I just got a call that my MRI was clear. Yay!
Recently I met with some parents to obtain background information as part of my assessment of their son. They are highly educated people, both with advanced degrees. They have three young sons, all of whom they speak of lovingly. The father charmed me with the fact that he calls his sons, “honey”. There words were measured and they described their concerns about their oldest son, his tendency at time to not to own his own actions, his quickness to anger, and his frequent use of exemplary verbal ability to argue with adults.
Despite their calm and professional demeanor, I could see the mounting fear behind their words. Their fear for their son’s happiness and safety in the world. We had had a chance to establish some rapport and I decided to take a chance on expressing an awareness of an issue that had yet been unsaid. “I can only imagine the stress that you feel in raising a Black son who has these difficulties, in our country.”
Both parents nodded vigorously and the father said with palpable relief, “Finally, someone gets it.”
I am not African American. It was chancy for me as an outsider to make the comment that I did. It was also chancy for me to use the term “Black” instead of African American. The former is more likely to be acceptable when used by African Americans, not by an outsider and further a member of a privileged race, such as myself. But I thought “Black” was a better reflection of their own thoughts and feelings about their son. I also know that due to my personality, I tend to be able to say things like this and they are interpreted in the way I intended. But I am still very careful. I will never know what it is like to be African American.
But I can try to understand the best I can and to be aware of the common challenges that African American families face. And my awareness must be more than an internal event. It needs to be linked to effective action. In this example, my action was communicating my awareness of the rational sources of their fears. These parents have three boys. The number one cause of death for African American males between the ages of 15 and 34 is murder. And one might think that the risk does not apply to these boys because they live in an educated and relatively affluent family. I think realistically, it may buffer this risk to a certain extent. However, even looking at my own life, I know there is a particular danger that cannot be eliminated. I have a lot of friends. A great number of them have advanced degrees. Two of my friends, both Ph.D.’s, have had murder in their immediate families, one attempted and the second resulted in the death by shooting of a friend’s brother, who was waiting in line to get into a night club. Both of these friends are African American women from well educated families. One of them even had an uncle who ran for president of another country.
There are many people who live with the cloud of potential catastrophe. We are often unable to fully appreciate it but we can do our best to understand.
I am awaiting the results of the routine MRI I had yesterday. I am learning to deal with the anxiety of these scans but I am anxious. My husband forgot about the MRI even though I’d told him a couple of times as recently as the day prior and had asked him to accompany me. His alarm went off yesterday morning at 6:30, his normal time to get ready for work. However, he was planning to go to work after my scan and it was not until 9:45. He was getting up too early to have remembered the scan so I reminded him and he came back to bed. My husband is more forgetful than I would like. But I understand that he is not doing it on purpose and further, he would have seen the appointment on his calendar. Plus, he doesn’t live in the perpetual state of Potential Cancer so there are some things he doesn’t quite understand about my experience as a cancer patient. Similarly, a close friend apologized to me yesterday for checking in with me about my MRI. He’d had quite a stressful day of his own and again, he doesn’t live in the state of Potential Cancer. Before I lived there, I didn’t really worry so much about my friends’ scans once they’d had no evidence for disease for a couple of years. The panic subsides. I don’t want my husband or my friends to live in the Potential Cancer state with me. I don’t wish that on anyone just as my friends with metastatic disease wish it for others. But the actions that come from understanding our situation are important.
As a world, we need to find a cure for breast cancers. But as individuals, we also need people in our lives who have an awareness of the unique stresses of being a breast cancer patient who are also able to convert their awareness into emotional support. You, friends and family, may be helpless to prevent recurrence or to cure a loved one’s active disease, but you can provide emotional support. You can make living in the Potential Cancer state or the state of Perpetual Cancer more bearable and less lonely.
Perhaps it would be helpful to explain to you what scans mean to me. A clear scan means that I can live another six months with “no evidence of disease”. A clear scan to a person with metastatic cancer means that they can live with “no evidence of progression”. If my scan shows evidence of cancer, I will go into the fast paced chaos of not knowing and having many tests, the perpetual “hurry up and wait”. If it turns out that I’ve had a recurrence, I will likely undergo a more aggressive treatment protocol than I did in the past and to undergo previous treatments for which I now appreciate the full impact having gone through them before. By the way, a lot of cancer treatment sucked. My family will suffer. My patients will suffer. I could go on and on.
