The Test

It was that time again.  I was six months overdue for what Kaiser has deemed an appropriate interval between mammograms.  So 2-1/2 years after my previous one, now armored only by a bronze health insurance plan and feeling very ambivalent and reluctant to undergo the damn thing at all, I caved.

The day after the mammogram, I got a call.  An overly cheerful male voice announced that radiology would like to take a few more pictures, that they had noticed something.

I sighed.  Great, I thought.

“Can you come in again in the next few days?” he asked.

As chance would have it, I was working at home that day, and I happen to live three blocks from Kaiser.  Lucky me.  “I’ll come within the hour,” I said.

On my walk over, I was feeling really pissed off.  

Within several minutes of my arrival, a radiology tech ushered me in and took several more pictures of my right breast, which, laughably, there isn’t much of to begin with.

“Okay, great.  Now wait here.  I’ll be back in ten minutes.”  I got dressed.

Remarkably, in less than ten minutes, the tech returned and led me down a hall to an office where a young woman was sitting in a chair in front of a computer.

“Hi, my name is Casey.  I’m a nurse practitioner.  Have a seat.”

The next 15 minutes were a surreal blur.  On the screen of her computer, she pointed out to me four pin prick-sized calcifications in my right breast pretty far back from the front.  Tiny, tiny. The radiologist, via Kaiser protocol, had deemed this biopsy-worthy.  When I asked what that entailed, what I keenly gleaned from the words that oozed from the nurse practitioner’s mouth was that it would involve cutting.  She went so far as to suggest that I could kill two birds with one stone by removing the area of calcification WHILE they performed the biopsy procedure, since they were already infiltrating the tissue, and be done with it.

I was stupefied.

I asked what other women had done in my situation.  By this point, I think she knew that I would take no bullshit from her and that she better be straight with me.

“Well, calcifications are very common, and 75 percent of the time, they’re nothing to worry about. But 25 percent turn out to be pre-cancerous.”

PRE-cancerous?  What the hell does that mean?  25 percent?

“Some women do opt to return in six months for more films to see if anything has changed before taking further action.”

“Ah,” I said.  “I like that door.  I’ll pick that one.”

“Okay.  Well, due to liability issues, I have to send you a letter that you have to acknowledge receipt of via signature that documents our conversation and that you have opted to wait.”

“No problem.” I replied.

“Kaiser’s official recommendation is to proceed with the biopsy.  But I understand your decision.”

Listen,” I said.  “You have to do your job, and I have to do mine.  This is my body.  Thank you for your time.”

I was out the door, actually feeling better than when I had entered.

Over the next few days as I tossed and turned over what had transpired, I slowly settled into a comfortable position.  A calm clarity.  A resolute peace.  My anger had burned through a filmy residue of fear.  Now I knew how the game was played.  Six months hence, I thought, I may or may not return for more films.

But my biggest fear?  I’ll let the bastards scare me again.

Honoring My Winter

I’m sure I’m not the only one for whom winter can be rather tough.  I used to think it was the cold, gray, wet weather that put me in a funk.  But in generally fair-weathered and recently drought-stricken California, where one can conceivably swim in an outdoor pool well into November with minimal discomfort, I don’t have that excuse.  Perhaps it’s the light deprivation or Seasonal Affective Disorder (the Cal-lite version) that takes hold of me.

Yet as autumn has fallen upon me this year, I’ve been reflecting on how I can prepare and perhaps “do winter better.”  And I have made what feels like a very satisfying resolution.

In the past, I’ve regarded winter as just another season, wherein my routine is little changed.  I’ve endeavored to work, move, and live with as much fervor as I do the other sunnier seasons.  And it is in precisely this effort, I’ve discovered, that I’ve made my mistake.

All four seasons uniquely require and inspire our alignment.  And winter, for me, poses the greatest challenge in this regard.  Like many, I thrive on sun, water, and movement (not water that is snow and not movement on skis down a hill, mind you).  So, for me, winter is a journey through a strange, dark, foreign land that I make with resistance, where I keenly savor the post-Winter-Solstice lengthening of days.

In my contemplation about this coming winter, I’ve figured out that it is best to surrender to what winter is calling me to do (and not do).  Winter’s elements echo my winter within; that tick on the dial of my cycle that is winter and all that engenders.  Heck, if the bears are retreating to their caves, perhaps I should take a page from their book.

So as I am so moved, I will turn inward.  I will nurture myself, surrendering to the stillness.

