Cancer Recovery: Yes in a World Sometimes Full of Violent No’s

Perhaps I shouldn’t have had the massage.

It had been almost two years since a professional had touched me in a compassionate, and not a clinical, way. My chemotherapy for breast cancer had finished, and I was trying to reconnect with my body and find some physical relief. My cancer recovery had begun.

But massage releases both the angels and the demons within. The secrets you are keeping from yourself, locked in your flesh like invisible fists, come undone, and suddenly you are surprised by what you feel; you are overcome by what you have long suppressed.

Plus, I was still wrangling the final arrangements for my cancer treatment, infusions of zoledronic acid to keep the cancer from recurring in my bones and to keep my bones strong despite my daily estrogen blocker.

Suddenly I was flooded with nausea, like I had just had chemotherapy, but the chemotherapy was just a toxic memory, a specter of sickness that choked me and caused me to vomit. And the one word in my head, when I wasn’t puking red sports drink was, Why?

Why did the doctors who were supposed to make my cancer treatment easier make it more difficult? By refusing to acknowledge my past and my identity and my current suffering? By lying to me to spare themselves a tiny expense of energy and emotion? By abusing me because they were extremely important and I was nothing but a nuisance, when I should have been a motionless, mute piece of meat on the healthcare assembly line rather than a fully alive and fully functional human being?

And of course, there was the original, Why? Why did my parents also treat me as a nuisance for feeling anything, for needing anything, for saying anything, for taking up space, for not constantly contributing to the glorification of themselves at everyone else’s expense?

Why? 

I vomited at home. I vomited a chunky crimson path through Edmonton International Airport. I met the looks of fellow travelers, twisted with a mix of compassion and revulsion.

Nevertheless, I got on a plane. I flew to San Francisco, as I had planned, a treat for myself for having survived what I doubted I could survive.

So, on an empty stomach, and with an exhausted heart, I found myself sitting, first row center, in a small black box theater, listening to Christian McBride play the bass with his latest group of fellow musicians, Ursa Major.

Listening to live music, watching virtuoso musicians play their instruments, seeing practice and hard work transcended into something spiritual and moving, freed of gravity, freed of words, freed seemingly of labor, although I know from my own time as a dancer that seeming free of labor is the utmost of labors.

To be an ear. To be a rhythm and a beat and a wave that changes melancholy to happiness. That says it is good to be alive. That momentarily leaves the nausea and the Why? behind.

So you can breathe. So you can relax. 

Cancer recovery: Yes in a world sometimes full of violent No’s.

Health is being both the instrument and the music