Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (83 page)

Brenda Michaels was first diagnosed with cancer at the age of twenty-six. She battled her disease for seventeen years and had three major surgeries. Finally, after her third diagnosis, and a prognosis that gave her less than a year to live, she took charge of her life and com mitted to listening to her inner wisdom. She wrote me the following: “I chose to view my cancer as a teacher and a wake-up call in my life and then take responsibility for my health. This decision led me to exploring not only alternatives with respect to my physical body, but also to begin to heal my deep, repressed emotions and the spiritual roots that were associated with my disease. I feel this is where most of my healing occurred, which ultimately led me to the health and vitality I experience today.” Brenda is now a nationally recognized speaker with the American Cancer Society and is the first person to work extensively with this group who has used alternatives outside of conventional treatments to heal her cancer. She hosts a show on Internet talk radio (
www.conscioustalk.net
).

Another of my patients, Julia, was thirty-eight when she had a lumpectomy. The biopsy showed that not all the tumor had been removed during this procedure. A mastectomy and lymph node dissection were recommended because of the nature of her cancer. Instead, she chose to return to her childhood home in the South and confront her demons—a lifetime of codependence and a marriage she had outgrown. This process was accompanied by a deep emotional cleansing and a letting go of her past ways, unhealthy behaviors, and habits. Julia also changed her diet to a healthy vegetarian one. Though she is cancer-free at this time, she knows that she must stay in touch with her innermost needs and her bodily wisdom. She recently felt called to move to the Southwest. Though unsure of how she would make a living, she decided to go anyway. Almost immediately she found a job at a bed-and-breakfast. Her circumstances there were very healing and afforded her not only room and board but a great deal of time and space alone and close to nature. Julia is extraordinarily courageous and continues to do well.

Another of my patients, Gretchen, was diagnosed with a type of breast cancer that is known to be very aggressive and fast-growing. She refused conventional treatment and instead changed her diet and left an abusive marriage. She eventually found a job in a publishing house doing work that she loves. Three years later, she has no obvious cancer. But she doesn’t think in terms of “being cured.” She says, “The essence for me is living my life one day at a time.” Gretchen believes that the lifestyle changes she made have been the major factors in her healing.

Women’s Stories

Caroline Myss and other healers teach that cancer is the disease of timing. It can result when most of a person’s energy is tied up dealing with old hurts and resentments from the past that they can’t seem to release. These old hurts need a witness—someone who validates the wounds—before healing can begin.

Our relationship to time can and does make us sick. Sonia Johnson says, “Time is not a river, we all have all the time there ever was or ever will be right now. Linear time, itself, is a workaholic construct.”
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In a materialistic, addictive culture, we learn that time is money and that we should spend each minute of our lives accomplishing or producing more and more. Instead of enjoying each moment we have and living our lives fully, we are instead taught at an early age that there is never enough time. We are always running out of time. Far too many of us suffer from “hurry sickness.” We rush around, our hearts beating faster, feeling that there is too much to do and not enough time to do it. The state of our bodies and the cells that constitute them reflect this.

Monica: A Summer of Healing

Monica was forty-eight when she first came to see me. She had recently had a positive biopsy for breast cancer. Her general surgeon wanted to do a mastectomy as well as remove the lymph nodes from underneath her right arm. Monica and her partner had both read extensively on the topic of breast cancer, and she objected to the mastectomy. After full discussion, the surgeon stated that he felt comfortable doing a lumpectomy. However, after the lumpectomy, he found that her tumor margins were not clear on the specimen, leading to a concern that cancer cells still remained. He sent her to see an oncologist who explained that chemotherapy was a standard recommendation for her type of cancer. But she wanted to find out about other things she could do before having the conventional treatment.

I suggested to Monica that she could switch to a diet that would lower her circulating estrogen levels, apply castor oil packs to the af fected breast to enhance her immune system functioning, and begin a good supplementation program. I stressed that these measures were not considered “cures” in a conventional sense and that they hadn’t been studied nearly as well as surgery and chemotherapy. She understood that. I told her that it was imperative that she spend the next few months learning how to take care of herself and do things that brought her pleasure. She and her family left to consider all her options, and I planned to see them three months later, in September.

When Monica returned three months later, she looked fifteen years younger and was radiant with health. I asked her what she had done. She told me, “When I left here, I knew that I had to change my life. This summer I decided to do whatever felt wonderful and healing. So I rode my bike every day and spent long hours lying in the fields looking up at the sky and the clouds. I took summer into every cell of my body. I haven’t had a summer like this one since I was a kid. It seemed to go on forever.”

Monica had changed her relationship to time, stopping the clock and bringing her cells into the present. Many of us need to take the time to “take summer into every cell of our bodies.” It has been more than ten years since Monica has had any evidence of cancer. Though she eventually decided
not
to have chemotherapy or further surgery to try to eliminate tumor cells, she has remained cancer free.
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Serena: Releasing the Past

Serena was forty-eight when she first came to see me following a mastectomy for a fairly large breast mass that was a poorly differentiated breast cancer—a tissue type associated with faster growth and a poor prognosis. Though she had been involved in alternatives to conventional medicine for years, her inner guidance led her to chemotherapy, which she went through without any problems by using meditation and relaxation. (See “How to Prepare for Surgery (or Chemotherapy),” page 665.)

When I met her, she had just moved to the East Coast from California. Two years earlier she had broken up with a man with whom she had lived for ten years when he fell in love with and married another woman. This man was the creator and founder of a very popular self-help group, and the group activities, workshops, and trips had not only provided Serena’s income but also functioned as a family and support system for her. In addition, Serena had contributed substantial money toward a center where this group met regularly. When her significant other left her for another woman in the group, Serena found herself on the outside and was no longer welcome at group activities in the same way as in the past.

