Blessings From Cancer

Lions, Tigers and Bears, Oh My

Depression, Anxiety and Dread, Oh My

I absolutely love the movie The Wizard of Oz. There are scenes, phrases in that movie that I still say today. “I have a feeling we aren’t in Kansas anymore” and “There’s no place like home”. I bet most of you did not know that the two most often quoted sources (for day- to- day dialogue) are the Bible and William Shakespeare. Yet, most of us have never read either source. Isn’t it amazing how something as small as words can enter your ear and stay in your brain forever?

There are so many gifts and blessings that we, as the children of God, have received throughout the ages. I count the gift of language as one of the top 5 (air, water, fire, vegetation, and language). I whole heartedly believe that God’s gift of expression via words was always intended to bring us closer to him and lift one another up. But just as we have abused the other top 5 gifts, we have also gutted the original intent of language. Our words these days do very little to raise a soul closer to heaven. Often times, we use words to destroy and belittle a person, a culture, a race, a theological sect. We use and abuse people with the words we speak. But this post is not about how we inflict pain to others, but how we used this beautiful gift to destroy our own minds and hearts.

I am not the only woman to look at her image and think “I’m fat” “I’m ugly” “if only I…”. I am not the only human to fall short at a goal and then berate my own shortcomings as total failure, absolute loss and unforgiveable sins. We take the words God created (love, beauty, identity) to destroy ourselves and, in the process, we slowly break out chain, our connection to God.

In 2006, I did my first round of marriage counseling. We spent a lot of time talking about our feelings. I now see that as a bad way to work through pain and hurt. Pain and hurt live in feelings. To get out of pain and hurt, one needs to change the way they think, not feel. If more time had been spent addressing each other’s actual needs and red lines, then maybe things could have improved. Instead, the focus was on how someone’s actions made us feel? And to be honest, feelings are always raw, and picking at raw wounds is not how you heal a wound. Giving a wound the time and space, unbothered, is the only way it heals. After all a wound acts, if allowed, on it's own to heal, eventually scabbing over and allowing new flesh to grow underneath (description here is of a skin wound).

Do not get me wrong, there are many wonderful words God gave us that are tied to emotions. Words like “love” “sadness” “joy”, etc. But each of these words, at least from a biblical sense, is tied to action as well. One does love. One does joy. These words, these feelings do not just linger as an object, as a NOUN, they are working and moving and are very much VERBS. We forgot that. We labeled them as subpar verbs and often use them descriptively and not actively. We stopped working at loving, liking, being happy, finding joy, allowing for sadness, embracing our disappointments, surrendering to hope…and I could go on. And all of this is to say…I used words to discredit my own thoughts and therefore allowed feelings, feelings that I was not actively working through, to lead me into a dark and deep depression.

Oh, I know, I know that I have had so much blessing and mercy and triumph through this battle called Cancer. A battle I never volunteered for. I was voluntold by God – you will suffer and battle through…and others will see your battle. It has not always been pretty. I have wallowed in self-pity, I have suffered from non-belief, I have bottomed out on hope, etc., etc.…. I have experienced great highs and horrendous lows. I have put on the brave face, I have smiled when I wanted to cry, I have isolated from others to help ease their burdens of “not knowing what to do”. I dread using this phrase but battling (over and over) cancer is very much like suffering from a TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) and/or PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Yes, PTSD is very much like a TBI in that your brain has experienced a trauma and is unable to operate as usual. The difference being a TBI is physical trauma and PTSD is psychological trauma. But both disorders of the brain can create inaccurate responses and allow for “misfires” in certain areas. PTSD can change a persons’ language use. For example, many with PTSD blur first-person and third-person wording and associations (basically a singular view and a world view all in one) and they typically adopt very negative words, often associate death with everything and remove light and joy from their vocabulary.

Do you know how long it has taken for me to admit that I suffer from PTSD? I still have not accepted it completely. I mean cancer wreaked havoc on my body. The cancer (or should I say treatments) destroyed my blood, numbed my hands and feet, created a loss of short-term memory and memory recall (I can think something but am unable to get it from brain to mouth), has weakened my eyesight, has deafened one ear, has concaved my fingernails, has darkened my veins, changed my skin, the daily chemo pill I am on has weakened my bones, destroyed my joints and stiffened my muscles. And all of this is physical, I deal with it daily and it is what it is. But the absolute worst effect has been my mental changes. I don’t date hope, I don’t dare plan, I live in the very minimal moment (I know we are supposed to do this anyway – but mine is extreme), I am scared, I am always waiting for the other shoe to drop, I see doctors ALL THE TIME – SO I HATE THEM, I don’t dream, I don’t live fully, because I am always dreading getting going on something and having to PAUSE for treatment, or worse to DIE. There is no joy, there is no happiness, it is all just a “wait and see”. Cancer destroyed my body and my mind and right now today – I feel like it is aiming for my Soul.