I keep telling myself that the results of a scan, assuming accuracy, don’t tell me anything about myself that wasn’t true yesterday. I often tell my patients this about the diagnoses I give them. “You are the same person you were yesterday.” On myself, this is a hard sell. I am a clinical psychologist. Nobody comes to me unless they already know something is wrong. Something is not going well. There is a problem. I didn’t know I had cancer. I felt fine. There was no lump. Right now, due to my mental and physical health practices, I feel healthier than I have in years. But cancer can hide for a long long time without someone even knowing something is wrong.
For me as a cancer survivor, it is surreal at times to realize that I can’t trust my own sense of my body. I can’t gauge my own health. My body can lie to me. I try to be a very truthful person with myself and with others. Honesty and clarity are extremely important to me. This is hard.
Offer your loved ones your understanding and support. You don’t need to live with us and we don’t even want you to, but do connect with us. And when the Pink wave tells you that awareness is action and pink is helpful, put your money and volunteer time somewhere else. Somewhere that helps.
Gray and black clouds
hide the sky.
The light shines through
There is clarity above.
The clouds will burn off
maybe today
maybe tomorrow
some day, certainly.
I will see the sky
I’ll know if I traveled
during the quiet space
between dreams
to the terrifying place
the familiar chaos,
the Cancer Place.
This morning’s sky inspired the poem, my first in nearly 20 years so be kind.
You may have heard this. A complaint about one’s life is followed by the statement, often expressed apologetically, “Well, that’s a first world problem.”
I realize that the intention of the phrase is to provide perspective, to encourage people to count their blessings and further, to appreciate the poverty and unhealthy living conditions that are typical for people who live in poor countries.
I want to let you in on a secret that I have told no one until now. I strongly dislike that expression.
Perhaps for many of you, it helps you gain perspective, a reality check combined with a big dose of empathy.
To me, it sounds like an invalidation of one’s own thoughts and feelings and a kind of intended short cut from point A, being distressed to point B, feeling calm.
I know for me, this kind of short cut doesn’t work. I tried invalidating my feelings for years. “You shouldn’t feel, angry” I would tell myself. “You shouldn’t feel sad.” “Stop feeling guilty. You are always beating yourself up.”
By not allowing myself to feel what I felt, I found that it took me a great deal of time and energy to calm myself down. And I remember a number of years when my normal state was one of a roiling anxiety in my gut and in my brain. My twelve years of chronic neck pain happened during this period of time as did my two episodes of depression.
It also didn’t make me feel any better about other people. It wasn’t like I wasn’t a nice person or that I was not kind but it took a great deal of work. Sometimes, kindness and compassion would just flow from my being but lots of the time, it didn’t. I had to at least a little digging. And then because I was anxious, I would sometimes worry that I hadn’t done the kindness or compassion “right”.
This is the way I feel about the “first world problems” expression. I don’t deserve to be angry, annoyed, sad, worried, anxious, etc because I live in a wealthy country.
Feelings don’t have to be deserved. Feelings just are. We have them. They happen.
Stress can make our brain misinterpret situations; it can get biased toward interpreting the world in a negative way, being on the alert to find threats to our safety such as rejection and danger. Stress and anxiety can also impair our brain’s ability to differentiate between meaningful and trivial threats.
First world life is fast-paced, over-saturated with information, competitive, and demanding. In other words, it provides genuine stress. And that stress can produce feelings that we think we “shouldn’t” have.
And aside from stress, people feel stuff. We just do. For myself I know that if I am mindful of my distressing feelings, they lose power over me. And when I validate my patients’ parents’ stress and frustration with a basic problem such as potty training, they can stop feeling stuck and ridiculous in their feelings of powerlessness as a parent.
I live in the first world and I enjoy its benefits unlike many in my country who live in poverty and unhealthy conditions. I am no more important than people who live in the rest of the world. However, I am not less important, either. When I feel happy and calm, I find it easiest to be charitable and compassionate. Being happy is not the same as having things. However, for me, it frees time for me to exercise my good will rather than perpetually questioning the validity of my petty irritations, fears, and sadness.
