Love remains

by mortal12_wp // March 14, 2023 // No Comments

Like vapours we vanish

The thoughts we had, the life we lived

suddenly gone

Love remains, in the hearts of those still living

Like vapours we vanish

The fights we had, the feelings we felt

No longer matter

Love remains, in the hearts of those still living

Like vapours we vanish

The goals we set, we strived hard to achieve

Dissolve with us

Love remains, in the hearts of those still living

Like vapours we vanish

The wealth, the fame, the celebrity; ego in all its faces

They all stay here, not bound to the soul

Love remains, in the hearts of those still living

Like vapours we vanish

We loved freely, gave selflessly, poured kindness into the world

That meant something to those who received

Their hearts ache in memory

They find comfort in having known our soul

Love remains, in the hearts of those still living

Personal growth

by mortal12_wp // January 9, 2022 // No Comments

There is one reason that souls re-enter the realm of the living, in my understanding. It is for growth. With each ‘life’, the soul gains new understanding, learns lessons, then it takes them with it when one life is snuffed out and another begins. When all is learnt (is that possible?), it is released from the cycle of birth and death. In our religion the belief is that you are born and re-born until you have lived a life where you are truly good, reach close to God and then you achieve Moksha, released from this life of suffering, the endless cycle of birth and death. I suppose my own understanding must have developed from this background knowledge that I absorbed growing up.

The reason I am thinking about it is that recently I watched a movie, “At eternity’s gate” and in it there were several scenes of a mental asylum, back when there was such a thing. In one such scene, two residents of the mental asylum were depicted to make the viewer think that they did not understand much, were at the mercy of the world but not of it, were in some ways not truly living. The thought crossed my mind, ‘how do the souls in these individuals experience personal growth?’. After all, if the purpose of a life is to experience personal growth, to pick up lessons while we are here on this earth, how do these individuals grow? Just as soon as that thought crossed my mind, I had a realization. My understanding is flawed. How much more must I have to learn, if I believe that individuals who are in some way less mentally capable than everyday regular functioning ones, do not experience personal growth. What a disastrous way to think!

At face value it may appear as though someone who has been chalked up as having a mind of a 3 year old in a 40 year old body cannot possibly experience personal growth, but that is the limitation in our own thinking! After all personal growth does not occur by virtue of what we are capable of exercising, what we show the world; rather personal growth occurs at the level of the mind, or rather the consciousness. We are all conscious beings, regardless of the level at which we may appear by worldly standards. Ahh what flawed thinking and how much more personal growth do I need to go through…It is stunning to me, this lack of understanding in myself. I see now, that, no matter your mental capabilities, as conscious beings we may have so much going on inside us that no one by merely observing us, could ever gauge. When I was growing up, I often heard my mother say, roughly translated, “We have found the limits of the oceans, but not of the human mind”. Today, I finally understand in it’s entirety, the meaning of that phrase.

We cannot gauge what someone else is going through, what they are experiencing. Our capacity is so limited, how could we ever propose to know what goes on in anothers’ mind and heart. It pains me to think how much suffering someone must be experiencing, which we are not able to respond to appropriately because we don’t see it, don’t understand it, don’t feel it. We’re so limited. We will never truly know but we cannot think any being is impervious to experiencing growth, no matter how small, no matter in what form they arrive here on earth, no matter what we perceive their capacity to be.

I do understand now that everyone goes through personal growth while here, on this earth. Some individuals are quiet successful in their own lives, yet, may experience minimal personal growth, while others may not be self-sufficient and may need many supports, just to exist, but go through monumental personal growth. Our capability to be self sufficient is not proportional to our capacity of personal growth. Some individuals in fact are only here a short time, what growth do they experience?

