Help is here for the asking. . .
Cleaning House
by robin birdfeather
For five years I have told this story to those who could hear it, yet have never written it down until now. I have come to empathize with the Ancient Mariner, the sole survivor of a horror only understood by somehow repeating it enough times to enough listeners that the meaning takes on a new and only slightly independent life away from the actual experience. The experience of being deliberately and deeply poisoned for the purpose of curing me of the poison responsible for my illness is my handy summation for what happened during chemotherapy and radiation.
Even now I am momentarily overcome with the enormity of the crimes committed against my person, my body, of how alone I have felt with this information, and of how many people I know who have gone through and will go through this deadly challenge.
We really do not often know how much strength we have and how much is available only for the asking. The asking is the key. The opening to the possibility of getting answers from within lets us connect with whatever healing forces are simply waiting to hear from us. I discovered this not at all by accident, but by dire need and a desperate sense of wanting to go on living.
Two months since my breast cancer diagnosis and then into surgery which has gone well but I can't make a living this way anymore - can't see patients. The lump and some lymph nodes have been removed, the lymph system contains cancer too. Now they tell me, even the second pathologist says it, your cancer is moving much too fast for your age. For the first time in my life, I am not so happy about not 'acting my age'.
They say I have to have chemotherapy. A great awful darkness - the unknown, the menacing unknown - looms in my imagination. I have been a warrior all my life, and now the enemy feels much too big and powerful.
All my life I have largely relied on my own resources, not asking for help, not even knowing how. Part macha, part loner, part rugged individualist, and part witch, these aspects of my character have carried me through and past immense obstacles, impossibilities of many kinds. Now I am tired, working too hard, for too many others, and never having really learned self-care, though I teach it to those who come to me for help.
The oncologist leans almost menacingly over the desk "You have to get into chemotherapy now ! You cannot wait and drag this indecision out any longer."
The pressure is real enough. I ask myself if I want to live. Spirit immediately says yes. I feel no options. I have to do this unspeakable thing, descend into this hell in order to have more life. I use the fact that I have daughters and granddaughters to bolster my answer. If I can't quite decide about myself, at least I can see the value in being brave, modeling survival for them.
I gather my women friends about me. We, particularly my lover Sandi, plan an evening when we can create support to help me over this threshold. We are going to do the Options Process with me in the center of a ring of support, witnessing my needs, my fears, my changes. First we celebrate that we are gathered, that I have decided to heal in this way. We dance under and through a bower of tree limbs, then assemble and begin the exploration into feelings.
How do I feel about allowing chemotherapy? Then, how do I feel about how I feel? Then, how do I feel about that? On we go, digging together, getting to the root of me.
Then my sisters lovingly report back what they see under the surface. I am struck by two of their observations. One who hates the system in all its aspects sees that I am afraid of using it to my benefit. Another who cracks jokes endlessly says in utterly solemn tones that I really have to hear both pathologists' reports seriously.
The next day, terribly depressed, I find the right hospital, call them, get set up to go in a week. I am alone in my house, casting my eyes around as though what I need is not what I can see. This is where the magic begins.
In one of those pure moments of seamless connection, I say aloud to the universe " I need an image!" The words have not even cleared my mouth and it is t/here.
"Chometz, you're cleaning out the chometz". Of course. I know what it is, what it means, but have never done it. There's a whole other story here, but briefly for those who know even less than I, observant Jews at Passover - the celebration using bread that does not rise (matzoh) - prepare their houses by cleaning out all the grains that do rise.
Cancer cells rise.
The chemotherapy will do this, will kill all the fast rising cells, cancer among them. Cleaning out the chometz is what women do, part of spring cleaning. This is distinctly a woman's image, as will be many more when later, talking to my sister hospital patients, I will discover deep freezers, vacuum cleaners and brooms among the ritual arsenals for dealing with this enemy. (Later my friend U. will say to me "I just said to myself, 'The chemo is God'. A vengeful god in my opinion, but whatever gets you through.)
I carry the certainty and power of centuries this image brings - women cleaning out the undesirable, what does not contribute to health - right into chemotherapy. How does it sustain me? It just does, who knows how, and science is pitifully unable to verify what I already know. Even through an error of miscalculation of my dosage in the very last month when I am weakest, Something helps me hang in there. the Greater Medicine. More than even the image itself as a token and a grounding of this experience in my chosen reality, is the sure and closely held knowledge that I am connected inside to powers that can never be denied no matter what the earthly outcome. This personal image coming from both near and far sustains me even to this day as a great undeniable proof of the oneness of time, space and spiritual energy.
The story continues into other phases of treatment and other even more powerful images. The physical outcome - my greater health - is a direct result of my going beyond the kind of ordinary terror induced by the word 'cancer' and the huge moneymaking system surrounding and protecting it.
As women and as spirits in bodies, we have to refuse to be pulled so inexorably into 'the way things are' because they are not organized around our greater intuitive intelligence. Our very lives depend on the full use of our creative spiritual energies.
©copyright 1999 by robin birdfeather