Category Archives: Meditation

Look At Me

Hanging out with a three-year-old the other day, I was reading a magazine while he attended his own mysterious business. Suddenly, he clambered up beside me and, clasping my face between small, absurdly warm, moist palms, turned my gaze full upon his own.

I started praying the St. Francis Prayer about nine months ago, using a great meditation tape by a man named Andrew Harvey. Taking each line of the prayer and meditating deeply on each word, then applying each line to my particular situation or frame of mind at that moment, provides me with a tether of sorts. The familiar words weave a connection to my Higher Power and a link to my beloved human family too. I can call on those words anytime; in fact, they are beginning to develop the power to rise up within me unbidden, yeast for a potent salve. Harvey says praying it regularly installs it like an operating system, and that’s what I need to be running on my hard drive.

“The innermost — what is it?
if not the intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.”

–R.M. Rilke

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace.” Most days, my attention is like an overstretched rubber band, snapping off wildly in every direction. Even after a quarter-century of regular meditative practice, I find myself with a toothbrush in hand when I mean to be sitting still with my eyes closed, or, worse, slipping from meditation into those endless loops of imagined conversations justifying myself to my brothers and sisters. Right in the thick of doing that, I picture myself, awkwardly and with great effort, climbing up into an oversized lap.

Lord.” Tugging. Small, inconsequential. Oozing with need, sticky hands. Desperate courage welling up, I struggle through the fear to clasp the Beloved’s face in my hands. Hot, importuning. “Lord, make me…” Make me pay attention to you. Shape me, turn me, make me gaze deeper within.

A miracle: the Beloved turns to me, locks eyes with me. I am sinking into an infinite gaze, until nothing else is, only deep cobalt sky and stars. Rilke wrote “The innermost – what is it? if not the intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.” 

Yes, that, for an eternity that snaps into an instant and suddenly I cannot bear to sit another moment and jump up to take a pill, make a phone call, a cup of coffee.

The shape of my life frequently feels unbearable since my cancer diagnosis. Besides the physical pain, setting aside even the emotional pain, there is my cursed imagination. The turmoil in my bowels often bears a distressing resemblance to the shifting, turning, inside-out sensation of a near-term baby in the belly. Early in my diagnosis and even now if I work to attain it, I can revel in super-saturated sensations of taste, color, smells, just like I did in pregnancy. There is a waiting, an expectancy. My body is changing shape; the surgical hernia surges out from under my ribs, now larger than my breast. I wear a pregnancy belt to contain it. But what rough beast is slouching to be born?

Lord, make me pay attention to you. Take my thoughts and fears and yes, my imagination. Use me, play me, shape me, melt me down and cast me, into an instrument pouring out endless songs, an implement of peace that is itself intrinsically at peace. I clamor for that, I cast about and thrash wildly in demand of that, I wear myself out with these childish tantrums. But even that, even those struggles which appear pointless, damaging, serve a purpose: they force stillness on me, and eventually, with smeary eyes and snotty fingers, I can reach out again. Beloved. Turn your gaze to me.





I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead

what price, facing the wreckage of my past…

After becoming a mother in my late twenties, I zealously guarded my sleep privileges. When my children were older, I heard several variations of this thought: why waste time sleeping when there was so much living to get to? I was deeply offended. Sleeping late, long, luxuriously, was my reward for hard work and stress and parenting.

Several years before my cancer diagnosis (although the cancer was already hard at work in its own indolent way), I began having terrifying episodes of insomnia. They seemed to be connected to the heart trouble I developed in 2006. I would wake up in the wee hours with immobilizing chest pains. I slept alone; Doug and I were separated for years before he actually moved out of the house. So the pain would wake me and I would begin a vigil of fear and shame.

These days, I can’t always sleep. I meditate and pray. I putter, trying to shave a few seconds off my Freecell time, noodling around on the internet, flitting through Facebook. I read, a lot. I ruminate more than I should.

The fear was that I was actually dying of a heart attack. I have a very mild case of congestive heart failure and a very active imagination. The pain was transfixing – literally pinning me into the bed while I struggled to breathe and slow my heart rate. The shame remains more difficult to speak about. But isn’t that the bondage of shame, anyway? The inability to speak it aloud?

I was ashamed that I would be found out as a fraud. That I was not really sick, that I had somehow manufactured the experience of pain. I was deeply ashamed that somehow, my mind had tricked my body into feeling symptoms. I felt shame that I might be, however inadvertently, taking more than my fair share of attention, of medical care, of health insurance benefits. I felt such deep shame I even made up a little rule for myself: no more than one ER visit per year for chest pain.