1.      I’ll listen to music, light a candle, and drink ginger peach tea.

2.      I’ll walk the lake instead of running at the beach.

3.      I’ll wear flannel pajamas and watch marathons of Mad Men and Damages on  Netflix (and maybe even Gilmore Girls).

4.      I’ll take long hot bubble baths instead of quick showers.

5.      I’ll roast root vegetables instead of steaming broccoli.

6.      I’ll keep the gift-giving simple and meaningful.

7.      I’ll pull out and actually wear my winter scarf collection.

8.      I’ll take a leisurely tour of the holiday lights around my neighborhood.

9.      I’ll celebrate my awkwardly dated winter birthday (January 4) with a trip to the spa for a soak and a shiatsu massage.

10.   I might even ice skate. 

May you honor your winter as well.

Vision Quest

“But, Sue, here’s the thing.  You made a commitment.”

 

Ouch.  Did I?  Really?

Granted, I signed a contract with a spiritual teacher to fulfill certain requirements of a 13-moon program.  At the start, we reviewed each bullet point together.  I understood each one, and I signed on the dotted line.  One of the points was that if I chose to leave the program prematurely, that I would pay for the entire program in full.  No problem.

Well, five months into an intense immersion of twice-monthly sweat lodges, New Moon and Full Moon ceremonies, monthly Sacred Hoops gatherings, two Medicine Wheel ceremonies, a Moon Dance that spanned five days including preparation, supporting a Vision Quest that spanned seven days including preparation (all of which required at least a 90-minute round-trip drive and a $5 bridge toll), as well as the making and fringing of a Native American shawl and the reading of three books, I burned out.  I decided to call it quits.  It was all great medicine, intense medicine, but in the process, I was feeling cut off from other aspects of my life.  I had stopped writing, stopped painting, had foregone a fair amount of work that this self-employed person would have otherwise had time for, and I was missing outings with friends.

Don’t get me wrong.  My teacher was more than fulfilling his end of the agreement.  Perhaps a little too much so for my Western, colonized blood.  I was accustomed to “pick and choose” spirituality, not such deep indigenous immersion.  At 52, I had attained a lovely satisfaction with who I was and with who I was becoming.  For the previous eight years, I had done what I considered an extensive amount of healing and clearing out through various other spiritual and energetic modalities.  I had gained awareness of my patterning, my shadow, and had learned effective tools and garnered excellent resources to further my quest.

Yet during this five-month immersion, something was different.  My teacher was very emphatic regarding adherence to protocol.  His protocol.  Now, I understand the significance and necessity of protocol.  It is a strict and (ideally) uniform way of performing ceremony that takes into account energy flow and energy balance.  Protocol determines the difference between order and chaos.  And by God, there was a lot of it.  I had bristled at the whole notion of protocol at the very beginning of my program and had voiced misgivings about it early on.  Being told how to do something and subsequently corrected if I forgot was tough for this Catholic-raised 52-year-old who had a very hard time distinguishing between protocol and dogma.  After all, protocols differ from family to family in Native American circles, so clearly they are not absolute.  I began to feel increasingly frustrated and confined; very much how I felt sitting, standing, and kneeling in the pews of the church throughout my childhood.  I came to realize I had a very intractable streak of rebellion against being told where to stand, where to sit, how to sit, not to step over tipi poles, and, most significantly, how to pray.

Prayer is sacred.  Prayer is personal.  In this tradition, people pray out loud.  I respect that.  And to a degree, I have become comfortable with praying out loud, and I see the value of it.  But only to a degree.  There are some things I am simply too uncomfortable sharing out loud.  And I was actually told a couple of times that my prayer was not “deep enough.”

So when I finally left a voice mail message for my teacher telling him, “Thank you for everything, this path is no longer for me, and the final check is in the mail,” instead of responding with, “Sorry to see you go,” or even, “May I ask why” and respecting my answer, I was met with, among other things:

“But, Sue, here’s the thing.  You made a commitment.”

Which, for me, brought up a lot of “stuff.”  I guess my teacher viewed my signing the agreement to take on the 13-moon program as “absolutely no way will you drop out, no matter what.”

Well, isn’t it that kind of thinking that has caused so much misery, unhappiness, and oppression in the world?  People doing things they perhaps do not even want to do and without knowing why they’re doing them for the sake of this idea of “commitment”?  Healthy commitment, from where I sit, must be deemed WORTHWHILE by the committing parties.  Not necessarily without difficulty or adversity, mind you, but made and adhered to in the spirit of furthering a higher end.

As far as I was concerned, after five months and girded with a lot more information and experience than I had had at the beginning, the “worthwhile higher purpose” was eclipsed by burdensome detail and perfunctory actions, not to mention some very earthly drama that had appeared nowhere in my contract.

I listened to my teacher for a good 30 minutes as he made his case for why I should not depart the program, which, by the end of his soliloquy, only fueled my desire to depart.

So here I am, days after this exchange, happily writing this blog post at a very cool café in Oakland after having downed two lattes, once again the writer, the artist, the Western gal I truly am, for better or for worse.