As I mentioned in my last post, my psychologist gave me much to think about when she linked the amount of work I spend on happiness to the fact that I have much to be happy about, which means taking inventory of it all through mindfulness would naturally take a good deal of time. The image that came to my mind was “counting my happy money.” I don’t know why it came to me, maybe because it is like the sayings, “an embarrassment of riches”, “count your blessings”, and “pay it forward”. In any event, I find it kind of amusing and so it has stuck in my mind.
Last week, I focused as well as I could on counting my happy money. Looking at each gold bar in my Fort Knox of things for which I am grateful. I am no stranger to Positive Psychology and know that expressing gratitude is linked to increased happiness.
Even so, I was taken aback about how calming it was to use gratitude and appreciation at the times I was feeling unhappy. When I wrote the post about appreciating my husband even though I was mad at him, he was actually sitting next to me. I knew I was mad at him for the wrong reason. I was taking some parenting stress out on him. But I was still upset. By writing, felt a gradual re-centering, a misting of calm, that cooled me off, pulled me back into my orbit around reality.
What a soothing exercise. I have used that strategy in the past at a time I was extremely distraught. I just started writing a list of positives, the resources I had that would help the situation. That a very constructive coping strategy, which helped me avoid panic. But using gratitude and appreciation last week, when I was not so stressed, actually made me feel happy and calm.
I am so very thankful to have had the Pay it Forward opportunity. What a gift.
John and me. 9/17/14 by Miguel Cornelio of Momentous Image.
I had big plans for my blog today. It’s Pay it Forward Friday to honor our friend Karen Sutherland’s late husband, Hugh. Today is his birthday. I committed to honoring Pay it Forward Friday with several posts this week about acts of kindness and gratitude.
Karen writes lovingly about her husband and their relationship. What better way could I honor she and her husband than to devote todays post to my appreciation for my husband, John and our marriage.
Then it happened about 20 minutes ago. John acted in a way and said things that really pissed me off. Nothing horrible was said. It was just a disagreement. But it was a disagreement with interrupting. Between my daughter who interrupts constantly and my husband who interrupts frequently, this has been a hot button for me for many years. Actually, interruptions are not bad per se but the ones that change the subject or serve to confuse communication happen far too frequently.
But you know what? I’m going to appreciate my husband, anyway.
John, thank you for being my best friend for the past 27 years. You are a wonderful companion, have curiosity about the world, are compassionate, and are damned funny. I had long thought that any romantic, passionate relationship that I had would need a basis in friendship to last. And so far, I am right about that!
Thank you for being a wonderful father. I still remember your absolute and unbridled joy at becoming a dad. You have one of the closest relationships I’ve ever seen a father have with his teen daughter. There are times that I envy that but mostly I’m just happy for the two of you.
Thank you for being excellent at your job and for your financial contributions to our family. You work more hours than I do and make more money. You carry the health insurance for the family.
I have such gratitude to you for being so good to my extended family. They love you a great deal but I also know that there are a lot of them!
Thank you for supporting my career aspirations and education. I remember when people would say to me, “Your husband is so nice to LET you get a Ph.D.” They were right about the “nice” part but for the wrong reasons. Thank you for not acting as if I needed your permission to be a highly educated woman.
Thank you for supporting my friendships and my life outside of our family. Thanks for being such an eager host for our many social gatherings. Despite your natural introversion, you have a demeanor that puts others at ease, you are a wonderful conversationalist, and help people have a great time.
Thank you for your forgiveness, time and time again for the times I have hurt you, often unintentionally but more often than I would like to admit, I have hurt you purposely. I have acted selfishly out of fear, lashed out in times of stressed, and stayed distant at times I felt most vulnerable and hurt. You have loved me through all of this. You have always been open to working on our marriage for the health and happiness of the both of us as well as maintaining a strong foundation for our daughter.
Thank you for taking a chance on me. I know that when we met and even when we were getting married, your frame of reference was one in which people didn’t stay married for more than a few years.