This brings me right back to those early days of marriage counseling. Where we had to write a list of all our “let down” moments and feelings about them. I remember clearly my list was pages, and my ex-husband's was two things. My let-down moments were all “things” very materialistic and his were all “actions” very doable things. I remember the pastor telling me that even though my let-down moments were very important, his “action” moments were more substantial. Simply put actions outweigh feelings. We both learned that communication was key, but I also learned that my behavior, my actions, my “doing” was way more vital to health than my “feels”. For example, being upset about the trash not being taken out was not as heavy as say withholding intimacy because I was mad. You see from an early age; I twisted action and feelings and created a combo of inaction when I felt. You know the “silent treatment” or as my daughter and ex-husband still say today “she blows up like a puffer fish” – meaning I sit quiet and look mad but say nothing. I failed at using God’s gift of words to fix, heal, and move on. Instead, I took those words, made them angry and hateful and let them brew in my head.

I have done the same thing with this cancer. I have let its evilness live in my brain. I have let the let-down and disappointment associated with cancer live and thrive in my heart. I stopped crying. I stopped screaming. I just stopped. When you stop and close your heart and brain, you allow for a breading ground of emptiness, darkness, and hate. Every action becomes a chore, becomes an unbearable thing that you just need to get through. You close shop to all the possible light in the world and you say, “hey Satan – I am open for business”. Sounds stupid I know, but God exists in the light and will rescue in the dark, but Satan lives and operates only in the dark. So, when you close shop, you are primed for the picking by Satan.

I do not want to live this way. I really don’t. I want to be me, but I have forgotten who I am. This downward spiral into this current depression began long before the cancer. I have just shoveled disappointment, grief and hurt, one after the other, for decades and now I cannot stand to feel this anymore. Trouble is I don’t know where to start to dig out.

I know the words of God (and the words of Shakespeare) and can say them to myself over and over, but something else is missing. The words are hitting me but no sinking in. I feel worthless and dirty. Seriously cancer is so dirty. For a year there I did not even have my own blood in me. Say what you want, but sometimes I feel like a stranger in my own skin. Like I am clawing from the inside to get out.

And I no longer want to feel like this. I remember a girl that loved the Wizard of Oz. I would watch it every year on the TV. The hourglass moment in the movie is one of my favorites. I loved Star Wars and the opening scene of Return of the Jedi is one of my favorites. I like good overcoming evil. In both of those stories at those moments, really bad things have happened to the main character (Yes Han Solo is a main character) and what they do not know is that while they are facing peril, their friends are in the background plotting/creating a way to rescue them. When all hope looks lost, light finds a way to rescue. I love it. It is a redeeming storyline that makes Star Wars, Wizard of Oz, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc. live in our hearts. Good overcomes evil.

So maybe I am living a Job moment. Maybe I need to remember that Job, like Elijah, like Paul, each suffered greatly for their faith. Each for different reasons. Each, in my own opinion, suffers a time of depression. I mean Elijah begs to die, Job lies in mud and wills himself to just die, Paul after the encounter on the road to Damascus is forced to question everything he has ever known, and he is forced to physically suffer. Each suffers pain, both physical and mental. Each is redeemed, raised-up and rescued by God.

That gives me comfort to know that this is a season. I know I was not supposed to be in this season for as long as I have been in, and that comes back to language. I need to start speaking words over my own life, that represent where I want to be, who I want to be and how I want to live. In the words of Shakespeare “what’s done is done”, it is now time to get on with life and live life as written in the bible “eat, drink and be merry”!

REFERENCES:

TBI and Cancer (Chemo brain): https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/chemo-brain/symptoms-causes/syc-20351060

PTSD and Cancer: https://www.cancer.net/survivorship/life-after-cancer/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-and-cancer

Isolation and Satan: https://knowingisdoing.org/blog/devil-desires-isolate-you-christ-dont-let-him

Job, Elijah and Paul and Depression: http://www.catholiclane.com/paul-and-elijah-the-pharisee-and-the-prophet-on-sinai/

https://faithalone.org/grace-in-focus-articles/suicide-bible-people-who-wanted-to-die/

https://seattlechristiancounseling.com/articles/coping-depression-even-bible-heroes-cope-depression

Shakespeare's use of the bible: https://www.biblesociety.org.uk/latest/news/shakespeare-and-the-bible/3

https://www1.cbn.com/how-bible-influenced-william-shakespeare

Language and Depression: https://theconversation.com/people-with-depression-use-language-differently-heres-how-to-spot-it-90877

https://www.mentalhealthtoday.co.uk/blog/how-the-mechanisms-of-depression-are-reflected-in-language

Suicide Hotline: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/ 800-273-8255