No Turning Back

As I sit at my keyboard on the eve of my first meeting with a thoracic surgeon, I cannot help but think – here we go again. And I can’t help but wonder, why do we have so many body parts if we can live without so many of them? Honestly, if you ask me, I am a healthy person. I am not on any medications, don’t have high blood pressure or high cholesterol, and until this cancer business haven’t had any chronic illnesses. Somehow, for all my healthiness, I sure have managed to rack up quite a number of surgeries. If this were 100 or even 50 years ago, I’d be long dead by now – most likely from complications due to an untreated broken femur. Back in 2008 I made my first offering to medical wasteland of a hip joint and have lived a good long while with no real noticeable changes to my lifestyle (OK, I wasn’t ever going to take up jogging no matter how much I moan about it.) In 2021, a giant bulge appeared in my abdomen. Like any sane person I ignored it until my daughter exclaimed (loudly in a Kohl’s dressing room) MOM you have to go to the doctor. This led to my donation of one giant benign cystadenoma, one fallopian tube and one ovary. Once again, I donned my invincibility cape and brushed off any lasting impression my scrape with mortality had made. By 2023, the sludge that had been solidifying in my gallbladder  for decades finally decided to form its own opinion about things (seriously, I will never eat another Cheeto), and ended its shelf life in yet another operating theater. Finally, in a ruptured frenzy, my appendix gave up the game in 2025 – a situation that was way more go than touch. I am the type of person who will go to the emergency room for a stye but will have a ruptured appendix and “sleep on it” for a night. Awareness of a trait like this is better than nothing, but really – c’mon Mary. So last October on a drive from Buffalo to Cooperstown, when I was having symptoms that I can only describe as heart-attack like, it is not a surprise that I went back to my lodgings at the meditation center and waited a day to go to the ER. Of course as we now know, I indeed had a tumor in my lung.

There have been cancer scares over the years, as well. A breast biopsy in 2019 led to the usual weeks of waiting in the profound space that not knowing gifts us. There was another three week pause while waiting for the cystadenoma to decide if it was more of a trouble-maker or just inconvenient. And, the latest scare came a mere two months before the real deal – an overzealous radiologist had all but written in red ink the likelihood that there was cancer in my uterus. Another month suspended in biopsy waiting land. In the six years since I began practicing the dharma (whatever that means), I have offered four organs. And part of a toenail. Oh, and some of my hair. I have also had three cancer scares. And each time, especially those times I was in the realm of cancer possibility, I have been gifted a precious and profound opportunity to see things a bit more clearly. And while I haven’t completely wasted these gifts, each and every time I got the thumbs up and returned to the land of cancer-free, I shrugged off the extra practice, allowed what I had learned to grow hazy, and neglected any insight into impermanence or mortality I had had. Some might say that my spiritual path has expedited somewhat and I am burning off a shit-ton of karma. Maybe. But, this time I can’t shrug it off. It’s as if I was given these opportunities to truly understand, but then as soon as things got easy again, I went back to the la-dee-da of daily living. Now, I am really in it for the rest of my life. And the gifts, well, they just keep flowing down the bittersweet river of understanding. I imagine the staging of cancer, like most other things medical, will change dramatically as time goes on. When I first heard stage 4, my assumption was that this was the END. But today, stage 4 cancer is treated much differently than it used to be. Oligometastic patients with limited spread who are healthy enough are sometimes offered surgery to remove the primary culprit. New medicines can make stage 4 more of a chronic condition, than an “oh dear you are truly f’d condition”, and combined with radiation or surgery, disease can sometimes be more effectively controlled. We shall see. At this juncture, it is not so much about the will-he/won’t-he answer I receive from the surgeon tomorrow. It’s more about embracing the not knowing and being OK even when things are not OK. I am a very emotional person (yes! It’s true) and that has its place for release and processing. I can’t help but cry each time I get my scan results.  But the precious moments, sometimes hours, spent in waiting rooms elbow to elbow with others who are suffering provides an opportunity for love like no other. If things go so-called “good” for me, I will strive to never forget what I have learned. There is no turning back. Indeed, there’s not going to be much left of me to take should I forget.