Deathternity talks about all things death related. There are 1 million+ owned graves in cemeteries in America that people will not use. Cemeteries do not buy graves back. I would encourage people to begin thinking about either selling or buying these graves at a deep discount to what your cemetery charges. Or you can donate unused graves for a tax deduction. If I can help you with this please contact me here, email me at deathternity@gmail.com, or call me at 215-341-8745. My fees vary.
Q:I read with great interest your article on coping with the death of a pet. Can you recommend books and other resources?
—G.C.
A:Several recent books offer emotional support and practical advice. “The Loss of a Pet” by psychologist Wallace Sife provides guidance and resources on the stages of the grieving process; look for the fourth edition, published in 2014. Gary Kowalski, a Unitarian Universalist minister, offers spiritual comfort in “Goodbye, Friend.” Educator and grief counselor Alan Wolfelt explains why some pet owners’ feelings are so strong in “When Your Pet Dies.” And “Saying Goodbye to Your Angel Animals” by Allen and Linda Anderson, speakers and authors of many books on the animal-human bond, includes personal stories, exercises, meditations and memorial services.
Pet owners who are grieving intensely often benefit from talking with a pet-loss counselor who is trained to understand their bonds with their animals, says Joy Davy, a Hinsdale, Ill., pet-loss counselor and author of “Healing Circles,” a book about pet loss. Many counselors also offer support groups; pet-loss.net posts a state-by-state directory of counselors and support groups.
Telephone support is available from university veterinary-medicine programs and nonprofits via 22 pet-loss support hotlines listed at aplb.org, the website of the Association for Pet Loss and Bereavement. The site also offers chat rooms, a reading list and memorial products.
If you’re planning ahead for end-of-life care for a pet, a directory of animal hospice-care providers can be found on the website of a 400-member professional group, IAAHPC.org, including veterinarians, vet technicians, counselors, chaplains and social workers. Visits may cost about $100 to $250 an hour, but fees vary by region and type of care.
Birth is a beginning. And death a destination. And life is a journey: From childhood to maturity and youth to age; from innocence to awareness And ignorance to knowing; from foolishness to discretion. And then perhaps to wisdom; from weakness to strength or strength to weakness-and, often back again; from health to sickness and back, we pray, to health again; from offense to forgiveness, From loneliness to love, and joy to gratitude, from pain to compassion, And grief to understanding-From fear to faith; From defeat to defeat to defeat-Until, looking backward or ahead, We see that victory lies, Not at some high place along the way, But in having made the journey, stage by stage, A sacred pilgrimage. Birth is a beginning and death a destination. But life is a journey, a sacred pilgrimage-
To life everlasting.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, thalidomide was used as an anti-nausea drug by tens of thousands of pregnant women in Europe and Japan, some of whose children developed severe birth defects. Although thalidomide was never approved by the FDA, millions of free tablets were given to doctors as part of company-sponsored clinical trials, and 40 American children were born gravely affected. Not surprisingly, this led to a backlash against the drug industry. In 1962, Congress passed the Kefauver-Harris Amendment, giving the FDA power to require drug makers to demonstrate not just that drugs were safe for human use, but that they effectively treat the symptoms they say they do.
The upshot of this tragic episode is that the current FDA can be excessively risk averse, slowing drug development by demanding copious amounts of testing from producers to rule out rare problems. There’s no doubt that clinical trials have become much more complex and expensive: From just the late 1990s to mid-2000s, researchers at Tufts University estimate that the average length of a trial increased by 70%. In 2014, Tufts estimated that it costs $2.6 billion to bring a single new medicine to market, up from just over $1 billion in 2003. The drugs that do eventually reach market take longer and cost more.
In her new book, “The Right to Try,” Darcy Olsen, president of the Goldwater Institute, illustrates the terrible cost of this predicament. She focuses on the plight of terminally ill patients navigating the FDA’s dense clinical trial regulations, pleading with reluctant drug companies and trying to convince paternalistic bureaucrats to grant access to medicines that could mean the difference between life and death. Ms. Olsen does an excellent job of interweaving the technical details of drug development and clinical trial design with deeply moving stories of patients dying from cancer, Lou Gehrig’s disease and other devastating ailments.
