Ta Da!

I told you guys I'd rise again.

I had an appointment downtown late Friday morning and with great reluctance got into go-out-of-the-house clothes. I was going to go bald but was a bit worried about going out for an unknown time with a head that had never before been directly exposed to the sun.

I got a ride downtown, did my errand, and then walked several blocks to the bus stop, crossing the streets strategically so that I could bag the maximum possible number of rays. I have heard that chemo and sunshine absolutely do not go together but Lalitha has always been a strong believer in it's essentialness.

Lalitha's insistence that sunshine is a good thing has been going on for decades...decades during which sunshine was considered very, very bad indeed due to the risk of melanomas. But now, of course, sunshine is good!...Vitamin D is necessary...Certain cancers clearly benefit from vitamin D. This to me is a perfect example of why we have to figure out for ourselves what is good for us and not. I know that being in the sun feels very, very, very good. I am a Vancouver girl. How could it not feel good! I will be very cross if it really is true that I won't be able to tolerate sunshine and that my usual olive skin will turn all delicate and sun-intolerant. The red on my head is just a wig.

Okay, I'm off my soapbox...actually back on for a minute...I'm starting to notice that I'm developing a bit of a bucket list in my head. These are strictly for fun. So far I have New York, Rajasthan, and today's addition because soapbox + me laughing about all of my big fat opinions about basically anything and everything made me think of London's Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park. I so want to do that! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soapbox.

Okay...what I had actually planned to write about today, is the resiliant gene, something that I first heard about while on Callanish retreat. I'm going to go Google and see what I can find so that I don't make all of this up. I'll be right back...

"In recent years, biological science has proposed a new paradigm. The latest research shows that resilience can best be understood as an interplay between particular genes and environment — GxE, in the lingo of the field. Researchers are discovering that a particular variation of a gene can help promote resilience in the people who have it, acting as a buffer against the ruinous effects of adversity. In the absence of an adverse environment, however, the gene doesn't express itself in this way. It drops out of the psychological picture. "We now have well-replicated findings showing that genes play a major role in influencing people's responses to adverse environments," says Sir Michael Rutter, a leading British psychiatrist and longtime resilience expert. "But the genes don't do anything much on their own." (Excerpted without permission from: New York Times Magazine, "A Question of Resilience," written by Emily Bazelon, published April 30, 2006. I highly recommend reading the entire article but be warned that it deals with and talks in great detail about survivors of child abuse. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/magazine/30abuse.html?fta=y)

So the resilience gene is actually a real thing that scientists refer to as "protective version of the gene [GxE] (two long alleles)." I am so not a scientist and am getting tired so I'll just say that apparently we all have two alleles related to the gene GxE and if we have two long ones and we experience traumatic events in our lives we have a better chance of overcoming them (I'd wager my house that Ishmael Beah has two long ones) and if we have two short alleles we are more likely to experience depression and not recover as well. I would guess that I have one long one and one short one. Or that in really intense times my short allele lengthens and then when the pressure is off they both shrink and I am susceptible to the blues. I don't know.

I have observed for myself that during the last nine years...a period of time that has been more challenging than not challenging from many different perspectives, not just the health aspect...that I do keep popping back up like one of those bobble-headed whats-its with a big grin on my face. I also have observed that while I can put on a good show, some of the traumatic events have ways of bubbling back up to the surface as if to say "you have to actually deal with this one."

I'll give an example: At the Callanish retreat we did many, many fabulous things to the point that any time I had a session I had developed an expectation that it would end wonderfully no matter how many tears were shed in the midst of it. So when I read that I was to have an afternoon " Therapeutic Touch with Sound" I thought that that meant I was about to have an extended version of the therapeutic touch we received at the end of every pre-breakfast session of meditation, chanting and qi gong. Mats would be laid out and we would be personally tucked in with fleece blankies, seed-filled eye patches to block out the light and amidst lovely sounds, receiving by not one, but two people, one at our heads and one at our feet, in synchronistic, tandem strokes. For someone who rarely receives adult touch other that a quick hug from a girlfriend, it was really something. So I walked into the space that is built over the creek with high expectations.

In I walked to see a massage table set up in the middle of the room. I hopped up, had the blankie and eye patch placed and we began. One facilitator doing the energy work and one doing the voice and music. Almost immediately I was aware of pain in my chest similar to the pain immediately following surgery I had this summer to have a "window" cut into my pericardium (the fully-enclosed sac in which one heart rests). Then I started to have intense pain in my left side. My thoughts were running amuck: oh my god, this is bad. this is not working. i'm supposed to be relaxing. My entire body seized up. Then the chanting began by the person standing by my left ear...she kept singing "noooooooooooooo, nooooooooooooooooo, noooooooooooooooo." I wondered with incredulity why on earth she would be chanting "No." I finally blurted out "Why are you chanting No?!?" The voice person said "I was chanting "Do." I should have been emphasizing the "D" more. The facilitator said with such compassion, "Oh my goodness, you put up with that for so long." I burst out laughing at myself and tried to settle into my "relaxation" session. So after I realized that they were done and I was in a great deal of physical pain. I told them about it and they said that this kind of work can bring all sorts on cellular memories to the surface. They said that they would keep working with me and focus on where I was experiencing the most pain. I found myself very tearfully retelling the story of how I needed to get someone to pick Charlotte up in the middle of the night before calling an ambulance last summer due to intense chest pain and how that led to an unscheduled week-long stay in the hospital and surgery with most of my intimates having absolutely no idea where I was. It's something that I would have thought I had dealt with, was over, done. But apparently not.

The energy work continued and the pain dispersed throughout my body. "Is that feeling any better?" one of the facilitators asked, and I blurted out that I felt like I was being buried alive in cement. More tears, more work. When it was time for the session to be over I hobbled off the table, almost buckling over from the pain that was in my left side. I was laughing and saying "thanks...sort of" and went to have some tea and finish off my collaged votive candle to take my mind off what had just happened.

That evening, the "Do" chanter asked me with great kindness how I was feeling. "Oh I'm great," I replied, "I'm very resilient." I really meant it when I said it but on later reflection I observed that just to make it through any given day I often just hack off the sticky emotions and am left with a lot of phantoms that can resurface unexpectedly when my guard is lowered. I would love to figure out how to just have one big sobfest and then be done with "it:" (whatever that day's "it" is).