Dear Friends,
I’m getting a really late start on my Health Update tonight! It’s 12:30 AM and I am just now thinking about my readership. (That word makes me laugh…such a serious word for friends reading my Wednesday night ramblings!)
Today was my second to last treatment. My IGM went from 2162 to 2144, so it is “flattening out” at an acceptable range according to the doctor. “You are in good partial remission now, Ruth, and will be in remission when the Velcade and Rituxan are out of your system in a month or so,” she explained, “If you came in to see me today for the first time, I would not treat you.” So that is great news! This has been a gentle biotherapy that has been physically painless, but not without its unique symptoms and mysterious side effects, and it has been mentally challenging because I am a person who likes to know what is going on in my body and mind, and it has been emotionally stressful, of course. But isn’t it the stresses in our lives that are also the teachers; my cancer steered me into a fluid and introspective six month journey.
This has been the first time in my life that I have had no time constraints of job or classes to attend and, like a hibernating bear, I have sought silence. I’ve read many books: all nonfiction, I’ve watched almost no television and read very few newspapers. I’ve quieted my mind and come a little closer to learning how mindfulness heals the body. Even in remission, I know my body will not be up to keeping the frenetic pace it has in the past, and this is actually a good thing. I have wanted to practice mindfulness ever since I returned from Costa Rica. It’s time to stop all my doing and shift over to being mode; to nurture calmness…no easy task for me! So I’m now reading Full Catastrophe Living, Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness. I bet many of you read it twenty years ago when I was multi-tasking on speed dial and had no time for slowing down. I love the saying, “When the student is ready, the teacher will come.” I am ready for this, and although the book is twenty years old, it is still timely. If you're interested, I've attached a few quotes from his book below.
I have also read The Journal Keeper, a Memoir by Phyllis Theroux. It’s not a book I’d recommend to most of you, but I love this: “‘Accept your place on the conveyor belt. There is nothing so unattractive as someone trying to run backward. But the sadness that we will never be on the same portion of the belt, that one day I will be dumped off it, remains.” So of course I am not running backwards but I am thinking a lot about the conveyor belt image as this six month journey comes to an end. (I also couldn't help myself, I had to write you a short story about a conveyor belt)
It’s way too late to think rationally any more, so it’s time to push send and get some sleep.
May you and your summer gardens thrive during this time we’ve all be waiting for!
Love to all,
Ruth
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by Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Patience: A child may try to help a butterfly to emerge by breaking open its chrysalis. Usually the butterfly doesn’t benefit from this. Any adult knows that the butterfly can only emerge in its own time, that the process cannot be hurried.” P.35
“The new perspective acknowledges the central importance of thinking in terms of wholeness and interconnectedness and the need to pay attention to the interactions of mind, body, and behavior in efforts to understand and treat illness…. Science is now searching for more comprehensive models that are truer to our understanding of the interconnectedness of space and time, mass and energy, mind and body, even consciousness and the universe.” P 151
“Dr. Selegman’s overall conclusions from these and other studies is that it is not the world per se that puts us at increase risk of illness so much as how we see and think about what his happening to us. A highly pessimistic pattern of explaining the causes of bad or stressful events when they occur seems to have particularly toxic consequences…a pattern of optimistic thinking in response to stressful events, on the other hand, appears to have a protective effect against depression, illness and premature death.” P 201
“Cancer is a condition in which cells within the body lose the biochemical mechanisms that keep their growth in check. Consequently they multiply wildly, in many cases forming large masses called tumors. Many scientists believe that the production of cancerous cells in the body is happening at a low level all the time as a “normal” process and that the immune system, when healthy, recognizes them and destroys them before they can do damage. According to this model it is when the immune system is weakened, either through direct physical damage or through the psychological effects of stress, and it can no longer effectively identify and destroy these small numbers of cancerous cells that the cancer cells multiply out of control. In short, the development of any kind of cancer is a multistage, complex occurrence involving our genes and our cellular processes, the environment, and our individual behavior and actions.” P. 209
“So it can be particularly helpful to keep in mind from moment to moment that it is not so much the stressors in our lives but how we see them and what we do with them that determines how much we are at their mercy. If we can change the way we see, we can change the way we respond.” P 241
Potato Chips, a Conveyor Belt, and Adrian
A Teacher’s Story
I remember the summer I took my students on a fieldtrip to see what a conveyor belt was. It was summertime and I took my class of fifteen elementary school “migrant kids” to the Ego Mayonnaise and Potato Chip Factory in San Jose. Once we were inside of the large cement factory building, the owner told the kids to line up and do exactly what he did. Now these kids were with me, so they could learn how to read and write in English; their abilities were limited! Adrian was the kid I identified with the most: hyper active, bright, mischievous, and incorrigible. Of course field trips were his favorite activity and we had “enrichment fieldtrips” every Wednesday. There was never a fieldtrip “without incident”, thanks to Adrian!
On this particular trip, we followed our leader past the potato washing machine and then watched the slicer cut the clean potatoes and drop them onto the conveyor belt. From there, the thin white slices were transported on the belt down to the vats of boiling hot oil. Adrian was at the end of the line, in front of me. As the salter sprinkled the hot, crispy potato chips, our leader stopped and announced, “Remember, you may do what I do” and he walked up to the conveyor belt and plucked one potato chip off the belt and put it in his mouth. Each student did the same thing…except Adrian. When he got to the belt, he spread his fingers wide and suddenly slammed his hands down on as many potato chips as he could reach as they passed along on the black belt. “Adrian!” I screamed as I wrapped him in a cross arm body block, grabbed two chips for us and backed him from the temptations of repeating his move. The frantic ladies on quality control went into a frantic frenzy as they scooped handfuls of crushed potato chips from the moving path trying desperately to keep them from going into the bags that were only a couple of feet down the way. I could only laugh with relief that nothing REALLY bad happened!
The next week we went to The San Francisco Zoo and it was Adrian who went missing for a few minutes. Turns out he was at very top of the bear cage, but that’s another story.
No, we don’t want to be walking backwards on the conveyor belt, but we all want to be very sure when we glance backwards we’ll have some good stories to remember.
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