Life, moving forward

Posted by Joe on his FB 5/21/11


I feel a bit like a pretender as I write these blog posts. “Cancer survivor” is not a badge I feel that I have earned; in all honesty, despite the inconveniences and annoyances of the past six weeks, the pain I have had to bear is not that heavy compared to others. So I write this today not as someone who claims to have all the answers – hell, I don’t even think I have many of the right questions yet – but just as a person who is on a journey, and seeing some things for the first time, and remembering others that had been long forgotten or ignored.

Many of you may have seen these things already, and my observations will mean little to you. I hope you’ll think of me like someone just moving to your hometown – the things I note may be obvious to you, and they will almost certainly be naïve in some cases.

The polite thing to do here is to give you the quick and easy rundown of what’s happened, so we’ll start with that: Sunday, May 8, I was sprung from Cleveland Clinic and came home. Since then, I’ve been building strength in my left leg, and endurance to walk on it for longer. It’s been getting a lot better – they sent me home with a walker, and I’ve ditched that. Friday, I went to Kroger with my mom and was able to walk (albeit very slowly) from the car, to the bakery, and back out to the car. It may not sound like much, but it was pretty sweet for me. I also have a new primary care doctor, whom I like personally, and trust professionally. It looks like I’ll be trapped in these compression stockings through June, but then will be able to be barelegged and barefoot, as I prefer to be, throughout the rest of the summer. More on that barefoot business later. I will be on blood thinners – rat poison – for about a year, during which I will have to be exceptionally careful to not to get cut or bruised. Specifically, I am forbidden from being on ladders or roofs. I can't imagine either of these shall be a problem.

Medically, my known future includes weekly blood draws, a return to the Clinic in late May to meet with the oncologist to begin a clinical trial on anti-recurrence drugs, and an August appointment with the vascular people.

That’s the boring stuff. What I’m excited about is that life itself seems to be slowly getting off ‘pause,’ and back in a new kind of action. Next week, I’ll begin my return to work on Thursday and Friday. I just can’t overstate how excited I am about that – not only do I miss the kids and my friends terribly, I miss the routine and the excitement of not knowing what every day is going to bring. I’m sad that I’ll only get a couple of weeks of school before coming home for summer. My summer plans are sort of in flux right now, and I’ll explain more about that in later posts.

If you were looking for a brief update on my condition, that was it! You don’t have to read anymore! If you’re into reading some stuff that’s spiritual on the border of hippy-dippy, feel free to read on.

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Still with me? Cool – but don’t feel you have to be.

Less than an hour after doctors used the “C” word to describe what was in my body on March 31, Fr. Mark was at my bedside and encouraged me to dig deeper – that cancer, physical cancer, sort of is what it is. But what’s important is to tackle the spiritual cancer. Even at that point, Father identified exactly what my spiritual cancer was, and has always been: Fear.

So, from the day of diagnosis, I’ve been grappling on and off – and sort of grasping in the dark for answers – with fear and its consequences. This past week, I read two books that helped me further understand both my specific fears, and fear’s opposite, love.

I’ll start with the second book, “Dealing with Cancer.” My friend Colin’s mom sent me this book just a day or so after I got back from the Clinic. At first blush, it’s something that would probably not be my cup of tea. The author, Myron Eshowsky, is a modern-day shaman – which, in my mind, conjured up some kind of crazy-ass dude in a loincloth jumping around a fire yelling ‘Oonga Boonga!” To be fair, there is a little of that in here. But it’s much deeper.

Eshowsky’s central premise is that we’ve got it wrong in the Western world when we say we’re ‘battling cancer,’ or ‘going to war with cancer,’ or even when we say we are ‘beating cancer.’ Eshowsky takes the position that this visualization is completely wrong.

Cancer is part of all of us; you, me, anyone. All of us have cancer cells in our body. But only some of us have the cancer cells actually take root, replicate, and raise a ruckus in our bodies. So declaring war on cancer is sort of… declaring war on yourself. Eshowsky encourages the reader to confront the cancer; to understand what the conditions were that allowed the cancer to decide to put its roots down, and to sort of negotiate a truce with the cancer, rather than defeat it on the field of battle.

For me, as a guy who counts Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower as idols, this idea of peace-making with a deadly enemy is almost anathema – especially since our doctors, our society, and our friends all use the same verbiage: “You’re gonna beat this thing!” “You’re gonna win this fight!” “You’ll win this battle!”

So as I’m reading the book, and it starts making sense to me, I’m having to reprogram my brain – having to reframe my concept of my recovery. So, the history junkie in me starts realizing that what Eshowsky is saying is kind of like the difference between the Treaty of Versailles and the Marshall Plan. After World War I, we enforced a brutal peace, and felt like we won for a little while. But we never addressed the underlying problems – and it led to an inevitable resurgence of conflict that caught us off guard, and was even more deadly than the first fight. We learned that lesson after World War II, and the Marshall Plan approached the end of the war far differently. In the simplest terms, the Marshall Plan built peace through partnership.

With that vision in my head, it was easier to take deeper steps into Eshowsky’s method. And this is probably where all of this gets a little weird for most of you, and I’ll not even share the weirdest parts.

Eshowsky encourages people to take a ‘shaministic journey’ to sort of ‘meet’ their cancer and learn what it is, and where it comes from. He encourages the journeyer to envision themselves descending below ground, and meeting a ‘spirit animal,’ and then traveling to find and meet one’s cancer and find out why it is working against us.

