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Another Writing/Cancer support group essay, done earlier today.


Loves, romantic or otherwise
 
The story of how I found out I was in love with Carolyn.
 
Carolyn and I were in the same class for smart kids in junior high school and in high school. Socially, Carolyn was a normal girl. She went on dates, to dances, stuff like that. I, on the other hand, was a bit delayed in my social development. Part of the reason was that I wasn’t very big, or athletic, and I didn’t think girls would be interested in me. Partly, I was a year younger than other kids in my class, and I didn’t think girls liked to go out with boys who didn’t have a drivers license, something I didn’t get until well into my senior year in high school
 
So I didn’t really start dating until my first year in college. But I went to an all boys college so I didn’t know many girls. We had mixers with nearby girls colleges, and I’d go to them, but I wasn’t much of a dancer, and the few girls I actually met at mixers were, once I got to know them, frankly, uninteresting to talk to. So, on the Christmas vacation, I called up a few of the girls from that class for smart kids that I was in in high school. I got dates with two of them, Carolyn and Ricki, who happened to be best friends.
 
Apparently, it’s not smart to date girls who are best friends with each other, but I was fairly clueless back then, probably still am, and I didn’t know that. We all lived in Baltimore. Carolyn was going to college in Pittsburgh. I was in college in Baltimore and was commuting. Ricki went to the University of Maryland and sometimes came home on weekends. So there I was, dating both of them.
 
They weren’t like the ordinary girls I met at mixers. These two were smart. They were fun. When Carolyn was home from school, I’d date her. Other times I’d date Ricki. They didn’t have the Internet back then. We had letters, delivered by the post office, if you can believe such primitive means of communication. Carolyn would write to me, and to Ricki,  and Ricki and I would discuss the letters we’d gotten from Carolyn.
 
At one point, when I wanted to get a bit romantic with Ricki, she pointed out to me that she and I were just friends, and that I was in love with Carolyn. So I asked her how she figured that out, and she told me that she could tell by how I’d talk about Carolyn when we were on dates. I thought about that, and admitted that she might be right. But I wasn’t sure, yet. So, during college I dated other girls when Carolyn was out of town, but I began to notice that whenever Carolyn was back in town, I’d try to monopolize her time for dates.
 
That would work OK during holidays, but not so well during the summer. One of my friends, Steve, started dating Carolyn, and that made me pretty jealous. Finally, I figured it out. I suggested we become engaged the summer after we graduated from college in order to convince her to go to grad school in Baltimore rather than in Boston. That worked. I hadn’t been quite aware that becoming engaged kind of meant you were supposed to actually get married somewhat sooner than after you get your doctorate, but she pointed it out to me, and that worked, too. And here we are, 43 years later, still doing stuff together, including oddly enough, getting cancer together.

Writing/Cancer support group

Assignment: Thoughts and feelings regarding an important emotional issue that has affected you and that might affect recovery.

You might think that getting cancer –and then a recurrence, would be my current big emotional issue. I'd think that. But it's not as depressing to me as I'd think it ought to be. Now, I have to figure out why that is.

When my wife and I got married, I asked her to make a deal with me. The deal was that we wouldn't have any kids who were more than 30 years younger than us.

That wouldn't be so difficult. We were 21 when we married. Our youngest daughter, Miriam, came to us when we were 31, but she was an unplanned adopted child, and she was 11 months old—so she slipped in right under the wire. Our other two kids are two and three years older than Miriam.

So what does that have to do with an emotional issue from cancer? The kids are kind of elderly right now. They're 38, 37, and 35. One might, if one were feeling expansive and generous, consider them to be adults.

That's a weight of responsibility off my mind. Even if my cancer comes back, I've raised my kids. They could be considered adults, and, more importantly, they're doing a very nice job of raising their kids.

When Carolyn and I were younger, and raising our family, our parents were not as accepting of our choices as we'd have liked. Particularly the choice to adopt two of our three kids—biracial--half black, half white.

But all the kids turned out OK other than the one little problem that one of them seems to have become a lawyer.

So, now, you'd think—if he's so accepting that he's done his job in life—he won't fight, battle if you will, as hard against the cancer. And there was the temptation to refuse the treatment with “curative intent” that they offered me at the Cedars-Sinai Cancer Center when my cancer recurred and was stage four. I thought, at the time, that the “curative intent” was just a ploy so they could make me feel truly miserable during the treatment without them having to feel bad at all. They offered to use a new radiation machine that they'd only just installed the previous week, the Trilogy. I figured they were using me as a guinea pig, and that at the end, my cancer would still be incurable.

And that still might happen. My wife and kids (adults?) weighed in on the side of going for the possibly curative treatment, although they pretty much knew I'd have to make the decision myself. I have to say, having been in a situation where I needed to decide for myself, and where I knew I, personally, would have the last word, that I still wanted to have a consensus with my family.

It's been about seven months since the treatment, which did make me feel truly miserable for about a month, has ended. Since then, I've been free of detectable cancer. More importantly, I've been free of cancer treatment, and I just had a negative scan, so that guarantees me three more months of not being poisoned or irradiated. And that's pretty good.

What, if anything, have you been focusing on differently before the Ca Dx and now?

What, if anything, have you been focusing on differently before the Ca Dx and now?

 

 

 

Before the Dx:

 

I did plan to retire. I envisioned a fifteen or twenty year retirement, plenty of time to do whatever I wanted.

