Dancer Down: an unexpected seclusion

The morning of August 7 was unusually bright and sunny. A series of personally difficult life challenges had come to resolution and I was filled with immeasurable joy. Driving to my dance session that morning, I felt glad to be alive. Normally an experience like this would have made me eager to dance, but I had a vacation coming up in two days and things to do in preparation. I didn’t really want to go, but the body can get rather lazy. Like the tin man in the Wizard of Oz, it can come to a rusty impasse. I didn’t want that, so I drove on and arrived—all smiles—without a hint of the disinclination I really felt.

Jane, my teacher/partner, was not her customary, cheerful, and optimistic self. Something was off. Normally we will match each other in body-spirit whether we start out that way or not, so I didn’t think to question, nor did I state the truth of my disinclination. Undaunted by the disparity, I was confident we would find each other eventually, and so we began as we often do, moving in our separate spheres, performing for each other. Midway through the hour Jane put on the album I’d brought with me: Picture, by Night Ark (a quartet of musicians known for their fusion of instrumental jazz with tradition Armenian tonalities). Little did I know: I was about to meet my Waterloo.

I felt this hypnotic, seductive rhythm as a call of connection to the culture of my ancestors, hidden deep within my DNA, and my joy quickly increased to excitement. Although far beyond my improvisational abilities, I threw myself into moving interpretively to this hauntingly beautiful music, without the willing consent of my aging hips, and in a manner I think may have looked something like my little diagram drawing.

Within minutes, there was an audible a POP sound, followed by white-hot, searing pain! I knew something had torn inside. Groaning, I crumpled to the floor, where I stayed motionless and incoherent for several minutes, as the shock of the experience overtook reason. Time lost dimension and I was swimming in painful slow motion—a curious 4th dimension of my customary reality.

Having spent much of her life as a professional dancer with a collection of her own dancer’s injuries, Jane sprang into action, as I laid there in stunned disbelief. Prone to responsible problem solving and somewhat stunned herself, she tried her hardest to get me to consent to an ambulance ride to the nearest hospital emergency room. There was no way I was going to see the inside of one of those buses, before my time was up! Absolutely not! I took ibuprofen and arnica and continued to try… unsuccessfully… to reach my partner, Judy, by phone as well as text message.

As an InterPlay leader of 20+ years, with a talent for cleverly overcoming roadblocks, she reassessed the situation and applied InterPlay’s signature principal of incrementality to moving things along. She would suggest a move and I would try it. Little by little, I was miraculously on my side, then sitting up, then standing on one leg, and then leaning on the back of a chair. Using the chair as a walker, with Jane cheerleading, I hobbled to the elevator, out the door and into the car. Within 10 minutes, Judy arrived on the scene and drove me to an immediate care facility, where we learned that no bones had broken, but the pop had indeed been a tear, requiring weeks of rest, ice, pain medication, and a walker, along with patient acceptance of the situation (a challenge for me).

A stunned state of shock persisted for the first week, deepening as Judy and I felt our way around and through the daily realities of a crippling injury—a disability of unknown duration—to a person of a certain age. This was something I couldn’t accommodate without anticipating a measure of public chastisement. Had I been a bit too pleased with myself for having a fairly agile, old body? Perhaps I’d pushed it beyond reason…colored too far outside the box? Won’t people think I fell and broke my hip, like many older persons before me? But I knew I hadn’t crash-fallen; Jane taught me a dancer’s fall and that’s the way I went down.  Still, the idea haunted me and I didn’t want the humiliation of being thought of as a silly old lady playing at dance in her old age. The truth is: if I could have been anything in my life beside a visual artist, it would have been a dancer. To dance now, even past reasonable age, has been life affirming. All things considered I was even pretty good at it…for an old lady. 🙂

It wasn’t until a follow-up orthopedic appointment 10 days later that I learned my pop had been an avulsion, i.e., a tearing of the Sartorius tendon where it attaches to the iliac spine area of the pelvis. (The Sartorius is the longest muscle in the body, resolving in a tendon attaching to the pelvis.) This accounted for both the bone and tendon pain I was experiencing. No bone chips, no fractures—just a painful separation between the tendon and its point of insertion. I was assured that it was a common athletic injury—particularly in football—one that occurs when the muscle is stretched beyond its capacity. Well, I clearly did that, without doubt…but football? That was worthy of a laugh out loud!

