wingwmn

spreading my wings and sharing random lessons learned along the way

A Bittersweet Ending

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I’ve got good news and not-so-good news.

First, the good news:  Today, I am officially done with chemo.  All 26 sessions over 15 months, all fina-frickin’lly done.

The not-so-good news is: I haven’t been in the most celebratory of moods lately.  In fact, I’ve been kinda-a-little-very frightened.

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Cancer, in itself, is a beast.  

But the fear that is fused in with the experience of cancer is a whole other animal.  It begins even before an actual diagnosis in the form of “scanxiety” (scan anxiety); and it can persist, according to many, years after the end of treatment.  The fear morphs, it is sometimes quieted, but it is pervasive.  In her book, The Cancer Journals, writer Audre Lorde speaks of it many times:  “I do not forget cancer for very long, ever. That keeps me armed and on my toes, but also with a slight background noise of fear,” or “Sometimes fear stalks me like another malignancy. . . a cold becomes sinister; a cough, lung cancer; a bruise, leukemia.” 

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During the countdown to the start of treatment, I was overwhelmed by a particular type of fear.  It’s the kind you have as your roller coaster car inches its way up an incline — with you, waiting white-knuckled and heart-in-throat, for the big drop.  You know the shape of the drop and where it ends; you can anticipate much of it.

Taking guidance from the Stoics, I managed this fear by taking apart what I knew was coming.  I took each concern — losing my hair, surgery pains, chemo side effects — approached it to the extent I could (like cutting my hair, practicing cooking with one arm), made plans accordingly, and reminded myself that it all shall pass in about a year.  Then, these fears no longer had power over me.  The woman that emerged from that practice astonished even me!  She was brave and ready for the adventure. 

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In these past few weeks as I neared the end of treatment, the fear that arose felt different.  The fear of recurrence is a nebulous kind; its form is ungraspable and its end-date is uncertain.  As such, I can’t prepare for it in any kind of concrete way.  Stepping out of routine infusions that were killing off the cancer and out of the watchful eye of my oncologist, I feel like I am being handed my graduation gown and thrown into the middle of the ocean to figure it all out — how to stay afloat, or even where to swim to.

And so I’ve had to manage this fear very differently.  

First, I do what i can to stay physically healthy — I eat well, I work out, I try to avoid alcohol and stress.  

But I know that it has to go deeper than that.  Dr. Joe Dispenza in “Becoming Supernatural” talks about how our thoughts and beliefs influence our physical reality.  It all starts with the mind, he posits.  So, I have started becoming very conscious of what I feed my mind and what I allow to flow through it.  I scrub my mind clean and scroll past fear-mongering posts about how “a recent study proves that chemotherapy causes so-and-so” or how “so-and-so can increase the risk of recurrent”.  I do not pay attention to cancer statistics or statistics on family history.  Instead, I flood my brain with inspiring stories that show me what IS possible.  

Then, during my meditations, I let this knowledge drop into my heart, course through my body, and seep into my bones.  I FEEL healthy; I AM healthy.  

Then, I drop to my knees and hand over the rest.  

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This has become a daily discipline.  It has had to be to touch solace.  There are days when the fear is still intense, when I struggle to keep my head above water.  But there are more and more days when that brave woman shows up, non-alcoholic champagne in hand, itching to start Life Post-Cancer.  

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This is the tenderness of an illness. And this is the grace of Life itself.

It will systematically try to undo us — stretch us in one direction, pull is in another. It will break us, mend us, then crack us wide open again.  And as we bend and stretch with it, may we one day realize that something new has been created — from a shallow vessel that easily spills over by the slightest fear, we have become the ocean.

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Today, I am closing the book on cancer.  Thank you, friends and family, for your prayers, messages, cards, flowers, gifts.  You are my biggest blessings.  Cheers!  As they say here, SALUD!

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Photocredit: Robert Stoke on pexels.com

Birthday Moments

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Closing the decade chasing sunsets in Morocco.
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I almost forgot that exactly 365 sunsets ago, on my birthday, I had my very first chemo session. I was facing about a year’s worth of treatment. A well-meaning friend advised: Just consider the year lost.

