Chapter 11: This Witch is Healing Her Cancer
'And all the ground beneath with tears and blood was drenched.' Dante Alighieri
March 1, 2024 - Friday
A new woman sitting next to me in the waiting area – I say, how you doing, honey? and she starts talking. Fast. She tells me she’s only 49 and has been on chemo for a year. Breast cancer, she’s had the surgery, they got 95% of it and now the radiation is supposed to destroy the last bit. She’s freaking out about the cost, not doing any alternatives, and not interested. Her name is Diana and I asked her where her bow and arrow were. She laughed. She’s after me on the radiation line so I hug her on my way out.
Friday’s, I meet with Dr. V to discuss my progress. This week he had an intern trailing him. I wouldn’t have trusted that intern to make me a milkshake. So, I’m looking at this kid thinking you have no aptitude for this work at all, but what I said was,
The most important thing you can do is listen and really hear what your patient is saying. That’s what Dr. V does.
My vital signs - body temperature, pulse rate, respiration rate, blood pressure – continue to be excellent and yes, Dr V is pleased with the my progress – the tumor is shrinking.
You’re sure, you’re not lying to me? I asked.
I won’t lie to you, he said.
After meditating on it and a channeling session with Marci’s, I am doing the full 5 weeks. That means I’m done on the Friday the 8th. Monday the 11th at the latest. Good thing - the side effects are kicking my ass. There’s a blinding quality to the side effects - like the lens you see life through was changed without your awareness.
March 2, 2024 - Sat
I’m a strong proponent of sitting with feelings – no matter how ugly – until you know right use of those feelings. I hold true that all human beings are perfect microcosms of Nature, and our feelings are a barometer of our weather. Feelings are not facts, like gravity and the tides they are fact, they are clues. What I learned with Wise Joe is if I don’t make the feelings conscious, they’re going into shadow where they will continue to fester and grow in power until they’re calling the shots in my life. Feelings that tend to be slipped into shadow are the ugly ones: resentment, vindictiveness, intense dislike, envy, the list goes on.
I read over everything I’d written the other day and I’m floored by the emotional arc of the last 6 months. From the devastation of the diagnosis, to hating everything, and everyone involved, with traditional cancer treatment, to putting up a wall to some people I love because I just can’t talk, to feeling blessed beyond all reason for Laura and Vinny and my team at Fox Care.
I call Katie at the front desk – Beautiful Katie.
“Katie, beautiful Katie,” I sing and she laughs. Queen A and Queen B wanted to know what I called Suzanne. I call Suzanne - Suzanne with Z - because that’s how she introduced herself to me. She felt left out (not that she said anything, but I could tell) and I didn’t want that, so I looked up the letter Z, which I knew for fact was a very powerful letter, and cut, pasted, and printed out the meaning. She loved it and wanted to talk about the power of the number 8, which is associated with the letter Z. I should tell you - at first, I didn’t care she felt left out, she’d been a bitch to me, but came the morning I really looked at Suzanne with a Z, while she was helping Queen A get me arranged and for treatment, and I saw behind the terseness and the sharp, to the heart and soul broken one too many times.
—
I know a few traditional medical doctors who are honest-to-God healers, but I don’t think of the traditional medical community as a whole as a healing community. I’m flashing on back in the late 70’s. I was 27 and moved to D.C. because I planned to get a job on the Hill and go into politics.
(Mother said, “But you don’t know anything about politics, Kathy..
My Uncle Bill said, “Dee Kathy knows everything, she needs to know.”)
My period didn’t seem to want to stop and after 6 weeks of blood I went to see a GYN, recommended by a friend of my mother’s. He examined me and said I needed a D and C and hormone treatments. When I told my mother she said, “Don’t do it in Washington. You come across the river and have it done here.
I said, “The doctor’s an idiot and he’s flat-out wrong. I’m going to New York to see my GYN who knows what the fuck he’s doing. Doctors are not God, mother.”
“You always make things so complicated, dear.”
—
Caught the Eastern shuttle to New York the next day. As per Alvin (my GYN) all I needed was to have my IUD taken out.
“Breathe in.”
“Oww! Fuck!”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Alvin tells me. “You are 100% healthy.”
—
I got Alvin through a high-class escort who lived down the hall from me in the fancy, doorman, Upper East Side high rise I first lived in when I moved to the city after college. Rona quit working as an escort when a Texas billionaire fell in love with her and wanted exclusive rights to her body and her many talents.
“Exclusivity means you have to keep me,” she told him, and he kept her very, very well.
Rona was also an astrologer. Once a month the Texas billionaire would show up, meaning I couldn’t drop by to see what-was-what with the planets. Rona’d make the man strip, snap a dog collar on him, and order him to sit next to her Eames Lounge Chair. She would then strip, take a seat in her chair, attach a leash to his collar, and read Harpers. Rona is the first person I ever heard use the phrase – I’m having feelings today.
The point is if anyone knew a good GYN it would be Rona, not a friend of my mother’s; women who thought you couldn’t wear tampons unless you’d had sex and lunched on tuna stuffed tomatoes and unsweetened ice tea, apres tennis. Ultimately coke took Rona and her best friend Marty out. I saw Marty at B&H on the Lower East Side hassling the man behind the counter. He’d no idea who I was.
