Defenses

Yesterday, before my last chemo, I saw Dr. Blue and Brown. His opening was, “I heard you were a bad girl in Florida,” (because I hadn’t seen a doctor about my fever. I could just imagine father-daughter rooms next to each other in the hospital. No thanks. I survived without doctors.) We then took stock of where things stand at this quarter way through my treatment. He had sent me to a breast surgeon, whom I just met before going to Florida. There are pictures of her in her office from the beginning of her practice, and Robert and I did double takes to recognize her. I was glad she has lots of experience.  As she gave me my surgery lecture, I wondered if it got boring for her. I had to stop and ask her to repeat some things because her voice was soft and without modulation. I doubt doctors take speech lessons in med school any more than they get handwriting classes. Her competence and compassion are what matter.

Defenses

Mastectomy is set for Sept 1. Dr. Soft-Spoken said since there is at least one lymph node enlarged still, everything is coming out on the right side. She told me the chemo had shrunk the tumor, yes, but as far as she could tell, hadn’t shrunk the node. This was disconcerting since I know the nodes are my last defense before the cancer metastasizes. She explained what it could be like to live without those nodes, the heaviness and swelling I could feel in that arm each day, the need to move it overhead after surgery. A survivor friend told me she sits beside a lamp and just holds on to the post above her head for as long as she can stand it to relieve the heaviness.

Dr. Blue and Brown pshawed Dr. Soft-Spoken’s assessment. He said it was unlikely the lymph nodes were unaffected, and he poked around to double check. He said if I wanted, he could order another CAT scan to check for metastasis, but he didn’t recommend it because it was rare for cancer to spread during chemo, especially chemo like mine that was working, and if the test showed “hot spots,” all he would do is cancel surgery because there is no cure for metastasized cancer, so what would be the point? The cancer was out the gate. But he thinks so far so good (no guarantees).

So I realize after these four months of chemo that yes, the cancer has probably been stalled, but it’s still capable of spreading, and surgery is my next line of defense. I will live without lymph nodes on the right side after Sept 1 and move on to radiation once things have healed, the third line of defense.

What’s crazy to me is the silence of the battle. I know it’s a life and death struggle, and all I feel are the effects of the chemo, nothing of what’s happening inside. I take these good doctor’s words that my defenses are holding, but I really won’t know for years. I sit in that chemo chair with that final potion going in my arm, and I look at the five other people in my pod connected to IV’s and most of us have care-givers like I do, and most of us are silent. The couple to my left asks our petite nurse Lisa questions about what the drugs do and how the PICC line works, and he has all his hair, so I realize he’s new, but after 4 months, I have no questions for Lisa. At the end of my 6 hours, she takes out my PICC line, making my arm vibrate slightly, but no pain.

For the rest of this year, I’ll have an IV put in every three weeks to finish out my treatments. When they offered me the gong, I said I’d wait until all that stabbing was over. Seemed premature right now to ring it when I have all that still ahead of me. Surgery. Radiation. 13 stabs, which they beguilingly call pokes. (My chemo brain calculated 40. But it's NOT 40. It's only 13! Host Dad caught that one. Yay!) More prayer. Robert said I should practice the gong. One battle down. But I was still thinking about the uncertainty and the invisibility. My guess is that with teamwork like this, it’s always that way, you trusting other people to help you see, help you judge. So little of reality is accessible. Trust, waiting, underscores everything.

Notice the melting ice, the bird trap. You've seen this before: Peter Bruegel the Elder

Austerity

My friend Compassionate Nurse lent me some BBC series, the goodies like North & South and Cranford. She threw in an extra movie, which we watched, about bands of people who choose austere lifestyles, like Spartans or the Amish. I was thinking, who would do such a thing? And then I remembered I’d chosen to live with Miskitos and Mixtecs, who had less freedom to choose where they lived. In both places I slept on boards, slogged through horrible weather, and felt constantly hungry.

