Why does the thought “cancer” squeeze my heart in terror? I know that I have metastatic breast cancer and that if I do not die of something else I'll die of it. I try to keep in my consciousness the burning shimmering truth that we must all die of something.
Ellen Scheiner 2007
"Shortly after I finished chemotherapy, I had a kind of epiphany. I have been studying meditation with a Buddhist trained teacher for some years and have been meditating for 17 years. One day I realized that I would die. Not necessarily of cancer, but of something- since we all will die. My experience as a physician and my meditation training have removed a great deal of fear about dying. When I had this experience, I realized in the most visceral sense, that there was nothing that I could count on and that nothing was permanent. For several weeks I was in a state of free fall. I knew in the deepest sense that all of our plans are tentative. Sometimes we make them to fill the future to assure ourselves that we will still be here then. Gradually I felt more and more freedom. I began to differentiate between made up plans and real goals-those acts which truly are right for me. What a release that was! Many cerebrally concocted schemes fell by the wayside. I began to live more and more in the now and to treat each breath as precious. My meditation training had taught me that each birth ultimately results in a death, and so the end of my life as I know it seems less important. I now strive to live. When I make a toast I now drink to aliveness, not to health, which is quite slippery. Having stared into the abyss I am no longer afraid of looking at anything. I know on the deepest level that I do not know what will happen and that I never did know."
Ellen Scheiner, shared by Musa Mayer, NYC
Rosemary: Reflections:
What you refer to, Ellen -- the confrontation with our inevitable mortality, is certainly one of the elements in the fear that grips the patient and also those who love her or him when a diagnosis of cancer is handed down. But we do finally accept that we will die, sooner or later if not right now, and know that this is the natural order.
Personally, however, I found it very hard to reach that point as we lived with your cancer throughout our relationship. It was only after your death that I realized death is not fearsome – that it is a joyous homecoming for the soul, despite the sadness experienced by those who remain in this life.
I remember your routine physical in July 2002. We received the blood test report online from your new California oncologist, and printed it out. I remember standing in the kitchen at the moveable island, the setting sun painting the room pink, poring over the report. Everything looked great – normal-normal-normal-normal. Then we came to this one value that was slightly elevated – 38, with a normal value up to 32. Generally, a slightly elevated value on a lab test report isn’t a big deal. Everyone occasionally blips outside normal ranges on something, sooner or later. But what WAS this? CA15-3? I’d never heard of it. You shrugged your shoulders. Looking back, I suspect you knew – although it was a different blood marker than the one your old oncologist in New York had used since your cancer diagnosis in 1992, ten years before. It was too late to call the doctor that day to get an explanation. The next morning, we called. It was a marker for metastatic breast cancer, saying that the cancer had returned, and was now metastatic.
We were devastated. We stood there, in shock, looking at each other. My mind was in a flurry. In three weeks, we were about to celebrate our commitment ceremony. Everything was arranged – over 100 people were coming from all over the country, the caterer and minister were finalized; your nephew and niece from Albuquerque were set to photograph the event, and we’d chosen the beverages, the cost of which your former practice partner at Sloan- Kettering had bequeathed to us as a parting gift. She had just died from the side-effects of treatment for her own metastatic breast cancer. We were all set for a glorious celebration, complete with everyone dancing Hava Nagila at the end, accompanied by the Irish musicians from the corner pub and by my daughter, who was playing her fiddle for the great occasion.
We decided to go forth with the celebration. We told no one what we had just learned. We felt fogged in by uncertainty. What was going to happen? In 2002, the hormonal drugs for metastatic cancer were still in clinical trials, and the only treatment available was harsh chemotherapy, which promised no assurance of cure or even remission. You had already come close to death on several occasions during your original chemotherapy – a severe protocol designed to test how close patients could be brought to dying from treatment, and whether that would offer any better success rate in killing the cancer cells. You had already decided you were not going to go through chemotherapy again, after that experience. You had no reserves left. You felt drained and aged by that first round of treatment.
We did institute treatment with classical homeopathic remedies. I was still an advanced homeopathy student, just starting out in practice, and since helping cancer patients had been my motivation for becoming a trained homeopath, my graduate instructor was the acknowledged world expert in treating cancer homeopathically. He mentored me as, together, we treated you homeopathically. Your cancer grew and spread slowly, but since we weren’t aware of the ways lobular breast cancer (the kind you had) spread differently than ductal breast cancer, we didn’t recognize the symptoms – nor did anyone else. You basically did well, and were able to continue living normally and to remain engaged in life till late 2005 and early 2006 – already longer than the mean survival time in 2002 of 2.5 years from diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer.
Dancing “La Guillonnee,” Ellen, Officiant Harriett, Rosemary, Commitment Ceremony, August 31, 2002, Berkeley CA
The Other Shoe January 12 2010
It felt like waiting for the “other shoe” to drop
Upon our heads.
We lived in darkness, not knowing what you’d feel
Or how the cancer would become apparent.
We watched the cancer marker numbers climb, inexorable,
Month by month – from 32 when we began
To 800 and still rising, when we stopped that vigil.
It was just too agonizing –
It felt like counting up for some unknown, explosive “Blast-off.”
Though absolutely no one knew the meaning of those numbers,
They didn’t feel good.
We tried imagining what might be going to happen.
We learned futility in looking to the future
When trying to find answers.
All we can know is here -- now – present:
The aching of uncertainty in sorrow’s waiting room.
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