How Did I Get Cancer?

 Genetic Testing

The same question dogs everyone who gets cancer: Where did it come from? It’s not a critical question because we already have cancer, and our focus is on getting rid of it. 

Yet I wanted to know. If my cancer came from an outside source and is environmentally-caused, like exposure to a lawn herbicide or a crop pesticide, which seems to be a problem in agricultural areas, especially in Iowa and Illinois, then I want to stay away from it. Were there industrial carcinogens in my drinking water from fracking? Maybe a pathogen snuck in through a cut in my skin.

Going To The Monastery To Face Cancer

 

I am delighted that my new essay was published today by the Chautauqua Journal. 

It’s called “Unmasking In the Monastery.” This makes me so happy!

https://www.chautauquajournal.com/post/unmasking-in-the-monastery

Happy Holy Fools Day! (I’m serious.)

Mark

Wild Cancer

 

Rick Lamplugh’s book, The Wilds of Cancer, is the only memoir I’ve found about prostate cancer. He shares his thoughts and emotions as he makes every decision from diagnosis through treatments, and what he struggles with along the way. My thanks to Christina Eisenberg for telling me about it.

While I’ve read quite a few memoirs by women about their breast or ovarian cancers, I haven’t found many men who were willing to write even an essay about their prostate cancer, and I think the reason is that prostate cancer hits men where their pride resides.

How Are We Then To Act?

 

Katharine Smyth, expectations and reality

When we get cancer, we think we have to act like the cancer patients in the movies. People who have no experience with cancer also expect us to act like these stereotyped, sanitized, devoid-of-personality presentations. Don’t act when you have cancer. Let yourself experience what you are feeling and thinking. 

Biopsies Don't Tickle

 

If you have cancer, you’ve likely had a biopsy, and it’s not a pleasant experience. It probably made you squirm. There is discomfort during the procedure, and pain afterwards. Doctors do biopsies for breast, lung, prostate, liver, colon, bone marrow, and other cancers. Doctors go in through the back, the abdomen, the groin. Techniques vary from using needles to punches to surgery. I’ve had two biopsies – a prostate biopsy, and one when they drilled into my pelvic bone to check out a spot that lit up on a scan.

Is Cancer Still a Metaphor For Anything?

Susan Sontag - breast, uterine, leukemia cancers

 When the radio said that Susan Sontag died on this day in 2004, I wrote her death date on my calendar so that every year I could remember her, as I do with other dead people who’ve influenced my life. Her birth date was also given, but I didn’t write that down. This struck me as curious. Would I rather grieve her loss or celebrate her birth and coming alive in her writings? One date affirms the beginnings of her creativity; the other boards her in with nails of sorrow. 

Inside the Radiation Chamber

 

Suzanne Strempek Shea, breast cancer

It’s in the quiet places that you can hear yourself breathe, places without time or expectations that hold you, where you feel the terror of cancer and find the resolve to live.

When Anne Pinkerton suggested I read Suzanne Shea’s book, Songs from a Lead-Lined Room, I thought it would be a short read because nothing much happened when I spent five weeks in the radiation chamber. You come in, lie down, try not to think about how much radiation is being beamed into your body, get radiated, and go home. Come back the next day, and do it again. Diagnosed at age 41 with breast cancer, Suzanne had surgery and radiation. I finally found a companion to my experience.

Is Cancer a Journey, a Quest, Or and Adventure?

a beginning lexicon, part 1

I’ve called my experiences with cancer by a number of names, and different ones for each step from diagnosis through two kinds of radiation and a year of anti-hormone therapy as I encountered fear, trauma, and loneliness, to where I am now, in surveillance, with post-treatment uncertainty as to whether the cancer is gone. I continue to deal with a number of side-effects that stubbornly don’t want to fade away, and I’ve had to make adjustments in my life to accommodate them. In the coming weeks, I will see a urologist and a cancer dietician looking for solutions.

I’d love to hear how you describe your experiences with cancer, and I’ll post what I hear back. 

Turning Cancer Into Art

 

Tony Hoagland, pancreatic cancer

Tony Hoagland died of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer on October 23, 2018. He knew he had the cancer for only two years because this kind is hard to diagnose before it becomes terminal. Pancreatic cancer is potentially curable if the cancer is caught early, is on the head of the pancreas, and it hasn’t spread, then it can be surgically removed, followed by a course of chemotherapy.

Music, Cancer, and Creativity

 

Franz Liszt and grief

As we get older, more of our friends and family pass away. And while we expect this, it’s still a shock. Some die from cancer, some from old age or accidents. Too many die young, we think, before their time. Yet a life of attention and service to others is not diminished by the shortness of time, nor does the length of a life bestow any particular honor.

Not realizing how fragile life is, and how quickly death can come, we can be so unnerved by an unexpected death that we wake up every morning fearing that someone else we love has died. And every strange ache, every cough and tick of our body, can make us fear that something is seriously wrong with us and we’re next to go.