Personal growth takes place in just this way, a fleeting image portrayed in a movie, leads one to think, reflect, conclude, adjust one’s perspective. I’m grateful for that movie, that allowed me to go through this bit of personal growth. ♥️

9 Jan 2022

Reflections- at year’s end

by mortal12_wp // December 31, 2021 // No Comments

The last day of the year is here

Tomorrow, today will be yesterday

here today, gone tomorrow, a few smiles, a few sorrows

then there is the year ahead, promising, beckoning

You step into it and realize, it’s just like the one behind

there isn’t much difference; a day is a day whether today or yesterday

It’s up to us to make it stay

Do something good, to make it stay

Do something with love, big or small

Smile at someone, lay a reassuring hand on a shoulder

Give of yourself without expectation

Exercise kindness and compassion

Give your heart with every smile

Hold the others’ heart in delight

Allow yourself to be kind

Let ill will pass, don’t hang on

For it’s poison to you, if you do

And a potion if you let it go

let today not be a regret, for it will tomorrow be yesterday

let today be lived with joy, in every moment, every breath

then you’ll remember it tomorrow, with a smile upon your face

and a warm glow in your heart

It’s up to you to make it stay.

31 Dec 2021

Summer nights

by mortal12_wp // June 26, 2020 // 2 Comments

Here I sit, content in my front garden. The candles are lit all around me, there’s a soft evening glow casting shadows on the path, the scent of flowers and candles hangs in the air, as if it has no place else to be but here, with me. I have to pinch myself because it almost seems too perfect. Nothing is hurting bad enough just now either. The sound of a teenager’s skateboard quietly traversing the street and the evening birds, mixed with the somewhat uninvited sound of the air conditioner are all part of the scene, making it perfect.

I wonder when it was last I felt this way. Lately, I’ve had several of these nights, where I sit out in the Muskoka chair and lose myself to the mild summer night. Maybe it’s the caress of the gentle summer breeze with the temperature just right, the nostalgia and romance of the summer garden, and more than likely, the knowledge that soon this will all be gone as the summer passes, so I need to get every last drop of goodness out of the season. Every night that I can spend in this beautiful magical garden is a night I can hang on to when the weather turns cold again. I will have had these summer nights that’ll remind me that winter won’t last forever. It is what will get me through the wintry days when the chill keeps me indoors. I turn into a hermit then, not wanting to step foot out of doors, even for things I enjoy.

It is interesting though that the cold winter, makes the summer all the more inviting. The anticipation of summer months has a certain delicious feeling. If it was summer all year long, would I enjoy summers as much or appreciate the special pleasures only the warm weather can bring? After all, the hard won battles are all the more gratifying than those we didn’t have to struggle to get through. When we have so little, we appreciate everything we have; when we have too much, nothing seems special. You only take for granted things that come easily. When you’re learning a craft, every achievement is a victory to be celebrated and marveled at. Once you’ve learnt the craft, all those early achievements seem run of the mill, forgettable.

There is a lesson here. Too often we forget all that we have achieved. We think of the next goal, eye on the prize we think…forgetting what got us here, in a position to achieve ever greater things. It is here, at this juncture, we must stop and reassess our motives, confirm to ourselves that our reasons for wanting more are sound, that we are not losing ourselves in the strife to gain more and then, be grateful, systematically for the very first thing to the very last one that got us where we are. For if we do not appreciate every little blessing in our lives, we lose ourselves to mindlessly running after more without enjoying the season and at the end of life, all seasons have been lost and time once past, cannot be retrieved.

Here in our mortal lives, every day is a gift, every moment precious. May we all chose wisely how we spend our summer nights. ❤️

The power in unseeing

by mortal12_wp // April 28, 2019 // No Comments

I clearly remember the experience of getting my very first pair of eyeglasses. My parents had finally realized that (at the age of 11 i think), my vision had started to deteriorate enough to need glasses. I went with my dad to get my eyes checked and next thing you know I was looking through magical pieces of glass at what seemed like EVERYTHING! I could read ALL the signs. It was a moment of re-discovery. On our drive home, I annoyed my dad, unintentionally of course, by reading every single sign, billboard, graffiti, everything. It was a heady experience, one I thought it would be hard to ever replicate or beat. I guess along the way I had slowly accommodated for my deteriorating vision and didn’t realize just how little I was seeing clearly. I was so grateful for the glasses, for the genius who figured out how to correct myopia, for my dad, for my eye doctor. I brimmed with joy and gratitude.