Quick-witted that I am, a year and 22 chemo sessions later, I finally have a reply: 6.4 billion.
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There are 6.4 billion moments in a day according to Zen Master Dogen. (A snap of a finger has 65 moments.)

Rather than viewing Time as hulking chunks — a whole year of loss, a solid block of pain to power through — I prefer to think of Time as Dogen does: fine particles of moments. Billions interweaving, overlapping, entangling, almost merging with each other.

Because if not, how else could this year have been?

How could the discomfort of a needle co-exist with the comfort of a nurse’s soothing caress;

How could the tedium of chemo exist right next to the delight of settling in a chemo chair with a good book or podcast;

How could physical exhaustion occur right by the joy of sunlight streaming across the bed;

How could cancer in a foreign country be associated with feeling embraced and carried by friends and family sending messages and snail mail and gifts and new friends to meet;

How could a supposedly lost year be filled with laughter and lightness?
The good can co-exist with the bad because each moment offers space for something new, breathing room for an entire universe of potential.
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In this 65-moment snap of a finger, I am sad to see the (rapid) fading of youth, happy to be aging, nostalgic for the decade that was, excited about the decade that will be, and just profoundly grateful. All of it possible and all of it existing so potently side by side on this bittersweet birthday.
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50 years. 18,250 sunsets. 116.8 trillion moments. The terrible and the beautiful, I’m owning all of them. None of them worthless. Not one of them lost. All of them essential to the becoming of little (kinda very) ol’ me.
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Thank you so so sooo much for your birthday wishes. Between spotty connection and too many hours in carpet shops, i am slow on the catch up and replies. I also learned of a secret anitapifty account set up by the bestest sisters Angela Payumo-Stricker Aileen Payumo Alexandra Asuncion. I will read them, wallow in them, and shed many many tears. Then we catch up, ok?

Death, Life and Cash

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Hi dear friends!  

I wrote a piece for my friend, Pallavi’s, newsletter.  This one was kind of a biatch to pound out.  Talking about money is haaard. But I wanted to put into words my evolving relationship with it in light of an illness.  And all it did for a very looong time was make me want to curl up in bed and browse through IG.  So thank you, Pallavi, for whipping my arse.  

Will you go and have a read?  I’d love to know what you think about the book I talk about and if you think I’m crazy.

While you’re there, have a browse through Pallavi’s account.  It’s mind-candy for anyone with wanderlust.

p.s. Pallavi and I met through Joanna.  When Joanna told Pallavi of my diagnosis, she called me, a total stranger, to help me cope.  Not only was she instrumental in helping me navigate this country’s health care system, but when she told me she was a writer, I knew there was a divine plan in this whole cancer story. 

https://pallaviaiyar.substack.com/p/death-life-and-cash?r=20i3h&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Photo by Hasan Albari: https://www.pexels.com/photo/round-gold-colored-1-coin-1350463/

Carousel Perspectives

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Walking by Madrid’s Royal Palace, my family and I stumbled upon a Christmas carousel. Naturally, my nieces wanted to ride so we made our way over.
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While waiting in line, we watched the kids revolve around the carousel in and out of sight. We noticed one of the bigger girls, about 6-years old, unquestionably dejected. She was riding the only horse that didn’t dance. While all the other kids bobbed up and down around her, she was on a motionless horse that didn’t do anything. She sat slumped, sides of her mouth sharply turned downwards, her face scrunched up holding back tears.
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When our turn arrived, we instructed the nieces, “Choose a horse with a pole. Not that small one; it doesn’t move.”

And “Hold on to the pole with both hands. BOTH hands.”
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The music started, and the next revolution began. Kids appeared and disappeared, tentatively releasing a hand from the poles to wave at their parents.

Then we heard “Mama! Mama! Miraaaa!” A little girl of barely 4-years old spun past us. She was on the same motionless horse, her body leaned waaay back against it, one arm dancing in the air rodeo-style. She spun out of vision.

Then she came back, this time with one leg standing on a wooden stirrup, the other leg floating behind her. “Mira Mamaaa!” She disappeared again.

