Injured

She died on Saturday evening. A wonderful woman; elegant, sophisticated and intriguing. She had battled her cancer; therapy after therapy, always trusting the decisions being made always trying to remain ahead, never giving up or in, never wavering. Her last therapy I recalled had injured her lungs making it hard to continue. I go back to that moment, it’s not easy to know that our therapies have consequences and sometimes the outcomes are not what we want. Damages from our treatment, whether in the short term or the long term, are now playing an important role in our choices of what we treat our patients with. Why bring this up now?

As most of you have realized I have not been blogging for a long period of time. There are many reasons, which I will not divulge, but I will share one. Over time I have been sharing intimate stories with you. Each blog is truly a touching experience for me and hard sometimes to materialize into words. Yet I found myself doing that time and time again. I had not realized that sharing these stories was cathartic to some and injurious to others. Each blog represents a humans experience and journey with me. Such is surgery and chemotherapy, they are painful, often helpful, and not always curative. I found myself revisiting scars and wounds that made up the utter fabric of my existence. It was hard to put a positive spin on things, as often they have sad endings. It was hard to read them after I had written them. So I decided to pause. In this pause I have been reflecting and rethinking, “how am I supposed to write? What reason do I have to write?”

Today I received an email from a patient who had survived her disease. I am quoting it word for word….please take a moment….to read these powerful words.

“Hi Dr. Mo,

I felt the need to write and thank you. After my last visit this past summer we discussed your blog and that day after our appointment I started to read it. As I sat in waiting rooms all day for my appointments I continued to read post after post to pass the time and couldn’t get enough. I signed up to get email alerts when new posts were written and pretty soon it became what I looked forward to each week. Between all the junk mail there would be the notification that a new post was up and that meant that I had a five minute break from the world.

This past fall I have been extremely busy with my job dealing with lots of traveling and deadlines and sometimes the stress tends to pile. No matter how overwhelmed I would be feeling when I started to read one of your blog posts all the things that seemed important disappeared for that short time.

I tend to worry a lot and am a bit of a control freak I’ll admit, but when I was diagnosed with cancer things that I thought were so important no longer compared to having it. That experience gave me a new way of living and seeing life with a new perspective. No one tells you though that if you are lucky enough to win the battle with cancer that eventually that new outlook you have on life tends to fade once things eventually start to go back to normal. There are times when certain things bring me back to that way of thinking when I did have cancer, whether its a movie, a book or examining my scar that I realize some things I worry about just don’t really matter as much as I think they do. Your posts are one of those ways I am brought back to that state of mind and remind me how fragile and short life is and how the things I was worrying about before are nothing compared to other issues in life and what I went through and could have gone through.

When I had cancer I didn’t share my feelings and thoughts that often with friends and family. I just felt no one knew what I was going through and I was trying to keep everything the way it was before. I also felt like I wasn’t worthy enough to talk about it since I had it much easier than lots of other cancer patients. I’ve noticed since then emotionally healing from having cancer has been a lot harder to deal with. Every post of yours I read helped me deal with those issues and heal in some way. Things I had thought about and didn’t know how to put into words were all there. The fact that you were able to cure me physically and even somewhat emotionally is beyond amazing to me. I have no way to tell you how thankful I am other than my words.

Although I know you don’t write as often now and I know you have good reason since you are a busy man I want you to know that not only are you a great doctor who saved my life, but you are a great writer who has helped me heal. “

Thank you my hero, for teaching me that all injuries heal including the deepest wounds. Your words have touched me deeply. That despite the injury that cancer inflicts on us, there are lessons that broaden our minds and deepen our senses to the ongoing conflicts we face in life. Thank you for opening my mind to the reactions and usually not shared. I truly am touched and indebted to your kindness and your words have far more impact that you can possibly imagine.

Mo.

 

Perception

Clinic ended in the usual way. A daughter and her father came to have a closure visit. The Cancer Center was quiet as I made my way to the room where they were waiting. I walked in and we hugged each other deeply remembering the moments we had spent and the many struggles we had been through. My closure visits are usually at the end of my clinic visit, but there was something different about this one.  She looked down as she talked, her voice strained and her mind rattled as she spoke. There were questions this time on what happened, on why it happened and “please explain it to me?” She continued, “where is science to answer these questions, what is pain? And how is it that we don’t know more about what to do?” She sobbed “I saw things I did not want anyone else to see”. She re-iterated “don’t want anyone to see, things that have changed the reality around me”.  Her mother had died, her close friend, her confidant. “When my mother was coming for her chemotherapy, people would say to me I am sorry, and I would look at them and say “sorry? This was a chance to hang out with her, to be with my mom, to lie in the bed and bond as we watch television and shared our stories”.

This was a very young woman who got exposed to death at an early stage in her life. She wanted to talk. Her speech was pressured, she touched my heart. No, she penetrated ripping right through. She vividly described all the stages that she had witnessed as her mother became acutely ill, her voice was shaky, and I could hear her unrelenting grief as she told her story. She had met death, and it had changed her. She told me of how when someone asked her “how she was?” She would just look at them as if they had asked her something that did not make sense. They should rather ask her who she was, because death had left its mark on her, embedded itself in her history and future. Death had become a fact for her, a part of her life now intimate in the details she shared of what it really meant to lose someone dear. She did not search for words, she found them and the courage to share them with me for which I was honored to receive them. In this discussion, many doors opened as we settled and submitted. Her mother was so unique as her cancer was a rare diagnosis with sparse cases and documentation on its treatment. The husband looked at me and asked “did you learn something from this?”

I explained to them both that to me each human that I treated was like a piece of a larger puzzle I was trying to solve. I was trying to connect the jigsaw pieces collaborating with researchers in Iowa and in the nation. How each person gave us clues and a wealth of information that was used to create a network for us to better understand what at this moment I was having a hard time explaining. She asked me why is that? I explained that her mother’s sarcoma diagnosis was rare and that progress in these cancers was slow. I explained that the knowledge would eventually come to explain it but it did not exist now. In Iowa we have built a resource that is proving powerful in bringing researchers together uniting them in a common cause to decipher the cancer code. I have often quoted it as being like a coral reef in an ocean that is formed slowly over time, but allows the development of ecosystems of different living organisms that can thrive and be nourished.

Her questions continued, and I was stunned at the depth of their feelings, their attachment, and their grief. She traversed the mindset that death is something out there to fear, avoid, kick and scream about, the perception of the masses. To her it was present, it was unexplained and it was intimately associated with her recent loss. They were accepting the ambiguity and mystery around the other side. Our human bodies are vulnerable, and our lives are delicate. And death is bigger than life because it is inevitable and certain. She demanded answers.

They thanked me and made their way to leave. At the doorway, she paused; her tears began to flow again. As I sit tonight I ponder that image. How many of us stand at the doorway of death not fully understanding its implications in neither our lives nor the provoking questions that erupt when it happens.

-Mo