Cancer, Here I Come – Ready to Rock

Good Morning America.  I am so chipper this morning.  Maybe it was the incredible Taj Mahal concert we attended last night.  72 years old, playing the guitar with the verve and gusto of a man half his age.  Cute as a button, alright a big, round button, Taj balanced his substantial bum on a wooden bar stool, explaining, “I don’t stand up when I play in fine art auditoriums because I know you all will want to dance and there isn’t a dance floor in sight.” Coy and friendly, he played at least 7 different instruments including the electric keyboards, banjo, a rose-colored steel guitar, either a mini guitar or a ukulele, not sure which and multiple acoustic guitars.  What a night.  Jazz, blues, reggae, with a few ballads thrown in to mellow us out.  Loved it.

So here I am, Friday, March 21, ready to go see my general practitioner to discuss my game plan.  JImmy and I have decided to refer to my doctor, Jeff Warren, as the point guard, the play maker and I am the coach.  I am assuming full responsibility for the choices I need to make.  I am almost positive my treatment will include surgery and, most likely radiation.  Last time I had cancer I had radiation therapy for 42 days consecutive days, not counting the weekends.  Trying to find a clear 42 day window in the next 5 months of my life is going to be tough.  I will not start treatment before we go to the beach on May 8.  Then at the end of May, we have tickets to DC where a very good friend of ours will celebrate his 60th birthday.   Two weeks later, we have flights booked to Las Vegas.  From there we will head out to the Grand Canyon with several of our good friends, including my doctor, Jeff Warren, to go rafting for a week.

My plan is to delay radiation until after the Grand Canyon trip.  I do not want to forgo the 7 day silent meditation retreat I plan to attend starting July 17th at the Upaya Zen Center just outside Santa Fé.  The problem is I only have a  22 day window between our return from the Canyon and the departure date for the retreat.

Would that I could delay all treatment until August 23rd, when I come back home from a writing workshop in Provincetown, MA.  That would be my choice. Not likely.  So as I write this I can see that the best compromise is to miss the silent retreat in July..  Get the damn radiation over with and be healthy when my daughter,  Katie, delivers our second grandchild in last August.  That way I can go to the writing retreat, which I do not want to miss.  Another consideration in my favor is that I have been accepted for the Rohatsu:

Rohatsu Sesshin marks the enlightenment of the Buddha. It is a powerful gathering of practitioners and friends who are dedicated to realizing the way. Roshis Joan Halifax and Enkyo O’Hara, and Sensei Kazuaki Tanahashi explore the enlightenment of the Buddha, the story and its meaning in our lives today, during this powerful annual retreat. The retreat is in silence, with sitting and walking meditation, eating formally as a community, daily dharma talks, private interviews with teachers, liturgy and samu. Sesshin provides a powerful container supporting the unification of body and mind, and our individuality with the community and the world. Roshi Joan Halifax is Abbot of Upaya Zen Center. Roshi Enkyo O’Hara is Abbot of Village Zendo, and Sensei Kazuaki Tanahashi is a Dogen Scholar.

I was hoping to attend the 7 day retreat in July as a training ground for the Rohatsu in December.  Time will tell.  After I see Dr. Warren today, I will have to meet with a surgeon, an oncologist and a radiation oncologist before the entire plan is set in place.  So much ado over such a small mass.  Cancer certainly can take over one’s life, but it will not do that to me.  I am committed to living in the moment every step of the way.  No falling victim to this disease or its cures.  I always laugh when I use the word cure for cancer.  It is ludicrous to call chemotherapy and radiation cures when they, in and of themselves, do so much damage to the body.

One last thing.  I will not settle for just any oncologist, not matter how well-known or highly regarded he or she may be.  I want a oncoclogist who will talk openly with me about all my concerns, who will, with compassion and understanding, answer all my questions.  I also want a doctor who is open to the alternative modalities that I am now using including cannabis, Reishi and Turkey Tail mushrooms, Vitamin D, Turmeric and whatever else comes into my radar that I think will help prepare my body for the onslaught of radiation, and to prevent me from further cases of cancer.  Amen.