I think my worst moment was a night in a village called San Miguel. We’d walked for hours and then ridden in the back of a truck through a river and up a mountain to get there, hoping to find Reinaldo (not his real name), a man we’d met at a migrant worker’s camp in northern Mexico and who we thought had turned to Christ. He had offered to take us over the mountains to another town where we had friends, and we thought we were ready for this long day’s hike. We weren’t, so fortunately our trip took another turn. 

When we found Reinaldo’s house, we committed our first faux pas right away when we asked his wife where Reinaldo was. The terms for “he’s on his way” and “he’s not coming” are only a tone apart, and we missed that little detail and sat down to wait. (Later we found out he had slipped away when he saw us coming, not wanting to be seen in his village with foreign bringers of a false religion.) His wife, I’m sure, wondered what we were up to. We practiced all our Mixtec on her, but even Robert soon ran out of words, and she wasn’t offering any conversation, so we took a walk up the mountain path. We came to an altar of rocks with dead flowers and dried blood on it, and realized we’d found the town’s altar to Saint Mark, the rain god whose day of appeasement matched Saint Mark’s festival day, so shared the name. We knew this was no Catholic saint and wondered if we offended by being here.

Returning to our hostess’ wooden shack, we found her preparing supper, the usual beans, greens, salsa and tortillas, and since we were still hanging around, though for no reason she could see after her plain answer, she had no choice but to feed us. After that I committed the second (or was it third or fourth; we were racking them up) faux pas. I had to use the wilderness restroom, so out I went, and on my way back I found a cut bouquet of bright red flowers on the ground. I picked them up and brought them into the house. “What are these flowers?” I asked, proud I could say this much. She mumbled that she didn’t know. I thought she’d misunderstood my words, so I slowed down and enunciated more clearly. She glanced at me, then at her daughter, then looked away, mumbling even more quietly that she didn’t know. I insisted. They were flowers she’d cut herself. Finally Robert put me out of my misery, “Anne, they’re poppies. Put them down!” The daughter eventually picked them up and slipped out the door.

“Oh!” The light dawned. Glancing down, I could now see (observant person that I am) that there was a slit around the enormous bulb from which the white gum had been harvested: the base for heroin. I’d just asked this woman about a sale of illegal drugs. Now she probably really wanted us out of there, but it was dark, and she was stuck with us for the night. The bedroom was a second wooden shack with nothing but two beds, both made of sticks. She piled her kids in one bed with her and gave us the other. Rain leaked through the roof and wind reached through the slats of wood. We were at 7000 feet. We covered ourselves with our plastic rain jackets and slept in our boots. No, didn’t sleep. We shivered until first light when, after a breakfast of tortillas, beans, and salsa, we finally got that little detail of the tone pair figured out and realized we should be on our way. Down the mountain road we went to wait forlornly in the town square for a return truck. We did not feel welcome.

The river had swollen from the rain, and we took our chances fording it in the truck, but over we went, eager to get home. And from there it was supposed to be a plain hike, but I’d picked up a virile bunch of giardia bugs and could barely walk. I kept thinking what would have happened if I’d attempted the all day hike over the mountain with two men. Whew. When we got to a doctor a few days later, he was impressed with the virility of my giardia bugs—had seen nothing quite like it. Wondered how I’d managed. I wondered, too. But after I knocked them out with drugs, we went back. Austerity is a relative thing.

Countdown: #1 Last Chemo. The Theory of One

Although I still have 40 IV treatments left, today is the last of the chemo. No more pure poison after today. YAY! So today I celebrate One. And it’s about the Unified Theory of Everything.

River Styx

Sometime back I said that I believe Christianity is true because of the Gospel of Homesickness, which is an application of Plato’s Ideals. In other words, I am convinced that the reason I have such an ache for something more out there, is because there really is more out there. Of course Plato thought that the more out there was bad news for human beings, just tragedy and Hades, so they may as well forget about wishing for anything different. He wanted to eliminate art, eliminate music, eliminate comedy, because they made you think there might be more than gloom and doom out there, but there’s not. But because of Jesus, whom Plato never met, I know differently. I know that the story ends well. That is the Gospel of Homesickness.