She returned, “Mamaaa!”, in jockey position, bouncing on her horse, slapping its wooden culo.
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She had us all in stitches and in awe. While one kid saw a dud of a horse, this rockstar kid saw a safe platform for her equestrian dreams.
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May we all see the rodeo in any and every horse we’re on. Merry Christmas!

Hope-less

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I am not a fan of Hope.

All this puffery of Hope — Hope is a thing with feathers, Hope against hope, Audacity of hope — I’m not buying it. Hope isn’t rainbows and butterflies. In fact, it can be vicious. It has, many times, torn me apart.

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Hope broke me very early on in this cancer journey. People told me “Let’s hope you won’t need chemo. A lot of diagnoses don’t need chemo.” I hoped and prayed for that — a diagnosis that didn’t need chemo. I didn’t mind surgery or radiation; I just didn’t want all the side effects of chemo.

Early test results were promising. My cancer, it seemed, was acting like the relatively easier Luminal A type — and at Stage 1, it was the type that wouldn’t require chemo! I was giddy with possibility! Several tests later, I was told that my type was not Luminal A. Instead, it was the more aggressive Triple-positive which would, very unfortunately, need chemo.

My world collapsed.

Hope kicked me a second time. Two months ago, after my 12th and final chemo session, my MRI scans showed that my tumors had “practically disappeared”. I shrieked in excitement! I hadn’t expected that good of a response! So, after avoiding Hope since the last burn, I dared hope again. I hoped and prayed that my upcoming surgery would confirm that the tumors had, in fact, disappeared.

As it turned out, reports from the pathology lab saw the presence of a 2mm bit of tumor remaining in the tissue that was surgically removed. 2mm! The littlest, teeniest, tiniest thing. Sure, it had “practically” disappeared. But it did not “completely” disappear. And with cancer, we need it to “completely” disappear. That little, teeny, tiny thing changed the game for me. Instead of smooth-sailing towards the finish line of my treatments, I have been thrown back on the chemo chair for a brand new cycle of chemo. Which will last a very long time.

Hope stings. When I dare reach out to it, it slaps my hand.

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Pema Chodron, a Zen Buddhist, claims we have an addiction to Hope. “As long as we’re addicted to hope, we feel we can tone our experience down or liven it up or change it somehow . . . Hope robs us of the present moment.” When I am hopeful, I am at the same time unsatisfied with my reality. I don’t want this; I want that. It is an implicit awareness that what is happening to me is not good, and that there is an alternative in the future that is better than where I am now.

When I am hopeful, I am also insecure. Because hoping is a recognition that I have no control of the future. (If I had control, I wouldn’t need Hope. I simply would do what was needed to reach my objective.) And yet, despite knowing that the future is beyond control, Hope tells the future what she wants it to be. It is micro-management with absolutely no teeth. And the result is insecurity, longing and a grasping.

Hopefulness as it is, is already an emotionally unsteady place to be in. To top it off, when Hope ultimately spurns, entire worlds collapse.

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“Abandon hope”, Chodron says. Being hope-less, she says, is the “beginning of the beginning”.

I like that. There seems to be so much wisdom to being hope-less, wish-less, want-less. It is a state of being that is stable and peaceful; no wishing for a specifically-drafted future, no clinging, no expecting. Being hope-less is submitting to perfect humility, knowing your smallness and placing full trust in a greater intelligence. It is faith that everything right now is right, however that may look like, even if it looks like a chemo day unit.

Rather than Hoping, I think I prefer this Knowing.

So, I snuggle in and get cozy in this chemo chair, in this moment. I don’t think of tomorrow. My prayer is wordless, want-less. I know I have everything I need. And I know that I will have everything I need in each moment that arrives. For that, I am peaceful, I am open, I am fortified. It is the beginning of the beginning.

In Defense of the Trite

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“It is important that you feel beautiful.”  I heard these words over and over again before I started chemo.  From my oncologist, from my cancer-survivor friends, from the guy measuring my head for my hair prosthesis.

“Oh noooo, no, nooo,” I would think to myself.  “Don’t tell me what to feel.  I’m here for the enlightenment.” 

