Beltane Closing Moon
When attention defocuses and my mind heads toward default, it no longer picks up a stray red flag: What about the $%*&$NG house in Andover? This creates space for other thoughts to arise, of course, like: what about my prostate? But that’s fine because action on it is ahead and noticing it does not create anxiety, just resolve. This means I now have some free space, some room to expand my horizons. That makes me feel good.
Beltane Closing Moon
Realized after talking to Kate yesterday that I have a tightrope I’m walking. I need to recognize my prostate cancer as potentially fatal, because of that I need to find the best treatment possible. Yet. I also need to find ways to be with that possibility and not sink into the slough of despond. There’s a tension created by the act of staying focused on the medical issues and trying to maintain calm. I’m sure this is not novel to me. Anyone with a lethal agent inside them must face the same dilemma.
One solution is denial. Nope, nothing’s going on. I’m ok. Another is wallowing in the terrible fate. Poor me, why me, oh my. In between these two extremes is a path that sees things as they are, but does not give up living. Of course I swing between the two poles. At certain points I think oh this is no big problem. It’ll get fixed (how is not part of this thought pattern) and I’ll be better and life will return to normal. At other points the disease has already won and I’m planning my last good-byes, writing my obituary, planning my funeral.
Most of the time I’m aware of the disease, know I’m taking the steps that can be taken, and am at peace. Life is not normal. Concentrating for Latin or writing has not returned. Daydreaming seems to have a foreshortened horizon. I no longer imagine long projects like Superior Wolf or translating Ovid, finding a way to go on another cruise or start researching certain facets of Western history. Now my daydreams stop at tomorrow or next week, do not extend into the next decade. This is, I suppose, my subconscious reminding me of the predicament.
I do not feel anxious. I sleep well and, for the most part, am level and engaged, not wandering off to thoughts of doom or what might be. In my opinion I’m handling the situation, if not always well, at least honestly. Not sure what else I could ask of myself right now.
Beltane Closing Moon
Cancer still on my mind. This time the battle, war, fighting, struggle words so often attached to thoughts about it. Cancer caused 585,000 deaths in the U.S. in 2013. That’s a city, a whole city the size of Tucson or Milwaukee. From this social perspective perhaps a fight against or a battle against or a war against cancer makes some sense. That’s a lot of people to lose and war would be fought if some nation took out Tucson or Milwaukee.
On a personal level though, say my level, those militant words feel like the wrong metaphor. Cancer is not, in my body, an outside invader that has breached my defenses. No, it’s more like a group of deluded idealists, a utopian commune to which I (or at least parts of me) belong, dedicated to the concept of their own immortality. To extend this metaphor the commune might grow and grow and grow, taking resources from the larger population until everyone outside the commune starves.
Another metaphor might be mental illness. Gripped by the illusion that certain actions will make me live forever, I first cut off a foot and eat it, then a hand. Later, hungrier still, I cut off a leg. At some point there will be nothing left to feed the illusion, but the conviction remains and I take no other sustenance. Death results.
Cancer, of course, has no motive. It has no intention, other than survival. Yet, it is my own cells gone off on their own, to a different rhythm than the rest. As they grow, zombie like, staying alive when they should be dead, cancer recruits other cells to supply it. The host, me, must furnish more and more resources to keep the cancer cells alive. This process has a finite limit.
Cancer cells are more horror movie than battlefield. The first step, it seems to me, is to stop seeing cancer as an enemy and begin to see it for what it is, a deviation from normal cellular processes that left unchecked will slowly consume the host from the inside. It is not fear or violence that will put a stop to it, but careful application of known techniques like surgery (removal), chemotherapy and radiation (to stop the zombie cells). Will these techniques always succeed? No. Not right now.
Horror movies rely on fear for their effect. So do the metaphors of war. We need to back away from both and demythologize this monster. See it clearly. Then, deal with it.
Beltane Closing Moon
No longer the same terrifying monster that stalked through my childhood and adult years, cancer yet demands careful attention. And, it kills.