The second reason I believe Christianity is true is because of Occam’s Razor. This is also called the law of parsimony, or frugality, or even stinginess. In other words, shave off what you don’t need.  Occam’s razor is a heuristic device that helps you choose between several explanations. (a heuristic device is a rule of thumb, a rule of common sense, a mental short cut. For example, when a stranger offers you a ride, as a rule of thumb, don’t take it.)  Occam’s razor is a rule of thumb that says if you have several explanations, take the simplest one. Here’s an example. Calvin’s dad walks into the bedroom and yells, “And what’s with all these feathers? Are you tearing up your pillows? Calvin insists innocently, “It was incredible, Dad. A herd of ducks flew in the window and molted! They left when they heard you coming!” Yep, incredible all right. Calvin’s dad applies Occam’s razor and Hobbes adds, disgustedly, “Nice alibi, Frizzletop! No dessert for a week!”

One of my favorite children’s books is by William Steig, entitled Yellow & Pink. William Steig wrote Shrek and Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, which won the Caldecott Medal. In Yellow & Pink  two carved wooden figures wake up in a field and try to figure out how they got there. Pink assumes someone made them. Yellow starts coming up with a series of accidents that might explain their existence. It’s obviously a creationist tale, and the American Academy of Pediatrics as well as the New York Times don’t recommend it. It’s not in print. But it does illustrate Occam’s Razor. 

Someone, later than the Franciscan Friar William from Occam, added a few words to the Razor so that it now said, “if you have several explanations, take the simplest one, but don’t bring in the supernatural.” This is how Occam’s Razor is applied today, making Yellow’s long explanation for our existence the only one acceptable. And I can see how giving supernatural explanations for everything isn’t helpful when you are trying to find a cure for cancer. You have to know how stuff works. How the laws of science hang together.

But our entire culture is suspecting that behind the laws of science, there is more out there. The race is on to find the Grand Unifying Theory, or the Unified Theory of Everything . These theories try to connect the various forces of the universe including  nuclear particles like electrons, magnetism, and gravity. Scientists want these forces to come up symmetrical, like the neat symmetry between energy and matter (E=mc^2),. They aren’t there yet, but they might find something any day. I don’t know. Meanwhile I think their title is a bit grandiose. It connects forces. It doesn’t begin to explain love or poetry. I suspect that the real Unified Theory of Everything is not an equation but a Person. Someone ultimately holding physical forces together as well as love and poetry. My personal Unified Theory of Everything, my Theory of One is far more interesting, and bringing Him into the picture is definitely more in keeping with Friar William’s Razor.

Conversion

When the sun is going down, Robert and I walk out the door and down the road for exercise. I feel I am made of blocks that are having difficulty staying stacked on top of each other in a straight line. We pass vineyards. I hadn’t noticed how many vineyards there are until the summer covered their bare branches with leaves. They are propped up with string—no wonder they grow so straight and regular. We pass a tiny cemetery with family names, including the name of our own short road with its warning “Rough Road” at its entrance. We pass a church converted into a family home with big windows along its sides so that you can see all the way through, like looking at the sky through square glasses. Friends live there, and we’ll visit on Sunday. We pass apple trees and corn fields and bean fields. The wheat fields are the most colorful with white Queen Anne’s lace (wild carrots) and purple hairy vetch (someone does not like this flower) showing through the gold. The winter wheat is ripe for harvest, and these are the tares to be cleaned away, bouquets that can’t be eaten.

The vineyards have brought a conversion to the area. It’s not just fruit farms and grain farms now; it’s a wine trail, and where there were just a handful of wineries when I first married here, now there are dozens, their driveways lying right next to each other along these roads, and I watch how they choose their labels, some from family names, some from locations, some from a whim or a to make a statement. One is called Megalomaniac with classy clothes in human shape but no faces.

