Ch 15 - This Witch is Healing her Cancer
I wish I knew I wish I knew...What makes me me, what makes you you....
Hey y’all.
After the emergency appendectomy, June was pretty much a lost month. I don’t have dates; I do have what I’ve jotted down. It takes a lot longer to write a post these days because I keep losing the plot. Rather than posting art with this piece, I am posting the latest photo of me as per y’all’s (my readers) request. See, I really am ok. x0x0x0x0
Do I still have cancer? Have I eliminated it from my body? I’d one tiny tumor low in my rectum and it’s not there anymore. It was still there after radiation, weirdly shaped like it’d been folded for origami, I wasn’t sure if that was scar tissue or tumor. I started with feco suppositories and there’s nothing there now. Due to the emergency appendectomy, the sigmoidoscopy had to be cancelled and I have to get it rescheduled. They told me no drugs for the sigmoidoscopy. No one’s coming near me unless I’m sedated. I don’t know what’s going in my body. Do I just go about life and living like a normal person?
I’m not sure what to say when people ask me, “How are you feeling? You look great!” I usually answer, “pretty good,” but the truth is I don’t know how I feel. Radiation, the cancer diagnosis, shattered me. When I close my eyes, I see shards of over dyed, radiant colors. Blues and fuchsias, greens and yellows, and oranges and pinks, twisting and bumping gentle off each other, untethered in the space of the round. Instinct and intuition tell me the magnetism of old stories, that held the shards solidly in place, is gone. The old ways of being, thinking, and doing are gone. We are not linear beings; we live in the 3-D round; individually and collectively – life, death, re-birth. If the linear is to be effective it must be rooted in and serving the round.
I do feel way better than when I was undergoing treatment, and I do feel way better than I felt those first few weeks after treatment. My strength is coming back incrementally – I used to walk/jog 8 times around the track, now the most I can do is 2. Having cancer is like walking on a razor blade and my sanity is a direct result of compartmentalization. Coming back to self after treatment feels like falling off a high rise, through a plate glass window, and landing on filthy concrete. Bam! And she’s back, warts and all! The pieces of me are landing. One’s here, one’s over there, oppsy here’s one right here.
A woman, who lost her husband to cancer a little over a year ago, asked me why I was fighting with people who were trying to save my life. This was in response to her, ‘you look great!’ and my pithy answer – ‘fighting with doctors keeps me young.’ The venom underneath and threading through the question was unmistakable – who was I to question the medical establishment? And science?! Her husband was ‘important,’ the best in his chosen field. They were a ‘power couple.’ He received cutting edge standard of care, landed on stage 4 of the gameboard, and because of personal connections was accepted into a clinical trial for the latest immunotherapy drug. Don’t believe anyone who tells you, your personal connections do not count for getting into a clinical trial. Take one available space and 3 people, each with the necessary criteria (symptoms) to be accepted into said trial. The person with the connections gets the space.
A year into immunotherapy, the man was deaf, and his wife was digging his poop out of his butt. By stage 4 there’s no immune system left, so why are you giving a patient a drug that needs the immune system to work, or is supposed to strengthen the immune system that’s no longer there? He was dead a little after a year of starting the trial. No question the trial bought him time. No question standard of care can buy you some time, no question traditional cancer treatment can buy you some time, if you’re willing to sacrifice quality of life. At this point I honestly think that cancer treatment is a result of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. I also think it’s pretty awful you’ve got celebrities shilling for standard of care. The average person’s standard of care is nothing like a celebrity’s standard of care.
“You practice a very strange form of elitism, Mom,” my son tells me.
I grew up in privilege. I’m thinking of college: I’d gone on the pill, and I was dizzy and having breakthrough bleeding. I checked back with the college doctor who told me to double up on my pill, which didn’t sit right with me. It didn’t sit right with my roomie either, who promptly called her grandmother’s doctor and got me an appointment that day. My roomie’s family owned the state where we were in school.
“We have to be there in 2 hours,” she said.
After I finished telling the doctor my symptoms, he asked if I was on the pill.
I was bright red. How did he know? I hadn’t mentioned the pill because I didn’t want the doctor to think I was a whore, which is what my mother called women who had sex before marriage. It was 1975.
He explained that out the 100% of women taking the pill, 20% had severe side effects and had no business taking it. I was one of them.
“Get off the pill,” he said.
I did and presto- all my symptoms cleared up. Now that, was a great doctor.
Sense memory: I was a method actress back in the day. Studied with Strasberg when the Lee Strasberg Institute was still on 15th street. The point of the exercise (sense memory) was to create honest emotions using different sensory elements. Heat, sun, cold rain, etc. There’s a huge different between acting cold and really feeling cold. The sense memory of this past year (the diagnosis, the treatment, the freezing cold mornings, the feel of my gown being pulled up, the sound, the smell of radiation, the sense of my ovaries turning into charcoal briquets, the devastating loneliness) is fading but still very much there. Like a three-d line of mud colored energy laid on top my seven planes.
