back to (almost) normal
Three weeks and three days after having finished the radiation treatment I am almost back to normal. The last week of the treatment and the next two weeks were the most painful and difficult time but the short pangs of intense abdominal pain were alternated by much longer time slots of painlessness. Even in this state I managed to talk to a group of students and faculty at Ripon College about my experiences in working with international refugee-relief organizations, attend official receptions and dinners. I stopped losing weight at a point still above my body-mass index and can now eat and drink almost everything.
I still sleep one or two hours more than before but that does not disturb anyone and I still have to take imodium occasionally.
I started making my daily walks with my kids again and resumed some of my chores, foremost among them cooking. My wiener schnitzel was highly appreciated even by the most critical members of my family.
I am looking forward to the St Patrick’s Day party at one of our friendly neighbors, even though I might not want to indulge in my deep reverence for Jameson whiskey. Yet.
Every day re-birthday
I used to count my re-birthdays.
At the age of 9 or10 I walked out to my mother’s aunt’s farm from my grandma’s house in the village. It was a walk of about 3 or 4 km along a dirt road and short cuts over sugar beet fields. When I arrived to their open gate I saw a German shepherd bolt from the far end of the yard and dash toward me. I was dumbstruck by surprise and paralyzed by deadly fear as the animal made his killing leap towards me. Time stood still as I gazed at his ice cold eyes with greenish reflections, suspended in the air at the height of my neck, his jaws open, his formidable teeth pointed at my face. As time stood still I was irrefutably convinced that my young life would be disrupted the moment those teeth reached me. And then something inconceivable happened. Like a sack of potatoes dropped from a cart the dog plummeted to the ground howling in pain. My grandma’s sister, her husband and their son were running towards me. Their son, Imi, had reached me first. He leaped between me and his dog, now writhing in pain on the grassy ground. While his mother put her arms around me his father, who could not bend, kneeled down to take a look at the dog. “A bee has stung his upper lip” the old man grumbled as he pulled out the sting. They explained that bees die when they sting. They also said that bees sting only if they feel attacked and that they therefore could not understand why this one single bee sacrificed its life for me. I spent the next few days saving bees that fell into the water in the trough, endlessly grateful. From then on I counted this event as my first re-birthday.
I considered my mother’s cousin, Imi, to be something like a bigger brother. None of us had sisters or brothers and, although nine years older, he spent quite a lot of time with me on weekends during the school year in our town home, where he went to a boarding school, and on their farm during the summer holidays. He taught me, among other things, how to ride a motor bike.
I must have been 13 or 14 as he came to us, proudly showing his new motorbike and asking me to take a ride with him. It was a wine-red and silver 125 ccm Java and I felt honored and excited to be taken to a ride. As he pulled out of the driveway onto the high traffic street something happened to the gearshift and the bike suddenly stopped in the middle of the street, not making it to the opposite side of the street. I saw the white Polski Fiat approach in slow motion and then I saw ourselves from above, from a bird’s eye view of about 3 meters as the car, in very slow motion, hit the bike from behind, the bike sliding ahead and tipping to the left and sliding on its side a few more meters. I saw at the same time Imi slowly fly and gently land on the right side of the road. And I saw myself slowly fly behind the bike and then gently land on the tar, in a sitting position, right in front of the front bumper of the Fiat. The bird’s eye view stopped here and I was wondering how the Fiat managed to stop before hitting and crushing me. This was to be my second re-birth day.
On February the twentieth, 2002 (20/02/2002), I was driving in Hungary from Székesfehérvár back home to Budapest where I lived at the time. It was getting dark and I chose not to turn on the radio but reflect on the business negotiation I conducted with the managers of a Japanese company. The right side of the road was about 2 meters higher than the road and I saw a huge stag take a jump from above towards the middle of the road. Then I saw his enormous mass come in slow motion towards my windshield, that first slowly bent inward and then, still in slow motion, form hundreds of crack lines running in all directions. I knew that this would be the last thing I saw in life and was quite surprised when the slow motion stopped, with a bang on the roof, and the Volvo came to a halt. I was fifty that year and this experience drove it home to me that I should change my life. And that that life of mine was extremely fragile and finite.
After this third re-birthday I had no more mysterious and dramatic near-death experiences. Nevertheless I went on living through moments that conveyed the same message: that something irrevocably ended and something entirely new began.
One of these moments came again as I took off from Dusseldorf on Dec. 13, 2009 heading for America with my two youngest children. My 8 year-old daughter told me that this was the second most important day in her life, after her birthday, and I could not get out of my head the first two lines of an Italian song: “Il tredici dicembre, Santa Lucia , il giorno piu importante, che ci sia.” (‘December 13, Santa Lucia’s day, the most important day that exists.’).
On Feb.18, 2010, as I pronounced my vows to my newly wed wife, I felt again very intensely that something completely new began in my life.
On Nov. 24 I was diagnosed with a rare and mean skin cancer and on Dec.1 they found out that it had metastasized into the sentinel lymph nodes. From that day on I have been celebrating every morning as a new re-birthday. The “celebration” consisted for the last three weeks of enjoying the moments of the absence of pain, or the grayish morning light, especially as some of the side effects of the radiation therapy got worse and worse.
Every day was still a re-birthday, only the party was every day different.
Today’s re-birthday party has something special about it. The sun is shining and I have managed to have two slices of toasted bread without pains and issues. My thankful pores are telling me that this is the beginning of a new life period.