The FDA has a “compassionate use” policy, by which terminally ill patients may access experimental treatment. But a very wide gap persists between official policy and patient need. Ms. Olsen notes that “today, about 40 percent of cancer patients attempt to enroll in clinical trials, but only about 3 percent end up participating. That means that the vast majority don’t make the cut, whether because they fail to meet the strict criteria, or a trial is thousands of miles from their home.” Many of those who don’t get these experimental drugs are the sickest patients because they are deemed “too sick to be useful for the study.”
ENLARGE
THE RIGHT TO TRY
By Darcy Olsen Harper, 311 pages, $26.99
Ms. Olsen argues that terminally ill patients should be able to access such drugs—at their own risk and outside the context of FDA-required studies—if the companies are willing to provide them, and the book’s title alludes to her proposed remedy: the state-by-state campaign the Goldwater Institute is leading to pass “Right to Try” legislation. The bills would allow terminally ill patients who have “exhausted all conventional treatment options” to access an experimental treatment if their doctors believe it is “the best medical option to extend or save the patients’ life” and “the treatment has successfully completed basic safety testing and is part of the FDA’s ongoing evaluation and approval process.” Insurers, critically, would not be required to cover the treatment—a significant hurdle, largely unexplored here, since such costs could be significant.
Opinion Journal Video
Goldwater Institute President and CEO Darcy Olsen on her new book, “The Right to Try,” and the effort to accelerate access to experimental drugs. Photo credit: Getty Images.
The think tank’s campaign has been incredibly successful, with 24 states passing Right to Try laws to date. Still, Ms. Olsen doesn’t present such laws as a panacea. She doesn’t expect experimental treatments to always—or even often—work for terminally ill patients. But she believes that some chance is better than the alternative. “If you have the Right to Die, you have the Right to Try,” Ms. Olsen writes. “And you don’t have to wait on Washington to secure it.”
Yet therein lies the book’s main shortcoming. Washington, it turns out, has a fair bit of say here. Courts have found that the FDA’s powers to regulate drug development are extraordinarily broad. Many changes Ms. Olsen champions won’t be possible without congressional action to revamp the FDA’s drug development process and find new ways of paying for experimental drugs that would make widespread access sustainable for patients, companies and insurers. These issues, though touched on, are not grappled with in detail.
The FDA has taken some positive steps. The Breakthrough Therapy designation, for example, created by Congress in 2012, has allowed the agency to approve promising drugs for life-threatening ailments based on small, early-stage trials. But this doesn’t let the agency off the hook. Scientists are increasingly recognizing that even common diseases like cancer are made up of hundreds of distinct genetic variants. The challenge ahead will be to match many more medicines to these targeted populations—a strategy called precision medicine—while sharply reducing the time and cost needed to bring them to patients.
I would go even further than Ms. Olsen does here. By focusing only on terminally ill patients, she’s overlooked that at some point everyone will become a patient. Rapid advances in inexpensive whole-genome sequencing tests, like 23andMe, are already allowing individuals to peer into their own medical futures and, even more powerfully, those of their children. We may not be far from a world where medical problems—from Alzheimer’s to cancer—will be identified while patients are still young and healthy enough to demand dramatic reforms to how medicines are researched and tested. The right to know our own medical futures may become even more important than the right to try.
Mr. Howard is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
In August 2002 Mickey Santi, then a 41-year-old manager of a veterinary clinic in Denver, received an anonymous phone call. It was from a lady who lived nearby and claimed to own a Spix’s Macaw. The woman hoped that Santi, who owned seven parrots, would know how to return the animal to Brazil, its home country.
At first Santi was skeptical. She was aware that the species was considered extinct in the wild. And she knew there were probably fewer than a hundred of the birds left in captivity—none in the United States. But when Santi arrived at the woman’s house, she was surprised to find that the medium-sized domesticated bird with a bluish-gray head and body was, in fact, a Spix’s Macaw.