Fast forward 30 or so years and I had a far more gratifying experience but this time without the gift of sight, yet the experience itself was a gift of unparalleled proportions. Having gone beyond the small worries of elementary school, moving countries, rearing children, fighting off illnesses and so on, life was feeling a bit more complex than when I was eleven. My mind was full on this particular day, I felt ragged, overwhelmed. My husband was driving us somewhere and I was wearing glasses. My myopia has steadily worsened many degrees since I was 11 and without glasses I can only see silhouettes, vague colours and shadows where details of people and objects would clearly be visible when looking 7-8 feet out. Sitting in the passenger seat I took of my glasses to rub my tired eyes, closed them to rest a minute and heaved a sigh just to get a proper breath in my lungs. The next thing that happened put a perma-smile on my face, one that a child naturally breaks into when they’ve caught sight of a surprise ice cream cone being handed to them. With my glasses still in my hands, I opened my eyes and what I beheld was a scenery that I couldn’t make out, it was bright but fuzzy. There were hues of various colours and some darker areas of shadows signalling objects or people in the distance but I couldn’t make out any of it clearly. When I tell you that visual stimulus produces a reaction in our brain, I’m merely stating a fact I recognized on this particular -otherwise forgettable drive. I realized in that moment that my joy arose from NOT being able to see clearly what I was looking at head on. I couldn’t see people frowning or smiling or scowling; I couldn’t see the dirt on the road, the litter on the sides of the street, the long lines at the gas pump, the road raging people fighting over parking spots, red or green lights…the absence of it all in my newfound fuzzy world made it all suddenly bearable. In fact, it made everything joyful.

So much of what we’re feeling in any given moment stems from our reaction to things, people, their expression, society at its business. If there is no stimulus being absorbed, there is no reaction being created. It leaves our brains with so much more time and space. With less junk to process, our brains are less occupied and more open to absorb and digest that which we have already consumed in stimulus or experience. While I had vowed to remember from that moment on to take regular breaks from “seeing”, I have promptly forgotten that because of too much else crowding it out. As empowering as it was to be able to see clearly over 3 decades ago, it was just as freeing to abandon that gift of sight for a short while in my forties. It allowed me to have perspective. It allowed my anxieties to melt away just like that.

You may just have the power to unsee too. See if you get out of it what I did. You will have found another tool in your toolbox to temporarily gain perspective and feel free. Go ahead and give it a try. What do you have to lose? 😉

It’s time to hit the reset button

by mortal12_wp // September 14, 2018 // 5 Comments

Last day of chemo

Reset.

This is my state of mind today; like my brain has been reset. It’s been 9 months since I stopped treatment. I met with my oncologist today and he reassured me that he does not see any signs of a recurrence (despite my own apprehensions). Strangely, I felt slightly lost. Not jubilant- lost! I asked him what I should do now. I don’t know what he said to that. Isn’t that odd? Cannot even remember when I close my eyes tight and will my mind to remember. I did reflect on where I stand and what I’ve been through and I finally knew what I needed to do.

I need to stop waiting for the other shoe to drop and carry on with the rest of my life. No matter how positive I’ve been all my life, the past several months have knocked the stuffing out of me; Just because I had to face this difficult predicament does not mean that will be my lot forever.

I need to keep in touch with that fact.

Cancer came, it socked me a heavy punch, I’m still recovering from it, but it hasn’t taken me down and I can still carry on. Bruised-yup, battered-yes, throwing in the towel- Not a chance!

Revisiting the past year, I admit it has been the hardest time of my life but cancer was just one part of it. I lost a friend to breast cancer last year (quite unexpectedly) and that, coupled with the hardest part of my treatments nearly did me in. Maybe it was her good will and that of everyone who has loved and cared for me so deeply, that I did not turn into a pile of dust along the way. She has been very close to my thoughts this past year and giving me courage even when I could no longer see her or speak to her. It’s incredible what we can go through and still survive, thrive even. While I’m not at the ‘thrive’ stage of my journey just yet, I am definitely surviving.