I’ve always been comfortably vain and I’m quite enjoying how I look these days – naked and in clothes. I’ve lost 40 lbs, meaning I’m weighing in at what I used to weigh when I was still acting in the late 70’s and early 80’s. I’m still not doing any sugar and almost no carbs. I really miss my sugar. I miss muffins and pasta and pizza and my very favorite cinnamon toast. I REALLY miss eating for pleasure. I continue with the Joe Tippen’s protocol, cannabis, and Onco #2, #3, and #4 supplements. The links are hot if you want to check them out. From the beginning I was looking for supplements that worked synergistically and I found the answer at Onco. I don’t do any supplements on Saturday and Sunday – it was an intuitive, instinctive decision.
The first 2 weeks of June:
I have to get up; I have to get going; I can’t be lying around sleeping all the time, reading, and watching NetFlix. I need to get a part-time job which will help me organize my time, which I seem to have lost the ability to do. I’ve been working part-time day jobs for fucking ever to support my writing. Between a day job and psychic readings, I won’t be rich, but I’ll cover my nut and I’ll have time to write and pitch and write some more. Fluent in Alzheimer’s and rich in recommendations and referrals, I decided to look for a patient I could take care of 2-3 days a week.
The first woman was blind, only needed me for a day, and didn’t want to pay my fee. Her aide, who I was crazy about, was clearly being taken advantage of. The next woman was in perfect health – mentally, emotionally, and physically. The daughters, in their early 60’s, did everything they could to make me feel comfortable and wanted. The mother - beautiful with white shoulder length hair and fine, intelligent features sat in stony silence gazing at the lake outside her window.
“You’re really hating this aren’t you?” I said.
“I don’t like strangers in my house,” she said.
“I get that.”
The sisters looked pained.
This was not going to be my job. Loved the house on the lake, knew I’d love the mother, but I wasn’t her cup of tea. The sisters were babes in the woods re: hiring an aide, and the mother was acting so cold and rude to me, they were clearly embarrassed, and I felt bad for them.
“Whoever you hire,” I said, “hire on contingency. Go private if you want her to drive your mother around – agencies don’t allow their workers to drive the clients. Pay by the week. Private aides cost more but you truly do get what you pay for. There are state programs that pay family to take care of family. More and more arrangements are being made where the aide signs up with one of the programs and the family hiring her pays the difference. My employers paid me my fee every week; the state paid bi-weekly, and I had that deposited into my client’s checking account. In other words, I was earning my fee, and my employers were getting part of the money back. This is highly illegal, so don’t tell.”
The sisters giggled, even the mother gave me a smile. All I could think was – tomorrow is another day. Buy stock in turnips, Katie Lou.
By the 3rd week of June, I was unable to do anything but sit in my chair and cry. Every time I made an effort to move forward (get a side job, pitch a book) and make plans (learn how to line dance, write the new novel) I hit a wall. Even micro-dosing mushrooms wasn’t helping. I was awake, I was alive, but my mind, of which I am inordinately fond, wasn’t working. I am partial to the seeds of new ideas and planting those seeds with the right words, but my brain couldn’t pick a seed from goat poop.
I was sitting in my navy-blue velvet armchair, legs up on my navy-blue velvet ottoman crying away, when Lynn barreled in. Lynn is my neighbor Hilda’s daughter-in-law. I’ve written about Hilda before, she’s 95, stone deaf, sharp as a tack, and I’m crazy about her. Lynn, Hilda, and their entire, very loud, loving, battling family are originally from Queens, NY. I live in an old white, Victorian house complete with portico. Hilda and I are upstairs; she has the east wing, I have the west, and Sheila, the owner, has the downstairs. Doors are never locked in this house – we walk right into each other’s apartments for visiting, and people coming to see us do the same. This is why returning home I periodically find a 40 lb bag of kitty litter on the ottoman in the living room. I order from Amazon and Hilda’s son, on his way to visit his mom, brings it upstairs and puts it in my apartment for me.
“I can’t stop crying,” I wailed, standing to hug Lynn her hello.
Lynn grabbed my shoulders, gave me a hard-shake, and kept on shaking.
“You’re healing! You’re allowed to cry! You hear me! You are healing and you’re allowed to cry!!!”
I collapsed in her arms, sobbing till I couldn’t sob anymore. All my female friends are strong women, and we suck at asking for help or leaning on anyone: the fear being they won’t be able to help us and then we’re stuck having to make them feel better for not being able to help. My therapist Wise Joe used to ask, but what if they could help you? and I’d shrug him off. Later, power walking the sidewalks of Brooklyn, I’d wonder what it’d be like to be vulnerable. What it’d be like to allow another person to see that vulnerability and help you.