Thank you for letting me expose our relationship, bumps and all, in my writing. It shows trust in the strength of our relationship as well as your kindness in hoping that sharing our lives may help others.
I had a psychotherapy appointment today. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the work I put into being a happy person. I told Rebecca that at times, I wonder if I make life too complicated since I work so hard at happiness. But I also told her that I realized that I have the CAPACITY for happiness and that is a big deal. Yes, I work hard but I know how to be a generally happy person.
She made a really interesting observation, a profound one I think. “Elizabeth, you have a lot of happiness in your life. Because you have so much, being mindful of all of it from the smallest flowers to the love in your marriage, is a lot of work.”
I said, “Oh it’s like happy money! I have to work hard because I have so much to count.”
Finally, Karen I am so sorry that you lost Hugh. I am so sorry for your cancers and your suffering. I so appreciate you. I know that in your sadness and suffering, you are growing stronger. You are a very kind and resilient person with much loving wisdom that you have shared with us. I consider not only your friendship a gift but also your relationship with your dear husband. Your love for him has always been incredibly apparent and incredibly strong. But the reality of the difficulties of living even with a soul mate, have always come through in your writing. I have felt encouraged and validated by the real, loving picture you have drawn, bumps and all.
When I was in high school, my humanities teachers, now know to me as Helen and Bob, took a group of us on week long trip to New York City, with a one day stop in Boston. Bob and Helen worked with us for months ahead of time making sure we would know how to use the subways and get around because we were on our own for significant parts of each day. By day, we visited museums and scoped out architecture. We had a journal for each day with tons of questions corresponding to different paintings, buildings, and exhibits. I remember spending about 10 minutes staring at a series of Frank Stella paintings at the Museum of Modern Art before realizing that I was on the wrong floor of the museum and none of the questions in my book were matching up to the exhibit. I remember my excitement with visiting my first Frank Lloyd Wright building, the Guggenheim Museum. There was a large collection of later Picassos on exhibit. One of my friends was totally disgusted. I was so taken with the colors and the abstract forms that I did not notice that most of paintings were of female genitalia. Come on, like Picasso was the first horny artist. The man was a genius and I got to see his original paintings, some from the Blue Period and some from the Lady Bits Period.
We also went to a lot of Broadway shows. We saw Noises Off (meh), Cats (T.S. Elliot and cats dancing on the balcony; awesome), and the very fun Little Shop of Horrors. We skipped Oh, Calcutta, the all nude musical that was playing at the Edison Hotel, where we were staying. I remember I worked long and hard to charm the cranky and rude man who worked at the front desk. He yelled at us every time we asked him politely to get money out of the safe, to which only he had access. By day three he was smiling every time he saw me and calling me, “Darling.”
Oh yeah. I almost forgot. We saw a very famous play. We saw the Death of a Salesman. Dustin Hoffman played Willie Lowman. He was so amazing. I still remember the uproar caused by his not being nominated for a Tony Award that year. He was invited to present at the awards and received a standing ovation. Although my memory of this event seemed so clear, I was recently reminded that John Malkovich played Willie Lowman’s son, Biff, in that production. He was already famous by that time. His voice was as distinctive as it is now. It was amazing.
The whole trip was an amazing experience and I almost didn’t go. My parents told me that it was too expensive. A few days after telling my teachers that I would not be able to go on the trip, Bob took me aside and told me that there had been an anonymous donation for my airfare. That allowed me to go. I remember that it was about $300 and that we flew on Continental Airlines.
For many years, I have suspected that Bob and Helen paid for my airfare out of their own pockets. Maybe I’m wrong about that. But even still, the trip would not have been possible without these two dedicated teachers, giving so much of their time not to mention giving up their spring break every year, to teach kids from Renton, WA about the arts and the big world outside of us.
I have kept in touch with Helen over the years. She reads this blog and sometimes sends me a personal email with her thoughts about a particular post. She retired right after my cancer diagnosis. She is extremely beloved by many former students. There’s even a fan club on Facebook for her!