I’ve heard people answer sometimes to a well-meaning, ‘how are you?’, with, ‘oh, I’m surviving’ followed by a chuckle and while there may be some truth to that, that use of the word, ‘surviving’ may be slightly different than the way I use it here. I mean to say it in a way you might say, ‘I survived a head-on collision’, for that is what the past year was like- a head-on collision; where you are shocked to your core, where fatalities are expected and if you get away with your life, you survived it. You may be badly banged up, barely holding on to life, but you survived it. It is beyond the daily exhaustions and frustrations of life. It leaves you breathless, in a desperate state that you need to recover from, and yes, traumatized. It’s akin to fighting an enemy loaded with guns, grenades etc. I imagine, but the enemy is camouflaged. You hide in the trenches, firing your own weapons all the time but you’re not sure you’re getting any of them, until…until you go to your follow up visit and the doc tells you to relax, you got this thing beat (at least so far).

Sure, there are plenty of reasons to fear. In fact, the more I read, the more I start to tag my fate to those that won’t survive this thing but I’m asking myself, why? Why do I tag my fate to the statistic that says x percentage will recur? Why don’t I follow along the statistic of those who’ve managed to survive? It’s my choice how I think of my chances. There is nothing my oncologist could find that makes him think I’m relapsing, so why don’t I hook my boxcar to his engine and believe what he’s saying? It leads me to open pastures of possibility. A place where I might live out my normal expected life expectancy. No reason I should deny myself that possibility unless I am decidedly fatalistic. I don’t want to be. There are too many possibilities, so I’m going to choose to be pro-life in this instance and believe that I need to live out what life I’ve been given and not worry about if and when that other shoe will drop. I have a clear choice to make and I pick life! Life, with all its’ ups and downs, rewards and challenges, thrills and valleys.

The news is not always good. I’ve had the privilege to stand by those who have not been as lucky as I now find myself. They’ve surprised me with their attitude, willing to look their mortality in the eye and continue with what courage and grace they can muster towards the end of their life. In those situations I cried for them, I wished them strength, I wished they’d be able to tie all loose ends and continue to the end of their life with dignity and love to carry them through. I hope when that time comes for me, as it most certainly will, that I’ll make myself worthy to be counted in that class of souls who continue to live, until there is no longer life left in them.

For now, I am choosing to press the reset button and am keeping my mind on all the life I have yet to live.❤️

A love so pure

by mortal12_wp // September 10, 2018 // No Comments

I remember those late night feedings when everything else receded into the background except the close presence of my little baby girl and the soft noises she made as she nursed. My sleepiness in those moments was quickly replaced by a feeling of love so deep and pure, nothing could equal its unparalleled joy. I was lucky enough to experience it a second time when my second daughter was born.

Now, many years later, I’ve been fortunate enough to have experienced it yet again. My daughters are almost 16 and 19 now. Over the years they’ve lovingly created mother’s day cards and gifted me pictures made with dry macaroni and bracelets made of beads. I’ve been frequently overwhelmed with love whenever I’ve received such gifts but nothing could have prepared me for what they did for me just over a year ago when our family faced one of our biggest challenges. My heart swells with love and my eyes brim with tears as I recount it.

In June last year I was diagnosed with Lymphoma. We didn’t know what to expect then and well, no one really knows what to expect next either but rewind a year and we really felt like we were standing at the foot of a great big forest with only darkness and a chaos of jumbled branches visible through the woods.

We chose to be honest and transparent with our daughters, who, wise beyond their years were so in need for us to treat them as adults. I shared with the girls that I was going to need a bone marrow biopsy. They were horrified when I explained to them what that entailed even though I tried not to scare them too much with details. It was definitely not a pleasant experience but not as bad as I expected either. Let’s just say I’d maybe rather have a tooth extraction? I’ve had to have 2 bone marrow biopsies now and I’ve lived through them…it’s really not as bad as I had conjured it to be in my mind. The unknown is definitely scarier than the reality in this case. Well I was a little worse for wear when I got home after the first bone marrow biopsy that day. When I went up to my room for the night, a beautiful array of goodies awaited me!