I was convinced that beauty and other frivolities had no place in a cancer diagnosis.  As the body healed, I wanted my petty ego to heal, as well.  

I was eager to learn one of the hardest lessons that simple aging hadn’t been able to teach me: to gracefully accept the subtle but incessant changes occurring to my body — the graying hair, the sagging jowls, the flabby-ing arms.  Instead of softening to them, my vanity raged against aging.  And as it goes, a lesson will keep repeating itself until it is learned. So here it was — cancer offering me the lesson anew.  My body will age in warp speed, and I was determined to finally learn to inhabit every evolution of this body.
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That was the plan.

Nine weeks into chemo, I stare at my reflection in the mirror – the weird wig, the puffy steroidal face, skin dotted with chemo acne — and I think, “Screw enlightenment. I just want to be cute.”  I don’t need perfection. I just want to like what I see in the mirror!  
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Call it trivial, but the desire to feel beautiful during cancer is to harness the fight within.  I saw it with my grandmother.  During her cancer treatments, even in the worst of days, she made a commitment to elegance. That beauty translated into inner joy; which translated into an excitement for life; which translated into 29 magnificent years after her mastectomy, outliving her 3 oncologists, and dancing her way to heaven at 92 years old.

My mother is the exact same way.  She takes delight in dolling up.  After arduous sessions, she dons her glamour, steps into a party and becomes its life.  15 years after her first diagnosis, she is still unstoppable.  

For them, cancer is the battleground, and lipstick is the war paint.

For someone like me with no dependents, it can be easier to throw in the towel when treatments get difficult.  Feeling beautiful, even if trite, offers a tiny lifeline.  And that little lifeline can be a step up to greater things — regaining the self-esteem upon which to engage with all the marvels of the world again.  That would be worth the fight.
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I am learning that there can be no enlightenment without our bodies.  The body is the theater for spiritual growth. It is precisely because of our bodies that we experience and are forced to navigate life’s contradictions: our hunger to be virtuous vs our carnal desires; our yearning for spiritual maturity vs our ego’s hankering to be pretty. 

Yes, the end goal is still enlightenment.  But I will drop by the dermatologist on the way there.  Because while I inhabit this body, I am and will continue to be, a raging work in progress.

For Mom

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Dear Mom,

You never taught me to cry. You MADE me cry at times, but that’s beside the point. The point is that from you, I never learned HOW to cry — how to feel my emotions, luxuriate in them, and weep. I don’t ever remember crying on your shoulder about my pains – external or internal, or stuffing your ear about my problems – real or imagined.

When I was sick and rolling in self-pity, you plied me with Tylenol and told me to get better. When I wasn’t doing well at school, you told me to work harder (or else). When I was smarting over a break up, you demanded that I put on make-up and go forth and conquer.

Simple. No drama required.

I grew up believing that nothing was worth my tears. Because I saw that nothing was worth yours.

When life handed you lemons, you tossed them aside and drank your wine. Then you overdosed on your medicines: laughter, family and girlfriends, eating, and traveling. These are and have always been your elixirs.
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Eventually, life itself taught me to cry.

But I am grateful for the gift you gave me: to know that at every lemon moment, I have a choice — to wilt or to anchor myself in the levity of the experience.

Because as you have taught us time and again, everything, no matter how seemingly serious, can always be a laughing matter.

How lucky I am to have you as my role model, my guide and my source of strength. Love you so much, Mom. Happy birthday.

Love,
Me

Seashells

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It’s no coincidence that my first chemo session landed on my birthday.

I always try to spend my birthdays alone, on a new adventure, with lots of quiet time for meandering thoughts.

Technically speaking, sitting in a chemo chair for the first time conforms exactly to my birthday criteria: alone, new, quiet. Apparently, God knows (and has a sense of humor!) I chuckle and embrace this gift.

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There were a few more new adventures in the few days leading up to my birthday.
I cried out of fear for the first time; not out of fear of cancer or death, but out of fear of this ominous monster called Chemo. (Fyi, as opposed to cries out of anger which are potent and energetically-targeted, cries out of fear are more searching, as if calling out to anyone who might be listening.)