We take our walk along the escarpment, the cliff over which the Niagara River falls. At the Falls, water thunders abruptly over rock shelves with such power that its seething surge at the bottom holds the ferries at bay with their blue-raincoated passengers drenched in river spray. At night this water power is harvested for conversion to electricity. Here, though, the escarpment drops smoothly, gradually, so that tiny vineyards nestle in crooks of the drop, drinking their flavors from micro-climates caught in mini-plateaus like fumes in wineglasses. Here the water drips from the sky and filters through soil to be sipped calmly by grapes, water converted to wine the quiet way. Some wineries let the grapes freeze in winter to squeeze out ice wine, the sweetest of all. The tourists follow both trails of water, leaving a trail of their own, of water converted to houses and jobs.

When you are driving above the escarpment and come to the edge, most roads curl round and back to take you down more safely, although in winter, black ice can still lie in wait and ambush you. One winter night my friend Alyson found herself hanging upside down, strapped over her car-roof in a ditch on such a road down the escarpment. But on one road named Victoria after a queen, you crest the top and go straight down (watch your speed; the cops are merciless) and as you first catch sight of the bottom, you see the lake stretch out majestically before you, with the silhouette of a great city lying dim in the distance across flat water, with its iconic tower soaring above, and I’m surprised every time, and my heart lifts like it lifts when I drive round a curve and see mountains!

As we walk along the escarpment beside quiet vineyards, I tell Robert of the book I’ve just finished. This one I savored while vineyards greened: The Cloister Walk. It describes how people following the Benedictine Rule commit for life to an ongoing conversion of the heart, a slow, gradual renunciation of power until God has it all. This conversion, this wine-turning, takes a lifetime. It’s not a moment, a raising of hands and going forward. Somehow I think the Benedictines have the better definition. 

Goldfish crackers and broccoli

As often happens these days, I tired quickly and went to wait in the car for Robert to finish his shopping at our local thrift store. There were lots of people out in our small town--three young girls walking by all in black summer wear (is that an oxymoron?), a dressed up Asian couple, a black guy cruising on a stretched out motorcycle, an older lady under a denim jungle hat. It made me wonder, as I am sure you have wondered, surrounded by people from diverse groups, how do you introduce God into this shifting  kaleidoscope? How do you bring God to people who live in settings pretty different from yours? Maybe they know God better than you do. How would you know?

I once watched a psychology experiment with two kids, a one-year old and a two-year old. The psychologist put two plates of food in front of the one-year old, one piled with goldfish crackers, the other with broccoli. The psychologist took a goldfish cracker in her hand and made a big fuss about not liking the cracker. She was shaking her head and wagging her finger and saying, “Yuk! Ugh! Gross! No cracker for me!” Then she took the broccoli and started rubbing her tummy and smiling and nodding and saying, “Yum! Yum!” Next the scientist put her hand out to the one-year old and asked, “Can I have some food, please?” The one-year old didn’t miss a beat. She grabbed a goldfish and handed it placidly to the scientist. I mean, that’s what she would eat. Who would want that broccoli stuff? 

With the two-year old things went a bit differently. After the scientist made her preferences known and held out her hand for a cracker or a broccoli stick, this youngster cocked her head to one side, pursed her lips, scrunched her eyebrows together, and reached for the broccoli. But all the time you could see the thought bubble over her head, “You’re crazy, Lady, but here’s what you want.” Sometime between year one and year two of life, most humans learn that other people do things differently.  Other people like different things. This doesn’t make sense, but by age two, we gather it’s true.

Sometime later we also learn that groups do things differently, too. “We Joneses do it like this.” Or, “We Canadians do it like this.” Or, “We Baptists don’t do that.” What we do in our own group makes sense, and what other groups do doesn’t. This is how we are wired, and it takes a great amount of listening to understand that other groups really do want the broccoli.

I heard a great story on TED from an outgoing Italian NGO worker trying to help a Zambian community build its economy. The soil along the river where they lived was excellent for growing tomatoes, but the community never grew tomatoes there. In fact, they didn’t grow anything there. The land was wasted. So the Italian busily planted row and row of lovely Italian tomatoes and showed them off to the Zambians. The tomatoes grew. The tomatoes were a success. Until 200 hippos came up out of the river and devoured everything. “My God! What about the hippos?” exclaimed the Italian. “You never asked,” replied the Zambians. That other group wanted the broccoli, and he kept handing over the goldfish crackers. You know what this Italian titled his talk? Shut up and listen.