Just heard the wild geese outside my office window and thought of this poem by Mary Oliver.  May we all be comforted by her words.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

 

What? What the World Needs Now

That is a good question.  What?  What is your name?  What do you do?  What are you feeling?  What is the weather like today? What’s going on?  What have you been up to lately?  What did you eat for lunch?  What color is your daughter’s hair?  What do you think about unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed?  What is the impact of a global economy on the wealth of American businessmen?  What makes civilization?  What is anarchy?  What makes democracy better than socialism?  What long-lasting scars linger in the hearts of the children of Hiroshima?  What did you do last night?  What amount effort are you willing to put into getting healthy and staying that way?  What happens to your heart when you lie?  What does it take to get a book published?

What do you want to be when you grow up little girl?  What do I most miss about the world of commerce?  What drives me to write?  What right do I have to think I am good enough to be a writer?  What was my mother thinking when I told her I had remembered being sexually abused and her response was, “Get over it.  Everybody has a bad day.”  What do I think about getting older? What do I still keep hidden under lock and key?  What am I still afraid of?  What do I long to do?  What precipitates depression?  What drives a mother of three to walk into a lake and drown herself?  What is mental illness?  What about the library of congress?  What does retirement mean?  What is sin?  What is redemption?  What is Soul?  What is moderation?

What is the source of my eternal longing, my need for attention, my desire to be noticed, my drive to be seen and heard?  What crosses the mind of a poet like Mary Oliver when she sees the refracted light of the sun cast upon her bedroom floor?  What makes ice cream irresistible?  What complex sequence of events causes two people to fall in love, marry, have children, build a life together, and then, after thirty-two years together, divorce?  What happened to all the sea shells in Destin?  What drives one person to adultery, betrayal, vengeance, remorse, revenge, and retaliation, and another to loyalty, forgiveness, empathy, compassion and sympathy?  What is love?  What is the difference between the alcoholic and the social drinker?  What draws one man to God and religion and his brother to crime and misfortune?

What is enough?  What for?  What if?  What he bleep?  What difference does it make?  What did you say?  What’s that?  Now what?  What do you mean?  What do you care?  What do you think?  What do you have to say for yourself?  What is it?  What now?  What, why, where  and when?  What do you expect?  What else?  Now what?  What for?  What the heck?  What do you want?  What do you like?  What did he say?  What are you saying?  Say what?  So what?  What ever!?  What ….wait just a minute? What works?  What I mean is….What can I do?  What’s the use?  What does it matter?  What do I want?  What do you want?  What’s left?  What goes around, comes around.  What else?  What’s up?  What the world needs now is love sweet love, not just for some but for everyone. What more can I say?

Money=Happiness?

I opened a yoga studio, MIdtown Yoga, in 2001.

At the age of fifty I started a business at least that is what my husband called it.  There was no business plan because I had no intention of making money.  I simply wanted a space in which I could teach yoga.  People came.  Rodney Yee had just been on the Oprah Winfrey show.  Christy Turlington was on the cover of Time magazine.  Unbeknownst to me, I was riding a wave destined to become a world-wide phenomenon.  Yoga went from something that only hippies and naked Indian gurus did to something celebrities and soccer Moms did to get in shape and relieve stress.

Being a studio owner was hard work.  I taught 14 to 18 public classes a week, managed other teachers, promoted and put on workshops with famous teachers like Rodney Yee, Shiva Rea, Richard Freeman, Cyndi Lee and others.  My bank account grew.  I put my son through college.  He went to NYU.  I bought a new car.  We traveled  to India and across America to study with world-renowned teachers of yoga philosophy and meditation.  My little studio, Midtown Yoga, made a name for itself.  I was successful.

Fast forward to December 2013.  I sold my studio a year ago.  I am one of the lucky ones.  I found a buyer who was willing to take over the studio and pay me for the years of hard work I had put into building and establishing a “yoga business,” two words I never dreamed would come together.  When I began, in 2001, having practiced and taught yoga for several years already, I only knew there was a need and I had the tools to fill it.  As time went on, running Midtown Yoga, became more and more about bringing in more students, promoting visiting teachers, organizing and spear-heading a teacher training program that produced over 100 certified yoga teachers.  I gave myself completely over to the business.  I missed weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, birthday parties, vacations, and lost hours of sleep worrying about the studio.  The passion I once felt for the practice of yoga dwindled.  I started out as a  humble yogini and ended up an over-worked CEO.  I wanted to quit, to find someone, anyone who would take over the business.  I tried unsuccessfully to get my husband to run the business side of the studio.  I delegated responsibility in hopes of finding some relief from the stress and wear and tear, but the truth is, I did not want to give up the income. The more money I made, the more addicted I became. The little girl who grew up with nothing, who never had an allowance, who shop-lifted to get the clothes she so desperately wanted, was now a successful business woman, well-known in the community.  I became so strongly identified with Midtown Yoga that I forgot who I was.  I drank more, played less, and complained a lot about being over-worked.