 

Plan one: Goof off and travel. Our daughter, Kathy did that after she got out of college. She, and some of her friends, borrowed my wife’s minivan and traveled around the country for some months. It was a spontaneous journey reminiscent of the old TV show, Route 66, except that they didn’t ride around in a Corvette, and they didn’t solve any murder cases or rescue any endangered damsels. I was jealous.

 

Carolyn and I had been focused on grad school, med school, work. We had a son by the time we got our respective doctoral degrees, and we just kept on working. I was envious of Kathy’s trip. I wanted to do a similar trip.

 

Fortunately, Carolyn shared my interest in this travel plan.

 

After the trip, I’d get around to saving the world. You have to have priorities.

 

The way I was going to save the world was to go back to college and become a mechanical engineer. I’d get my bachelor’s degree. Then I’d invent something that would harness the power of the tides and waves to provide electricity. The design of that invention, and a working scale model would be my Master’s thesis, and the actual working full scale generating plant would be my PhD thesis.

 

So then, I was diagnosed with lung cancer four months before my planned retirement. I had surgery, experimental immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania, and adjuvant chemotherapy back home in Elkton. That caused a delay in my trip, but it also made me rethink my long term goals. I could no longer plan to live long enough to do all that educational and inventing stuff. Fortunately for the world, other people are working on using alternative forms of energy to free us from dependence on fossil fuels.

 

When I had a recurrence, it delayed my travel plans. But now, I’m cancer free yet again for a while, and am going back to the travel plan. But I need something to do after that. I actually have a new plan. I’m going to join Americorps. If I can’t save the whole world, I’ll save a bit of it right here in Los Angeles.

Writing Group – 4/15/09

Feelings, am I holding back any?

Recently, a few months ago, I read something in a book about a character who, according to the narrator, had never had an unexpressed thought. I found the concept amusing and mentioned it to my wife. She told me that it was her distinct impression that I, like the character, have never had an unexpressed thought.

So does that apply to feelings? Nope.

Carolyn enjoys relating the time, in late September, 2007, when I had an unexpressed feeling of pain, at least, for a while. We were visiting her brother and sister-in-law in New Jersey when I started having pain in my right shoulder. For a while, it wasn’t too severe, and I thought I’d pulled a muscle. I thought about heart attack, but I discounted it because I wasn’t sweaty or short of breath, and my pulse rhythm was regular and my pulse rate was normal. But, the pain started getting worse, and it kept getting worse.

Finally, I didn’t finish my dinner, unusual for me, and asked Carolyn to drive us home, also unusual for me. My rationale, unexpressed, was that if I were indeed having a heart attack, and I died, I didn’t want Carolyn to be in the passenger seat while the car was going 65 on the Jersey Turnpike.

I also told her I was having pain on my right side and that I needed an aspirin. That was a test. She was supposed to pick up on the fact that I wanted an aspirin and then she was supposed to figure out that the reason I wanted the aspirin was that I thought I might be having a heart attack. She didn’t figure that out.

She did figure out that something was quite wrong with me, and asked if I thought I was having a stroke. I reassured her that my symptoms weren’t anything like a stroke. Then, she figured out the right question to ask. She asked, “If you had a patient with symptoms just like you’re having, what would you tell them to do?” So I told her that I’d advise such a patient to call 911 right away. She hadn’t actually driven onto the Jersey Turnpike yet, so we pulled into a parking lot, and we called 911.

You might ask, why was I playing games like that in the middle of having a heart attack, which is what I was having. I’d answer, that I was in denial, at least a little bit. But that’s not the whole story. I just didn’t want to have a heart attack at some strange hospital in New Jersey, which is what happened. It turned out fine. The hospital was nice, and I lived.

So, that’s the story of my most recent unexpressed feeling.

The assigned topic for our writing/cancer support group was, anger, our experience with it now and in the past, and how it affects our state of mind, well being, or recovery.

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Anger, for me, is unhelpful. It doesn't improve my control of my life or my situation. I used to get angry at others who didn't do what they should. It turned out that my anger didn't have the effect of making them, or me, do the right thing.

There were times when I'd get angry at myself, generally for not having done what, later, it became clear that I should have done—studied harder for a test, made a more witty remark during a conversation, been a better person.

But my anger at myself didn't make me a better person. My anger at others didn't make them better people.

Then, I saw a TV show—an episode of JAG. It's probably pretty pathetic that my whole approach to a philosophy of life could be affected, not by reading the wisdom of philosophers, but by watching a TV show about lawyers who are way better looking than 95% of everybody and who, at times, fly around in jet planes—but there it is.

I learned that the best way of dealing with anger is to forgive whoever you're angry at—including yourself.

Thus, you(I) can focus on living the rest of my life, improving if that's what's needed, and not letting incidents mess me up.

When my wife and I were 26, our first son died, suddenly, unexpectedly. He was 2 ½. Nobody could figure out why he died. I was angry at G-d for a few years. I wouldn't go into a synagogue. Did my anger improve G-d? Probably not. No sense keeping that going.

Forgiving works quite well. You get to stay calm. You don't get ulcers—saves a bundle of money on meds you don't need to take. How you forgive people is an exercise best left to the ingenuity of the perspicacious student.

This business of forgiving—and going on from there—is probably someone's philosophy. I have to admit that in college, the non-science, non-math courses were not my strong point. So here I am, stuck with a philosophy of life based on a single episode of a TV series that's been discontinued.