Laughing or crying, in 3 weeks I would begin a course of physical therapy that would help me regain 95% of my former function. My inquiring and restless mind finally had an understanding of what had happened and a course of action. Between the relief I felt with the diagnosis and prognosis—along with the homeopathic care I knew would hasten healing—I returned home ready to welcome this secluded time out as an unexpected gift.

The story continues…

something on my mind

Last week, in an Oprah Winfrey interview we heard Lance Armstrong, the world-class Olympic cyclist confess to having used several performance enhancing drugs to achieve his string of seven Tour de France medals during the period 1999 to 2005. These medals were stripped from him late last year, and recently the Olympic bronze medal from the 2000 Sydney games as well. Lance is a proud man, a fighter—a winner at all costs sort of person. Oprah did a magnificent job of drawing him out from shadow to full light truth. She did this by offering him kind, compassionate support all the way home. He needed that and she, out of her storehouse of experiences, could give it. I don’t think she skipped a beat.

For two hours I watched and listened to two amazing persons reveal themselves to the world: one a fallen celebrity newly discovering his feet of clay, the other a celebrity interviewer/entrepreneur who has never hidden hers, even from herself. This is a distinction of importance as I look through the pages of my own book of life. I find identity in both areas and I am not at ease.

I am annoyed with Lance Armstrong, not for the doping, arrogant lying and power-driven will to win, win, win, but for the cancer mythology he helped to perpetuate through the LIVESTRONG theme of the foundation bearing his name. The foundation has done good work and raised millions of dollars for research, but it did that based on Armstrong’s own cancer experience turned into the thematic slogan: LIVESTRONG. Many thousands of people carried this message to heart—persons unlucky enough to have contracted the disease, were caretakers for them, or otherwise touched by the disease.

In 1996, Armstrong was diagnosed with late-stage, metastatic, testicular cancer that had spread to his abdomen, lungs and brain. He ignored the warning signs at the early, easily treatable stage of this cancer, common in men aged 15-35. Had his body not been as fit as it was, he may very well have been a statistic instead of a survivor of heroic proportions. LIVESTRONG worked for him because it was his personal modus operandi. People want and need heroes. He was a winner, so the slogan became a word to live by for many, but not for me. I survived cancer and didn’t have the strength to live strong for a very long time. I simply survived. It took many years to overcome the side effects of the treatment, some of them permanent.  I am still surviving. There is a 50/50 chance that my cancer will return at some point. I live with that daily. Is that living strong or living true?

The yellow LIVESTRONG wristband always turned me off. I didn’t know what it meant and still don’t. In the absence of broader knowledge of this disease, responsibility for outcome tends to shift to the sufferer. How does one live strong when the drugs that flow intravenously through the body every three weeks (or less) leave you chemically depressed, thin as a bone, bald as a bat, sick and wobbly as a toddler learning to walk? Does that mean soldiering on through, fighting on through, or what? Cancer is still incurable. Oncology speaks of remission these days, not cure. So, is remission the goal of living strong? Is that what is meant by “beating it?” I don’t know. We see the happy faces of cancer survivors in commercials and advertising. We don’t see the thousands of people permanently disfigured and/or impaired by the side effects of these chemical cocktails, nor do we understand that each recurrence of the disease further weakens the body’s ability to counter. We don’t see the epitaphs of those who apparently didn’t live strong enough to survive. We aren’t ready yet to admit that the war on cancer, started 40+ years ago by President Nixon, has not produced cure. Treatments are better and drugs are becoming smarter, but it is still treatment that will be deemed barbaric some hundred years or so in the future.

I would like to hear another interview where Armstrong takes responsibility for misleading the public into thinking a catchy jingle could make us all strong survivors. We aren’t. If he does this he will be a true leader and a strong advocate. Cancer is still a dark thief riding a dark horse in the darkest of nights for most of us.  Both my niece and my sister lived their cancer as best they could…some might say strong, but the endings were not pretty. After Adopted Daughter died of cancer, I found the yellow bracelet among her things. I recoiled at the sight of it and tossed it out. My loss was too great to even look at the talisman she thought would help her. If I had it today, I’d take a scissor and sever the LIVE from the STRONG. I’d throw out the STRONG and pin-up the LIVE in my studio to remind me of what surviving is all about, at least for me: living authentically, gracefully and joyously.

