Search Results for: cancer

Seeding a Dark World with New Life

Seedling ready to be planted

Sara B. Franklin | Longreads | March 2020 | 4 minutes (1,034 words)

 

On Saturday, March 14, the day after public schools and our twin three years olds’ daycare closed in our Hudson Valley town, I sent the kids to their sitter one final time, frantic for a couple hours to get a few things done before I turned myself over to motherhood, all day, every day, for the foreseeable future.

There were piles of laundry to do, a shopping list that needed tending, urgently. But I found myself drawn out into the garden, still covered with mulch for its wintry slumber. Poking around, I saw early signs of life; the rhubarb had poked its rippling, fuchsia crowns out of the damp earth, and the tiny frills of wild nettles were several centimeters high in the rangy, untended back corner. The chives, too, had suddenly shot up in the preceding days’ warmth. It seemed too early, I thought, running back in my mind over all my years of planting. But then, this was the winter that never was, the deep freeze that never came. The unease has been around us for months now. The geese came home early, turtles are resting on logs already, the peepers out in the beaver pond the first week of March: a full month ahead.

wasn’t ready, but the earth was ready; the plants were telling me so. So I pulled my box of seeds from the kitchen shelf. Out back in the shed, I wrangled a sharply-tipped hoe from behind a mess of bikes and lawn chairs. In the garden, I knelt over a bed, pulled aside the browned grass clippings from the last mowing of the fall, made two shallow rows, and dropped seeds into the ground — tiny, almond-shaped lettuce seeds and those of kale and collards, like burgundy poppy seeds. It might be too early, I thought as I sprinkled the harbingers of life into place, but it’s worth a shot. Anything hopeful, right now, is worth a shot.

I should know. I’ve been here before, in another time, another life, it seems.
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Why I’m Giving Myself Permission to Keep Writing at This Time

My great grandmother, Freida, two years before her death from Influenza, with my grandmother, Clarisse, as a baby.

The timing of the coronavirus pandemic has been convenient for exactly no one. For some writers’ careers, it’s been devastating. They’ve had their book releases eclipsed, their tours canceled, their sales thrown off by readers’ new economic precarity — several years’ worth of hard work and anticipation thrown, largely, down the drain, although some have been holding virtual book tours, and social media posts imploring people to support authors by ordering their books could help. (Please do this if you are able!)

If the pandemic continues in varying degrees through fall 2021, as some scientists are predicting, lots of other writers will be similarly affected, along with book stores and the entire publishing industry.

It’s been ill-timed for me, personally, too. It comes just as my agent has begun negotiating the contract for the memoir-in-essays I have been working on for years — my first solo book, after publishing anthologies. I have been playing what feels like the world’s longest game, being dogged but patient in my pursuit of a deal. I’m hoping the small indie publisher we’ve chosen to go with will be able to ride this out, and I’ll get to go forward as planned. But who knows?

It’s been challenging, though, to feel as if my publishing plans and my writing in general matter at all right now. In the midst of a global health crisis that is disrupting lives and killing people, it feels frivolous to even think about my book, continue with my newsletter, or write anything at all that is not virus-related. This, after decades of struggling to overcome a feeling common to many women: that my story doesn’t matter, and I don’t have permission to tell it.
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The Consequences of Surviving

Courtesy of Getty Images

PTSD is defined as an anxiety disorder caused by a traumatic event, or stressor, such as a natural disaster. A life-threatening illness is only considered a stressor if it involves a ‘sudden, catastrophic event’ such as waking up during surgery.

In this article for Aeon Liza Gross explores an argument put forward by Phil Wolfson, a psychiatrist in Marin County, that hearing the words “You’ve got cancer” is a catastrophic event in itself, and even when the tumors retreat, “that kind of fear stays with you.” Wolfson is campaigning for a new diagnosis: PTSD-life-threatening illness (PTSD-LTI) — to increase support both for the survivors of life-threatening illnesses, and for their carers.

Although a diagnosis can bring benefits, Cole says, ‘you are in a state of anxiety at all times.’ He can’t shake the thought that any aches and pains, normal for his 67 years, might be new signs of his body’s betrayal. Today, he practises palliative care at a hospice. He knows the patients are probably floating in space, too, needing specialised care to manage their distress.

He believes no one should leave an oncologist’s office with a cancer diagnosis without a referral to someone trained to manage the anxiety and trauma that inevitably shadows the course of treatment. But that’s not what happens. ‘As medicine advances, we have more survivors,’ Cole says. ‘That’s a good thing. But those survivors carry trauma to their graves, and we haven’t recognised that it’s a disease process that needs treatment.’

