, whether you still have cancer, whether you’ve lost your home and all your money to cancer treatment, or if you’re dying in hospice. Deaths that are a result of treatment (lots of heart attacks, kidney’s exploding, fissures and other lovely bowel issues, chemo/radiation induced metastasis) are written up as the cause of death, not as the result of cancer and treatment.
I would rather deal with hard truth any day rather than a lie. The powers that be and their verbal sleight of hand – evil genius.
Sun March 24, 2024
Seriously not in a good place - I have lost my trust, I have lost my faith. Spoke with Fiona today, couldn’t have come at a better time. Fee is British, a therapist, and a close friend. Like Wise Joe, she doesn’t lose the thread of the conversation. She knows how to bring the drift back to the sharp rock that’s killing you. It’s always old rocks, rocks you thought you’d worked through. An hour later, I say, “Fee can I talk to you later in the week too?” And we book something for Thurs, the 28th.
Thurs March 28, 2024
Well into the second week of radiation being over. The first week was a lost week. I have hazy memories of getting up, taking supplements, eating, going back to bed. The 2nd degree burns in my lady parts and nether regions remain excruciating. Castor oil, A & D ointment, and Balmex and Laura’s herbal mixture for bathing help the most. For elimination, I press a dripping wet, ice-cold washcloth against my cooter and that cuts the pain of the burns by about ¾’s. (A woman on one of the cancer facebook pages recommended it) I feel like I’m walking around with a ¼ inch, glass tube stuck up my urethra, and there’s a gooey, golf ball on the base of my spine. Still, I am feeling an eighteenth of an inch less exhausted than I was and that incremental difference is something to be grateful for.
I’ve started castor oil packs, which are supposed to be great for getting radiation out of the body. What you do is saturate a piece of wool flannel with organic castor oil, lay it over what hurts, and put a heating pad on top. I first read about castor oil packs in Edgar Cayce’s work and have used them over the years on clients and myself. More and more alternative cancer treatment centers are recommending castor oil packs and coffee enemas. (Coffee enemas are part of the Gerson protocol but I am not there yet.) As ever with any alternative cancer treatment you have people for and people against. People against castor oil packs are hollering that they send blood to the tumor. People for castor oil packs ignore the people against.
Diet really gets people worked up too: Keto or plant based? Plant based keto? Mediterranean? Paleo? I’ve seen people ready to kill each other over fruit or no fruit. Feeling powerless begats the need to feel powerful.
I’m a huge fan of castor oil packs, castor oil in general, and protecting my liver from all harm, for which castor oil packs are famous. (Best supplements for healthy liver are milk thistle and tudca – I take both.) I have used castor oil packs on my clients (and me) for back spasms, cramps, and stomach ulcers. Amazon now carries a castor oil wraps in different sizes, that fit wherever you need it to. You can pour the castor oil right on the wrap, tie it on, lay a heating pad on top the pack, et voila!
Castor oil packs feel so good you may never move again, and the wraps make it easy and way less messy than it used to be..
—
I’ve been doing hands on energy healing for almost 30 years. I love the way energy flows in the body and that energetic blockages can be moved with energy. There are established and healthy pathways (what I call light lanes) of energy in the body. I chose acupuncture, fenbendazole protocol, and a cannabis protocol (in conjunction with keto) to keep myself as healthy as possibly through all this. I’ve kept up with all of it, except for the days when I-Just-Couldn’t. (I am ever second guessing myself when it comes to food and supplements and protocols.)
I sat down at my altar tonight, chanted a little, meditated. The ley lines of my body are filled in and completely blocked out by radiation. From the waist down I am contained in stone, large irregularly shaped charcoal black stone. There is no life force at all in the part of me that was radiated; no connection, no feed, no grounding for the life force in my upper body.
You can’t destroy the impact of radiation. You can work around the radiation – 300 mg of melatonin protects the DNA in healthy cells, a certain number of grams of shark liver oil stop 50% of the damage caused by radiation. They say fasting before and after treatment is beneficial, but I couldn’t do it. My body needed to eat before and after treatment even if it was just almond butter on a spoon, or almonds dipped in plant butter, both of which I was capable of keeping down even on the worse days. Acupuncture was not destroying the impact of radiation BUT it was keeping my living life force, alive and moving.
Radiation sucks all the fluid out of your body, right when your body needs water the most. One of the side effects is peeing all the time. My organs desperately need fluid, but whatever I drink goes right through me. Laura tells me I need to get fluid into the cells and make sure the cells hold it. Given the pain of peeing the last thing you want is to drink more water. Still, I add Celtic Sea Salt to my water because it’s supposed to enhance hydration.
The further away I get from radiation, I’m wondering what the fuck just happened to me. Crying, exhausted, depressed, and the pain - oh my Goddess. Intellectually I am very willing to step out of the agonies and see life through a new lens, emotionally my biggest fear is I won’t be able to. I won’t be able to move on. I also know from my cancer facebook pages that this is pretty common among cancer patients. We won’t be able to get back to who we were or become who we’re supposed to be becoming.
Joe says that cancer has a voice, that permeates the culture. The image he shows me are of giant clouds. All these different giant clouds, all these different voices, and they do intersect and some of them form even bigger clouds. Makes me think of banks and too big to fail.
—
“You’re re-calibrating,” Fiona says. “What does your inner child want?”
“To let go, to just let go. And trust, and have faith, and go to the beach for a month or two and not worry about money or where the next job is coming from.”
I can’t stop crying – as if this desire will ever come true. When I started therapy with Wise Joe he said, don’t you believe in happy endings. I said, it never occurred to me I could have a happy ending. The depression gets worse every day. I have done my dance with anti-depressants, and they saved my life. The only time I used them was in the spring because that’s when I got depressed. I have what is called reversed sad.