Helen got pretty ill last summer and last I heard, she was getting stronger each day. Maybe she’s even reading this post along with the rest of you who are reading this right now. Helen, I have enormous gratitude for what you did for me in my teens. You are smart and an outlier. A passionate person who enjoyed her career. You were and are a role model to me about living a life of meaning, humor, and service. Thank you for all that you have done for THOUSANDS of students. Not every teacher gets fan page on social media. And not every teacher agrees to meet with former students, still in their teens who miss their teacher and want to talk to her about books.
I have filled my blog with posts of gratitude and appreciation this week, with an eye on paying-it-forward. I have had the privilege of an exemplary education and you were among the very best of my teachers during my 25 years of schooling. Your dedication to the welfare and education of youth, helped inspire mine.
Thank you and I wish you the very best in your health and healing.
I have an MRI next week. I have them once a year as a routine follow up. In six months, I’ll have my annual diagnostic mammogram. Welcome to Breast Cancer Land. When they aren’t loading you into a noisy, rattling tube, they are smashing your boobs while having you hold the rest of your body in positions reserved for the less commonly read sections of the Kama Sutra.
I actually don’t mind the actual procedures so much. It’s the worrying and waiting for results. I don’t want to do this! I have all kinds of fun things planned for October! So I find myself thinking, “Maybe I should just reschedule my MRI for AFTER I do my fun things. Then if I have a recurrence, it won’t spoil my fun.”
This is a ridiculous kind of thought. I mean I could reschedule for November but then it would be, “What if I have a recurrence? It will spoil Thanksgiving.” Then Christmas may be spoiled, etc.
The fact of the matter is that there is no good time to have cancer. Right before scans, I find myself scheduling patients with the thought, “Hmm, I wonder if I will be able to finish that report if I find out I have a recurrence?”
When I was diagnosed with cancer, I can’t say that my life came to a screeching halt, because it didn’t. But major changes and upheaval occurred in order for me to get the assessments and treatments I needed. On the day I was diagnosed, it was a work at home day and I ended up cancelling two phone consultations with other healthcare providers. I worked on my reports the next day. It was a three day weekend and we were expecting my father-in-law to come stay with us. It was actually nice to have him there. He gave us a lot of support.
My life will stop when I die. A cancer diagnosis didn’t make it stop. I can’t juggle my schedule around the possibility that I will be worried and stressed. I am a planner but this is not one of the things to plan for, at least in the short term. I mean, I do think about the long-term. That’s why I exercise regularly, try to eat well, meditate, and go to psychotherapy. I am taking care of myself for the long term. I am preparing for the possibility of a long life. And those things I do for the long term, make me feel better right now.
This is my gratitude week. I had an idea in mind when I planned this but I have not quite followed it. Instead, I have gone according to what I wanted or needed each day. Today, I feel like I want to do something different with my anxiety.
I trust myself to do what I need to do if my cancer has returned.
I appreciate and feel deep gratitude to my friends and family for holding my health in their warm wishes and prayers.
I appreciate my access to excellent cancer treatment.
I am grateful that although my breast cancer surgeon has retired, that there are a number of excellent remaining surgeons at my cancer center.
I appreciate my healthcare insurance.
I am grateful to my husband because I know he will drop everything and come to my MRI appointment next week if I ask him to do so.
I appreciate my daughter’s resilience in the face of my health problems and her tenacity in life.
I love living.
I am alive until I am not.
I will do my best to live accordingly.
When I was an advanced graduate student, I helped teach new graduate students how to do standardized testing and write assessment reports. One type of test that clinical psychologists often give is an intelligence test. Now there’s no end all, be all measure of intelligence but they are useful. Often the students would chat excitedly about a child they’d just tested and describe the child as “really bright!”. This was prior to scoring the test and on several occasions, the child ended up with the numbers not matching the student’s assessment. Typically, what they really meant was that the child was sweet, hardworking, and happy. We have a habit of making intelligence equivalent to being “good”. This is a particular issue for bright and highly educated people.
Also in graduate school, I remember having a heated argument with one of my classmates and her husband. The argument was prompted by my remarking about how damaging and insidious I thought the stereotype that Southerners in the U.S. are less intelligent. To my surprise they responded, “But Southerners ARE stupid!”