To an astronomer, this would be almost like finding water on Mars. To a physician, like discovering the cure to a disease. To ornithologists, the discovery of an unknown Spix’s Macaw stoked hope that, just maybe, a remarkable species might not dwindle down to one last bird in a zoo, like Martha the Passenger Pigeon. Santi had just found what might be the world’s lone unaccounted-for Spix’s Macaw. His name was Presley.
By then Presley had racked up at least two decades in hiding. His exact path to Colorado is hard to track, but he was probably born around the São Francisco River in a savanna region that unites Bahia and Pernambuco, two states in northeastern Brazil. Captured as a fledgling in the ’70s, he was likely taken by car to Paraguay, where he was sold to the British importer Gordon Cooke—who would later be sentenced to six months in prison for animal trafficking.
After a likely stopover to change planes in Madrid and a short stint in London, he eventually joined another very young Spix’s Macaw purchased by a Colorado collector. The collector, probably aware that he was being investigated, gave the birds to the woman who would later call Santi.
The fate of the second macaw was unclear. Presley, on the other hand, had been named after the King of Rock and Roll and received the company of a female green parrot, with whom he set up housekeeping. Santi said that the owners “were good people who had children. The birds were part of the family. The lady knew she owned a rare bird, but she had no idea how rare and precious it was.”
Presley and his companion lived in relative harmony for about two decades until 2012, when the female died. This caused Presley to sink into a depression. The owner, after seeking help from Santi, eventually signed an agreement with the feds that, in exchange for turning over Presley, she would not be prosecuted. Once informed about the bird, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the World Parrot Trust began to coordinate an effort to return him to Brazil. Since neither organization had an office in Denver, Santi was appointed Presley’s guardian.
A captive Spix's Macaw named Presley emerged in Denver, Colorado, in 2002. Photo: Lymington Foundation
That day Santi wrote in her diary: “Taking Presley from the home where he lived for 23 years was very difficult. I developed a relationship with him and his family, who trusted me. The family said good-bye knowing that he would be safe.”
There are three surviving species of blue macaws, all from Brazil. The largest, the Hyacinth Macaw, has a wild population of about 6,500 birds, mostly in the Pantanal region. The intermediate-sized Lear’s Macawnumbers roughly 1,000 and lives in an area known as Raso da Catarina, in northeastern Bahia. The smallest, rarest, and most famous blue parrot, the Spix’s Macaw, was formerly endemic to the caatinga, a habitat of semi-arid scrub forest in the Brazilian savanna.
The Spix’s Macaw was named for the German biologist Johann Baptist von Spix, who collected a specimen on the outskirts of Juazeiro in 1819. He and botanist Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius had arrived in Brazil two years earlier as part of the entourage of the Archduchess Leopoldina of Austria. They were on the hunt for unusual plants and animals.
According to Carlos Yamashita, Brazil’s leading authority on parrots, Spix and Martius were probably by a river when they spotted the parrot, which is described in the book Avium Species Novae as “large and blue-gray in tone.” The bird was likely mummified and sent to Europe in 1820 aboard the ship Nova Amazona, along with thousands of insects, mammals, fish, and other birds collected by Spix. The Spix’s Macaw would not be observed again in the wild by a scientist until 1903, when the Austrian ornithologist Othmar Reiser reported seeing the species at two sites near Juazeiro. Then, in 1927, German naturalist Ernst Kaempfer recognized an individual caged in the city’s train station. After that, said Yamashita, “the whole generation of ornithologists of the ’40s and ’50s tried to find that animal.”
The search continued until 1986, when a Swiss ornithologist, Paul Roth, reported finding what he judged to be the last three macaws in the wild, near Curaçá, in the region around Melancia Creek, about 70 miles from Juazeiro. Based on the location, Roth surmised that the birds were likely related to the macaw collected by Spix. He speculated that the population had been wiped out by hunting, wildlife trafficking, and the introduction of African bees, which compete with the birds for nest holes.