Wolfson is also an advocate for using ketamine and MDMA in the treatment of those suffering from this form of PTSD.

Therapists have long known that MDMA, outlawed in 1985 as having no medical use and a high potential for abuse, melts defences and eases anxieties while boosting mood and trust – key ingredients for successful therapy. The drug works partly by dissipating the crippling fear that prevents people from revisiting a trauma, a necessary step in learning how to live with it. ‘It opens the doors of the heart and removes some of the blocks to feeling and suppression,’ Wolfson says, making it easier to tolerate deeply distressing memories and emotions.

Feeling unburdened, Wolfson’s patients were willing to plumb the depths of their psychic pain in profound ways, looking at how the disease disrupted their lives, self-worth, and personal and professional interactions. Their ability to confront their worst fears helped Wolfson chart a therapeutic path to ease their suffering and anxiety.

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A Survey of My Right Arm

Greenspe Huang/South China Morning Post via Getty Images)

Ge Gao The Threepenny Review | Fall 2019 | 15 minutes (3,057 words)

 

Last summer, I woke up one morning to find my right hand couldn’t grab the doorknob to turn it open. The next thing I knew was that no matter how many times I shook it, it remained numb. Soon, on a hot June night, a furtive pain traveled from my right elbow to my palm, back and forth, through and through, like a fractious child jumping between hopscotch courts with his full body gravity, determined and ferocious.

I am a Chinese woman. Two things I am good at are self-diagnosing and self-preservation. I went to a Chinese massage place the next morning. The lady there told me it was “tennis elbow.” Which seemed funny and unfair to me: I had never played tennis in my life. When I was eighteen and dreamed about my future self wearing a short white tennis skirt, running in a blue court, I signed up for a tennis class—and quit after the first session. My skinny right arm was not capable of holding a 9.4-ounce tennis racquet against a spinning ball. The lady at the massage place first used her arm, then her feet to dissolve the knots on my forearm. A day later, small black and blue bruises on my right arm left a message—there was pain; there was suffering. I consciously wore long sleeves to cover it up, afraid of being misunderstood as a domestic violence victim. But I would roll my sleeve up when I met my friends for coffee. It was show and tell: my pain needed to be noticeable to others as well.

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Through a Glass, Tearfully

Illustration by Hannah Li

Maureen Stanton | Longreads | January 2020 | 26 minutes (6,448 words)

In the early 1990s I joined a stream of people strolling past the AIDS quilt spread across a gymnasium floor in Lansing, Michigan, the room quiet but for our muffled sniffling. I hadn’t expected the quilt — a patchwork of many quilts — to affect me so powerfully, the clothes and artifacts and mementos stitched into tapestries, with dates of births and premature deaths, soft beautiful tombstones.

Humans are the only creatures who cry for emotional reasons. Animals do not shed tears of emotion; apes have tear ducts but only to “bathe and heal” the eyes. Crying makes us human. In the 1956 film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, people who’d been replaced by aliens could no longer cry, a telltale sign that they were not human. In one scene, a man carries a pod containing the alien replica of a small child. “There’ll be no more tears,” he tells the child’s mother.

***

Some people are super tasters or super smellers, or even super see-ers, with an uncanny ability to remember faces. I am a super crier, or maybe a super empathizer. An astrologer once said that my soul bears the karmic burden of feeling others’ pain as if it were my own. This is apparently because of the placement on my birth chart of the comet Chiron, “the wounded healer,” named after a Greek centaur who could heal everyone but himself.

Once, in Columbus, Ohio, I choked up at Taco John’s, a brand new mom and pop joint, all spiffy with shiny stainless steel, but empty of customers. I could see the work and sacrifice the family had made to realize their dream — opening a taco shop. I could feel their hope when I walked in the door, but I could calculate the meager profit from my order against the cost of utilities, salaries, supplies. I could see their dream failing.

I nearly lost it again at Karyn’s Kitchen, a food truck in someone’s yard along the road to my house in Maine. Karyn probably figured she’d snag summer traffic on the way to the beach, but who wants to eat in someone’s yard? I ate there once out of pity — her husband’s “famous” meatloaf, which she served with mashed potatoes, steamed carrots, and two slices of white bread with a pat of margarine. When I asked her to heat up the cold gravy, she microwaved it until the plastic container melted and handed it to me like that. When I drive by Karyn’s yard now, I can’t stand to look at the empty space where her dream failed.

