Healing

Mata H — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 11:02:51 -0600

It is so true that healing comes from many directions -- including these tender moments with strangers that turn out to be more than strangers...I am getting well, happily. Thanks for the wishes.

I am just blown away by the hospital stay that seemed to be a rich hotbed of active spirituality...it just seemed to be raining grace,

~~ Contributing Editor, Mata H. also blogs relentlessly at Time's Fool

Hospital Stay

Rachelle Mee-Chapman — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 07:48:04 -0600

Mata,

May healing come to you quickly this day! Shalom!

Hospital Spirituality -- Part Two -- cancer survivors find each other as if by magic

Mata H — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 21:47:58 -0600

It was about 3am. I had just shuffled back to my hospital bed from the restroom. I needed a nurse’s aide to help me get re-situated in bed. I am a feisty, independent woman. I hate asking for help to go to bed. But I need to be propped up, and re-nested in this clumsy jumble of bedclothes and hospital equipment. A woman comes to help who seems to be in her mid-30’s. I comment about her lovely haircut, trying to get the focus off my clumsiness, my unappealingly infected legs. “Yeah, “ she says, “it grew back well after the chemo. I was relieved.”

It is dark in the room. We can hear my roommate softly snoring in the background. There is the quiet hum of hospital machines like waves on a gentle and distant shore. The window looks out over the roof of the hospital, into a grove of trees.

“Cancer survivor?” I ask.

“Double mastectomy,” she replies.

“Uterine here,” I say.

And with that shorthand we peg each other as survivors, as women who have shared something foreign and terrifying. We have come back with the story lodged in our mouths, waiting for the slim and silent moments when it can be told.

Then the big question. It is asked in a subtle way. It is not subtle.

“How long ago?” she asks.

“Almost 25 years,” I reply. “You?”

“Only two,” she says, the silence feeling like a choked off pause.

(For those of you who have not experienced a cancer diagnosis, even if the surgery has gone swimmingly well, going 5 years without a re-occurrence is the big number. Five years. It is like the border to The Promised Land. You do not really breathe well until then. I bought a big bottle of champagne for my 5th anniversary of no-cancer.)

“Three to go,” she adds, as I nod.

I am back in bed now. I ask if she is busy. She says she can stay to talk for a while.

We do what women do.

We do what women cancer survivors do.

We tell our stories. She tells me of her suffered indignities, and I tell her of mine. She tells of the doctor who said “It’s no big deal – it’s just your breasts.” She tells me she wanted to grab his testicles and squeeze them until his eyes bugged out. But she kept silent, afraid of offending the man who was about to remove her breasts. “I figured I’d deal with it later, “ she said.

“Did you?”

“Well, you know, as much as I could. I just focus on being alive.”

I tell her of the intern doctor giving radiation treatment at the teaching hospital (Sloane Kettering) who wondered why I asked his name.. “Because, Doctor, if our positions were reversed and I was shooting radiation through what was left of your ravaged reproductive system, you just might want to know who the hell I was!!”

The nurse’s aide and I laugh. But we know it isn’t funny.

“I don’t know where I got the strength to say that.”

“I do,” she said. “Sometimes it just made me that mad.”

“I would cry all the way home after the treatments,” I confess to her.

“Me too,” she says.

We both sigh. We have been momentarily snatched back into the past, into memories of a fear too deep for words. We’ve walked away from the vortex, but the memory is still there, like a scar that throbs in the rain.

We sit there, in the dark, the hum of the hospital around us. She rests her hand on mine; I turn my hand to hold hers against my palm.

“You’ll make it to Year Five, you know. I can feel it,” I tell her after a while.

She thanks me. We talk about how one survivor understands another in special ways. She says, “If you haven’t been there, it’s like trying to describe a color to someone who has been blind since birth.”

We talk about how we are probably better friends now, better able to understand other women who have dealt with these female losses of breasts and uterus – with losing a place that loved being touched, losing a hope of babies. We talk about being stronger now.

We talk about our faith, and how that played a part. We talked about how some religious people missed the point entirely. And how some knew just what to say.

Then the time comes for her to move on, this survivor angel of mercy. We smile as she leaves. We know to recognize a little miracle when we go through one.

I know some of you reading this have had cancer, or have it now. I hope you know that we have a lot of sisters out here. Healing happens in odd ways sometimes, sometimes as a result of shared courage, or even shared fear.

Please use this space to share hope and strength with those who may be reading this in the silence of their own darkness. We are not alone.
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Healing

Hospital Stay

Hospital Spirituality -- Part Two -- cancer survivors find each other as if by magic