When Roth returned to the Melancia Creek area in early 1987, he found that one of the three macaws had disappeared, probably poached. The following year he heard from residents that between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, the other two had also been captured. “As these trappers are not exactly gentle in their operations and they penetrated the area on this occasion with a band of armed men, none of the local people employed by us as lookouts dared to interfere,” he wrote in 1990 in an article for the German magazine Papageien.
The species was considered extinct in the wild for the first time.
In January 1990 Brazilian wildlife photographer Luiz Claudio Marigosent a fax to the International Council for Bird Preservation (now known as BirdLife International). Despite the supposed extinction of the species, Marigo had heard rumors of a wild Spix’s Macaw. In 1986 Paul Roth had photographed three birds. Still, a little while later, IBAMA (Brazil’s federal environmental protection agency) declared the species finished. “This was not making sense,” said biologist Francisco Pontual. The ICBP agreed, and decided to finance a new expedition.
Marcus (photographed here at 19 days old) is the fourth Spix's Macaw chick being raised this year by the Association for the Conservation of Threatened Parrots (ACTP) in Schoeneiche, Germany. Together with the Brazilian government, ACTP tries to build up a captive population that can survive in the wilderness. The birds' release is roughly planned for 2021. Photo: Patrick Pleul/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
In June a group comprised of Marigo, Pontual, and ornithologists Yamashita, Roberto Otoch, and Tony Juniper left Rio de Janeiro in four-wheel-drive vehicles. They planned to spend a month in the areas previously mapped by Roth.
Arriving in Curaçá, the search party made camp at a farm called Concordia, the place where Roth had reported seeing the trio of macaws. Pontual remembers that the next morning he woke up early, “before the sun came up,” and drove with his companions to a location indicated by a worker. “When we left the car to walk up the creek, we began to hear the macaw, as if it was the voice of a ghost. From the sound, we knew it was him.”
Tony Juniper described the scene in Spix’s Macaw: The Race to Save the World’s Rarest Bird: “The cry grew louder, then louder still. Finally, the source of it came into view. Its blue plumage was visible in the first proper daylight. With a pale head, a distinctively long tail, and deep wing beats, there was no doubt what it was. We had found a Spix’s Macaw. . . . We were speechless as we simply stared at a creature we had come to regard as almost mythical.”
Two Spix's Macaw chicks at ACTP in April, 2014. The species is slowly gaining celebrity outside of the bird world: It played the main role in last year's animated film "Rio 2." Photo: Patrick Pleul/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
The bird was driven by car to Concordia farm, where a 70-foot-high cage would serve as her training base. When she arrived she could fly only about 165 feet a day. Four months later she could go a full two miles. Gradually, she was conditioned to a new diet featuring the seeds available in the caatinga. The nuts were tough to crack, and at first it took her 15 minutes to open one. But by week four, she had cut that time to three minutes.
Months later the male Spix’s restored his relationship with the Blue-winged, and stayed true to her until 2000, when he disappeared. In the absence of a body, there were rumors that he had been captured. For the second and last time, the species was pronounced extinct in the wild, and the project was discontinued. At about the same time, in the United States, Presley was being discovered.
Arriving at his new home in September 2002, Presley was taken to Mickey Santi’s room, where he met his roommate, an African Grey Parrot named Rikki. “We thought he should have the company of a bird,” Santi said.
Lean and moody from his bereavement, Presley was greeted with toys (his favorite was a small stuffed frog) and a spray bath to polish his feathers. Santi changed Presley’s diet from industrialized food to one rich in seeds, grains, and fruits. And unlike the other seven birds of the house, he was allowed to walk across the room (good exercise for him after living for so long in a small cage). On occasion, he did the tour to the tune of Elvis’s “Blue Suede Shoes.” He “loved the song,” said Santi, who also recorded the bird’s own singing and reproduced it in a loop so that he grew accustomed to the sound of his species.
The next step was to restore his muscles. Santi left food in different parts of his cage, encouraging Presley to jump from one perch to another. Twice a day she also exercised his wings, spreading them open and moving them up and down. In time, Presley began to help, receiving pine nuts—his favorite food—in return. After three months of training and recovery, a veterinarian at the Denver Zoo determined that Presley was strong enough to make the 20-hour journey to Brazil.
