Return to Wholeness

This post's title is a title of a book written by Dr. David Simon in 1999. The subtitle is: Embracing Body, Mind, and Spirit in the Face of Cancer.

Dr. Simon self-diagnosed his own brain tumor in June 2010. He died 1.5 years later in January of 2012. I feel connected to this man and his work. It is beyond the cancer that is connecting me to him. It is how he said the word 'sweetness' in the videos that I watched, produced by his son Max.

Here is the link:
http://returntowholeness.com/

The title "Return to Wholeness" is my mantra right now. In Dr. Simon's introduction to his book he explains how Diane Connelly once said, "All sickness is homesickness." The healing journey is the returning to home. But where is home? What does that mean?

These are not new questions for me. I have asked myself this before. I was first prompted to allow this question to come up after encountering the book Women Who Run With the Wolves. I have been working with WWRWTW for years now. I have been living and breathing the teachings by this beloved author, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

Honestly, I have been struck a little numb and dazed by chapter nine, the chapter is titled "Homing: Returing to Oneself." I have thought before that this is the chapter of WWRWTW that has perplexed me the most. I couldn't understand why I wasn't receiving the messages that, say, my friends seemed to be getting.

I gave a copy to one of my friends, the fearless leader of our fire dancing troupe, and she was so inspired by chapter nine, that she created a whole fire spectacular performance based on, and dedicated to, that chapter alone.

Right now sitting right next to me, I have my own sweet copy of WWRWTW that Dr. E signed when I traveled to Colorado last June to start a training with her. (More on that later)
It is worn and torn with coffee grounds spilt into the chapter list. I carry this book with me almost everywhere I go. It went with me to my first chemo treatment. I am going to re-read chapter nine on Homing and Returning to Myself and invite myself to listen at a deeper level inspired by Dr. Simon's work and, of course, the fact that I have cancer.

I personally don't believe that my cancer is happening for no reason. Perhaps, I need this life belief to make sense of it all. But really, it matters not, for I know that part of my own inner and outer work is to find my own soul reasoning behind my illness.

xoxog

First days of chemo

Okay, so Cancer College just got mightier. I am going for a PhD now. This is a darker and twistier journey than we all first thought. The PET scan has revealed that the cancer has spread, a lot. I will know more next week after my team (I now have a team of oncologists and radiologists) meets to discuss the best course of action for what the PET scan revealed. I guess the radioactive sugar can reveal a lot. I am not invited to this team meeting even though it is me that is bringing them together and me they are discussing.

My body. My liver. My bones. My breast. My lymph nodes. My life...

A dear friend listened to me bemoan the western medical system. "I am not whole to them. I am only the sickness. They don't want to hear that I am a mother. That I am here to help people. That I work with so many children. They don't want to know how much loss I have experienced the past year of my life. They don't want to connect emotions to sickness, that is not tangible to them."

She texted me later and said she was thinking about what I had said and she suggested that it is me that makes the medicine whole. Me. Yeah, me. That is where I first need to start on the wholeness thing. I feel like it did start to happen on the first sleepless night after the breast cancer diagnosis. I am not ready to write about that yet. I have tried to explain it to friends and I feel like they are hearing me, yet it is not coming across right.

Yes, I will. I will make the medicine whole. I trust this cancer has already made me more whole than I have ever been in this life. The fucking paradox...again and again.

And I will fight this and I will survive because I am a survivor. I will transform this into hope and light and love. I am in the abyss. Indeed, I have landed at the bottom. The chemo is coursing through my body. I just had to quietly make my way to the bathroom thinking I was going to vomit. Nope, just dry heaves, which are a million times better than actually puking. I will soon start to notice my hair on my pillow is no longer attached to my head. The nausea is almost constant, but mostly bearable with the meds.

I am not telling anyone about this blog yet. I need it just for me. In the wee hours when I wake with that tangy taste of almost vomiting and reach blindly for my anti-nausea pills, I know I have gotten my sleep and there is no going back to magic dreamland for me tonight. Trying to feel my feelings about all of this when nauseous is not a good freaking idea. It just increases the nausea, so I write for my own self. I write to pass the time and attempt to catch some of my buzzing thoughts without actually crying. It sounds stupid I know. I should want to cry a fucking river right now, but crying seems to intensify the side-effects of the chemo and definitely makes the nausea turn into dry heaves or puking. So, I write to gently vent off some of the strong feelings churning inside of me. Maybe I will find that crying until I puke is what I need to do. Not yet though, I have not yet discovered that to be helpful. So, I write. And I wait for the dawn of the coming day, where my babies will open their eyes and say, "Mama, I love you."