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 April 2007 Post Book Essays "Coincidence, Connection,
and Grace" - Thursday, April 26, 2007 "Coincidence, Connection, and Grace" - Thursday, April 26, 2007 I recently talked with a woman named Sheila. She's a vivacious redhead who volunteers in the Cancer Resource Center of Memorial Hospital here in Chattanooga. I pass the threshold of that Center at least once a week for Tai Chi classes, or to see my social worker, or to get a Reiki treatment, or to talk with one of the oncology nurses, or just to hang out and see who's there. I've made some great friends. The volunteers are all wonderful, and I enjoy talking with them as I wait to do whatever is on the menu that day. This week, my conversation with Sheila went past the usual, brief pleasantries. She was interested to see my book, which is now is the Center's library, and it caused her to share her own story. It's a remarkable story of faith played out, of sacrifice, and of "coincidence," which has sometimes been defined as God's way of working anonymously. Sheila is a five-year survivor of acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). It's the most common type of leukemia in adults, and it can turn real nasty if not treated early. Here's how she found it and the beginning of a string of "coincidences." Sheila was at her son's ball game and got a spider bite. Her hand swelled alarmingly and this led her to her primary care physician, who did bloodwork. Her PCP came back with much more troubling news, that her blood picture was abnormal, and sent her to a hematologist. It was a matter of hours when Sheila was suddenly facing not only the news of a life-threatening disease, but immediate aggressive chemotherapy and hospitalization for weeks in an isolation room. Initially, this rigorous treatment reined in Sheila's AML; she was in total remission and enjoyed 14 months getting back to her life, tending to her three sons, enjoying time with her husband, Danny, and going back to work part-time. Then lightning struck again: news came that the leukemia was in full attack again. At this point, a bone marrow transplant became her only hope. A bone marrow transplant or a stem cell transplant are radical treatments that lead us literally to death's door and then jerk us back from the doorsill. In order to bring the raging overgrowth of Sheila's white blood cells back under control, she would have to allow the doctors to obliterate every cell in her body that could produce blood cells, since the mechanism that produced a normal amount of healthy cells had long since run amok. She faced massive chemo to accomplish this, but first, they had to find a donor who was an adequate match and whose bone marrow could be injected back into what would be Sheila's sterile, barren marrow. Then would come the days of waiting in total isolation, hoping and praying that the transplant took, that the new donor's bone marrow would rev up inside Sheila and begin to produce healthy cells in appropriate numbers, and that Sheila's body would accept the new marrow. Bone marrow drives were held. Friends rallied. Hope grew. Over a hundred supporters signed up to be tested for a match, but none of the potential donors were a match. How Sheila's heart must have sunk. How frightened her family must have been that they would lose her. An international search was launched on her behalf. One single match was found, in Germany. Sheila went through the bone marrow transplant and to see her now, you would never know that she had faced death by virtue of her diagnosis, and death again as she went through the most demanding of treatments. She told me that she met her donor this past summer. What a joyous and emotional encounter that must have been! The reunion was in Las Vegas, which provided for me some funny and poetic irony. They met in the capital of chances taken. It turns out that her donor was a schoolteacher named Dani. Ten years ago, this teacher had a student, a five-year-old boy, who had leukemia and needed a transplant. She had signed up then, hoping that she could help him. They weren't a match. But, ten years later, she was notified that a patient urgently needed her marrow. She didn't hesitate. One piece of Dani's history that made her match even better for Sheila was the fact that Dani and her husband had not yet had children. This circumstance of her life turned out to be a crucial factor in the likelihood that her marrow could help Sheila. She saved Sheila so that she could finish raising her boys, and help others, and now greet us other cancer patients with her smile and her auburn hair shining around her pink-cheeked, healthy countenance. The spider bite. The little German boy who had leukemia and needed help. The German donor who had signed up ten years before. A mother in the Appalachian mountains of the US waiting to reclaim her life and see her children to adulthood. Coincidence? God working anonymously? I think, rather, that if we look, we see the Author's name written in golden, capital letters of grace on these things, and at the crossroads of so many unexpected and outwardly unlikely intersections in our own lives, if we just look. Sheila and Dani have a connection that is more intimate even than the marrow and blood type they now share. They are forever tied together in the world of hope and selfless sacrifice, in friendship born of necessity and sealed with faith in human goodness by a gentle and insistent Guiding Hand.