Spix's siblings Paul and Paula were two months old when they were photographed at ACTP in September, 2011. Photo: Patrick Pleul/dpa/Corbis
In December, Santi and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agent George Morrison flew from Denver to Miami, where they met Brazilian wildlife protection official Iolita Bampi, a former department head at IBAMA. Presley traveled at Santi’s feet in an animal carrier provisioned with pine nuts and stuffed frogs, and Santi periodically put her fingers inside the crate so he could feel her company. Before handing Presley off to Bampi, she took him in her hands and said farewell. “It was very sad—I cried,” she said. “But it was also a good cry, because I knew he would meet other birds.”
Bampi and Presley transferred to another plane and hours later, after more than two decades of involuntary exile, Presley had returned to his country. “We flew straight to São Paulo, and once we got there, we drove to the zoo that had experience in dealing with the species,” said Bampi. “Our expectation was that once paired with a female, Presley could mate.”
After living the domesticated life for so long, Presley weighed less than a pound and showed an obvious fondness for his human handlers. They gave him a radio for company and dialed it to a news station so he’d have the constant sound of human voices. “I also put a chair in the room to spend time with him,” said biologist Fernanda Vaz, head of the zoo’s aviary. “And, of course, he had his toys from the United States.”
Presley was placed in a cage adjacent to that of a macaw couple, but he remained a bachelor for two years. Then the owner of an aviary in Recife was forced by the government to hand over four Spix’s Macaws he had obtained illegally. One of the macaws, named Flor, had been the first female born in captivity in Brazil.
In September 2004 Presley and Flor exchanged their first look. In the beginning, they stayed in separate cages so they could get used to each other. Six months later they were united. “Any approach with macaws takes time,” said Vaz. Their first physical contact was anticlimactic, in part because Flor was distracted, constantly looking for her sister, who was squawking in a nearby cage. Things stayed that way for a year until the Permanent Committee for the Recovery of the Spix’s Macaw decided that it was too risky for all seven of the zoo’s birds to live in one place. If a disease broke out, they could all die at once.
When Presley and Flor were transferred to an aviary overlooking the forest at the Lymington Foundation, a private breeding facility two hours from São Paulo, something clicked. “The two started to actually act as a couple,” said Vaz. “They were always in the nest.” Between May and August 2006, Flor laid 13 eggs. Unfortunately, all of them were infertile. The committee decided that Flor would be transferred to the Loro Parque Foundation in Spain (where she would again fail to reproduce). Presley, by then in his third decade, would be retired. He would live in a cage with a Golden Conure named Killer.
Despite their differences (one was blue, the other yellow), Presley and Killer got along fine until 2013, when Killer died. Presley took it hard, falling into another deep depression. “We could not leave him alone,” said Linda Wittkoff. She and her husband, both Americans living in Brazil, were the main supporters of the Lymington Foundation. So, after just three days, Presley, like a sultan, received yet another bride. The chosen female, a Vinaceous Amazon, was named Priscilla—in honor of Elvis’s wife. Presley seemed to take to her right away, cleaning her feathers and sleeping close to her under the heat lamp. But on June 20, 2014, biologist Patricia Serafini called the vet to tell him that Presley, possibly in his 40s, wasn’t looking so good. He had barely eaten for a week, and now he was breathing hard. The next morning Presley was taken to the hospital, where veterinarian Ramiro Dias and his team put him on oxygen and treated him with medicines for his heart, lungs, and kidneys, along with antibiotics to prevent infection. They wanted to do a closer examination, but Presley appeared too weak to withstand the anesthesia. Four days later he was dead.
The Wittkoffs quickly published a statement: “As the sun rose this morning on Lymington, the world lost without exaggeration the best-known name in the bird world.” They lamented how they would miss Presley’s “cheery vocalizations as we often pass by his aviary,” and concluded: “We truly believe he had a very good life for his nearly eight last years.”
Receiving the news by email in Colorado, Mickey Santi opened her diary and wrote: “I miss you Presley and feel so honored that you shared part of your amazing life with me. I know you are at peace.”