Lynn has a Queen’s accent and like every woman I’ve ever known, native to Queens (and the Bronx) that accent could peel paint off a wall when they start hollering. I lived in New York City for 35 years and loved it beyond all reason. Lynn’s response to my crying - shaking me and yelling - was home and comfort. Settling me back in my chair, she took a seat across from me.
“I don’t know who I am,” I told her, blowing my nose.
“I didn’t know who I was either,” she said, reaching for the balled-up Kleenex to throw away.
I hiccupped. “What’s wrong with me I can’t get up and get going.”
Lynn gave me a look. “Are you serious?”
Lynn is another cancer survivor – cervical. She had a hysterectomy, no chemo, no radiation, and her doctor said, “We got it all.” All these years later, she’s still NED (no evidence of disease) which she attributes to God. She’s Christian, I’m pagan, we are secure in our sacred paths and respect each other’s. The talk with Lynn, the intensity, the intimacy, and the overwhelming trust, moved me out of a very dark place and onto new ground, By the time she left, I felt overwhelmingly soothed. In bed that night I wrote in my journal, “I think feeling soothed and relief are my two favorite feelings.” I looked to the heavens, sending a telepathic message to Wise Joe. “I know what it’s like to be vulnerable and let another person help me. I think I’m going to do it again.”
Back in my chair, the morning after my visit with Lynn, reveling in exquisite dawn and held by sweet, all-encompassing wonder. Bird song sings new hope. Watching the light come, shadows giving way to color, marveling at this life of mine, gratitude so powerful I have to sit down. Like anyone’s life mine has had an unfair amount of shit, but the magick, the beauty, the love dance between the visible and the invisible, the interconnectedness of it all, cannot be denied. In acceptance is a recognition of the beauty that can be born out the ugly. It’s not our experience that makes us who we are, it’s what we do with our experience, how we process it, and the actions we choose to take.
My phone beeps. It’s a text from a dear friend who will be in Bovina, for July and August, and would I be interested in taking care of her daughter 2 days a week and teaching her Wicca? And of course she’ll pay my fee.
Once again, I am reminded that bunches of beloved dead friends are looking out for me!
The child in question is a beautiful, difficult little girl and I’m crazy about her. I’ve watched over her before, through tantrums that would scare a super hero (but not me), and from the beginning we’ve gotten along like a house afire. Teach her Wicca? What could be more fun than that!? Physically I can handle 2 days of work. It won’t make me rich, but with the readings I should just be able to make my nut. Plus, I’ll have time to write, pitch, re-write, post and work-out. I have to get some weights; I’ve loss muscle mass and I need to rebuild. Where I used to have biceps I have pockets of droopy skin, and my very flat ass could use a whole lot more definition. I still need a hair person. I am way more gray that I want to be and want my ginger back. Actually, my gray is coming in white and I’m thinking the ginger I grew up with might be nice streaked in alongside. And maybe a little auburn.
Checked my portal. Because of the appendectomy, I’ve been re-scheduled for a sigmoidoscopy June 27, but they didn’t consult me and weekend of the 27th is my grandson’s birthday party. Called left a message, that I’d been scheduled but I wasn’t going to be here. 3 weeks of back and forth and I finally reached a scheduler to reschedule the sigmoidoscopy
“There is no appointment for the 27th,” she said.
“Hold on a sec,” I said, “Let me check my portal again. Oh dear, it’s disappeared. Someone must have taken it off after I cancelled.”
“It was never there,” she said.
“Yah, it was.”
“No,” she said, winding up for battle.
An impassioned monologue and rising decibel of self-defense ensued. I am a fighter by nature, I like to win, and I like to win a lot. But over the last year, I’ve been stepping out of fights right and left. I don’t have the energy for bullshit fights, I need my energy for the big battles, so when I feel the Cuchulainn in me coming to surface I ask, “Is this a necessary battle?” It’s usually not. The question that logically follows is - what’s the easiest way to resolve this?
“Let’s go ahead and schedule something now,” I said, cutting her off in mid-sentence.
August 21st was the first available appointment.
“But it’s June,” I sputtered.
“That’s the first appointment I have.”
“2024 or 2025?”
“2024.”
“And I will take it. Thank you for your help.”
(PS - Cuchulainn was the greatest knight of the Red Branch Warriors and when enraged took on the characteristics of the Scandinavian Berserkers. I’d offer prayers to Cuchulain, Finn, and the Red Branch Warriors to keep my son safe when he was out and about in the city. They did.)
4th week in June, heard from same scheduler. She wanted to get me scheduled for a colonoscopy.
“I’m supposed to get a sigmoidoscopy on August 21, not a colonoscopy.”