Seeing my marvelous cardiologist every 9-12 months, as she recommended, we spent a lot of time talking about those chest pains and my fears. She ordered tests, changed up my meds. But the chest pains kept recurring, and I kept spending those wee hours of the morning, two or three times a month, in a fug of shame and pain. Insomnia plus a crippling fear of impending death plus shame is a potent and no doubt toxic mix.

Along with the initial cancer diagnosis in August 2017, I was told I have ulcers. In the flurry of consternation about pancreatic cancer, somebody prescribed me the generic equivalent of the little purple pill, and I’m happy to report I have had not a single episode of that particular insomnia since. I also learned that if you think you’re having a heart attack, you can get up and move around. If the pain lessens or changes, it’s probably not your heart.

Since the diagnosis of metastatic neuroendocrine cancer was confirmed in January, I have been experiencing several new kinds of insomnia. Unfortunately, most of them are related to pain. There’s the snakes in my belly that were the early harbinger of the cancer. There’s a pain in my upper back that I really think is my poor old liver quivering from repeated insult.

There’s an ache in my heart that sometimes flips into rage when my powerlessness crosses the threshold of my awareness. The post-surgical hernia, despite my best efforts, has grown as big as my left tit and is quite a bit more firm. It hurts if I do too much. These past few weeks I’ve had a constant headache and feel like throwing up most of the time, and all of these aches and pains are amplified after midnight.

So I can’t always sleep. I meditate and pray. I putter, trying to shave a few seconds off my Freecell time, noodling around on the internet, flitting through Facebook. I read, a lot. I ruminate more than I should. But the idea that sleep is something I’m entitled to doesn’t hold water anymore. I’ve had an important revelation:

I really was sick, all those nights I thought I was dying. In spite of my first-class health insurance, in spite of my faithful adherence to Western medicine, its skewed values and narrow perspectives, in spite of a fine education and my white skin and my privilege and my clenched-teeth determination to wrest what I want out of life, that system missed a simple case of ulcers, then misdiagnosed cancer as an emotional problem. Complicated my recovery with poor post-surgical care and then, again, misdirected my pain and channelled my shame to work against me.

My pain is real and my shame is unnecessary. In fact, millions of women just like me, throughout history, suppress their pain, or report their pain and are ignored, minimized, shamed for listening to their bodies and reaching out for help and health. So it’s okay to stay awake during these wee hours. Maybe even necessary. Because there is somebody else out there, struggling with pain and shame and fear. I’ll sleep when I’m dead. Tonight, I’m with you.

Good Book Upstairs, Big Book Downstairs

The tension between writing what interests me and writing what makes money has been a constant in my career. I’m delighted to report that my decision to write about recovery has resulted in my first publication in a national, glossy print magazine. Thanks be to God!

I picked out the photos, too. (Boasting now)

Take a look, I’m proud of it:

upstairs-downtstairs

Stinky and the Pain

“What’re we going to do tonight, Brain?”

“Same thing we always do, Pinky…try and take over the world!”

–Two lab rats from Warner Brothers’ “Animaniacs” circa 1995

When the cancer first began to make itself evident, I called it the “snakes in my belly.” At random, my gut would begin to rumble and roar, and I imagined I could feel the coils of my intestines slowly turn and twist. It was not painful, just kind of amusing, once I figured out the snakes weren’t usually followed by any other, more rude gastric events. The snakes are still with me, loud enough to be heard over a movie soundtrack in a surround-sound theatre, just today. But I kind of like snakes. They exude calm and warmth and an unmistakable physical presence.

The most obvious symptom of my pancreatic cancer (a rare type, slower-growing than its more notorious, ductal-type kin) was awful diarrhea. The uncontrollable kind, the kind of problem babies and old folks have. And I was lucky to have it. Yes, that’s right. Luckily, when the cancer cells left my pancreas, they drifted over to my liver, not my lungs or my brain or anywhere else. This type of pancreatic cancer is rarely found out in time for surgery or other treatment unless it goes to the liver and causes diarrhea and pain first. Thank you, Jesus? That verdict is still out.

Occasional sessions of raging, cramping, running-down-my-leg nastiness started coming weekly, then daily, leaving me weak and trembling and in tears. The worst spells were predictable, coming at four am like clockwork and often lasting for hours. During the day, more and more frequently over this two year stretch before my diagnosis, I would have unexpected attacks of diarrhea and I started feeling like I always, somehow, smelled like shit.