Postscript:

1) My personal cancer story, Dying to Live: My Cancer Odyssey, was written in 2007 and can be seen on my website: www.inheritanceproject-2.com – project 5.  2) Reports on Lance Armstrong, the foundation, the interview, other cancer survivor’s opinions can easily be found online. Your comments to this posting are welcome.

an unexpected sabbatical

I’ve been on something like an unexpected sabbatical since my last posting on this blog (June 13, 2012). My world has turned round and round, upside down, right side up and sideways. The sale of our Frank Lloyd Wright house took on shady tones and bogus proportions that finally were unacceptable to us. When asked to reduce the price to less than half its worth, it took us only a moment to flatly refuse in unison. We shifted gears, reclaimed the house and promptly put the smaller house—our downsize house—on the market instead.

July and August were full of heavy packing, lifting, and moving—box- by-box, carload-by-carload, all day, every day until Two Men and a Truck came for the furniture at the end of August. We were not just moving our living quarters; we were moving a studio as well. Despite having either sold or given away lots of things during our move to the smaller house on Audubon Road, the volume of stuff was staggering. I started the job with gusto mid July and ended with a torn meniscus in my knee shortly before the actual move. Since I had didn’t have a lot of experience with physical injury, I paid little attention. There was a job to do and a goal to be reached.

We were excited and full of hope at coming home and starting over. Thinking to put the past behind us, we planned to live in the spacious old house in a new way. We’d done a thoroughly beautiful renovation on it and lived there for seventeen years before moving to Audubon Road. It suited us in many ways, but there were some rooms that just never felt right to us, no matter what adjustments were made. We concluded that we’d been trying too hard to live there in a more formal FLW, prairie style. So the plan was to use the rooms in a different way…color outside the lines, so to speak. The most notable change was our decision to keep the 23 x 15 foot living room clear for large gatherings of friends and family, music and dance events to accommodate our current interests. We call it the ballroom. Here is a shot of the southwest corner of the room, showing the expanse of oak throughout and a great dance floor.

Once in the house, we felt an immediate sense of being at home…as though we’d been on assignment somewhere for four years and finally came home. It was glorious and it was fun. This was where we belonged, without doubt. The tenants we’d had were good people, but despite the arrangement we had made with them, they really had no investment in the place, so we had a lot to do in addition to the changes we needed to make for ourselves. The house spoke to us and we returned the greeting a hundred-fold, but my knee was steadily worsening and I was unable to dance. The big beautiful music/dance room stood waiting. With my oncology appointment looming (always a point of anxiety), I began a generalized worry pattern that pretty much centered on the idea that dancing was all over for me. I’d been too proud of my ability, so I thought; my body was now showing its true colors.

Finally, at the insistence of my very good friend, whose dancing days made her an expert on injured knees, hips and other parts, strategic to dancing health, I made an appointment with an orthopedic doctor. The MRI confirmed frayed meniscus in my left knee, a product of aging wear and tear, made worse by packing, schlepping and cleaning on hands and knees with relentless determination to leave the little house pristinely ready for the market. The doctor suggested surgery or physical therapy that would strengthen my quadriceps enough to relieve the pain.

I chose physical therapy and came home feeling hopeful enough to meet with my dance teacher for some gentle, stretching, body movement. It had been nearly three months; yet, under her direction, I was amazed at what I could still do. I was floating on cloud nine after she left. It was time for lunch…still floating,  I placed a piece of my favorite Middle Eastern lavash in the toaster while I went about searching for something in the pantry to go with it. (This lavash is very thin and needs only thirty seconds to heat.) While six feet away, standing on a stool in the pantry, something bright caught my eye: serious red flames shooting up from the charred lavash toward the wooden cabinet directly above. I told myself to stay calm and get to the toaster before alarm bells (or worse) went off. I got quickly down, protecting my knee, I lunged forward, jamming my left foot into the leg of the stool I’d been standing on and sustained a spiral break in my toe and an enormous hematoma. I hobbled to the toaster, unplugged it and carried it (still flaming) out to the yard, all the while telling myself I had not broken anything. The kitchen was smoky. Windows went up, the fire alarm got disabled and the pain increased; reason returned: I had broken a left toe, a very sore left foot and a damaged left meniscus. Agony! Bad luck! Misery! No dancing for me now, for sure! My glass was not half-empty…more like nearly empty.

Ice, ice and more ice. Ibuprofen. Homeopathic Arnica and Symphytum. It was two weeks before I could wear anything but a “glamorous” orthopedic post-op shoe and four weeks before I could manage a shoe with a big cutout on the side. I was limping along with a cane, feeling awkward and immensely unlucky to say the least. The doctor said it could take three months to properly heal. After six weeks, with the help of my cut-out shoe, I started physical therapy. Four weeks later, my quadriceps were strong and I was back! No surgery required.