No longer hypothetical for me, but a fact. Inside my own body, lodged in the core, lies a strawberry sized organ (mine’s a bit bigger) that now carries the seeds of my own apocalypse. I imagined I would feel my body had betrayed me, but no. Instead, if I understand it correctly, some of my cells have reached for that long held human fantasy of immortality. Oddly, if those cells reach their goal they will end their dream and me.
Yesterday I felt stunned when Ana, Dr. Eigner’s physician’s assistant, told me I had a positive biopsy for prostate cancer. So much so that her next words about the Gleason score came in my ears, rattled around hunting for understanding and failed. Later, in the book Eigner recommended, How to Survive Prostate Cancer by Patrick Walsh, they fell into place.
Cancer was what I had expected, given my PSA, the digital exam of both Dr. Gidday and Dr. Eigner and my family history. Dad’s prostate cancer at age 65. And, survival until age 89. Even so, the movement from hypothetical to real caused a reeling sensation that momentarily scrambled my thoughts.
Slept fine last night though there was, before I could get to sleep, a small fiery knot in my lower abdomen, a signal that I had unacknowledged fears. Through a trick I learned from either Carl Rogers or gestalt psychology I let this fiery knot speak to me. It spoke not in words as sometimes happens, but in a release of tension. Those fears needed acceptance, not repression. After that, sleep came and my dreams were usual.
On June 11th Kate and I will see Eigner for a long consult on what treatment option to take. After taking into account the pieces of information I have now and calculating that I have over fifteen years to live, I imagine radical prostatectomy, complete removal of the prostate, will be my choice.
Next up. Echocardiogram. Gosh.
Beltane Closing Moon
Colorado Native Plants. The books are out and water stained: Colorado Flora, Colorado Noxious Weeds, Native Plants of Mt. Falcon. The also water stained plant list for Mt. Falcon has check marks for the plants I need to know. Went through about half of them yesterday, the other half today.
In studying the very specific nomenclature for plant identification, I got a new appreciation for medical jargon. In writing and communication with other doctors and nurses it is necessary to name the various parts of the anatomy with specificity. Otherwise, the wrong limb gets cut-off or the wrong organ removed.
It is a comfortable feeling to take out books, arrange them in a particular way so they can be referenced easily, to create a plan for learning what I need to know and then execute it. This is an ordered world, one I know well. A safe, predictable world. Today, I need that.
This paintbrush is a beautiful flowering plant, one you may already know, Castilleja integra, the Foothills Paintbrush. It’s in bloom right now, creating impressionist dashes of color as it flowers in otherwise green fields of cheatgrass and yucca.
Permit one thought on mortality. These plants in the foothills of the Rockies have long evolutionary histories, often involving millions of years and thousands of miles, some crossing continents as continental drift shaped and reshaped earth’s land masses. They grown on soil covering rock created in the Archean eon, preceded only by the Hadean. Plants, animals and one-celled creatures have been living and dying on the thin, fertile layer below them for millions of years.
Our own lives are part of that same living and dying, drawing our sustenance from the same thin layer. Yes, each individual life is unique and precious, but each individual life is also ordinary and unremarkable, life and death being not rare, but mundane.
Beltane Closing Moon
The closing process with dribs here and there. At the UPS store in Aspen Park, Lauren, in a turquoise UPS shirt, opened her book of notarial acts (not kidding) and recorded her work on our closing documents. I signed them in her presence. Creedence Clearwater played on the muzak. When I said, I like your music. She nodded, I’m 67. 68 here.
The closer wants a document we sent by USPS two weeks ago, a document we couldn’t fill out online. Why’s that? Anyhow I took a photo of it with my phone and e-mailed that to her this morning. Another hard copy goes in the mail today.
A lien waiver for work we had done to follow up the inspection report. None of this amounts to much, but after three months on the market and six with double mortgages everything related has an edge. Though. Glad to do it. Want this done.