Within a half-hour of Presley’s death, Dias was already in his car, driving the 150 miles from Botucatu to São Paulo. The bird’s body was on the passenger seat, inside a refrigerated Styrofoam box. “I felt the loss,” he said. “But I had to think immediately about the species.”
In São Paulo, Dias was met by University of São Paulo veterinarians Ricardo Pereira and Jose Luiz Catão Dias. They took Presley from his Styrofoam sarcophagus and put him on the operating table to begin the delicate task of removing his testicles. “Patricia Serafini had asked about the possibility of using his cells in the future,” Pereira said. “I said I could freeze them.”
Pereira, a leading figure in the field of captive breeding, had pioneered the neat trick of having a healthy animal ejaculate the semen of another animal—alive, dead, or even of a different species. So far, he’d had relative success with roosters, getting them to ejaculate semen from quails. “In Presley’s case, we can transplant his cells to another macaw or to a Blue-winged Macaw,” Pereira said enthusiastically.
The procedure is a two-step process. First the cells are extracted from one bird’s testicles. Then the tissue is filtered to collect a stem cell called the spermatogonia, which undergoes a transformation to become sperm. Bird No. 1’s spermatogonia is injected into bird No. 2’s testicles, where the transformation becomes complete. But here’s where it gets tricky: Only 0.05 percent of the extracted cells are spermatogonia; what’s more, to avoid confusion, it’s necessary to sterilize the similar cells in the recipient—a technique that hasn’t yet been perfected.
The work on Presley is currently in its initial stage. “We removed the testicles and processed his cells, which are in liquid nitrogen,” said Pereira. He believes that the bird, though dead from old age, still has a chance to generate heirs. “Males have this advantage over females. They may have children in later life.”
A month after Presley’s death Linda Wittkoff said she was still sad, though not surprised that it had happened. “Birds disguise—they do not expose themselves. For him to have shown such a serious symptom such as to stop eating, it was because the end was near.”
She was pondering the future of the species. Most of the hundred or so Spix’s Macaws still alive today are outside Brazil—60 of them belong to the Al Wabra Wildlife Preservation in Qatar. There is an international plan to repatriate some of those animals and reintroduce them to the wild—a risky undertaking because, with their numbers so low, losing many of the released birds could dash the long-term goal of restoring a healthy wild population. The expectation is that once the captive population grows to at least 150, some birds can be moved to Brazil.
There is also an ethical issue to consider. The current owners of macaws, including the preservation center in Qatar, played a part in the bird’s decline because they illegally purchased wild birds. If captive-bred macaws are released, what’s to prevent them from being poached? Wittkoff said she thinks there needs to be a legal review of the punishment for animal trafficking. “There is no use in releasing them if there aren’t stronger laws.”
Even some of the birds’ devotees say the Spix’s Macaw will never fly wild again. The macaw is an “evolutionary relic,” said ornithologist Carlos Yamashita. “It was made for other times. Every organism has a peak and a decline, which can last several thousand years. This species of macaw is senile, and at the end of its line.”
Pedro Develey, a partner with BirdLife International in Brazil, agreed with Yamashita—to a point. “We accelerated a lot of what would be a natural extinction,” he said. In the hope that it’s still possible to reverse the damage, he has made a proposal to the Ministry of the Environment for the preservation of 170 square miles in Curaçá so that the macaws may one day be released there. His proposal is currently under review.
“We cannot wait. There is still some habitat,” Develey said. “People who have these macaws need to have the courage to give them up, even if it is risky. If 10 are born per year, we should release 10 per year. We can lose some animals, but we have to try. The biggest risk is to wait indefinitely. The ideal situation is now.”
Roberto Kaz is a journalist from Brazil. Presley’s story here, adapted from an article that ran previously in Piauà magazine, will be part of a book Kaz plans to publish next year.
Philadelphia Inquirer, Friday, October 30, 2015, OPINION, Page A16:
Moving beyond cancer, a new stage of waiting
By Carol Fragale Brill
Recently, I entered a writing contest with a deadline five months away. After tapping send, it hit me. For the first time since hearing four terrifying words — it is uterine cancer — Imade a plan for the future without first asking myself, Will I be healthy then? Will I be alive?