In the midst of all this came Thanksgiving with all its hustle, bustle, worry and scurry—our first big dining event in the ballroom. Thankfully, it was a great success. Five days after Thanksgiving Day I had a strange sore throat and cough. The next day was my six-month oncology appointment (never a fun trip). My lab tests were very good, so I didn’t think much about the sore throat, since it seemed to be improving. The following day was my last physical therapy session. I was unusually tired and low on energy with muscles more sore than usual. The day after came with chills, fever, gas, bloating and overwhelming flu-like tiredness. It was the first of December and I rallied to take the granddaughters to the town’s Frosty Fest pageant. It’s total fun to be with kids at Christmas. We had a great time…Santa, reindeer, cotton candy, hot chocolate…joie de vivre!

The next day my illness began to slowly return, but my youngest granddaughter, Miss Pink’s, birthday party was scheduled for that afternoon at the dreadful house of grown-up horrors called, Chuck-e Cheese’s. We had to be there. J and I soldiered through the noise, the din and the obnoxious urging to be happy, happy, happy; aren’t we all so happy today??? By the time it was all over and done with, and we were driving home to peace and sanity, illness overtook me. We had to pull into a parking lot; I sat on the curb, shaking with chills and gastric distress for fifteen minutes while my body decided which way it was going to go, up or down. Once home, I went to bed and prayed for recovery. Many weeks of illness ensued, making many return visits that simply would not stop. Since my blood work had been good, I could set aside my habitual fear of illness being cancer returning in cloak and dagger fashion. Nonetheless, I was really sick for weeks and not able to stay well for more than a few days at a time. My doctor suggested an immune strengthening regiment of elderberry, astragalus, and two homeopathic medicines to be taken regularly for four weeks. I am starting my third week of this regimen and feeling quite disposed to continuing until the robins and blue birds return and this unseasonable Midwest weather pattern gives way to proper spring days. We’ve set up a bird bath and feeder to encourage them back into our daily life.

During the course of the injuries and ensuing illness stretching into January, I’d lost my raison d’être as an artist. Only dancing made any sense to me. I watched many dance films to stay connected to this. Last week I looked at the computer and heard writing and visual art calling me to return to them as equal partners with dance. I don’t know exactly what it was that brought me back; I think it best to let go of so much knowing anyway. I’m back in my house, looking to the future—not as a younger woman would do, but as a woman in her seventh decade with a lot of history, a 50/50 chance of cancer returning one day, and a mind that processes time differently than I did in my fifties and sixties. I am at yet another point of transition and coming to understand that life is all about transitions. Nothing is permanent. Only now is here. Today I am glad to be writing again, composing visual art, dancing, and by grace, moving forward.

Mondays not Sundays

In the 1970s I was a member of an intentional Christian community north of Chicago. It was a mixed bag of positive and negative experiences in those days. Living in Community was a total immersion experience with shared purse and decision-making. The positives could reach beyond imagining and the negatives could inflict deep wounds that only confession and forgiveness and the passage of time could heal.

I met my life partner there. We left together at the end of a very dark time, re-entering a world that had changed in a myriad of ways. Time passed…30 years to be precise…with the best aspects of community living ingrained within us. Although we prospered in many ways, we could not even remotely re-assemble the best of those times. These were years of growing and learning the ways of the world. We did well.

In 2006 our world fell to pieces when I was diagnosed with non-Hodgekin lymphoma. I survived the attack of the cancer beast, fell in love with God again, and a year later found myself  returning to the church, which was and still is, in change-process. Change within the church, or any large organization for that matter, is slow and tedious with its own litany of hits, runs and errors. It has been both a painful and an enlightening experience, as many of my previous postings can clearly show. Writing this, remembering the events of the past half decade, I feel battle-scarred and tired. I am an artist, a seeker and a visionary. Moving forward within the church structure is a slow and burdensome process. I do not naturally travel slowly. Sometimes I wonder why I am still here…in church…any church at all for that matter? Good question.

