Learning to ride, falling down, getting back on
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They draw me into an arch so that they can run an eighteen-inch horse-needle in between the plates of my spine for an hour or so to get a copious sample of the cerebrospinal fluid. So the doctors can tell my family. What they know already. That I am very sick. That I might die.
Cholestiatoma is a loving beast; as with other cancers, he comes like a string around the finger, a chain around the throat, to insure that we do not idly forget why we are here. Cholestiatoma (Chole when masculine, Choleste when feminine) lives in my skull between the meninges and the right orbit.
It would be so nice if we didn’t have societal inertia, history, intransigence to deal with, but that’s a dream. We’ve got a system that was primitive, evolved to an enormously sophisticated set-up and is now riding on the myths and images and reputations of the past medical tradition. We need to recognize it, understand why it is what it is, and then step by evolutionary step take it apart and put it where it needs to be.
I’m on my way to the biggest — and for me the most enigmatic — of cities, New York, to attend Cancer Dialogue ’80, an historic gathering of physicians, scientists, and researchers brought together by the Omega Institute to shed light on the most frightening and puzzling disease of our time.
The suggestion coming down from the best minds in the scientific community today is that the world is crystallized thought. What you think creates your world. There’s an old Buddhist image of two mirrors facing each other — each one reflecting and creating the other. That’s the way it is with your consciousness and your physical reality.
The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease. Voltaire
The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
Voltaire
I can tell you everything you need to know about nutrition in one sentence. “Good nutrition consists of eating a wide variety of chemically unaltered foods.” That throws out 90% of what you’ll find in the grocery store.
A pituitary tumor, a shot of thorazine, the flu
There seems to be more of me in this letter than I like. However, I want you to know that, though tired, I am peacefully sad yet thankful that Peg’s pain is over.
It angers me that he can share that ambivalence about the value of treatment with a surgeon and get enraged when I, not only a patient but also a woman, question his recommendation.