She talked right over me about myriad different procedures that I needed; procedures I knew for fact had nothing to do with me.
“This is Katherine Tupman,” I said, “11/10/52.”
She got very quiet.
“I am so sorry; I have the wrong patient.”
“It happens, I said, and hung up.
I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry and not for the first time I wondered how stupid people deal with entrenched authority. Clearly, there are not enough doctors and nurses to staff the hospitals in rural upstate New York, which is why I called the minute I knew I couldn’t make the appointment, so someone else could get the slot. Still, I’d rather be here than New York City. I’d cancer patients at Sloan-Kettering and I never met meaner, more arrogant doctors, even at Bethesda in D.C. where my momma was. I have witnessed clinical trials at Sloan that would fry the brain of a true medical scientist and researcher. As for the good doctors and the brilliant surgeons, I think they are desperately needed and I think Big Pharma and Insurance does everything it can to destroy them. They want those boys and girls contained, doing the procedures that will make Big Pharma and Insurance the most money.
I still dream of the day doctors and alternative healers come together for the good of humanity. What could be accomplished boggles my mind in the best of ways.
Met my beloved baby brother, Michael, in Phoenicia for lunch. He drove up from Lewes with KC - his schnauzer and partner in crime – to check on my well-being. Michael and I have been fighting since he was born. There’s 18 months difference between us and according to my mother I broke his leg by pushing him off a chair. (In my defense, it was MY cookie) That we love each other deeply is a fact; that we would drop anything to help the other in crisis is also a fact. I can criticize Michael, and Michael can criticize me, but God forbid anyone criticizes Michael to my face or me to Michael’s face. It’s a death wish. (Unless you’re my former college roommate, who helps me steal things out of Mikey’s attic, like family silver he’ll never use, and art he doesn’t like but I do.)
Michael was Yale undergrad, UVA law, worked at White and Case (Gooliani’s former firm) for seven years and left to take a job as Deputy Assistant Attorney General of Delaware. At a dinner party he is a hostess’s favorite guest – the conversation doesn’t lag when my brother’s around. Erudite, sophisticated, and funny. Michael and I are intellectually and politically on opposite ends of the spectrum but morally and ethically on the same page.
He’s truly shocked by how good I look. No question he would have preferred I do Standard of Care, but he is doing his best to support my methods for eliminating this scourge from my body. Michael was musing on whether or not to sell his house and go for something with a smaller footprint.
I said, “You can’t sell the house.” We were having lunch at the Phoenicia Diner.
“Why?”
“What if the doctors tell me I’m going to die? I need a place to go die.”
Michael nodded.
“This is the first time I’ve gone off my cancer diet, I’m having a patty melt and fries. Bread Michael! I’m eating bread and French fries!”
“I’ll redo the second-floor bathroom,” he said.
My bedroom in his house is on the second floor.
Today is July 14th. This will be posted tomorrow, probably during my follow-up appointment with Dr V. After you finish treatment (radiation/chemo) you’re slotted into aftercare – in three weeks I was scheduled for a follow-up examination; in three weeks after that I was scheduled for a sigmoidoscopy with the surgeon, who would then speak with me about the way forward. If something should come up that changes the schedule (like an emergency appendectomy, or side effects so severe you can’t get out of bed, or scheduling incompetency) you are stuck waiting anywhere from a month and a half to two and a half months for another appointment.
If you’ve been following the blog, you know I like Dr V. A lot, and have since the beginning, except (chapter 11) for the time I told him to fuck off and get away from me. I want bloodwork and a pet scan and am hoping he can move things along. Dr V is very open to the pub-med studies I bring him re: cancer and cancer treatment, and I think the man is leaning towards epigenics, but he won’t discuss it. I found a functional medicine doctor in Oneonta, but in order to see her I have to pay $5000 up front to join her practice.
“But I haven’t even met her,” I told the receptionist. “Why would I pay $5000 to join the practice of a woman I haven’t even met?”
“This is the way we do things,” he said.
Hanging up I thought - It’s a damn good thing I’m a phenomenal researcher. Still, it’d be great to have a doctor in my court that I could afford who was up on the latest alternative and traditional cancer research. Someone who knew about histotripsy and could help me find out exactly what frequency they’re using to destroy cancer tumors. Someone I could trust to help me make the right decisions. I wish that kind of doctor for me, I wish that kind of doctor for everyone.
Live loud, love fierce and suffer no fools, Katherine x0x0x0
It’s a wonder how those who weren’t born ‘red on the head’ in the early days of November survive without our fucking guidance (the scheduler). You are perfection, cry—wail— you earned the right. You are a goddess. My goddess. xoxo
I was so happy to find this post, and though I get that you don’t feel quite yourself yet, your writing is as captivating as ever. ❤️ And you DO look fabulous! 😀