We make this mistake in the church, too. Yes, we sidestep the problem by setting out several plates: different worship services; a blend of hymns and contemporary worship songs; a Children’s Moment. The arguments start when there are several groups at the table and only one plate full of goldfish crackers. Then what do you do?

The problem is worse when we start churches in groups different from our own. If we aren’t asking the right questions, if we aren’t listening, they look suspiciously like our own churches back home but not much like the new group, and the hippos come. Christian history is full of hippos.

The very first church ever born had a problem trying to bring a new group to Christ that didn’t do things the same way as the original group. The book of Acts records the struggle. It shows how the Greek widows weren’t getting the same care as the Jewish widows. It explains how the Gentile churches felt pressured to become Jewish. It repeats Peter’s vision where God taught him to accept food from Gentiles, kosher or not. Finally it documents how the leaders of the very first church called a council in Jerusalem to decide once and for all whether Gentiles were bound by the Jewish way of doing things. Their answer was a resounding NO. Broccoli was acceptable.

Easy to say. Hard to do. I think of Peter, the one to whom God repeated that important vision three times, and yet after his own group pressured him, he stopped eating broccoli with his Gentile friends. I think all of us would agree now that God meets people wherever they are, in whatever group they belong to, and He gives them a new life and makes them witnesses to that very group. This is the meaning of the Incarnation: God comes to us. But accepting other groups without wanting them to do things our way does not come natural. It’s hard work and takes intentionality, even for Saint Peter. Our default mode is our own culture, so when we don’t think about it, we automatically go for the crackers (or the kosher food, as the case may be). And the hippos come. Where have you seen hippos lately?

Magic pills

Coming back home to the farm, I see that outside my window “the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye,” (just about), and Host Dad Larry is already talking about harvesting something—not sure what. He’s just waiting for one more day to dry the rain-soaked fields. Things grow so quickly! I overhead him say maturity is at 95%, and maybe the extra day will get another percent or four.  How does one know these things? Could one invent a way to measure one’s kids this way? “Yes, Bob, Philip is at 95% maturity right now. We’ll just wait a day or two to get that last 4-5%.” Huh! Wouldn’t that be great? Like magic.

Here is more magic: I unpack my identical bottles of unidentical medicines (could I have a blue bottle, and a red? We are all a little tired of orange, thanks. Oh, and do you have pills that aren’t white?). I’m glad that this week I am down to one, a beta blocker, which I’ve been taking for, what, a month now? In a week I have an appointment with the cynical cardiologist who prescribed it, and I decided I should go online and research what a beta blocker is before I see him. Not sure I want to ask him.

In the old days this little white pill would have seemed like magic:

“You say your heart beats way too fast at the wrong times? Not when you are startled by crazy cart drivers but when the weather is hot and muggy, and you’ve been out for a long walk with a motorcycle dog? Hmmm. Not sure I get the connection there, and I’m not sure what a Ducati is,  but let me see. Here: take this. This miniscule amount of compressed white powder should just about take care of it. If not, let me know, and I’ll be glad to burn that little spot right off your heart for you.  That’s if you survive that other little spot in your chest. That will be four hundred gold coins, please.” (Yep, that is what Dr. Cynical has cost me, so far, four hundred gold loonies, cold cash).

The Beta blockers that I take (there are three kinds) block the connection between stress hormones released into your blood and receptor cells in heart and kidneys. Keeping those hormones from linking to receptor cells mutes the effect of epinephrine (adrenaline) with its “fight or flight” reaction. I like this. I get to live in slow mo for the rest of my life, I guess, and not startle when certain people (who shall remain nameless) jump out from behind doors, or when certain other people drive in a certain way (that also shall remain nameless), or when the weather turns hot and muggy while I’m on long walks with a motorcycle dog.