I was thoroughly surprised at this display, of which I had had no prior inkling and nestled in my surprise gifts were what can only be described as two of the most tear jerking notes I have ever read in my entire life!!

Sure my hip still hurt but the love and loving words in those notes dulled the pain and made it bearable. My self-pity switched tracks and started moving down the path of gratefulness. In that moment I cried tears of joy, borne out of love, overwhelmed to see such empathy and compassion in my own children…experiencing their love in a whole new way. I whispered many blessings for them and prayed with all my might that sorrow never darkens their doorstep. It was the first time during this journey that I was grateful; had I not been faced with such a difficult time, I would not have experienced such emotions; joy so deep that it floors you, then takes you to such heights that you feel one with the universe; love so pure that it puts a sparkle on everything you behold and gives a silver lining to every cloud.

A life resplendent with such love can only be a blessing. I’m so grateful for mine. ❤️

Kindness and compassion; inspiring words, inspired thought.

by mortal12_wp // August 10, 2017 // No Comments

Sometimes in a passing moment, we feel inspired, profoundly touched, and close to our one great truth. I experienced such a moment yesterday.

Many years ago, I watched the movie, Seven years in Tibet. I know, thinking back that it was an important movie but like many other things in life, I had forgotten the story line, the details etc. Yesterday, I felt like watching a movie but wasn’t in the mood for most subjects. I scrolled through many titles on Netflix and not one touched a cord with me. Seeing the cover of Seven years in Tibet somehow felt right for the mood I was in.

I watched the entire film and felt moved by one scene in particular, so much so that it made me feel like I suddenly changed tracks on the path of life. In this scene, the Dalai Lama asks Brad Pitt’s character what he loves about mountain climbing. Brad Pitt says he loves the absolute simplicity, how the mind is freed from all confusion, becomes clear and is in focus, the light becomes sharper, the sounds are richer and you are filled with the deep powerful presence of life; “I’ve only felt that way one other time”, he says. The Dalai Lama asks, “when” and Brad replies, “in your presence Kungo.”, he says referring to the young Dalai Lama. That exchange touched me to my core. Everything else became buoyant in that moment, light filled and somehow explicable. The struggles we feel in life and how we are always looking for the meaning of the struggles (the why) and how we are looking for the solutions to those struggles ( the how), suddenly felt resolvable. It is what I needed to look to. A presence in which all other voices quieten…

I finished out the movie, then looked for the teachings of the Dalai Lama on the web and came upon the 25 teachings of the 14th Dalai Lama http://influence.techmazic.com/peaceful-teachings-of-dalai-lama/. I read through those simple statements of wisdom and read over some of them again and again. They spoke to me, simply, effectively, and with great emphasis. All other voices quietened. Two words resonated with me at a deeper level than all others: kindness and compassion. Below are some of the teachings found at the aforementioned website that embody the feeling And essence I hope to thread through my being. Clearly, the concepts are simple and perhaps even ones we are familiar with and we feel we know, but to inhabit your being within these words, such that they flow through us in our actions, ceaselessly circulate through our minds, in our hearts and with every movement or thought towards all human beings, that is what I hope to work towards and some day hope to achieve, in my remaining time.

It is a tall order but one can always hope and one can try. ❤️

2. “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive”

~14th Dalai Lama

3. “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion”

~14th Dalai Lama

4. “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible”

~14th Dalai Lama

12. “When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace”

~14th Dalai Lama

22. “A truly compassionate attitude toward others does not change even if they behave negatively or hurt you”

~14th Dalai Lama

The state of affairs- where is humanity headed?

by mortal12_wp // August 4, 2017 // No Comments

I’ve always avoided watching the news. The negative, disturbing events that most often get vast and obsessive media coverage tend to haunt me for days after I’ve let them seep into my psyche. It cannot be undone, I can’t hit the rewind button and jump over the messy, demoralizing parts. Yet lately, having found myself with time on my hands, I have been reading the news on Flipboard. Initially, I was just skipping over the sad news stories but a couple of days in a row now, I found myself opening the story and reading about it. It’s left me feeling like a guitar string that was pulled too hard and let go. The feelings of despair are reverberating through me and around me. I can’t shake it.