Got an appointment for an echocardiogram next Tuesday. They’ll fit me with a Holter monitor, too. I’ll wear it for a month. This is the follow up to those episodes of shortness of breath and palpitations. Could be stress related, I suppose. Trouble is, I don’t feel stressed. Slept fine last night for example.
Then, in other news, I get my biopsy results tomorrow. You might image a scene from Mel Brook’s High Anxiety, but instead I’m calm. Yesterday, as I said, I was weary of all the threats to my life and with this weariness I felt a bit down, but that has lifted.
Exercise helps. So does having framed all this in the week after my physical. That frame puts all of it, the house closing, the prostate biopsy, the heart follow-up in life as it is, not as I wish it would be. The closing takes time and exacts small cuts, none fatal. The prostate and the heart, though each could be fatal, do not change my life. I can still read, laugh, love, plan, hope. They may define my death, though I hope not, but they cannot and will not define my life. However much of it is left.
Beltane Beltane Moon
The hits just keep on comin’. Now, in addition to the biopsy this Thursday I have lowering oxygen saturation. This is not good. It can and does destroy brain cells and my brain is my favorite organ. So, I have an appointment with Lisa Gidday sometime in the next three weeks. Geez. This all converges with long standing, but well-managed issues (right now) like high blood pressure, cholesterol levels too high or too low, stage 3 kidney disease and others like left ventricular hypertrophy.
Now, I choose to see this all in a positive light. I have some chronic conditions that are common to many people and the dietary and pharmaceutical solutions to them have been successful so far. The kidney disease and left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) are not good, but they both seem stable.
Unless. The LVH ends up reinforcing the lowering oxygen saturation. That’s for the follow-up to my appointment with Lisa.
My sense of myself, in spite of all this, is that I’m healthy and strong. Doesn’t feel like denial. I know about each item here and its implications. My choice is to take positive and aggressive action where I can and to accept the limitations or ultimate consequences in those instance where no action can be taken.
Two different streams of thought have lead me to a calm place. The first, experienced immediately after the beginning of the prostate journey, involved facing my actual mortality. We maintain throughout most of our life a subtle innocence about the probability and even the possibility of our own death. In my opinion this attitude is the reverse of unrealistic. In fact it is protective of our need to get on with living in the face of an inevitability about which we can do nothing.
The prostate findings lifted that protective innocence from me. There was death peeking over my shoulder, the agency of its coming perhaps revealed. This shook me. Hard. Finding my way into it, not running away, took the better part of a week and a half. Then, I realized that, if not this, something. If not now, sometime. With that frame and the palliative effect of taking the actions I could take, I became peaceful again.
The second thought involves living until I die. This has always been intention, not to run away from life or problems but to embrace them. Make choices. Take action. If I see a problem that affects me deeply, my tendency is to move toward it, see if I can do something. The realization here is that no disease, no condition can stop me from living until I die. I will, in other words, continue doing those things that matter to me. As I have done. Death cannot defeat my life, just end it.
So far these two thoughts: something, sometime will kill me and death cannot defeat my life, have helped me see that I am in no different situation now that at any other time in my life. Nor will I ever be.
Spring Beltane Moon
Building on the Colorado River session reported below, I also wanted to comment on a happenstance that seems significant. When things show up in disparate parts of my life, surprising me by their shared connections, I try to pay attention. That happened on Wednesday night. In the post below I mention the pulse flow that allowed, for 8 weeks, river water to fill the Rio Colorado and reconnect that river with its delta in the Gulf of California.
Last year in April I drove to Tucson for an Intensive Journal Workshop. It so happens that was when the pulse flow was underway. It was a news story the entire time I was in Tucson and it intrigued me, though I had forgotten about it until the presentation Wednesday.
It was the psychic pot stirring that happened for me in the Workshop that led to a conversation with Kate. We decided to move out here. Perhaps an analogy could be made between the pulse flow that revitalized the Rio Colorado basin and the tilling of my inner garden in the Intensive Journal.