Yesterday was another Sunday survived. Today is Monday, the day of healing—the day I get to dance in a spaciously beautiful room—with beautiful Jane, who is my teacher and friend. We come together in this place, with its strips of colored sunlight streaking across the old wood floor,  and a ceiling that dwarfs us by its height. We come with our body spirits as is—a come as you are party of two. Through the various InterPlay forms, and her years of expertise and training, we shake it out, sing it out, shout it out and dance it out. We dance for ourselves, for each other, and with each other in familiar forms. We even create new ones. We are clay on the potter’s wheel, laundry on the line, birds unfolding, flags unfurling. We are movement in time and place—each of us doing our best, reaching for our personal sense of wholeness within and without. And when we achieve it…when it happens…we are altogether amazed and elated. We are uplifted—a Lazarus moment in time that requires a bit of exclamation and a roll or two on the floor!

And that is why I find myself so looking forward to Mondays with Jane, when my body-spirit regains its equilibrium and I am One with all of Creation.

Dancing me back together

I said I would talk about aging, most specifically my own, but in fact have said pretty much nothing since my last entry, about 6 weeks ago. I am mortified, and plead the second amendment. I’ve been busier than I’d like. Today I am catching my breath and writing about something very important to me: dancing. I used to say that if there is re-incarnation, I want to come back as a dancer, but now in my later life, I find that I am a dancer, not a trained professional, but a dancer nonetheless, thanks to InterPlay. The flyer that the leader of my group sent out this week reads:

InterPlay offers a soulful place to discover practices that develop ease in movement, voice, stillness, contact and storytelling. InterPlay is a practice and philosophy rooted in the power of play. It’s an easy to learn, creative process that uses movement, storytelling, and voice—but does it in ways that don’t require particular skill or even nerve. It balances experiences of reflection and activity. Integrating body, mind, heart and spirit, InterPlay creates connection and community. Through this simple form of play, we learn more about ourselves and each other. It is incremental, affirming, and something that anybody can do! It opens paths of connection between people—between cultures and faiths.

I began playing last February, after several difficult and painful years of loss and personal trial, culminating in a time of deep despair. A dear old friend of mine had been involved in InterPlay almost from its beginning on the West Coast, but I never gave it much thought. Seemed silly to me, but I’d become desperate and willing to try just about anything. So I looked it up online and found, behold: a group within a half hour’s drive from my suburban home! I emailed the person who was listed as group leader and made plans to try it. On February 4th, 2011, I began what has become a life-line for me. Within 2 visits, I was convinced. After 3 visits, I shed tears of relief and jumped in, lock, stock and barrel. Since that time I have gotten younger inside, where Spirit meets flesh. Outside, I am still qualifying on senior citizen discount days.

By November, I chose to deepen my involvement and added weekly, one-on-one sessions with the leader (now, teacher), which we loosely think of as Dancing Spiritual Direction, using the principles of InterPlay. I love Mondays. I am immensely happy on Mondays because I am neither old nor young, thin nor fat, tall nor short. I am just me, the same me that entered the world so long ago. And I am dancing! What a miracle!

Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matt. 18:3)

I think this is about living out the truth of ourselves…at the center…without ego and artifice…just like children. This truth is with us from the time we are born to the time we die, oftentimes blanketed by the demands of the world, but there just the same. When I dance I am all together—one person, freely in tune with Spirit. I do not think, I dance and am.

Kimerer LaMothe, Ph.D., author of the book, What a Body Knows, sees the practice of dancing as vital to our survival as humans on earth. Her blog on the Psychology Today website begins:

To dance is a radical act. To think about dance, to study dance, or to practice dance in this 21st century is a radical act. Because if dancing matters—if dancing makes a difference to how we humans think and feel and act—then dancing challenges the values that fund modern western cultures.

She goes on to flesh out this radical statement about a radical act, and what she says wraps words around my own experience of dancing. I am so happy to be finally living in my body instead of alongside it. This is how it should be. Whether he danced or not—and presumably he did at weddings—I think Jesus knew all about this and spoke from his Divine Center, as I do when I dance.

finishing free

This was the day of all days…the big one…the last Rituxan maintenance treatment and I had been alternately looking forward to it and dreading it. Generally speaking, by nightfall, the prior day of these treatments, I turn on auto pilot and sleep-walk to the clinic. Last night was no different except that wintry weather was on its way and could easily cause delay to our 7:00  a.m. appointment in the city. My partner, Big Dawg was raised on a farm and respects weather…I mean respects! So we rose at 4:30 and left the house at 5:20.