"We're praying for you!" - Thursday, April 19, 2007 I live in the South. I love living in the South. For those of you who don't live here, it really does have its own culture, values, and practices. I've always lived in the South, although one time I lived only 15 miles below the Mason-Dixon Line. Because of this brief foray toward the frontiers of Yankee-land, when my husband Steve was courting me, he challenged me on my Southern-ness. Raised in Spartanburg, South Carolina and Atlanta, Georgia, he had the unmitigated gall (we're good at righteous indignation in the South) to say that, perhaps, I was not, in fact, a true Southerner. I offered incontrovertible proof, to which he, like any Southern gentleman would, acquiesced. I provided three pieces of evidence. The first was that my mother's name was Emma Joyce, and that is what her family called her, all of a piece: EmmaJoyce. The second was that she said "bread" as a two-syllable word. The clincher, however, was my own name. He had not known my middle name. I'm Debbi Sue. Believe me, he withdrew the challenge gallantly and immediately. So, here I am in Chattanooga, gateway to the Deep South. Everywhere I go people speak to each other. Neighbors come over on the first day you move in and bring sweet tea (that's iced tea to you Yankees) and plates piled high with sandwiches. Then, nine times out of ten, they ask you the question that shocks folks who move in from other regions, but makes this a great place to live: Where do you go to church? Now, granted, not everybody goes to church. Some people go to synagogues and masjids or, like me, to our local Baha'i Center. Looking past the assumption of church as the place for worshipping God, what I LOVE about the South is that not only is it not taboo to get into discussions about God and spiritual things, it's welcomed. When I got sick, so many people immediately told me, "We're praying for you." I knew that this was not just an empty social nicety; they meant it. Not only would they be praying for me, but pretty soon, I'd be showing up on prayer lists in Bible study groups, in Sunday morning services, at prayer circles, and yes thankfully and to my delight in masjids, synagogues, and Hindu Centers, too. I believe what the Writings of my faith say: "The reality of man is his thought." There's another piece of Baha'i Scripture speaking about God's omnipotence that includes the words, "He doeth as He doeth and what recourse have we?" I've never seen these two verses as contradictory. How I frame my own thinking creates, to a large extent, how I experience life. I also believe with certitude that God's will is present and active. I don't think that I'd ever pray for a BMW Z8 sports car, but I do believe that if I pray for assistance, courage, patience, and strength and those other attributes manifest in me as tokens of how I was created in His image, my life will be affected to the good. So, when someone says that they're praying for me, I say, "Thanks, and keep 'em coming!" I can't explain the sensation or perception I have carried with me since the early days of my cancer nearly 13 years ago, or the intensification of the feeling at times of crisis, but I have felt carried along the whole time in a net of prayer. I know that strangers as well as friends include me regularly as they turn toward the Creator. Last week, I got a call from a friend who lives in Nashville. Lana has been through her own cancer hell, first with breast cancer and then with tongue cancer. She called me from L.A. where she was visiting her daughter and grandchildren and, as always, we compared notes, both medical and spiritual, about how we're coping. She called back the next day to say, "I've got one other thing I wanted to tell you." Her husband, Joey, had just flown in and they were talking about the cancer experience. She called to tell me that Joey prays a particularly powerful Baha'i prayer every night, one that members of my faith know and love as the "long healing prayer." This prayer takes about 15 minutes to pray aloud, and it calls upon God in many ways, identifying hundreds of His qualities, from the Old Testament destroyer and ravager to the tender One, the healer, and the concealer, in His mercy, of our sins. It has a cadence that is soothing, with a refrain at the end of each short verse that says, "Thou the sufficing, Thou the healing, Thou the abiding, O Thou, Abiding One." It's meditative in the way that saying a rosary is or reciting other repeated words or verses in other faith traditions. Lana told me that Joey remembers