Beta blockers were discovered by a Sir James Black three years after I was born and are considered a marvel of the 20^th Century because they slow down the heart and prevent heart attacks. Performers found they also reduce stage fright and within ten years the dancers, actors, speakers, and musicians of the day were popping them like candy. Stutterers and surgeons liked them, too. And the International Olympic Committee had to ban them after finding that their archers, shooters, golfers and snookerers (who pot balls from spots, I kid you not) relied on them like modern athletes rely on steroids. And I get to take them legally. I just can’t compete in the Olympics, drat.

“So, Doctor, you who can give medicine to slow my heart, to stop my heart, to cut its pressure in half, you who can eliminate the killing fluid from my father’s ankles and drive the clot from behind his eye, can you give me a pill to solve the stuff inside my head, the stuff that shall remain nameless? How far does your magic go?

Culture of God

I like borders. Even though they make me nervous, they make the differences easier to see. According to my daughter, when we cross the border from the US into Canada, the houses and roads perk right up in quality, but they turn somber and cautious. Other than the occasional red door, their colors are subdued. She lets her breath out in relief crossing into Mexico where variety and color reign, even riot. Like people, countries have personalities. Margaret Atwood says that at their core, countries have a single symbol that comes out over and over in their literature, movies, music and art. For the US she says it’s The Frontier with its Lone Ranger saving the world. For Canada it’s The Survivor, carving out a life up there in the North. 
 

She didn’t offer a symbol for Mexico, but maybe it would be The Rebel, someone never quite happy with the rules or the status quo. (Feel free to offer something better.) I’m thinking of the iconic legends of Zapata and Pancho Villa, or the name of Mexico’s strongest political party, the Institutional  Revolutionary Party (PRI), or the fact that narcocorridos,  drug ballads like the tribute to Chapo Guzman, are becoming ever more popular, even though they subvert every family value on the planet. “El Chapo” (Shorty) is the drug lord that just escaped from a Mexican maximum security jail (whether through a tunnel or right out the front gate, no one is telling) for the second time. He’s so wealthy that Forbes listed him as a self-made billionaire along with Gates and Buffet, and he’s offed thousands of people. There is a section of society in Mexico that admires Chapo’s ability to thumb his nose at authority. Not all Mexican rebels are as harmless as El Chavo. 

The week spent with my parents and sister, a type of  “border crossing,” reminded me that not only did our own original Patterson clan have its personality (that fortunately included card games I could win), but Angie and I have our own family personalities, or cultures, as well. And all of us are embedded in such different environments: living in a retirement community in Florida; selling houses in a bright Texas economy, and teaching school in southern Mexico. We are all constantly weaving new cultures out of old.

Recently, I have been asking myself how to describe the culture of God’s country. If it’s true that God as Trinity has always been a Family, a Community, a Union, a Pueblo, a Nation, a Country, then His country has its own culture, too, its own way of doing things, and its own unifying symbol. I think God revealed this symbol through Jesus when he taught us to pray, “Our Father...” Only he turned the whole device on its head, because He is The Father, and earthy fathers are symbols of Him, and never the other way around. We are the Bride to the Bridegroom, and earthly marriages are symbols of that, and never the other way around. Jesus showed us that the primary way we relate to God now is as his children. He is our Father, and he wants us back! And not just us; He wants the whole family estate. He wants the land, and he wants the people, and he wants all the ways we relate to each other in groups, too—the ways we govern, educate, work, heal, play, love, worship—everything.  In other words, he wants His Culture to utterly infuse ours. That’s living in God’s kingdom.

We are all embedded in such different cultures when He calls us: Mixtecs, Smithvillians, Oaxacans, Texans, young, old, post-moderns, pre-moderns, dead-on-moderns, don’t-try-to-label-me-whatever-moderns, and He meets us where we are. That’s the meaning of the Incarnation. But then he disciples us. And as more and more of us from any culture follow his lead, together we weave from that culture something truly beautiful, a tapestry made by all our choices together, all our work together, all our creative acts of worship together. May that tapestry be rich and not one culture lost! We kid ourselves if we think this is easy.