I can’t believe it’s been 5 months since I’ve written in this Blog. The last time I wrote, I had had a biopsy of the cancer in my lungs and I was waiting for a response from Foundations One (lab that tests a cancer’s responsiveness to different chemo drugs) as to what drug would be beneficial. I did eventually get a response from Foundations One and they had no drug to recommend that my cancer would be responsive to. It’s a relief to get that information without actually taking a toxic drug just to find out later that my cancer didn’t respond to it. But it does leave me with the question of what to do about the cancer growing in my lungs.

While exploring options to address this question, I had pneumonia, so have been focused on treating that. I wonder if I got pneumonia because my lungs have been weakened by the cancer growing in them. This is the fourth time in my life that I’ve had pneumonia, so there might be a vulnerability in my lungs even without cancer. The first three times were before I ever had cancer in my lungs.

I have just finished reading The Cancer Whisperer: Finding Courage, Direction, and The Unlikely Gifts of Cancer, by Sophie Sabbage. It may be the most useful and inspiring book I’ve read in the world of cancer. Sophie was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer when she was 48, was married to the love of her life, and had a 4-year-old daughter. She really wanted to live. She writes about her remarkable journey of healing and renewal that reshaped her life for the better.

She recommends a radical shift in the way we approach cancer, seeing it less as a disease and more as a symptom of other underlying causes. She reverses our traditionally adversarial relationship with cancer by teaching us how to listen to it, how to be transformed by it, as well as seek to cure it. She shows us how to engage with fear, anger, and grief in healthy and healing ways.

Because her cancer was in her lungs, she talks about the Chinese Medicine concept that grief is held in the lungs and she explores her grief. Because my cancer has metastasized to my lungs, and it is growing, this seems like an important thing for me to do as well.

Sophie writes, “Grief is a hugely neglected part of the cancer experience, usually held in numb abeyance until the end is nigh. Yet I have come to recognize it as one of the great healing forces in my life, and my inadequate attention to it previously as likely one of the primary reasons for my disease.”

She asked herself a question that I am now asking myself – “What have I not been grieving and why?” She says “Answering that question began with looking at my losses – not just the big deaths and endings, which still loitered like ghosts in my attic – but the less obvious hurts, regrets, and disappointments that lay strewn across the carpet of my life.”

Sophie says, “When we grieve well, it opens rather than closes the heart. This is why it heals.”

I’m making my list of what I have to grieve. It’s a long list. I’m just beginning on this road and it feels scary, AND important. I am looking for both a practitioner of Chinese Medicine and a grief counselor to help me with this. I have several appointments set up in the next month that I will blog about, after they happen, if they are useful.