Just when you think you've got it all buttoned up...
11 04, 26 Filed in: Memory bombs
Now in my seventies, I'm in a good place; all that therapy, meditation, internal and interpersonal work has paid off. At last I can just relax and enjoy life! That's what I was thinking when I got cancer.
Tiny the Tumor grew in my pancreas—hard to reach, ultimately impossible to live with. Suddenly life became a barrage of phone queues to schedule doctor appointments, juggling my own schedule when I finally scored one, managing my suspense as they made me wait weeks… to discuss procedures, prepare for procedures (protein shakes? empty stomach? metal jewelry?), endure procedures, recover from them… all to be followed by more phone queues to make appointments to discuss the results.
And that's just the scaffolding. What they do to you, when it finally comes down to it!
Lying prone in a flimsy gown in a shiny room with horrible silver lights glittering at you from above, surrounded by bustling strangers whose focus is theoretically on you but who are actually focused on various subparts like your vein or your lungs or your ability to recite your birthdate and you don't have your glasses so everyone's a blur and while no one's actually radiating malice, or glee at your helplessness, or making lewd jokes about your body, nevertheless you're prone and vulnerable amid various metal bits, shiny things, and sharp objects—
It came down to this: dissociate? Leave here, leave now, invoke that unwholesome disconnect I learned back when the glittering eyes belonged to Dagny and the malice and glee radiating from them seared my soul like a house fire… and later suffer the shame of the first such reversion in decades?
Or try to stay and tolerate it? But could I?
In other words, the idea that I'd finally done all my psychotherapy homework and could now just forget about it and get on with living—that turned out to be yet another illusion. "Done" is a slippery concept; for one thing, it's context-dependent. If I hadn't gotten cancer—a roll of the dice—if I had instead died suddenly in an accident, I really might have been justified in considering myself Done. I was doing fine. Nothing needed to bring up the intimate details of Dagny's torture sessions (touched on only lightly in the book); I really could've gotten on with my life never thinking about them again.
Instead, two major abdominal surgeries and six months of chemo stirred up lots and lots of nightmares about those glittering eyes / lights and hard-to-fend-off memories about the pain humiliation and helplessness of my body being acted upon in such distressingly—if superficially—similar ways.
I sure learned a lot, though. Pain is a teacher like no other.
Nor was it all pain. Turns out I've accumulated a surprising number of friends in my time on earth, and all the various ways that friends show up for you can be quite wonderful!
And, with help from my meditation teacher to whom I am deeply grateful, I learned that the absence of malice or glee, and the presence of an impersonal professional vibe or even, on occasion, real concern and kindness—these things are at least as real as my own memories and fears if not more so, and their presence can be felt and focused on and used to calm myself. Which is an amazing thing to learn at any age.
Tiny the Tumor grew in my pancreas—hard to reach, ultimately impossible to live with. Suddenly life became a barrage of phone queues to schedule doctor appointments, juggling my own schedule when I finally scored one, managing my suspense as they made me wait weeks… to discuss procedures, prepare for procedures (protein shakes? empty stomach? metal jewelry?), endure procedures, recover from them… all to be followed by more phone queues to make appointments to discuss the results.
And that's just the scaffolding. What they do to you, when it finally comes down to it!
Lying prone in a flimsy gown in a shiny room with horrible silver lights glittering at you from above, surrounded by bustling strangers whose focus is theoretically on you but who are actually focused on various subparts like your vein or your lungs or your ability to recite your birthdate and you don't have your glasses so everyone's a blur and while no one's actually radiating malice, or glee at your helplessness, or making lewd jokes about your body, nevertheless you're prone and vulnerable amid various metal bits, shiny things, and sharp objects—
It came down to this: dissociate? Leave here, leave now, invoke that unwholesome disconnect I learned back when the glittering eyes belonged to Dagny and the malice and glee radiating from them seared my soul like a house fire… and later suffer the shame of the first such reversion in decades?
Or try to stay and tolerate it? But could I?
In other words, the idea that I'd finally done all my psychotherapy homework and could now just forget about it and get on with living—that turned out to be yet another illusion. "Done" is a slippery concept; for one thing, it's context-dependent. If I hadn't gotten cancer—a roll of the dice—if I had instead died suddenly in an accident, I really might have been justified in considering myself Done. I was doing fine. Nothing needed to bring up the intimate details of Dagny's torture sessions (touched on only lightly in the book); I really could've gotten on with my life never thinking about them again.
Instead, two major abdominal surgeries and six months of chemo stirred up lots and lots of nightmares about those glittering eyes / lights and hard-to-fend-off memories about the pain humiliation and helplessness of my body being acted upon in such distressingly—if superficially—similar ways.
I sure learned a lot, though. Pain is a teacher like no other.
Nor was it all pain. Turns out I've accumulated a surprising number of friends in my time on earth, and all the various ways that friends show up for you can be quite wonderful!
And, with help from my meditation teacher to whom I am deeply grateful, I learned that the absence of malice or glee, and the presence of an impersonal professional vibe or even, on occasion, real concern and kindness—these things are at least as real as my own memories and fears if not more so, and their presence can be felt and focused on and used to calm myself. Which is an amazing thing to learn at any age.