PRESCRIPTIONS FOR A LONGER, FULLER LIFE
As a writer. I don’t like to lean on the use of clichés very often, but sometimes they get the message across so well. Take for instance, “Use it, or lose it.” That’s a truth not to be ignored. For those facing a life-threatening illness or dealing with a devastating prognosis, those five little words can focus one’s attention on what one has and needs to hold on to.
When I received the diagnosis of breast cancer in 1989, and the surgeon used the euphemistical phrase, “extensive tumor removal,” my knees turned to rubber as I made my way out of the breast clinic at the hospital. But in the two week period between the diagnosis and the surgery, I turned my attention to that admonition of actress Ethel Barrymore. I wrote it out on a huge poster board and took it to my hospital room, where I taped it to the wall and where my eyes could focus on it as I would recover: “The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about -- the more you have left when anything happens.”
For instance, there was a month or more between the healing of my lumpectomy incision and the commencement of radiation treatment for breast cancer. I had not been near the swimming pool for six weeks, and I knew once the five weeks of the radiation treatment would begin, combined with all the prior preparatory marking sessions, I wouldn’t be using the pool again for many months. A blessed physiotherapist squeezed me into her arthritis aquafit class for five weeks. I had seen the huge radiation machines at the Cancer Clinic, and I knew I had to be able to extend my arm on the involved side to grasp a rod so as to get the arm out of the way of the radiation rays. With the therapist’s guidance and support, I exercised that arm sufficiently to allow for the awkward positioning when the time came. The therapist also showed me many exercises to enable lymph to drain from my arm even though I no longer possessed, after the surgery, the lymph glands of my armpit. Only once in nineteen years have I experienced the lymphedema that plagues so many breast cancer survivors, and that resulted from a mosquito bite to the upper arm. Even now I exercise that arm with a 1/3 of a mile swim three times a week. I have chosen “using” over “losing!”
After radiation there is an overwhelming fatigue that dissipates with time. When I was able to resume aquafit at the pool, I had to make myself go through all the putting on and taking off of winter clothing with its many layers. (We were living in Eastern Ontario at the time.) It would have been so much easier just to stay home and take a rest. But I had learned that the body unmistakably “gets the message” of one’s intention. So I would give myself this little “pep-talk:” “Body, I love you and I want you to get well and strong again. We have been through a lot together these last six months. I don’t really feel like going, but for your sake, we are going to the pool this afternoon.” My body heard and cooperated with my intention to fully recover!
The “use it or lose it” cliché also applies to the dimension of time. With the threat of a shortened time in one’s life, -- each hour, each day, each week, each month, -- becomes more precious, a quantity not to be wasted. The “I’ll do that someday” things are taken from the back burner and given priority on one’s list of “to do” items. So it was, in the years that followed the surgery, my husband and I made a trip with our twenty-something offspring to Maui to see my brother and his family. Twice we flew West and rented a Cadillac, touring places we had loved in California, stopping to see family and friends en route. And in the following two years, my husband and I enjoyed two cruises, one involving our first trip to Europe, one transiting the Panama Canal and getting to visit a handicapped child we sponsored in Costa Rica. I even flew alone one summer to my Aunt’s 100th birthday party, a family reunion on many levels.
Later, I inherited my University son’s antiquated computer and began the serious writing I had had always wanted to tackle. Seven years after retiring from teaching, I even took a part-time position, which exercised some dormant administrative skills I was trained for thirty years before. My husband, now retired from business, joined me in hundreds of hours of volunteering in Hospice and palliative care. I began to take an interest in gardening, as never before, and together we learned about growing orchids, we raised basil and dried it for our friends, and we made all kinds of gift jellies and relishes. Each season had its joyous activities and pursuits.
Then there is the cliché, “If you want more days in your life, you must put more life in your days.” That’s a corollary to the first cliché. We remember our friend Dianna, diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given only months to live. She rejected the grim prognosis, eschewed the customary therapies, embraced a macrobiotic diet, swam often, sought psychiatric support, filled her life with the beauties of nature and music, and made daily doses of humor her staple medicine, a la Norman Cousins. And she shared with anyone who would listen to her, her upbeat, positive philosophy of life. She lived eight years plus beyond the medical prediction. In contemplating Dianna’s prescription for a fuller, longer life, all who knew her are reminded of Kipling’s admonition to fill “The unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.”
“When you are on thin ice, you may as well dance,” has become the motto my husband and I have adopted for these latter years of our lives. We became friends at a New Year’s Eve dance, had danced our way through courtship and 33 years of marriage, and when we returned to California to live, partially chose the place to live because, five months of the year, we could dance there twice a week. Dancing releases tensions and puts one in touch with one’s body and the joy of physical movement to music. When you dance, you put aside inhibitions. You cannot forget you live in “the here and now.” As poet Mary Oliver says, you “let your soft animal body love what it loves.”
Our late dear friend Nora, her body stiffened with Parkinson’s disease, clung to her memories of dancing away the hours when she was younger. Her loving family graced the walls of her nursing home room with a huge poster of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. When she lost her voice, she still mouthed the words of love-songs I sang for her, even filling in the lyrics when I forgot them. Author Ellin Berlin, the wife of composer Irving Berlin, put it so beautifully in her novel, “The Best of Families.” She said, “The body never forgets.”
In the winter of 2000 my right hip had so deteriorated that dancing and hiking, even walking with my grandchildren, had become extremely painful. I scheduled the indicated hip replacement with a much-practiced orthopedic surgeon. And as I entered the “O.R.,” I said this little mantra to myself, “Ginger Rogers. Ginger Rogers, Ginger Rogers……” Six weeks after the surgery I was back on the dance floor with my beloved. And, as I write this in the fall of 2008, we plan a November cruise in the Caribbean, hopefully, even at our advanced years, to “dance the nights away!”
An industrial accident felled my father during my high school years. He was in bed for months on end after back surgery. I attended classes in the afternoons only, spending the mornings caring for him after he came home from the hospital. Thus I missed high school chemistry altogether, so I would never be a candidate for pharmacology studies or employment in a drug store. But, thankfully, life has tutored me, and my husband, in a few necessary prescriptions for the human spirit. Taken seriously, applying them at every opportunity, you, too, can expect to live a fuller and maybe even a longer life!
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