Here are some of the stories I read about:

The President of the United States encouraging police brutality.
A teenager who encouraged her boyfriend, also a teenager, to commit suicide.
Increasing number of child deaths from being left in over-heated cars.
Alarming number of deaths in Toronto from Fentanyl overdosages

I recognize that these are not new, that is, this sampling of inhumane, dumb as anything, despicable human behaviour has existed for as long as we’ve been around, only the accessibility to the news is heightened; however, that in itself is appalling! Should we not be making progress, rather than repeating, watching our race continue to repeat such abominable acts?

For one thing, we have come through decades of human rights demonstrations time and time again, achieved high ground, declared all humans to be equal, only to go back to square one where the man incharge of a nation is goading the people whose goal is to serve and protect, to rather do harm?! It’s unthinkable, alarming, and unconscionable!

Then we have a teenager, who encouraged her boyfriend to complete his suicide attempt, which he did, upon her insistence. A young man, on the brink of the rest of his life, was taken away from his parents, sister, friends…I cannot begin to imagine the horror for this poor family- it is permanent. The girlfriend too, if she realizes now her mistake and regrets it, there is no turning back. This life she encouraged to its end, cannot be returned. It’s gone. The permanence of death is not to be misunderstood.

I don’t even know how to begin understanding the phenomenon where 29 children have been lost to overheated vehicles, this year alone. In one instance the mother left a toddler and an infant in the car as punishment and both succumbed to the heat. It makes me scream inside, so loud that my soul feels hoarse. How is this possible? How can we allow this to go on?

Life, the greatest gift of all, has become a cheap, dispensable thing. How did this happen and how can we undo it? Human life is taken in a fit of rage, under the influence of drugs, on the grounds of war (religious, territorial, racial, etc.), to satisfy ones ego, due to irresponsibility, to get money, and so many other such insane and completely unnecessary reasons. How is it that in the last century, or two or longer we have become immune to such atrocities and unable to come up with a solution? We have found a way to transport oil in pipelines, thousands of miles from where it was found, send our race to the moon, work out a way to send information anywhere in a matter of moments, beat diseases that were unbeatable, change the gender of a person but somehow, all this collective brainpower has not manifested itself into a solution to prevent unnecessary death and reverse motion on high ground gained in human rights.

I am not myself so bright that I could cause such a solution or set of solutions to appear, but I could contribute. I do hope though, with all my might, that we start thinking about and each of us join our voices in a chorus to affect a change, where solutions are created and put into motion, so that lives are not unnecessarily lost and are instead respected, for this highly regarded gift is only here to stay so long before it turns to dust. Collectively, we can affect a change. If each person, everywhere, joined their voice together, there is no knowing what could happen. We could overcome all the tragedies of our times and times past, to truly make progress, as one race, the human race.

No matter where we are from, where we end up, we all started with with a body made of the same materials and we are all going to end in the same dust that covers this earth. The differences that cause us despair, are immaterial. Some day I hope we achieve oneness of thought on that. I hope humanity is headed towards all that is good and peaceful, I hope we cause that to happen. ❤️

Insights from my 1st chemo treatment…

by mortal12_wp // August 1, 2017 // No Comments

Never, in all the time that I cared for my patients receiving ablative chemotherapy, was I so attuned to their particular misery, as I have just had the opportunity to acquaint myself with in the last several days. Today started on a high note. I felt great when I woke up this morning. In fact, the first time I was aware of myself after I closed my eyes last night, was when I woke this morning. I have a need to explain the pleasure I derived from this amazing experience last night.