Three things happened that change the course of my life.  My son died.  He was dead for seven minutes, his heart kept beating only by the CPR he received from a bartender who happened to be in nursing school.  Nothing mattered to me more than his recovery.  Somehow the studio managed without me.  A year later, I found a lump in my left breast.  It was malignant.  I gave myself over to the “cancer industry.”  On the advice of my doctor, I had the lump removed.  After two weeks of recovery, I began 45 days of radiation which left me exhausted and unable to teach yoga.  Again, the studio somehow managed without me.  At that same time, I learned my daughter was pregnant with her first child.  I suddenly realized I no longer cared about the studio or teaching other people how to be happier and healthier.  I looked at myself in the mirror and saw a tired, sad, lonely, and exhausted woman of 59 who wanted her life back, but I was still unwilling to let go of the income stream I had created.

As a product of the sixties, I grew up believing that women were second class citizens.  We voted, we worked, we held public office, but many men still thought a  woman’s place was in the home.  I worked in the private sector as a paralegal.  I was underpaid, “hit on” by one of the partners, told to quit and stay home after the birth of my daughter, and finally driven out of the office by a demotion to subrogation clerk.  So, yes, I was proud of myself for building a successful business, for starting something with nothing (I cashed in a $20.000.00 insurance policy), and for making a name for myself.  When I left my first husband, he told me “I found you in the gutter and that is where you will end up.”  That was not the worst of it.  Because all of our credit was in his name, I had none and did not qualify for a credit card.  When I left him, he gave me $7000.00 and nothing else.  He kept the house, all the furnishings, our dog and my “good name.”

It took me a year of therapy to process money was not the key to happiness.  On the contrary, studies have shown that once we have money enough to meet our basic needs with a little extra for enjoyment, an increase in income does not equal greater happiness.

Money and Happiness
In order to be happy we need enough money to pay our bills and have a little room to purchase extras. There appears to be an income threshold where making more than this amount contributes very little to being happier.

Having a household income below $50,000 is moderately related to happiness. A household income above $50,000 results in a vanishing correlation between money and happiness. There is some data indicating that the income threshold may be a little higher or a little lower than $50,000.

Americans who earn $50,000 per year are much happier than those who earn $10,000 per year, but Americans who earn $5 million per year are not much happier than those who earn $100,000 per year. People who live in poor nations are much less happy than people who live in moderately wealthy nations, but people who live in moderately wealthy nations are not much less happy than people who live in extremely wealthy nations (Gilbert, 2007, p. 239). ( excerpted from What Makes us Happy by Jamie Hale)

Bingo.  More money does not correlate to greater happiness.  Then why was I working so hard?  For the same reason so many others do.  We forget what really matters: family, friends, laughter, helping others, being a good neighbor,  and doing what we love to do, not for the money, but for the sheer joy of doing it.

Here I am.  At the computer, doing what I love to do…Writing.  Will I be famous, will I be rich?  The future is not mine to see.  I write because I must.  I write because doing it reminds me what real happiness is for me.

When I was just a little girl,
I asked my mother, “What will I be?
Will I be pretty?
Will I be rich?”
Here’s what she said to me:

“Que sera, sera,
Whatever will be, will be;
The future’s not ours to see.
Que sera, sera,
What will be, will be.”

When I was just a child in school,
I asked my teacher, “What will I try?
Should I paint pictures”
Should I sing songs?”
This was her wise reply:

“Que sera, sera,
Whatever will be, will be;
The future’s not ours to see.
Que sera, sera,
What will be, will be.”

When I grew up and fell in love.
I asked my sweetheart, “What lies ahead?
Will we have rainbows
Day after day?”
Here’s what my sweetheart said:

“Que sera, sera,
Whatever will be, will be;
The future’s not ours to see.
Que sera, sera,
What will be, will be.”

Now I have Children of my own.
They ask their mother, “What will I be?”
Will I be handsome?
Will I be rich?”
I tell them tenderly:

“Que sera, sera,
Whatever will be, will be;
The future’s not ours to see.
Que sera, sera,
What will be, will be.
Que Sera, Sera!

(Lyrics by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans))