Cancer. It is the one thing said that can never be taken back.  There are words that calm the current, like “recession” and “remission”.  But even the coveted “gone” does not pull back the tide. The salty taste of its condemnation lingers in the back of your tongue, waiting for its time to break free. It is the loneliest time in your life, and no amount of survivors you surround yourself with can bring you back from the cold. You just wait, wait for the warm ball of strength that is coiling within you, waiting for it to reach the depths of your soul, and remind you that you are alive. In whatever humbled state, you are alive.

If you are a child of loss, you feel its claws rising from the depths which you had buried it.  Feel them groping around your emotions, and you feel violated. Angered at the insight of reality. The days after my diagnosis, and pathologies felt like the days after my mom’s death.  You wake from sleep (permitting no nightmares), and for those few brief moments before your eyes fully part to see the light, your reality hasn’t dawned. There is a place of grace here, floating between your dreams and the smothering news that is about to come crashing through your cerebral peace. Daydreams are no longer idol gifts of the mind, they are demanded and begged for, pleading to cloak the pain of what you can not run away from.

I’ve moved past the horror of waking. My reality now doesn’t seem so dim. I have been reading a book called “Finding Hope When Life’s Not Fair”.  While based strongly on the bible, the author has given me a lot of other things to think about.  Like balance, in an entirely worldly sense.  After watching her husband battle a useless fight with chemo, she stated that if the western medicine world would put themselves aside enough to come together with the alternative therapy world, the results could be amazing.  That is my plan. Going forward with the Interferon (which is not really chemo, it does not poison the body like chemo) I believe that it is imperative that I learn to keep in place methods of supercharging my immune system permanently, coupled with detoxifying my life.  I recently read that both the Aveeno and Johnsons Lavender baby baths that I use frequently have traces of various carcinogens and formaldehyde in them at “FDA approved” levels. It amazes me the way safety can be bought, and I’m going to have to reevaluate all the things I use in my life.

Another story that has come up today that bothers me is the story of  Daniel Hauser, a 13 year old boy who is on the run with his mother, running from the state who is seeking to put him in foster care because they feel his mother is unfit for not forcing him to undergo chemotherapy. It came to my attention because they are trying to link him to a man from Massachusetts who also ran away when he was a teenager being forced to undergo chemotherapy. This man Billy Best felt as a teen, that the chemo was killing him, so he ran away until his parents agreed not to force him to go through more chemo. Long story short, he did his research, picked an alternative method, and is living healthy and cancer free to this day. If there is nothing else that I have gathered from this short battle I have been on, is that your treatment is nothing without your commitment, true belief, and faith in its ability to heal you. If you believe that something is killing you, medicinal community be-damned, it will kill you. If you believe in a treatment that is based on life, and the use of organic life-filled methods to heal, they can heal you. But it is absurd that the court system that is at times unable or unwilling to step in to save a child from an abusive parent for sake of violating a parents right to do what’s best for their child, they can force a child who is already grappling with an unfair world, and take their rights away from them to make a decision their body tells them is right. I can’t imagine being on a treatment that I felt in my body was killing me, and being ripped away from my parents to be forced to continue it. All on the assurances that western medicine is always the best path, right or wrong.

I am trying, every day to change my positivism. I am reading several different books, a few pages at a time, on faith, on the power of thought, The Secret. And it is a battle. It is a battle I have been waging for a very long while. I have a cacophonous mind, sometimes able to pick out a random note at a time, but never able to truly sit silent and listen to myself.  How am I supposed to know what I am telling myself, and what God might be telling me if I drown it out in fear of the honesty I know I’ll hear? Someone told me today that people don’t change. And I won’t accept that. People can change, but the change has to be from the truth that one finally listens to when silence of the mind is achieved.  Any other change is just an adjustment, forced by an outside need, which is not as likely to stick.

“We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls.” – Mother Teresa

And so, I’m trying to learn to love the silence, and not always look for a distraction.