The weather hadn’t actually arrived yet, so we were a miserable half hour early, i.e., 6:30 a.m.  The hospital never sleeps, so we could spend the 30 minutes in one of the less than delicious cafes, eating less than delicious morsels of flour, sugar and….and… Must have been something else in those buns, but can’t think what. By 7:00 we were checking in, sitting attentively for our pager to start squawking—the signal that my time had come to enter the portal gates and receive first my blood draw, and then my life-assuring Rituxan. We waited. No squawk was heard. Finally, after about 20 minutes, a technician came out and invited all those souls who would be receiving port-a-cath blood draws to follow her. I have a port-a-cath and I happily followed, thinking that the procedure would be expedited by reason of pager system failure.

No such expedition occurred—at least not for me. The device was clogged and could neither give blood nor receive Rituxan. The draw was done the old-fashioned way and I was sent to the chairs to wait…for what, I wondered? I waited and waited. Finally the technician came out again and beckoned me back to try another approach to unclogging the device. Not working; she asks who is my nurse? Can’t remember her name, so I give her the doctor’s assistant’s name, Ms. SM, and she is paged. Now the real waiting begins. A total of two hours, during which time I begin to slink into cognizance of low-lying fear—apprehensions common to cancer patients, but generally kept under wraps. It’s a bit like unlocking Pandora’s box. Other patients come and go and I am waiting with my uncooperative port, a constant reminder of my dilemma and discomfort. Finally the feeling of not being cared for takes over and I begin to tear up. A flood of cellular memory…times of childhood and beyond when I truly wasn’t cared for. This prompts BD to start the squeaky wheel apparatus. She makes calls to pagers and even speaks to some administration person. I am revived by this, but still the waiting continues.

Finally, the technician comes out and tells us that Ms. SM has been contacted and will page us out in the main waiting room. We trudge off for this area, which by now is overflowing with persons in varying stages of illness. This is discomfiting to me. We wait some more. Then a nurse appears (apparently the pager is not the signifier of choice for me) and asks us to go through the red door. We do and she is no where to be seen. Once again, long story short: we are ushered into a room to wait for Ms. SM. When she arrives, there is no apology or explanation. (This should not be a surprise to anyone reading about my medical experiences.) However, she is all smiles and warmly explains that although a final treatment had been scheduled for today, it isn’t really necessary since I have already had a little more than the two years of protocol treatment. Since Rituxan results are still being gathered world-wide, and since each person responds differently to it as well as to their cancer, I can choose to quit or stay and receive the stuff through a dorsal vein. After verifying with her that she thinks it is six of one half a dozen of the other, learning that my CT scans showed no problem, and my blood work was good, I heartily opted for NO MORE TREATMENT. Yowie, kazowie! I’m through! This means that I won’t have to endure another five or six weeks of recovery—that I can attend holiday parties and  go about my usual business with all my faculties about me.  What joy! I am officially in remission!

I will continue on with quarterly blood work, doctor exams, and periodic (hated) scans, but these will gradually lessen as long as my remission continues. I have follicular, B-cell, non-Hodgkin lymphoma that transformed in 2006 to diffuse, large, B-Cell lymphoma. The latter was wiped out with R-CHOP, the standard of care. I am left with the (indolent)  follicular lymphoma that may very likely cause a ruckus in the future, but I am told that it will not again transform as it did in 2006. Ms. SM outlined the possibilities for the treatment of recurrence. It would not be the R-CHOP and for that I am grateful. (Details of my experience—Dying to Live—can be seen as on my website.) On the other hand, it may never raise it’s disturbing head again…or it may be many years from now when I am older than the old I am now. No one knows what, how or why cancer occurs; how, when or why it recurs. No two persons respond to even the same diagnosis in the same way. Could be called a crap-shoot, I guess. Or is it a weather bell for the new individualized therapies now in the line?

Dr. G popped in to congratulate. He is really a mensch. Never mind the handshake, I had to give him an old fashioned hug.

Epilogue

Last night I asked God to help me be a conduit for my own healing and for BD to be that for me as well. I also asked to BE HEALED and to walk in faith for the healing God has already given and will surely continue to give. I asked this knowing that healing exists on many levels, not just the physical…knowing that healing is a very deep and wondrous thing. Today, I feel I’ve received a gift and a diploma. I am none the worse for wear, and clearly better for the wear. I am thankful and so ready to leave cancer behind. Tomorrow I will make an appointment with the surgeon for the removal of the dysfunctional port-a-cath. Then I will get rid of all the clothes I’ve kept just for port-a-cath infusions. Tonight I will put clean sheets on my bed and spread out my winter weight comforter. I am feeling loved by the Creator and so grateful for his/her Grace.

Grace