four women by name every night when he says this prayer, and she wanted me to know that I am one of those. He has prayed the prayer every night since February 7, 2005. What faithfulness he has offered to me! What a gift that Lana took the time to tell me that her husband remembers me in his prayers, a husband who has plenty to implore God of already on his own behalf. How blessed I am for this kind of love and care, and for the openness of friends offering its comfort to me, and the soul connection that is beyond my understanding. I ask that their prayer be for me to lean into God's will. If I can do that, then I know that whatever happens, all will be well. If you would like a copy of the "long healing prayer" from the Baha'i Faith, email me at: deborahhampton@slappedawake.com
"Fashion, Feet, and the Advent of Spring" - Wednesday, April 4, 2007 Well, it's spring again, that time of the year when we begin to bare more and more of ourselves, both for comfort's sake and to submit to the latest fashion trends. The past two seasons' shoe fashions have included cute, pointy-toed, closed-front mules with kitten heels (what kind of an animal combination it THAT?). This year, wouldn't you know, it's "peep-toes" for shoes. Everywhere you shop, all the shoes - casual and dressy - have the toe cut out, so that you can give onlookers a tantalizing glimpse of your pretty, pedicured toes. I have several foot challenges, before I even get started on the effects of chemo. First of all, I've worn at least a size 9 since the third grade. I'm not kidding. I can remember sitting in my mother's lap, my long skinny legs dangling towards the floor, with my ungainly, gunboat feet hanging off the ends, weeping and wailing during my ugly duckling stage, "I'm so ugly! My feet are so big." I have to give my mother credit for balancing honesty and consolation. She didn't try to tell me they weren't big. That would have defied logic, truth, and the fundamental laws of physics, given the space those hummers were already occupying. No, she reassured me with something I clung to for years. In the days of my childhood, when the nation looked to Jackie Kennedy as the gold standard of chic, my mother lovingly intoned, "It's OK, honey. Jackie Kennedy wears a size 10." The next challenge I have with my feet are two lovely recessive gene traits I picked up from swimming in the Lang/Johncox gene pool. First, I got my father's long, prehensile toes. My second toe is as long as my little finger - really. Even in my youth, when my feet had the advantage of young skin, I've had strangers stop me on elevators to comment on my toes. Second, I also got my mother's singular, crooked toe. The crooked toes veer off at a crazy 45-degree angle right at the tiny last joint. This anomaly graces the toe next to the littlest piggy on both feet. Actually, my mother and her kin wore this aberration with a kind of clannish pride. When she came to see my newborn daughter for the first time, she gave a passing, cursory glace toward the baby's beautiful upturned face and then turned her attention to the feet, hiking up the infant kimono to reveal the persistence of inheritance. "Ooooh! She's got our toes!" Mama crowed with satisfaction and mater familias pride. OK, so picture my feet, now a size 10 after
childbearing and 55 years of gravity have had their way with
me. Of course, I also have the mauve road maps of spider veins
on both ankles that age has bequeathed me. On top of that, I've
got chemo toes. Various kinds of chemo can kill toenails (and
even fingernails). Poet and cancer survivor Tess Gallagher describes
it in one poem saying:
Recently, I was looking longingly at a young friend's feet. Shirin is 20 and has plump, smallish feet that look like ripe fruit. She could model shoes. She has nice long nailbeds and smooth skin. Ahhh, youth! Then I contemplate my own feet ...I've been searching for something to wear with shorts, jeans, and skirts this summer that covers my toes but still feels festive. I found some slip-on shoes that are lightly beaded. I bought a brown pair and then went back and bought a black pair. They're "I Dream of Jeanie" shoes and could also be worn with a harem outfit (now, that wouldn't be a pretty picture either and perhaps is a subject for another blog entirely). So, I settle into spring, and I'm passing fashion by. Perhaps the truth is more that fashion is passing me by, and I'm waving as I stand on the sidelines. But, wait a minute! Hey, I'm still standing! Forget fashion! Another spring!
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