Soon after her relationship breakup, she consulted a lawyer to help her get her money and personal belongings back from the group. This lawyer told her that, given the legalities of her situation, it was highly unlikely that she could get her money back. After talking with members of her support group, she decided to get another lawyer and “take it to the Supreme Court if necessary.”

When Serena moved back to the East Coast following the breakup of her “family,” she im mediately went into therapy (both individual and group) to help her deal with the rage, grief, and abandonment she felt. As a result of this experience, she found herself meeting and taking comfort from many other women who also found themselves in the position of having been taken advantage of financially, sexually, and in other ways. She joined a breast cancer support group, too.

When I first met with Serena, she told me that she was feeling fatigued and listless. She wondered why this was so, given that she had finished her chemotherapy and radiation almost a year before and that she had always eaten a healthy, whole-foods diet, taken supplements, and exercised. When she told me her recent history, I suggested that in the future, she needed to make sure that every relationship she was in was a true partnership, in which she gave and received in equal measure. And I also suggested to her that she take a retreat and make a list of all the aspects of her life that were working and another of all the aspects that needed to change. Then, having meditated on the lists, she could come up with a plan for changing those things she was willing to change right now.

She went off by herself to a meditation center. While there, she had the following dream: She was on a raft and saw a house burning in the distance. Her former friends from her self-help community were in the house. At that point in the dream, she realized that she had a choice: to go to the burning house and rescue them, or to stay on the raft and allow the river to take her where she was supposed to be going. In the dream, she noticed that making the choice to leave the river and go to the house was associated with feeling tired and struggling. Even though her mind was pulling her toward the house, her heart (and body) were drawn to going where the river was taking her. She woke up abruptly and knew what she had to do. She had to allow herself to float on the river of a new life.

Even though all her thoughts told her that the community owed her financially, she realized at a very deep level that continuing to hang on to that old community was draining her life’s energy away from her—and keeping whatever energy she still had stuck in the past, so nothing new or better could come to her. One week after she returned from her retreat and had her dream, she stopped her legal proceedings against the old group and created a ceremony to release her past and let her move on to a new life. In time, she also stopped seeing unsupportive friends from that group, since she realized that these visits simply re-created her past. She also noticed that when she went to the meetings, she always felt more tired when she left than when she went in. She knew that although the group had originally been very helpful, it was now time to leave.

Two months after this healing phase, Serena was offered a job in publishing—something she had always dreamed of doing. She took it, and while there met a new man to whom she is now married. This mar riage, unlike her former relationship, is a true partnership of the heart for Serena, and she is able to look back on her breast cancer as her inner guidance coming to her at a critical time. She feels that it gave her the gift of a new, better life. She continues to do well. Most of the time she does not worry about breast cancer. And when she does, she turns it over to her higher power.

Though Monica and Serena chose different healing approaches, both have changed their relationship to time, and both know that they’ve chosen the right path for themselves. Most important, they are no longer afraid of breast cancer.

COSMETIC BREAST SURGERY
Implants: Are They Safe? Should You Get Them?

Breast augmentation is extremely popular right now, fueled in part by the constant bombardment (and perhaps alteration) of our senses by media images of enhanced breasts. In fact, it’s rare to see a non-augmented breast on a popular television show, in music videos, or in movies. The new “ideal” models of feminine beauty are seen in the hugely popular Victoria’s Secret catalog. So the bar has been raised artificially high on what our culture considers an ideal breast size and shape. The average implant is a C cup—many are even bigger. To put the entire area into perspective—and to make sure that women are really informed about it—let’s first start with a little history.

The first silicone injections were done into the breasts of Japanese prostitutes in order to satisfy the desire of their American GI clients for larger breasts in the 1940s and ’50s. Problems were reported with silicone leaking into other areas of the body because it was never con fined to an implant. Little wonder that these women reported health problems! Later, given the “bigger is better” American desire for larger breasts, the first silicone breast implants were developed by two plastic surgeons from Texas, Frank Gerow and Thomas Cronin, in the 1960s. And in 1962, a woman named Timmie Jean Lindsey became the first woman to receive silicone breast implants.
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At the time of the first implants, these devices were not regulated by the FDA or any other agency. In the ensuing three decades, it is esti mated that anywhere from 800,000 to 1 million women received the devices.
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No one questioned the safety of implants until the 1980s when some of the women with implants began to attribute their symptoms to having breast implants. Chronic fatigue, arthritis, immune system disorders, and connective tissue syndromes such as lupus were said to be associated with silicone implants. This resulted in a decade of controversy in which emotion took precedence over science. Though there was never any convincing evidence that implants were, in fact, associated with connective tissue disorders, that didn’t stop a series of huge class action lawsuits against Dow Corning and an enormous amount of fear in women who had had implants. It also resulted in difficulty in obtaining raw material and fear of litigation in manufacturers of other silicone medical devices including vital shunts, catheters, artificial heart valves, and Dacron grafts.
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In the end, researchers could find no solid data linking implants, per se, with an increased risk of death. In fact in June 1999, a panel of experts appointed by Congress to study the issue under the auspices of the Institute of Medicine (part of the National Academy of Sciences) failed to find any scientific evidence connecting silicone breast implants with an increased risk of death. This group released a 400-page report prepared by an independent committee of thirteen scientists that con cluded that although silicone breast implants may be responsible for lo calized problems such as hardening or scarring of breast tissue, implants do not cause any major diseases such as lupus or rheumatoid arthritis. The committee did not conduct any original research; instead they examined past research and other materials and conducted public hearings to hear all sides of the issue. Despite this lack of data on their harm, silicone breast implants were taken off the market in the United States and replaced by saline implants.