“Integrative” health, or “Surviving being a survivor”

It’s been a few days since I last wrote; they’ve been pretty good days, quite normal. Got some work done, played with kids, got family photos taken (okay, getting around to that long-procrastinated task was spurred on by the possibility of being bald in about four weeks, not exactly normal!). I did not despair, measure my life in short years, cry when looking at my kids (well, I did tear up when I saw the photographer’s wonderful images, but that would have happened anyway, I’m a mushball). Clearly, those two conversations last Thursday were a huge help.

Today, I met with another woman who went through breast cancer and is 11 years clear. Her experiences led her to all sorts of research into integrative therapy (i.e. diet, nutrition, holistic healing). Meanwhile, she also commented that she had “done” breast cancer for the time she had to do it, and then moved on, not wanting to be defined by the experience permanently.

Everyone has their own experience, of course. Some women, I believe, find themselves, perhaps for the first time, in the depths of emotion and the powerful relationships formed by the cancer experience. Some push it all away and don’t want to let it enter the rest of their life at all. As we agreed, chatting today, there is quite a sorority out there, and I’m grateful for the ‘sorority effect’ – the fact that women who have faced the challenge are willing to sit down and give their time to help me navigate facts, emotions, choices, and reactions. (Maybe I’m doing the same, in a different way, by blogging.)

It’s interesting how my own perspective on this is shifting. Initially, the cancer diagnosis was most disturbing to me in part because of how it made me perceive myself as compared to other people: I had become one of those, the other people, the shadowy ones, the sad and fearful ones, the ones who – perhaps despite admirable courage and valiant effort – were clouded in some way. It was not a club I wanted to join.

I’ve thought a lot about that reaction, about the ways in which cancer is a societal bogeyman, a terrifying term and one that defines us as “other” – possibly to be feared ourselves. The woman I spoke with today had a bizarre experience, after sharing her diagnosis at work, where a colleague coming down the hallway came around the corner, saw her, and literally turned tail and dodged into a doorway to avoid her. This is what we fear, in many ways: becoming an object of fear to others.

This made me think about another aspect of “integrative” healing. Yes, the sorority is important; they’ve been there, they can offer experience. But I bet the main reason women with breast cancer have traditionally held each other close in order to hold each other up is to combat the alienation of cancer.

For me, compared to my initial reaction, I have started to feel progressively confident in this. Oh, don’t get me wrong: I will cry again; I will worry about my body and what long-term health I may trade for short-term curing; I will stumble into the quagmire of emotion surrounding thoughts of my children losing a parent. But I am getting less shy. I am starting to feel that going through cancer is a different thing from being a cancer patient or even, being a cancer survivor. This is not a permanent condition.

Perhaps there’s another kind of integrative health we need in this picture – one where people don’t have to seek solace through a separate sorority, but instead are fully, openly part of their usual world even as they “go through cancer.” One where we confront our culture’s fear of death and stop painting it onto any face we encounter who has had bad health news. In this step towards integrative health, we start getting more healthy about life, transition to end of life, grieving, healing, and sharing the real burden of good and bad times. Luckily my friends are already pretty darn good at this (thanks, Marc, for listening so well last week when I was feeling blue and blown away by statistics – listening sympathetically but without getting uncomfortable or frightened). But you may notice how I have not used my last name here. I’m a bit leery of spreading my news throughout my work world. Why? The fear factor, the worry that work might decide to quietly avoid me “because she’s going through a hard time right now.”

I’ve got cancer (or maybe it’s already all gone, who knows) – but I’m not dead. Or dying. Not even close! Allow me, and those of us going through this journey, to be fully alive and not freak you out. No more shadowy room for me, no sense of permanent loss of the person I was. Yep, I might be pretty ill as a bunch of drugs go through my system, and I’m not keen about the alternatives either (and I expect I’ll be feeling a lot more mentally dragged down when I do get to those steps), but I’m adjusting to the idea of wearing hats, doing work in the in-between times when I’m (hopefully) not so down and out, and generally making what I can out of it. It will pass; I will go through it. Meanwhile, thinking about the ways in which we react to life, death, fear, and “survival” seem to lend themselves to more systemic questions about the way we live our lives and shape our culture than I had imagined, a few short months ago.