A woman in a laundromat once yelled at her small son, “No one wants to hear you,” and I got a lump in my throat.
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The Disease of Deceit

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Dvora Meyers | Longreads | January 2020 | 38 minutes (9,656 words)

In June, I woke to an alert from Facebook, a notification of a memory from five years ago. It was a photo of a woman in a park, leaning over, kissing the top of my dog’s head. The woman’s face was partially hidden but I immediately knew who it was — Chaya. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Elizabeth Wurtzel (AP Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Elizabeth Wurtzel, Nick Martin, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, David Wolman, and Jason Turbow.

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Elizabeth Wurtzel Made it Okay to Write ‘Ouch’

NEW YORK - AUGUST 14: American writer Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of the memoir "Prozac Nation" holds up a locket with the word "Prozac" on it and poses for a portrait in front of a window display of a hand holding pills on August 14, 1991 in New York City, New York. (Photo by Catherine McGann/Getty Images)

I loved Peter Schjeldahl’s recent New Yorker essay in which he alerted readers to his battle with terminal lung cancer. But I took umbrage when an acquaintance on social media praised Schjeldahl for adhering to the long-reigning maxim that a writer must never say “ouch” — never let the reader see that the painful experience you’re writing about actually hurt you.

It occurred to me that this is another of several “rules” about writing — established by affluent, straight, white men — that need to be re-written. I mean, could there be a more stereotypically male directive, or one more informed by white gentility? As far as I’m concerned, false bravado has no place in memoir.

When I learned this week of memoirist and Gen X icon Elizabeth Wurtzel’s death, at 52, from metastatic breast cancer, I realized: she re-wrote that rule.

Wurtzel’s raw, absorbing memoirs, Prozac Nation, and More, Now, Again, were ground-breaking in this way. They made it okay — even fashionable — to write “ouch,” something many of us in the trenches of publishing memoir and personal essays now see as valid and valuable. This is how readers with similar experiences have their pain validated; this is how readers with different experiences develop empathy toward others. This is how we change the world.

Wurtzel died as she lived, baring her deep, existential pain and vulnerability until the very end. She was working on her final personal essay for Medium’s GEN vertical when she passed away on January 7th.

In the piece she reveals that as her health was declining, her marriage was unraveling, and she was also still wrestling with new information her mother finally uncovered a couple of years ago: that her biological father was not the same man as the father she grew up with. Of her waning marriage, she writes:

I am estranged and strange, strangled up in blue.

I do not want to feel this way. I am going through the five stages of grief all at once, which Reddit strings have no doubt turned into 523. They are a collision course, a Robert Moses plan, a metropolitan traffic system of figuring it out.
I feel bad and mad and sad.

Is this a festival of insight or a clusterfuck of stupid? I change my mind all the time about this and about everything else.

I got married because I was done with crazy. But here it is, back again, the revenant I cannot shake. I feel like it’s 1993, when my heart had a black eye all the time.

26 is a boxing match of the soul.

I did not expect bruises at 52.

Wurtzel was often derided for her candid “oversharing,” and that rankled me. I’ve been defending her and other brave writers like her forever. Although I didn’t know her very well, we were acquainted, first meeting in the 90s when I dated her cousin. She was the sort of bold, outspoken woman I both admired and feared — the kind who inspired me to start an unapologetic women tag at Longreads. (And I had been meaning to ask her to write a piece for the Fine Lines series I launched a couple of years ago. I am kicking myself for missing the opportunity to add her voice to that series.)

I’m sad she’s gone. I’ve been finding comfort in wonderful remembrances of her by Deborah Copaken at The Atlantic, Emily Gould at Vanity Fair, and Molly Oswaks at the New York Times. Jia Tolentino at The New Yorker, Kera Bolonik at NBC News, Mandy Stadtmiller at Medium, and Nancy Jo Sales at The Cut.

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‘I Believe in Love’: Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Final Year, In Her Own Words

Longreads Pick

Memoirist Elizabeth Wurtzel was working on this, her final personal essay, when she passed away on January 7th, 2020 from metastatic breast cancer. In the piece she reveals that as her health was declining, her marriage was unraveling, and that she was still wrestling with new information her mother finally revealed a couple of years ago: that her biological father was not the same man as the father she grew up with. With an introduction and end note from her editor and friend, Garance Franke-Ruta.

Source: GEN
Published: Jan 8, 2020
Length: 19 minutes (4,830 words)

The Trippy Science of Psychedelic Studies

Longreads Pick

Psychedelic substances show great promise treating everything from cancer to depression, anxiety to alcoholism. To help understand this burgeoning field of inquiry, one writer participates in a study. Tripping taught her as much about the promises as the dangers of medical psychedelics.

Source: Elemental
Published: Aug 22, 2019
Length: 10 minutes (2,520 words)