I know what you’re thinking, and it’s probably not very far from what I was thinking. So last night, after saying my rosary, I’m sitting on the couch, and attempting to drift toward sleep, and I start going through his method to enter a trance. Well, what happened was I fell asleep. And then had a dream that, in large part, was exactly what he described as what happens in the trances.

In my dream, I met my dog Emerald, and she was with me at the grocery. There, we ran into a girl I had a crush on a long, long time ago. She was at least six and a half feet tall in the dream (larger than life, tellingly). I tried to say hey, and she sort of smiled, and walked away. Rejection at my most vulnerable time. Left alone. Scared.

Scared. Fear. Fear of being alone. Fear of being rejected. Later, when I woke up with a start, everything started clicking for me. For the first time, I was realizing what my really, really deep fears entail: Being rejected for who I really am. Being rejected by her so long ago was a scar I didn’t even realize I had – something I had kept down for a really long time. Obviously, it worked out for the absolute best over time! But it was a wound I had never even thought of, and hadn’t considered how deeply it wounded me at the time, and how it changed the way I approached life ever after that.

The dream went on, and if possible, got weirder. My youngest son and I were on a four-wheeler, and being chased by jaguars. I drove faster and faster, but the jaguars kept pace with us. I had to slow down to take a turn, and a jaguar cub caught up with us and jumped on the back. I told the jaguar to calm down, that we weren’t the enemy! That we didn’t want to hurt him, and the jaguar calmed down and said he didn’t want to hurt us, either. Somehow, we ended up driving off with the jaguar into a field being plowed. When I woke up, I had this really peaceful sense – that the jaguar was the cancer – that it didn’t want to hurt me, but that these wounded and fearful parts of my soul were scary to it, and it fought back.

At 2 a.m., it all seemed pretty profound, and I wrote it all down so I’d remember it in the morning. I know it all seems fruity as hell, and I’d be the first to make fun of me had the experience not been so powerful in the middle of last night. Addressing this fear, these fears I didn’t know consciously that I had; addressing wounds I had hidden for years under a protective layer of good humor and stiff upper lip… it feels something like progress on the spiritual side.

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OK, if you made it through that, congratulations. If you’re still with me, this will be the easy part. Promise.

The other life-changing book I read this week was Chris McDougall’s “Born to Run.” Coming back to the spiritual side, Father had asked me a few times throughout all of this – didn’t you notice the past few years how ‘busy’ you were? Working the school day – teaching the BGSU class – participating in youth group – getting ready for the France trip – doing the Tunisia trip – thinking about going back for the Ed.D. or Ph. D. – kids involved in everything – and running, running, and running. One night on the phone when I was in Cleveland, after Doctor Number One had said I likely wouldn’t be able to run the way I used to anymore, I told him flat out that running filled the hole left by drinking. Tearily, I told him, running’s the only thing I do for ME. It’s the only FUN I allow myself to have anymore. It was in that phone call that I realized running was the only thing from which I really derived a personal, internal joy anymore.

When I got home, I had a stack of books to read through. One was “Born to Run.” My friend Cheryl had seen it at Target, and picked it up for me before the whole blood clot thing. Soon after, my friend (and running buddy) Elizabeth told me I absolutely HAD to read this book. But it wasn’t until I was on the couch with a swollen leg that I actually had the time to do it.

I’m not going to even attempt to describe this book in any words other than life changing. Reading about these other runners – and WHY they ran, and how the single most important factor in their distance careers was the LOVE they had for community, and JOY they got from being part of the race… it just rang incredibly true to me.

I guess you could say it gave me something new to shoot for when I’m done. I’ll probably never run a 50 or 100 mile ultra like the people in the book – being down to one kidney does present a few physical limitations – but I now have a goal I never would have imagined before. When I crossed the finish line of my first half-marathon – the race that started the series of events that led to my cancer diagnosis – just about the first words out of my mouth once I could talk, were “I know I’m never gonna run a full marathon now!” But that is now my goal – I’m not just going to run again, I WILL run a marathon in the next two years. I don’t care about my time, I don’t care about any of that, I just want the joy of running with my friends.

Central to the book is the idea of ‘running naked,’ that our bodies were designed to run, and it may in fact be the evolutionary trait that allowed us to survive. It takes it further by saying that running barefoot, in the most minimalist sense possible, frees us to run healthier and further. Unencumbering ourselves, making ourselves freer, gives us joy. And joy helps us run.

I think that message brings it all together with the shamanistic voodoo, and everything else. This process is all about finding the things within me that need to be resolved, that need to be let go, and living life more simply from here on out. Money problems? They’re gonna come and go. Old hurts? They are real, they were bad, and now they can go away. Rich greedheads ruining our country? Nothing I can do about it. Union versus management bullshit at work? It just doesn’t matter, not one damn bit. All of these things that I have literally spent nights awake worrying about… not only don’t they matter. They were quite literally killing me.

Listening – REALLY listening to my kids? Loving every single minute with my wife? Laughing with friends? Spending every minute I can doing what I do best, teaching in a classroom? Feeling grass between my toes? And running through my town, not with a grimace of pain, not to beat a clock, but with a stupid smile on my face just because I can do it?

That’s what I was born to do. That’s what I’m living for.