I started wearing diapers, a huge concession. It’s ridiculous, how much I let that crush my spirits. I imagined everyone could hear the sound of the paper diaper rustling and it got harder and harder to leave the house. I didn’t ignore my body while all this was going on. I went to my primary care doc-in-the-box, who referred me to a GI guy. I’d had my 50-year inaugural colonoscopy a year before and I scheduled another one, did the prep, showed up on time, followed the directions, listened to the doctor.

“Irritable bowel syndrome,” was the verdict. The GI guy had a most irritating habit of not looking me in the eye. Nothing inappropriate, I think he kept his eyes on his fingers or something. I can’t imagine a career of looking at people’s assholes. Maybe it’s hard to meet people’s eyes when their ass seems the better part. There’s really nothing to do about it, he told his hands. You just need to manage your anxiety.

I glibly assured him there is most certainly something I can do about it. I could, and would, double my daily meditation time. And I did. It probably saved my life. But it didn’t help the diarrhea. I did a couple of exclusion-type diets, to determine if I was inadvertently poisoning myself with Taco Bell or glutens or something. I tried more exercise, I took immodium, I yo-yo’d between diarrhea attacks and wicked constipation. I tried vegan eating. I ignored it. I binged on spinach; fried chicken; broth.

I was falling in love, and is there anything less conducive to love than liquid poo? I think not. Yet my love carried a diaper in his purse for me, bought me distractions, brought me warm rags, cold rags, expensive scented butt wipes. Endlessly assuring me of my beauty, my desirability, my not-stinkiness. Then and now, I sometimes lie awake at night and look at our hair, mingled on the pillow. Long dark ringlets streaked with silver, careless waves of gold and silver. It’s alchemy of the purest sort, this tangling of ours.

I got so good at ignoring that symptom – the diarrhea – that I also totally overlooked the next symptom to come along. The snakes began to bite. It started small, it must have, because I don’t really remember a particular onset. It’s like I woke up one day, about a year ago, and realized I’d been in pain for days without really registering it. It’s a low-level pain, about a one or a two on scale of one-to-ten. It’s kind of like period cramps, or the very beginning stages of labor, or early in an appendicitis attack. Sort of like a mighty hand taking all those snakes and giving a gentle squeeze. But of course after a couple of hours of that, the snakes start stirring. They don’t like being squeezed. So they start biting.

There were clues all along, of course. I can see it clear as day, now. One confounding characteristic of all my problems was a strict 12-hour clock. Moving from Atlanta to Birmingham as often as I do, I’m never really sure what time it is. But just as the diarrhea appeared at 4 am on the dime, the snakes start biting at 4 pm precisely. My current opioid habit* stifles the diarrhea nicely these days, but my eyes pop open in the pre-dawn five mornings out of seven, and my snakes are there, lazily roiling. If my internal clockwork is on Central Standard Time, the clock might say five am, but my gut knows better. It’s Snake Time. That kind of regularity must surely be a red flag.

I see in hindsight too that my eating and cooking habits took a crazy left turn two years ago. I used to love to cook and feed my friends and family. But I stopped enjoying cooking. Everything I cooked tasted a little off. Preparing a big meal left me too nauseated and tired to enjoy eating it. Raw vegetables sent me scurrying off to the bathroom almost instantly, and I had to be close to home after I ate just in case something struck me funny. I couldn’t tolerate funky or foreign smells and tastes anymore, and I mourn the loss of my iron stomach. I used to be able to tolerate Lucky Dogs from a street vendor, for God’s sake. Now I can’t look at the mold on cheese without sicking up a little.

I really was spending a decent chunk of my day in meditation and prayer by this time. My mom was recovering from a miraculous but grueling near-death experience, and I was charging headlong into a long-distance love affair. If the circumstances of my life were causing me to experience some mild discomfort (diarrhea and snakes), maybe that was just the price I had to pay? Maybe, whispered an insidious little voice, maybe we have to trade a little pain and anguish for all that sloppy, giggly fun, eh?

Thank you, Jesus, unequivocally: my love and my friends (my higher power with skin on), quickly come to reassure me that that is never so. My Higher Power does not extract a pound of pain as payment for every ounce of joy. Joy is mine, free for the taking, by the double-handful if I want. Suffering is not part of my Higher Power’s plan for me.

