Feeling on the eve of surgery

In a few days, I’ll receive my third surgery since the cancer diagnosis. This time on a third affected organ—my lungs. My relationship with my body has endured many permutations since that traumatic day I was lying in bed in the hospital ward and the attending doctor came into my room with his cadre of students and told me “we can say with 95% accuracy that you have stage 4 cancer.” After they left, I sobbed with G.’s arm around my shoulders, and whispered desperately to everything I thought I knew, “What’s going on with my body?”

That very difficult day initiated a journey of discovering my body. Part of me has marveled at its endurance; another part has forsaken its morbidity. No matter the wonder or condemnation, I try to let all  parts of me be heard, because each makes sense in its own way. And within this gentle net of acceptance I’ve invested a lot of effort in cultivating a tender and merciful relationship with my body. Patiently listening to its aches and pains, clearing the floor when it desires to dance, learning beautiful songs for it to sing, and assembling soothing places it can relax deeply. Healing—not as a command, but as an open hand, invitation. 

There are really so many ways that I have learned to cultivate an increasingly harmonious relationship with my body. From a more nutritious diet, to enjoyable exercise, to somatic practices that nurture structural and energetic systems, to walking and breathing among our trees and rivers. And the blessed thing is that I genuinely revel in all of these things. Sure, they take effort and work, but they feel like gifts to my body, they’re enlivening.

This living and growing connection with my body, with all its natural beauty and dynamic dialogue, is something I really treasure. Which is one of the reasons why it’s challenging and sometimes heartbreaking to also obliterate its every cellular nook and cranny with chemotherapy, and toxify it with radiation tracers for imaging procedures, and puncture and slice at its viscera for surgery. This loving union with my body—is there a way to maintain our peace even as the best cancer treatments available wield weapons upon it? Can I keep its trust that this is our path to continued healing? Can it forgive the temporary though brutal trials and feel the care that underlies it all?