Good sleep is a singular treasure, one which you deeply and truly appreciate only after you’ve had the misfortune of sleeping fitfully or not at all for long enough that you shout, “enough already!”. I suddenly have a better appreciation for people who are constantly distressed due to insomnia. In the last few years, I’ve rarely slept well and in fact don’t remember feeling refreshed in the mornings for many months now, but being on steroids, gives sleeplessness new meaning. Frequently, I’m reminded that we only appreciate something when there is a lack of it (light and darkness, for example). I feel like I’ve just been involved in a brutal experiment to allow me to see this fact more clearly. For the first 5 days of the chemo cycle, I was taking massive doses of steroids, which made me restless, grouchy, emotional, and incapable of sleep. In addition to that, the cocktail of toxins that I consumed were playing all kinds of havoc on me. Trying to sleep these last few days was like trying to sleep on a heavy metal concert stage where the audience hated the music and pummelled the stage with anything they could get their hands on. It was tortuous. I could feel my husband softly breathing beside me, deep in restful sleep but all was chaos and misery just inches away on my side of the bed. I tried to pace the floor but I felt too weak; I tried calming myself down by breathing but my heart was racing and pounding so that I ended up constantly measuring my pulse, I read lengthy journal articles about steroids, played 2048 on my phone, under the covers, went to the washroom a gazillion times, cried quiet tears of anguish and pain, slept fitfully for 30 min at a time and finally…It was morning and I was exhausted from the effort of trying to sleep! ( I feel like we are missing a grammatical exclamation mark in the English language that expresses anguish and despair. The ‘!’ is so ill equipped to end the sentence in a statement such as the one I just made. 💡Note to self, to work on this at some point). Clearly, after 7 days of this unfolding of sleep time events, 6 hrs of sleep, where I didn’t know I even existed, was the highest gift I could have had bestowed upon me. Now you see why I woke up on a high note this morning!

Sleeplessness was one part of a mini-series of battles I fought over the last several days. 5 days in, I was sure what I felt was exactly as if a bomb had been dropped and detonated inside my body, in the area of maximum impact and reach. The day of the bombing (chemo cocktail) was mostly uneventful. I had some heart rhythm problems from the medication given to avoid a reaction to one of the cocktial of drugs I was going to get, got super sleepy, had a headache and fleeting congestion, felt exhausted from the long day, but that was it- uneventful. Slept fitfully when I got home and the next day it felt like my system was too full-overloaded. My little old heart pounded in my chest as if someone was after it, threatening its existence and it was shaking the prison bars to get free fast! My weight shot up 4 lbs from the previous day and to my knowledge I’d consumed no more than 500 cal the previous day! I had a headache to match the pounding of my heart and I was ready for fight or flight. Then late in the afternoon all dams suddenly broke loose and after the nth visit to the ladies room that evening, I had rid myself of 4lbs of fluid that had built up inside me. What a relief! The headache loosened its grip slightly and the heart finally lost its grip on the delusion that someone was after its life.

Just as I was starting to think the worst had passed me by, my mental faculties suddenly decided to take a vacay. This is the part where steroids suck any lexicon of rational thought you may have, right out of you, in case you try to be yourself while consuming tragic amounts of the stuff. I had a M-A-J-O-R emotional breakdown over something my husband said, which on any normal day would not even have caught my attention. It was as if he had been secretly nudged and queued by the dark steroid invaders to say something, anything, that would push me over the edge. I cried like a baby, quite literally and loudly, with a feeling of despair so great that I thought I was literally going to break in half or at the very least, dissolve into this great misery that was absolutely trying to swallow me up. In that moment (or collection of moments) I felt like life was over and this thing was going to swallow me up; there was no escaping it and no one understood how I felt. I was so far down in that dark well that no light approached me. No amount of hugging and loving it better, made it better. I was gone from the real world. I kept feeling this rage bubble up inside me, wanting to throw things at the wall, alternating with deep despair. I just couldn’t climb out of these feelings and to make matters worse, I was doubled over in pain that felt like someone drove a sharp object through my abdomen and clear through my back. It was so intense that I was crying at once from both the physical pain and the emotional well I had fallen into. I had to ask my daughter to bring me some food so I could buffer the pains I was feeling from the steroids attacking my belly. That did improve pain long enough for nausea to take over. I felt like someone maliciously threw me onto an old rickety roller coaster, which made me pass through the valley of depression, the whirlpool of nausea, and then jerked around on its old joints so hard that it made everything in my body ache from my head, down to my toes.