It was about a year ago that I began to look beyond the diagnosis of IBS-D (irritable bowel syndrome -diarrhea). I tried acupuncture; I finally went back to the GI doc, and saw his nurse practitioner. I liked her. She looked me in the eyes while I described my problems and told her I’d tried an illegal, herbal treatment for diarrhea that seemed to help a little. She looked away as she told me, reluctantly, that this doctor would never consider treating my problems with any kind of CBC oil, even if it were legal in my state. She ordered blood tests and wished me well.

Now the snakes were getting a little more fierce. It dawned on me, slowly, that they’d been eating into my sex life without my noticing. There’s just not a lot of room down there for extracurricular activity. And that’s a damn shame, because old people sex is just grand.

It was July when I had an attack of the shingles, simmering and basting slowly in the Birmingham heat, uncomfortable in the skin of my body and the confines of my mind.

Sometimes when I hate being myself, I use this little trick to slip my skin: I do something I absolutely do not want to do. It’s just to prove to myself that I can overcome myself. Overcome my self will. So I slid my fingers over the buttons of my landline and checked the voicemail for the first time in four months. I know that sounds awful. But the landline has been in my name for thirty years, and it’s got old voicemails from my kids, their high school friends. It’s the number the exterminator calls, the dentist still trying to track down my ex.

It’s a number I haven’t given out as my own for four years. I only keep the line to call my mother on it. Cell reception at my house, at the base of the hill where the cell towers live, sucks. It’s also the only telephone number my GI doctor’s office thought to call, when those blood tests came back. They may have had my cell number on my chart, but it was the landline they called when they discovered my pancreas wasn’t working right. They called it twice in May and that’s all.

I had a funny feeling when I heard the second message, listening in late July with a slash of shingles still livid across my side. It was the nurse practitioner. “You really need to schedule a cat scan,” she said. “There’s something wrong with your pancreas.” I didn’t skip a beat. I dialed that number right back and within a couple hours she called me back. On my cell. “Why did you wait so long to schedule the cat scan?” she wanted to know.

“You called the wrong telephone number with the test results,” I told her. “How soon can I have that CT scan?”

Now, I’m four months post-surgery. They removed two lesions (tumors?) from my pancreas, and the lymph node and a lesion on top of my pancreas. They took three more tumors off my liver and the surgeon confidently declared me cancer-free.

I still have the snakes, and they still bite. I still have diarrhea, and nausea, and now I vomit two to six times a week, probably because my poor pancreas was insulted and needs to heal. I have other pain, too, that I associate with my liver, on my right side and my right middle back.

Nobody tells me anymore that I’m not having any pain or that I’m not supposed to have any pain. I have opioids, in pretty small doses, that distract me from the pain. The side effects of fuzzy thinking and constipation are almost more trouble than the distraction warrants, but emotionally, I’m hugely dependent on those meds.

I’ve found CBD oil to be my most reliable friend in pain: it stimulates my appetite, destroys the nausea, lifts my mood, actually removes the pain (not just masking it like the oxycontin). I have other pain relief strategies: t’ai chi, meditation, prayer, conversation, stupid tv, challenging tv, board games, music, hot showers, meetings. I am back on my bike! My pain is of two kinds: the kind that chemicals can change, and the kind of heart-pain that comes with change. I am working on each kind of pain, the best way I can given my current state.

That heart-pain from change has two components: my own, and the pain I feel when I think about the pain my loved ones are experiencing. I can’t do much about either, but I’m at least trying to stop taking responsibility for the pain other people feel.

Both kinds of pain are real; do I have the courage, the wisdom, the desire to transmute it into something of value? What might that be?

When I took my CT scans to Emory in January, their radiologists spotted something the UAB docs did not. We’ve repeated those scans, and I’ll find out Thursday if the cancer has cropped up again or if the initial surgery missed something. I will update you as I am able.

*It’s a legal habit, thank God. I’m almost afraid to take them for fear of becoming addicted. I hear our president has proposed the death penalty as a cure for the opioid crisis. I wonder how that works?

This is me, asking for help.

Hey, is this your image? Artist unknown but appreciated. Stencil on concrete, circa 2013 From my camera.

Hello, my friends. It’s been confirmed. I have fourth stage pancreatic cancer, a type of rare and relatively slow-growing neuroendocrine tumor. The five-year survival rate is 20-25%. I’m getting care at Emory University’s Winship Cancer Center in Atlanta; they have a specialty clinic for this type of pancreatic cancer. I am praying and scheming to make my personal 5-year survival rate 100% and you are already drafted as a co-conspirator.