People, I’ve met a lot of highly intelligent people in my life. She was one of the smartest people I’ve ever encountered. Her husband was smart, too. I couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of their mouths!
It would still be awful but perhaps slightly more understandable if they’d never met a southerner in their lives. However, we were all going to school in the South. Not to mention the fact that our southern clinical psychology Ph.D. program was and still is one of the very best in the country.
They had explanations. “It’s because southern schools are terrible.” That argument made me crazy because even assuming that it is true, intelligence and education are not the same thing and anyone in a clinical psychology program should know that because it is a basic distinction that is covered in any introductory assessment course.
A number of our classmates were southerners. I said, “Well, what about x, y, and z.” Somehow they didn’t count because they didn’t have southern accents. Well one of our classmates did, Penny, and she was and is a brilliant person. “What about Penny?” The reply was, “She doesn’t count. She’s not a southerner. She’s from Appalachia.”
People, that is a terrible argument. She was also the daughter of a coal miner and the only one from her community to graduate from college. She was from one of the poorest areas in the country.
I could go on and on about the logical inconsistencies but I won’t. They were really smart people who considered themselves to be kind people who were going out of their way to make irrational ridiculous arguments to defend their hateful views. And you know what? In general, they were decent people. Decent people with a major blind spot.
Intelligence is not the same as goodness. It is also not okay to put other people down using one’s intellect. It’s no better than using less educated sounding language to do so. Being clever does not make being unkind, okay. Dorothy Parker was clever. You know what else? She wasn’t very nice.
This has been bothering me a lot lately. So I am looking inward because that is usually a fruitful thing for me to do. From my professional knowledge, I know that the fact that I am more intelligent than average is not a personal accomplishment. Brains are not the same, starting at birth. I consider myself to be very lucky. Further, not everyone has educational opportunities. I consider my education to have been a wonderful privilege that most do not get a chance to have. In my job, I see many hardworking children who are struggling with school. They are often treated like they are lazy and unintelligent. And by the way, even if a person is unintelligent, why is it okay to put them down as if it were their own doing?
Okay, I am complaining and this is supposed to be gratitude week. I am grateful for my intelligence and my education. I am grateful for my opportunities and experiences. I am humbled by the chance to help children be as happy and successful as they can be.
My daughter attended a mindfulness retreat on the Washington coast last summer through Inward Bound Mindfulness Education (iBme). It is a national organization but some of the instructors live in Seattle. My daughter had a tremendous experience there. She felt completely accepted as a person. As she put it, “I liked everybody and everybody liked me!”
That’s a powerful experience for anybody but especially for a teen. The instructors for the retreat are volunteers. Two of them continue having teen mindfulness meetings every month in Seattle. That is also free.
I thought about sending them a note of gratitude but there are so many of them on their website, testimonials from grateful families. Then I thought about their whole volunteer set up and how tremendously talented they must be for so many teens to have such a wonderful experience.
So I set up a small but meaningful donation to repeat every month to help keep this group going.
Check out the group at the link above. They have teen and adult retreats. I would love to go to one of the adult retreats one day. Right now they are all on the East Coast, which would mean taking off an additional two days for travel time.
Karen Sutherland is a dear woman whom I’ve not yet met in person. She is a cancer survivor in active treatment, a hospice nurse, a grandmother, a mother, and a recent widow. She recently spoke of a Pay it Forward day in honor of her husband, Hugh’s life on Marie Ennis O’Connor’s blog. Friday is to be “Pay it Forward Day” with the goal of encouraging others to partake in acts of kindness.
I pledged to Karen that I would honor the Pay it Forward Day. I have been thinking about what I might do. Today, it came to me. It came to me in the best way. It can to me in the way I have been bowled over by the positive consequences of small acts of kindness that I’ve directed toward others recently.
I am dedicating this week to conveying my appreciation to people in my life. I would like to start on my blog with an appreciation of Karen. Karen writes beautifully. Her words provide such comfort. It is as if her loving heart spills into each word. Karen comments on so many blogs and provides so much. Her presence in the world is a gift. Thank you, Karen! Please know that we are here for you, as well.
Peace and stay tuned,
Elizabeth
My Eyes Are Up Here 