It was at about this time, when my immune system decided it had been out of this exciting adventure far too long and jumped in head first to again make it’s motives known- enter joint pain. Not everyone is aware that I’ve had rheumatoid arthritis (RA) for over 10 years now and have been on injectible biologic agents and a low dose chemotherapy drug for 10 or so years. For the most part, I’ve been lucky with my RA, it’s been well controlled and my joints have been spared any damage in all those years. That the RA itself or the drugs to control it, may have had some hand in developing lymphoma and putting me in my current predicament, is another story, one which I may have to eventually put down to paper. For now, it suffices to say, the ugly face of RA decided to rear its head, now that it found itself overshadowed by the lymphoma mafia. Every joint hurt to a debilitating degree and no amount of pain medication popping and ointment rubbing was going to make it stop. In the end, I spent 2+ days in excruciating pain, while I passed through the valley of depression and the whirlpool of nausea… not fun at all. It took the daring right out of me, if it wasn’t already gone many years ago when I decided the thought of roller coasters produced the opposite of ‘thrill ‘ in me.

Then, just as I thought I was at my worst, the toxic sludge decided to shake up my insides, just to make sure it had done its job at the point of touch down and I started running to the ladies room for a whole other reason than before. After I emerged, I was so spent that I thought I was going to pass out in the space of time it took me to wash my hands! I had discovered the next phase of the roller coaster ride, the one where you go through the dark tunnel, where life like skeletal appendages reach out to touch you and for a quick second you see their red lit eyes in the darkness, then everything goes dark, and suddenly you are through the tunnel and light is here again, only to face some other horror on the ride. Twice, I had the blackness come over me and luckily, I got to a sitting position before it knocked me off my feet. I am so grateful for that, I cannot even form words to express it. I would be horrified if I actually passed out because I know just how awfully upsetting it would be for whomever in my family had the misfortune of finding me in that state.

Here I want to take a pause and reflect on a phenomenon my patients always told me about but I never truly understood: chemo brain. So, there is this foggy quality to your brain, when you experience chemo and initially (1st couple days out) it was just misplacing words and using the wrong word for things, calling Netflix, Pinterest and so forth, then I descended into stranger territory. My mind was no longer minding itself, I wasn’t just not connecting dots, there were no dots left to connect! I was not thinking about why I was having certain symptoms and how I might counteract or ease them. Normally my oncology nurse brain is in full swing, but here when I needed it for myself, it was suddenly out on leave! What I would have known on auto pilot (that I needed to hydrate, get electrolytes stabilized and eat bland foods to soothe my worn out gut) was suddenly a fact that I had complete amnesia on. I was shocked when I finally found this knowledge suddenly appear to me in a moment of clarity. Shocked, that I hadn’t thought of it over 2+ days of feeling rotten and nearly blacking out twice. But this was a manifestation of the brain fog induced by chemotherapy and I finally understood it.

Now, a week after my first chemo infusion, I finally feel a little like myself; weak, fatigued, a little light-headed, slightly nauseated, with lingering joint pains and a pain in the joint of my jaw that won’t quit, but myself. I am hopeful, the remaining 2 weeks till my next chemo infusion will be uneventful and the cycle will not repeat itself with quite the same intensity as this one. I expect there will be other adventures and insights to be gained in coming months. I’m content with the knowledge that through this past week I got to feel a little closer to the experience my patients were having. Though I empathized with them, I never walked in their shoes before but now I understand it just a little more from the insider’s view point…In case I forget to say it later, I’m grateful for everything that is to come. I know there is a good reason and a grand scheme. I believe it with all my heart.

I’ve got my sleeves rolled up and I’m ready to catch what comes my way (as best as I can) 😉

❤