I’m so very fortunate in so many ways! I’m frequently staying with Michael. His new place in Atlanta’s Westside is comfortable, convenient and cat-equipped. I have a decent chunk of life insurance and short-term disability resources, due to my early adventures in advertising (I sold myself on the idea while creating the advertising for it, an occupational hazard). But these benefits take time to line up.

For a year now work has been difficult and symptoms like pain, diarrhea, nausea and vomiting have made writing to deadline stressful. Since my surgery in October, narcotic painkillers keep some pain at a distance, but with the unfortunate side effect of distancing myself from my brain as well. These same issues, plus geographic distance, are complicating my ability to earn from my other business, hosting international medical students for 3-6 month stays.

So I’m asking for that kind of help, too. Financial. If you can kick in a few bucks, I would really appreciate it. I’ve been shitty my whole life about writing thank you notes, but I will post a thank you note of at least 1,000 words for every $350 raised. I love you.




Be Still

first published in “Through the Red Door,” the blog for Recovery Ministries of the Episcopal Church.

Headed out the door, late as usual, I paused with my hand on the key. The neighbor’s cat was immobile on the front porch, deathly still, ready to strike. My eyes sought out his prey. After a moment, I saw it: a lizard or green anole, just three inches long. It was a dusty, unremarkable brown, still as a stone, about three feet off the ground. It was out of reach of the cat, but was it aware that it was safe? Looking closer, I saw its throat was pulsing rapidly, and it looked like fear to me.

When I am fearful, anxious, out of control, I forget to breathe and lose my focus, paralyzed by the threat I am so certain is about to pounce. Then I am best served by stillness, because that’s how I sometimes discover how to act, think and become what my Higher Power has in mind for me.

How ironic, that the apparent source of its salvation at that moment caused even more distress.

My first impulse was to rescue the lizard from the fanged, clawed predator, but some instinct or maybe just curiosity stilled my movement. I stopped and witnessed the stand-off, a miniature high img_8214noon, completely inconsequential except to the three-inch anole. For the lizard, it was literally a life-or-death situation, and I wonder now: did those few seconds feel like an eternity to the cold-blooded creature?

Then, because of impatience or a short attention span or a desire to look like a responsible adult who owns a clock, I twisted the door knob. The cat, quite accustomed to my comings and goings, barely flickered an ear. The chameleon’s throat seemed to pulse even faster. How ironic, that the apparent source of its salvation at that moment caused even more distress.

I told the cat, quite nicely, to leave the poor beastie alone for the time being, and Rocket complied with feline aplomb. That is, he ignored me for a leisurely beat or two before strolling a few feet away and burying his nose between his long, upthrust legs.

I stood on the threshold and watched the lizard. The fresh air reminded me to breathe, and the deep stillness of the creature gave me a little jolt of joy. As I watched, and breathed, and remembered to be grateful, an electric, vibrant green crept from one end to the other of the chameleon, a transformation so soothing, so astonishing, so poignant I gasped – and just like that, the lizard disappeared.

When I came home hours later, no sign of the lizard. But Rocket, my neighbor’s cat, was sprawled across my front step, and deigned to allow me the pleasure of sinking my fingers in his silky, warm belly fur. He purred, and it was as if we had never held the balance of a tiny life in our control. Perhaps we never did.

Buttery Feet

Wise Woman lore:

When you move to a new house, slather butter on all four paws of your cat. By the time she’s licked herself clean, she’s comfortable in her new environment and won’t wander back to the old house.

I don’t know where I picked up that bit of wisdom, and I certainly don’t know if it works for cats, but here’s how it works in my life:

As my energy level increases, and my anxiety level fluctuates, sitting still to meditate becomes problematic. (let’s not talk about the painful process of trying to quiet my bubbling brain).  A couple of years ago, when the concept of self-care began to sink in, I discovered the pleasure of massaging my own feet.

Then, a delightful tiny epiphany. If I massage my feet with shea butter, cocoa butter, or some such, I am stuck sitting cross-legged on my bed until my feet are not too greasy to walk on my old wooden floors. If I get up and try to walk around with buttery feet, it leaves ugly footprints and there’s the very real prospect of busting my butt.

Sufficient incentive to stay still. If I breathe deeply, I reward myself further with the intoxicating scent of cocoa or the sweet, cotton-candy fragrance of shea butter.

I cannot muscle my way into good meditation practices, good health, emotional sobriety, happiness, joy or serenity. When I am open to the loving whisper of a power greater than myself, I can smell, touch, see and live these gifts, miracles of the commonplace.