Battle won, winnings shared – post-cancerous reflection
Dear friends:
Nobody knows how and when the enemy sneaked in. My allies discovered it and warned me about its presence after the histological examination of the tissues cut out of a sebaceous cell on November 18. The general of the allied forces, Surgeon Dr. Ronald E. Beresky, worked out a strategy at Dean Med Center-Stoughton Clinic, and brought up his big guns , i.e. his small and sharp scalpels, bistouries and lancets and attacked it frontally. After the battle he sent out his high tech reconnoitering units, the big CT and PET scanners, to make sure that the enemy is completely wiped out.
The time span between the „bad news” {’the pathologists found Merkel Cell Carcinoma cancer cells in your tissues’) and the good news (’neither the blood test, nor the chest x-ray, nor the CT and PET scans show any more cancerous cells in you body’) stretched over 34 days, in other words I had 34 days to think over everything, and especially my priorities.
Out came the “Cancer Patient’s Epicurean Time Management” which I shared with my friends in emails, in my blog;
http://stress-freedom.net/2010/12/cancer-patient%E2%80%99s-epicurean-time-management/
and on Facebook:
I have just re-read this posting with post-cancerous eyes and found nothing essential to be changed: the priorities stay as I defined them.
I am aware that just because I have got a bit of a reprieve, I should not think that I have turned a corner.
The other learnings of my reflections and musings are not new. In fact, they they were put down by Epicurus and his friend, Metrodorus, are 2300 years ago:
“It is possible to provide security against other things, but as far as death is concerned, we men all live in a city without walls.”
“We have been born once and cannot be born a second time; for all eternity we shall no longer exist. But you, although you are not in control of tomorrow, are postponing your happiness. Life is wasted by delaying, and each one of us dies without enjoying leisure.”
My dear friends, colleagues, wayfarers, trainers and coaches, trainees and coaches, fellow-mortals all: can you derive any benefit from the booty I made and shared for planning your own lives?
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ambition is counterproductive for pleasure production
My wife and my daughter made me a joint Christmas present, David Sedaris’ book ”Me Talk Pretty One Day “and I started reading the shortest short story practically during the breaks of our Mad-Libs game laughing out loudly (LOL) occasionally, i.e. about every 23 seconds.
Between the age of 16 and 26 I was convinced that I would become a brilliant short story writer and stopped to simply and purely enjoy the short stories I was reading. Instead, I started studying the techniques used by the authors.
After having given up this ambition I could just relax and enjoy them again.
About two or three years ago I chanced upon Sedaris’ “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim” in an airport bookstore but the book mysteriously disappeared as soon as I got back to Germany and miraculously reappeared again as I unpacked the cardboard box with my most beloved books in America. My wife and daughter must have seen it on my night stand and heard me chuckle while reading it so they decided to add another volume to my pleasures.
While enjoying every single sentence I remembered DeWitts’s words:
Epicureanism presented two fronts to the world, the one as repellent as the other was attractive. Its discouragement of the political career was repellent to the ambitious, its denial of divine providence to pious orthodoxy, and its hedonism to timorous respectability. Its candor, charity, courtesy, and friendliness were attractive to multitudes of the honest and unambitious folk. (Epicurus and His Philosophy)
…and I felt happy to belong to that multitude:-)
“carpe diem” instead of soul-searching for children?
Since my rare but aggressive little skin cancer was staged as “micro-metastasized” (meaning something between stages IIIA and IV with a survival prognosis of 50-65% in the first two years) I have become much more aware of the value of each day. This is normal for me in my predicament but I am trying to let others learn something about it, too, first of all, my children. (My wife and I have chosen not to name my disease to them at this point, so they do not start getting upset about the possibility of losing their father shortly after having lost their mother to a mental disease – on top of having changed their “country” for the second time.)
This is no easy enterprise since my children are no different from other children of their age (9 and 12) structuring time around the present-laden knots of Christmas, Easter, Birthday, Halloween. Luckily I do not have to start from zero. My daughter is taken to bed alternatively by my wife and by me each evening and part of the ritual is her remembering what the best thing that happened to her on each day was. We have extended the topic range now to mentioning all the good things that happened. If there are “not so good” things mentioned we talk about the chance of them happening again and whether she can do anything about it.
This little “spiritual exercise” is very far from the Ignatian Examination of Conscience I was taught by Catholic priests and nuns or the other Christian soul-searching practices that teach the children how sinful they are. It teaches them (or so I hope) the Epicurean joy of adding to our happiness account the mental pleasure of remembering pleasurable events and teaches them that there is something good to be experienced each day.
The part about “what was not so good and what can I do about it in the future?” might seem to be more in the Stoic and modern motives analysis culture tradition but we know that the Epicurean communities spent considerable time trying to improve themselves and each other by practicing how to speak honestly even when telling your mind might imply the risk of retaliation by someone stronger (parrhesia) and this practice must have been very much like what we do today in self-improvement life coaching or stress-communication training.
Now all I have to do is to extend the practice also to my prepubescent son…
euchre for pleasure
Thursday, Dec 16, the blood test showed no liver problems, the chest x-rays showed that the lungs were clear. I will have to undergo a CT scan next Wednesday (12/22) and PET scan Thursday (12/23). My appointment with the oncologist is scheduled for Dec 30 to discuss the test results and what we can do about them. Radiation therapy and later maybe chemo-therapy might be needed, depending on the stage MCC my cancer reached (IIIA, IIIB or IV). see also >> http://www.merkelcell.org/staging/index.php
I am in very good spirits. Yesterday my wife started teaching me and the kids a card game called euchre and it was a real pleasure for the whole family. For me it definitely and largely outbalanced the light pain I still feel from the incisions. I further improved my pleasure balance reading some pages from Tim O’Keefe’s “Epicureanism”.
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