For the first time, I felt a fierce love for my body. It is the vehicle through which I experience the world, and yet I did not appreciate it enough. (While I take care of it with food and exercise, I also demand a lot from it – I don’t sleep, I stress too much.) I felt such sadness and protective love for this body knowing that it would soon be put through even more.

And for the first time, I understood the saying “life is short”. It’s like the Filipino sungka game — if you asked me how many seashells each player has, I’d say “many”. (They actually have only 49; 7 seashells in each of the 7 buckets). Of course intellectually, I always knew that we have a finite number of years. But if you asked me how many years, I’d say “many” — enough to build a life, build a home, retire, travel. Middle age and the pandemic changed that answer to “less”. But the world of illness offered concrete numbers. When your oncologist mentions “5-year survival rates”, and co-cancer-warriors pray for “another 10 years”, you start thinking of your own number. What is enough? What is ideal? But whichever number I landed on — a sungka bucket? two buckets? maybe double that? — I realized that number is really not “many”.

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What do I do with my remaining buckets?

While speaking to an audience, Eckhart Tolle asked: do you need “25 years of eating, 25 years of taking your dog for a walk, going on vacation, seeing more sunsets, adding more life experiences? Is that the real purpose of your life?”
That struck me. I shouldn’t be spending my seashells on the same horizontal trajectory. I really should be planning to come out of this on a slightly higher plane.

Pema Chodron, a Buddhist monk, says we should use the moments, days, years of our lives to become wiser and kinder. The source of wisdom is in every moment.
That calmed me. I don’t have to be a monk or found a charity to reach that higher plane. I can reach wisdom from where I am.

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I heard a funeral director say that an essential element to a good funeral is Stories. A person is not facts. She is Stories.

I will take that, not as a prescription for dying, but as instructions for living. Don’t just fast forward to the good parts, the mere facts. (“She was a good student. He was a dedicated employee. She dressed well and kept a beautiful home. He cured thousands of people.”) Instead, roll in the whole mess of the story — the hows, the whys, the conflicts, the plot twists, the characters that come in and out. Linger over the funny bits, the triumphant bits, the sad bits, the downright scary bits. Participate fully in its unfolding. Seize every single second for it is the path to wisdom.

If things go as planned, I should be emerging from my treatments next year on my golden birthday. A “cancer survivor”, hopefully. But I won’t fast forward. There are full chapters still to live before that. For now, I will delight in the birthday flowers waiting for me at 4am as I prep for the day; I will search for calm while the doctors are taking too long finding a vein fat enough in which to insert my central catheter; I will bask in the music they play to calm me down; I will fascinate at my frost-biting toes submerged in ice; I will enjoy the chat with my Barbie-looking chemo roommate who is giving me tips on how to keep my eyebrows and lashes. I will remember that every single second is divinely written. There are no coincidences.

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Thank you soooo much for your birthday greetings, for your constant words of encouragement, for the love and light you emit, for the prayers and masses you offer, for the texts you send to simply ask how I am doing. I treasure all of these so much.

Photo credit: The Photomix Company

Attached

By ·

Some days ago, I woke up with the abrupt urge to cut my hair and prove to myself that I was no longer attached to it.

Lesson of that day: I was still very much attached to my hair.

Instead of zen, I was irritated. Irritated at the hairdresser who was just following instructions; irritated at my boyfriend who paused a second too long before saying “it looks good!”; irritated at every woman on the street who swished her hair at me.

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But as with baseball fields, haircuts abide by the same universal rule of the jungle: If you build it, they will come. 

😅

Lay that foundation, make that cut , and eventually the non-attachment will come.

I’m slowly getting there. I’m getting less and less emotional about my hair. If I wake up looking like a korean male pop star, fine. Like a tita of manila, fine. When i think about losing it all, I’m fine. … But ask me again in a few weeks.

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Side note: it helps to know that the oncological beauty industry has answers for everything! In the event that zen escapes me when my hair starts falling out and I emotionally implode, I was reassured that with a prosthesis, it IS absolutely possible never to have to see myself without hair.