I make another appointment with Fiona before we ring off. If Laura was the sunshine of the process of treatment, Fiona is the moon of my recovery from treatment. Wise Joe once told me that scars are eternal – we just get better at dealing with them when they get ripped open. Cancer has ripped open my two deepest scars; shame, and not being good enough. I know Fiona long enough, and I feel safe enough with her, to go there.
P.S. I’ve been so fucking cold this winter, I. Can’t. Wait. Till. Spring. I attribute this new kind of thinking/feeling/holding true to Eclipse Season.
—
RE: Eclipse season, Lorna Bevan writes: sudden tears and splits in the veil of linear time…
• reminders of impermanence - you “know” in your head that everything changes second by second but the sudden disappearance of the Light, the occulting, the overshadowing, the re-booting of what used to be your life, brings it home and make it starkly real. People leave, jobs end, passions fade, dreams disappear.
• the intersection of Fate /Karma/Free Will which accelerates the predictable unfolding of your unique seed pattern of growth and evolution, imprinted at your pre-natal eclipse. Your pattern is
interwoven with the collective zeitgeist. mechanisms that migrate you across time-lines + seed your new potential
• energy punctuation/inflection points in time and space
• vortexes that intensify the essence and qualities of the moment, when Chronos meets Chairos.
She goes onto say….
Now that the eclipses have knocked out much of your old infrastructure, it’s time to build using the technology of the future, not of the past…
• reshape your life in the image of what you want to be doing, not what
you did in the past.
• pioneer and break new ground
• take 100%responsibility for yourself and your actions
• start something radically new, that excites and intrigues you
• do more, much more, of what you’re passionate about
• break free from outgrown, restrictive roles, relationships, and ways of
living
Sunday, March 31, 2024
A conscious, wounded healer’s self-esteem is not tied up in their ability to heal others. A conscious, wounded healer participates in shadow work to uncover the frame and context of their experience/trauma. What makes the wounded healer a healer is their ability to draw new life and new seeds from their experience that are of soul benefit to others
Staring down April and May. Eclipse season – thinking a lot about what Lorna wrote, also thinking these are pretty standard actions, but they’re also actions, if you walk of consciousness, the path of the humane, that you are forever exploring. My context and frame – the ones I thought were going to take me happily into old age, are dead and gone.
I have not been near my altar much…just couldn’t bring myself to do it. But I’m ready now…to commit to the sacred without knowing exactly what it is I’m committing too. I’ve been dancing light, shadow, and everything in between for over 40 years. When I got sober in 1987 – one of the things I was told was to turn it over. You took the actions, you turned the results over, and where you ended up was God’s grace.
Someone once said to me, you can’t just call on God when you need help.
I said, “Isn’t that when you should call on God?
He said, I needed to be on my knees all the time to God, if I expected him to help me. I had to worship him all the time and then and only then could I make a request.
“And be grateful for whatever I get?”
“Absolutely!”
My first thought was – no wonder you’re sober without a modicum of recover. (Not kind, I know) My second thought was – your God is not my God. What your God represents is not my experiential understanding of the sacred; the Lady, the Lord, the Tao, and it is that understanding, which is calling me now. What it looks like are friendly tentacles coming from above and below, like Aunt Beast’s in A Wrinkle in Time. Suckers latch gently but firmly onto me, pulling me onto square one of a gray and black game board. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t fighting just a smidge.
“Better than a port, dear one,” I’m told.
I giggle. My friends on the other side have quite the sense of humor
—
We are all interconnected, all of life is interconnected, and the mystical experience is an experience of that connection that cannot be denied. It doesn’t have to be your name written in dew in a spider web, sometimes it’s as simple as thinking about the East and the Air and five minutes later finding a crow feather. It can as simple as Fiona saying to me, you have to have some fun, some faith, some trust. All of this dovetails with the themes of the eclipse. I’d be lying if I said I got excited when I read what Lorna had written. My first response was pissed off, and thinking I know all about this already. What I’m accepting is there’s way more for this High Priestess to know, and it’s pretty damn far outside my wheelhouse.
What’s strange is that I haven’t called on God or Goddess or the Tao, since I was diagnosed at the end of August. Yes, I’d a few sit-downs with Shiva and angels, and surprise gifts of cash that saved me from a much worse nightmare that this process could have been. But daily meditation and prayer - nope - and it’s time to begin.
I feel like I’m coming to this stage of sacred work as a beginner. The dining room, which is where my altar is, has become a witch room – my study. I have a large, dark blue, velvet armchair in front of the altar, truly a chair built for meditation, I also have a large round table, where I can write down whatever came through during meditation. I painted the altar and the table pink – it strikes me that if I’m painting something ballet slipper pink somewhere inside I’m alive!
I once wrote that pain hollows you out to know whole joy. When I first started writing this blog, I remember writing that I could not wrap my head around the truth, the reality, that everything contains it’s opposite, not in terms of opposing, but in terms of compliment. I’ve been twisting 36 ways from Sunday not to accept that there could possibly be a plus side to cancer. Now that radiation is over - I have to explore and unpack this idea - if there is to be any quality to my life and living at all. As I write this I’m quite clear on the fact that I am not running this show.
I don’t think I’ve ever been this wide open.
Wishing y’all love beyond all reason.
Live loud, love fierce, and suffer no fools. Kat x0x0x0x.
Sending you love my sister, beyond all reason. <3 <3
Big love to you, Kat. Your feelings and emotions are the fuel for the uncommonly gifted writer within you that simply “must” express.❤️. Even now, when you feel like part of you is gone, your written words fairly sparkle on the page! As does your sass. Your writing not only “invites” us to participate in first person, it commands it. You. Are. Not. Done. Here! xo