So I put it together this way: intra-psychic journey in the Southwest, during an important riverine experiment, which landed me here on Shadow Mountain. Now I’m learning more about the Colorado River, source of the pulse flow, and water usage in the arid West, a topic that has interested me for some time.
Not sure yet what to make of this connection, but there is one, and something may, well, flow from it.
Spring Beltane Moon
On Monday (yesterday) my spirits lifted. The beginning of the work week moves my needle in a positive direction. Kate came up with some distractions. Yesterday we finally liberated all the art with the exception of our really big paintings from their containers and stored them in the guest room. This meant another slice and compress hour or so with the discarded cardboard, then stuffing it into the recycle bin. Mostly though I think I’ve integrated the possible futures and can live with any of them. (well, maybe not live with one really bad one.)
My distraction level is down. I’ve given myself (contraindicated over time) a break from exercising. An occasional vacation is good for the bones and blood vessels. I’m being gentle and compassionate with myself.
I got back my lab test results for other parts of my body. I am more than my prostate! An odd finding was that my total cholesterol at 127 is too low. Those atorvastatin pills go under the knife, cut in half to slim them down to the 10 mg dose. It’s weird considering the need to raise my cholesterol.
My kidney disease is stable and may well remain so for the rest of my life. The numbers were good for the most part with the exception of that damned PSA and the cholesterol.
Under any future I plan to live and live well until I die. That has always been my plan, my intention and I refuse to let anything, anything, interfere with it.
Spring Beltane Moon
Discovered two places that may shape my long term presence here in the West. The first I found in, of all places, the NYT. The article recounts the new mission of the former owners of Denver’s most treasured book store: Tattered Covers.
They gave up the book trade to create the Rocky Mountain Land Library. Here’s a brief explanation from their website:
“IMAGINE a network of land-study centers stretching from the Headwaters of South Park to the metro-Denver plains. Each site will be united by the common purpose of connecting people to nature and the land, but each site will have something unique to share:
—South Park’s Buffalo Peaks Ranch will offer a 32,000+ natural history library, along with residential living quarters for anyone who would like to experience the quiet and inspiration of a book-lined historic ranch, set on the banks of the South Platte River, and surrounded on all sides by a high mountain landscape, with some peaks rising to over 14,000 feet.”
As it happens South Park (of television fame) is about an hour from here going west and over the Kenosha Pass in the South Park Heritage Area. It is, oddly, 66.6 miles from here according to Google Maps.
I plan to volunteer here as soon as my medical condition becomes clearer. This will point my life more towards the west, away from Denver. A good thing for me and it will root my life more in the Rockies and the idea of the West.
The second I discovered just today, The Shumei Natural Agriculture Institute in Crestone. Here is a brief explanation:
“Doing nothing, being nothing, becoming nothing is the goal of Fukuoka’s farming method, an approach to agriculture which he has pursued for over forty years with resounding success. With no tillage, no fertilizer, no weeding and no pesticides he consistently produces rice, barley, fruit and vegetable crops that equal or exceed the yield per acre of neighboring farmers who embrace modern scientific agriculture. The basis of his philosophy is that nature grows plants just fine without our interference so that the most practical approach is to get out of the way. In the course of explaining his reasoning and methods, this do-nothing farmer delivers a scorching indictment of chemical agriculture and the human assumption that we can improve on nature. He explains the beneficial role of insects and plants usually characterized as pests, the fallacy of artificially boosting fertility with petrochemical concoctions, the logical error implicit in the use of farm machinery or draft animals, and why pollution is an inevitable result of misguided attempts to improve on nature.” This from an Amazon review of his book: Natural Way of Farming: The Theory and Practice of Green Philosophy.
This is exciting, a form of gardening that appeals to my soul. Crestone is about three hours from here just off 285. I’ll get down there sometime soon and start reading about Natural Agriculture.