March 6, 2024 – Wed
Started losing it over the week-end and was in full meltdown by Monday. Between the second degree burns on my lady parts and the utter inability to keep anything down – I’m thinking just toss it in the toilet and skip the middle person – I’m crying all the time. The complexity of the feelings that I’ve had since my diagnosis and staying conscious of those feelings, is overwhelming. Still, I was counting on just having to make it till Friday, the 8th, Monday the 11th at the latest.
In 70 years on the planet, I’ve never experienced anything as brutal, isolating, lonely, and spiritually and emotionally devastating as radiation, and on the checklist of bad things that can happen to women, I pretty much tik all the boxes. Given the fact I point blank refuse to be controlled by my past, I landed on the path of transformation and alchemy. Psychic alchemy is about transforming the shit that happened into pure gold. It’s hard work, but I had Wise Joe and what we did together allowed me to move into and live from my authenticity. There’s a joy that comes from being your authentic self that can’t be contained and one of the greatest things about that joy is it can be shared.
That I could live and work grounded in Gaia, channeling/living/breathing transformation and alchemy, and passing on what was of benefit to me to others, when asked, was a gift with a capital G. But I’m bone tired of transforming and alchemy and I understand the word ‘weary,’ in a whole new way. I want to be doing something other than cancer; I want to think about something other than cancer. Given the horrific impact of radiation on my body, my mind, my spirit, that’s not going to happen for awhile. With every session of radiation more of me is erased.
—
Dr. V told me today that my last day was the 18th, not the 8th, not the 11th, but the 18th, and I completely lost it.
“I am burned to a crisp! I hollered. These are 2nd degree burns! I do anything not to have to go to the bathroom because it is so fucking painful. I’m not drinking enough water because it’s too painful to go to the bathroom. (P.S I was given something that was supposed to help with that – it does not. None of the drugs that are prescribed to relieve the side effects of standard of care treatment do much of anything.)
Dr. V’s being all compassionate and he understands it’s a brutal treatment, blah, blah, blah, and I said, “just get the fuck away from me. I don’t want to talk to you.”
All the nurses were offering me hugs and I’m still hollering and telling ‘em “No!’ I didn’t want their goddam hugs. Then the Dawn social worker showed up. obviously someone called her, or she heard me hollering, and proceeded to tell me all about her trip to Mexico. I’m not sure if it was to distract me, or to make me think about doing something fun in the future. I’m pretty sure she called Laura (she’s one of Laura’s clients) because I got a truly beautiful text from her. The thing about Laura is her response is heart-felt and true. I don’t feel like I’m being managed with love and kindness. I really hate being managed with love and kindness - the operating word being managed.
—
I’m bawling away on Laura’s table; she’s taking my pulses – and I’m feeling better with every needle she sticks in me. Vinny called, I was in the car on my way to home, and I told him about going off on the doctor and not letting the nurses hug me.
Vinny laughed. “You wanted to sting ‘em all to death, didn’t you?”
“Oh Goddess, yes I did!”
Vinny laughed harder, and I felt sane. I think the kindest thing one human being can do for another, when they’re going through really hard times, is to hold space for them to have their feelings, without trying to jolly them up, or steer them towards what they should be grateful for, or say something stupid like - God’s got a plan or wait for the miracle. I believe in miracles and there’s something about God-having-a-plan that I entertain periodically, but there’s a time and place to say - wait for the fucking miracle and/or God has a plan. Just because someone’s feelings are making you uncomfortable doesn’t give you the right to cut the person having those feelings off at the knees.
—
I can’t keep anything down, I had to quit taking my supplements; my tummy can’t take it. The point of the supplements was to kill the cancer stem cells. Given the fact there was no metastasis after 6 months of supplements. 4 months of keto, and acupuncture. the protocol worked.
Steamed or stir-fried vegetables and/or anything raw comes right up or flows right out. I did love juicing beet, celery, carrot, and apples together but once you throw up a beet, you don’t ever want to do that again. I buy grass fed chopped sirloin and make a burger when I get home from treatment and acupuncture. That I can keep down, and I follow with a cup of coffee with heavy cream. Dharti sends me a homeopathic thingy to help with the burns and it does but it has sugar in it. Called the kids and said I needed them to text me every week to check-in. They’re my family and I need them to be more present right now.
—
Nurse navigator spoke to me yesterday about setting up an appointment with the surgeon for a sigmoidoscopy."
“No one’s getting near me,” I told her.
“It’s three to four weeks out, you’ll be feeling better.”
“No one’s getting near me,” I repeated.
I am the woman from Sturges I wrote about early on, but the new woman, the one I hugged hello her first day, doesn’t raise her fist in solidarity.
—
Radiation was a conscious choice – I weighed what I knew at the time to be the facts and I made a choice. There’s a part of me that thinks I’m a total wimp. I could stop all this tomorrow and I should. There’s another part of me saying, finish it out Katie Lou. Finish it and fuck all.
—
Live loud, love fierce, and suffer no fools. Kat x0
Sweetie - seconding what Catherine said - sending you gentle hugs and wrapping you in light my sister. 😘 ❤️
I am hugging you and loving you with all the tenderness that you need. 😘 💦 💧 🚿