My rational self knows there have been countless advances in cancer treatment in the 50 years since my dad died of brain cancer when I was 12. Cancer is not the six-months-to-live death sentence it was back then, and many cancers are completely curable.
And yet.
Hearing the doctor’s verdict, my rational self went AWOL. My first anguished thought was, “Is this how I am going to die?”
I longed to turn back the clock and not know. Crazy-making thoughts engulfed me.
Should I donate my clothes, sort through pictures, put the house up for sale and downsize so my husband, Jim, wouldn’t be forced to weed through a lifetime of stuff all alone?
Admiring a sundress in a shop window, Iwondered, will I live long enough to wear it?
I started using the “good” place mats instead of the everyday ones, chiding myself, “What am I saving them for?”
My emotions whirled minute to minute or hour to hour — denial, loneliness, anger, acceptance, hope.
And, always, terror lurked just below the surface.
I finally shared my mania with Jim. He reminded me that we weren’t there yet. I was getting ahead of myself, drowning in an ocean of murky cancer gloom.
Entering that writing contest without fearing the future may not seem like much. To me, it felt absolutely huge.
My uterine cancer started with minor “spotting” that would have been easy to ignore. Confident it was nothing, I made a gynecologist appointment. One test led to another, and then came the waiting for results — the frightening, interminable waiting. Through scans, biopsies, surgery, tissue and lymph node samples, staging, I clung to assurances from cancer survivors that waiting is the hardest part — that it gets easier once you know the treatment plan.
I assumed that hearing I had the “Big C” meant I had heard the worst.
After surgery, the words aggressive cancer and spread outside your uterus and treated as stage 4 nearly did me in.
Then they dropped the second dreaded C.
Chemo.
The treatment plan required four months of chemo and six weeks of radiation.
Amazingly, my cancer-surviving friends were right. Knowing the plan actually was better than the fretful days and sleepless nights of imagining the worst. A fragile acceptance started to nudge my gloom.
Chemo was not the nightmare I expected. I didn’t love the steroid-induced sleepless nights or hours tethered to an IV dripping poison into the port imbedded in my chest. And chemo fogged my brain, making thinking hard and concentrating impossible. I wept in the shower when tufts of my hair circled the drain.
On the upside, there was no dreaded nausea and many more good days than bad. I shared quality time with Jim, family, and friends, took walks, read, chilled on the beach, and binge-watched movies — apastime I hadn’t indulged in for years.
I expected to be ecstatic when chemo and radiation ended. Instead, I felt vulnerable and afraid.
Treatment meant aggressively fighting back. Posttreatment, my body was left to face down cancer on its own.
When I shared my recurring fears, my radiation oncologist reassured me that after months of being cut, poisoned, and burned, I earned the right to allow my body, mind, and spirit all the time they needed to heal.
Cancer leaves behind unwelcome mementos. There’s the lingering germ phobia; the chest port that looks like an on/off button; the more-irritable-than-before irritable colon; numbness that comes and goes in my toes. Given that I’m childless, there’s the infuriating irony that my unproductive uterus is the body part that betrayed me.
Moving beyond cancer is a new stage of waiting. I wish my doctors could guarantee that I’m cured. The best they can do is reaffirm that they see no current evidence of cancer.
I asked several cancer survivors, “When will cancer be such a tiny speck in my rearview mirror that I won’t dread follow-up exams or cancer’s return?”
Their unanimous response: Never. It’s not the answer I crave, but it reminds me that post-cancer anxiety is normal.
I have a new respect for the legions trekking toward their fifth cancer-free anniversary. It never occurred to me before that, step by brave step, they march toward that milestone with the fear of cancer’s return nipping at their heels.
Cancer has meant surreal numbness and stark realities — hope and transitions.
If I let it, cancer and fear can hijack every inch of space in my brain.
One day at a time, I’m determined not to let it.
Carol Fragale Brill is the author of
“Cape Maybe.” She blogs at knowhopeknowgrowth.blogspot.com
