There Are Things Worse Than Cancer

Finally, it was 11:30 am. I had been waiting all morning for the doctor to finish his rounds on the Palliative ward where my mom had been for two days already. A couple hours earlier, I had cornered the gentle-mannered physician and asked for a moment of his time. "I'd like to discuss...things." I glanced sideways at my mom from the foot of her bed. I can't remember his exact response now but the time 11:30 is etched in my memory. Time was the pink elephant in the room. Even my mom agitatedly frowned at the clock and demanded to know the time many times that morning before she died, until I blocked her view of that over-sized clock with the curtain around her bed. She's obsessed, I thought. But then, so was I. In fact, it was underlyingly the point of discussion I wanted to raise with the doctor. After his rounds.
I hovered around the nurse's station while the doctor entered his notes in patients' charts. "I haven't forgotten you," he smiled kindly.
"Oh, no, take your time." I answered, as though there were a million other things I could attend to while I waited.
When he was ready, I followed him in to his office. I realized, sinking into the chair while he closed his office door, that I had no idea how exactly to broach the subject of my mother's pending death. I just wanted to know what was happening to her, to her body. What stage were we in? It seemed that the moment she was diagnosed with scleroderma she was placed on a graph, a downward slope, with the x-axis being time (in years - she was given 5) and the y-axis being her state of health. Well, it was almost exactly 3 years since her diagnosis and there was no doubt that the x-axis was going to be cut even shorter...but how close were we to the point of impact?
I talked about my concern regarding her confusion. I thought maybe she was on too many pain-killers that were making her incoherent. She was asking about odd things, being uncharacteristically forgetful and absent-minded. The doctor looked in her chart for the exact dosage of morphine and said that if he were to put me on the same dosage I could still walk around and have a conversation. It wasn't that much. It started sinking in. Obviously, then, the 'confusion' was probably attributed to her 'living' in between two worlds; not quite here, not quite there. All of the other medications were necessary for her comfort: Gravol for the nausea, antibiotics for the infection in her lungs.
And then he said those words that I will never forget. It wasn't the first time I had heard them, but for some reason it resonated loudly with me then.
"There are things worse than cancer. Scleroderma is one of them."
And yet, in conventional medicine there is no known cause or cure. It is supposed to be rare although over the past 3 years when I have told people about my mom's diagnosis, many of them said they knew someone (or knew someone who knew someone) affected by this auto-immune disease. Auto-immune diseases, a well-known one being MS, are so called because the immune system turns on itself and starts attacking. In the case of scleroderma, the production of collagen in our body goes in to hyperdrive. Collagen makes tissues less elastic and very tight. Some types of scleroderma affect only the outer skin, some types affect the internal organs. My mom's type was very aggressive and affected both. It began in her lungs and only when it showed up as tight, discoloured skin on her arms was she able to get a true picture of what was happening.
In energetic medicine, auto-immune diseases like scleroderma, MS, and rheumatoid arthritis are explained as negative messages stored in the cells of our bodies that cause the body to attack itself. These negative messages come from our environment and are then, literally, internalized. Some of the messages can be unspoken, such as a culture or society's view of women. Some of the messages can be verbal attacks of a personal nature. And then one traumatic event causes the body to say, "OK, I can't do this anymore", down goes the defense (immune system) and it acts on what everyone, including the host body, has been telling it. This is explained in Dr. Christiane Northrup's book, Women's Bodies Women's Wisdom and throughout the energetic medical literature.
I am writing about this because it is important to me to get that God-awful name out there: scleroderma. It's not that rare when it invades your home when you're not looking and steals a loved one.
And perhaps even more important than the names of these diseases, is the concept of the mind-body connection. It's something we innately know exists and yet we can rarely discuss it without being labelled "alternative" and other less-positive terms. Listen to the language you use and see how many times you talk about your chakras without even knowing that's what you're doing! If you don't know what a chakra is...um...just google it. Or post a comment asking for more info and I can recommend some great reads on the subject.
Thanks for reading...

Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom

Dr. Christiane Northrup's book Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom arrived last week with a thud on my doorstep. Well, it was a muted thud, cushioned by bubble wrap and cardboard, the precious cargo that it is. The sheer size of it surprised me but only for a brief second. And then that witty voice from deep within remarked, "It's a book on women's wisdom...did you expect it to be a 2 page pamphlet?" I laughed out loud and picked up the 793 page (plus resources) insight to women's health. And, knowing full well that my dad was waiting for me to pick up my daughter so that he could run an errand, I sat down at the kitchen table and opened up the book to the acknowledgements. One of the women she thanks is Ina May Gaskin, a very famous midwife, whose extremely helpful book I read while pregnant. I connected very quickly and easily with this book which I have slowly been mulling over and digesting over the past week.
To be honest, words are not coming easily to me; I am at a loss at to how exactly I can convey to you what a phenomenol book this is. Summarizing its contents is definitely not the way to go. It is such a comprehensive marriage of medical science, the chakra system, and innate wisdom - I couldn't possibly do it justice.
It is an easy read in terms of its language but definitely not a quick read. I think the trick is to take your time with it, see what you can get out of every paragraph and then let that resonate within you as you use the information before moving on.
If you have already read this book, I urge you to comment here. What I will do is post my thoughts on the messages in the book that ring true to me. I hope you find something helpful in these posts.
Thanks for reading...