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From the October/November 2005 Issue
An Essay at a Time of Illness
Laura Thor

Laura Thor, LCSW, practices in the metro Denver area and has a website she hopes will both bring people to her practice and provide a readable essay or two for the minutes people enjoy on the porch. See it at www.laurathorcounseling.com or www.natureandgracejournal.com.

Today, three weeks into the world of my cancer diagnosis, I must choose: either I let God be God, and allow peace, or I spend all my energy researching every paranoia-inducing fact I can about breast cancer treatment. So far, the latter has run my life.
Will anything be any different if I stop the research and just live? Writing this is a step. Getting a massage today was another step toward stillness without drivenness. I feel calmness penetrate my anxieties as I rock on the porch swing and type badly.

What if I give up the false control of scouring the web and big medical books that sink me into depression? Will I die sooner because I missed some medical fact? Not likely. Sandra, the nurse coordinating my care, told me I have very survivable cancer, giving me a nest for my darting energies by adding that I will likely not even need radiation. Maybe even, I pretend she added, never ever get cancer of any kind again. Keep my ovaries. Keep my hair and my life. Keep my daughter safe from it, too. Live long and strong. Fulfill all my dreams and goals.

I have stage 0 cancer, the best kind, called “ductal carcinoma in situ,” but at 3.8 centimeters long, the cancer is too big for a lumpectomy. I chose, with my surgeon’s encouragement, to have a double, or bilateral, mastectomy because my tissue is too dense to trust a mammogram year after year. I didn’t have much trouble accepting that; I’d have spent the future worrying about the other breast. The prognosis is excellent, pending a few details that won’t be known until surgery, but even so, it looks like I get to live a long and fairly unencumbered life afterwards.

I heard once that “we are the hands of God’s providence.” Helpful people are in my court, cooking meals and praying for me and my family, using their medical expertise, or offering helpful tips from the trenches they themselves once occupied. (Judy and her husband Al, who endured her recent cancer and recovery, said they’re signing me up for not one, not two, but eight weeks of Netflix for days I’m too tired to do anything else. Cool.) I have even begun to work out with sincerity, in preparation for a newer life. As everybody pitches in, I am quietly aware that if I maintain serenity, it’s not my doing alone.

Surgery’s in a week. My husband, sweet man that he is, thought I would want to have a quiet dinner and make love, one last time with my departing breasts, I guess, before surgery the next day. Sandra laughed at my plan to lie back and think of England. If it weren’t for my desire to be present to him in some way or another, I could enjoy being cloistered within myself. I seem to have no attachment to my breasts right now. They ache as usual at this point in my cycle. They seem to have betrayed me, to have already left: they don’t feel sexy or aroused, and curiously, I don’t want them to be. I want to forget them and not grieve them all over again. I am in limbo between diagnosis and treatment and I want to have a cuddler, not a lover, these days. He is afraid, he says, that everything will change between us, that he’ll be afraid to touch me, for fear of hurting me. But I think we’ll be fine. I don’t think I’ll resort to undressing in the closet.

It is strange that God and I have a privacy around this crisis that doesn’t include my husband. Only God is in that cloister with me, which seems perfectly right. But I feel guilty. I’m not very “there” for my family lately. Of course I know this is normal, but their feelings don’t know that. Marriage, family and work: only work has a leave available. These hours typing on the porch are a blessing, all to myself in the shade.

A few months before this diagnosis, I had asked God to kick me in the pants a little, get me inspired for writing again. But even as I prayed, I sensed that something was in the mail that would give the needed stimulus. Over my lifetime I’d had two of those “in-the-mail” experiences, one at twenty-four when my first husband, who’d been my first love and best friend, left our new marriage for another, and later, when my sister died of depression (she committed suicide when she was 21). This cut is not going to be the deepest. But were it to bring a further diagnosis of death in the offing, I’d be paralyzed. Don’t even go there, says Sandra.

I told a friend, just before the mail came, that I wondered if the message would be about my health. I think I’d had a suspicious mammogram by that point. I told him from an authentic place of peace within me that, in a way, if I didn’t think ahead to the impact on my family and my goals, I could accept dying now, because in the last ten years I’d finally reached such a happy state of being. But I do not feel so confident I’d maintain that serenity if the axe should actually fall! Perhaps I had a flash of what could be mine if I worked at opening myself to such grace. Fortunately at this time, I am not to be tested. Yet I will deepen the work of listening for God’s voice in all of this and get my own anxieties out of the way of peace.

Postscript September, 2005:
I’m three months post-bilateral mastectomy, almost finished with procedures to ready my chest for permanent implants in a month or two. I returned to my counseling job but knew it would have to change in order for me to honor the message in the mail that my illness brought me. I am preparing to leave the wonderful job and do counseling and spiritual direction the way I’ve always wanted to: in my home office, with long sessions that end more naturally, when my client and I have reached a stopping place. With lemonade in hot weather, hot chocolate or tea in cold. With quiet outside the room so our breathing can deepen us into reflection on the ways of God in our lives and in our crises. Thank you God for slowing me into a life-giving rhythm. I feel complete.

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