I am journaling this because my oncologist suggested it might help. I don’t like taking drugs ( unless they are recreational ) so I don’t want to try the alternatives he and I discussed.
It is now 2015 and this year, so far, is no better than last year. In January I was diagnosed with a malignant pleomorphic sarcoma – aka cancerous tumour in the leg. It is fast-growing, but still small. It is being treated with radiation therapy with surgery to follow and the long-term prognosis is good. That is what the left side of my brain has understood of the process.
The right side of my brain is harder to convince of anything. It is distrustful of authority, of change, of technology. It understands things differently. My right side has been giving me dreams. Some nights, one. Other nights, several. They are all about death, and some are also about being buried alive. Last night I had the worst dream I have ever had, and I can’t shake it. It has made me teary and anxious all day long. When I tried to explain it to my doctor, I could not. The adult in me understands what is happening and is fine. But the baby in me won’t stop crying…….
In the dream I had cancer and I had a doctor who knew a probable cure. I did not live in a wealthy western culture, but in a primitive, shamanic one. So my doctor ( ie shaman) had a cure that I didn’t really understand. It required a child to help out. I agreed to the cure therapy.
The cure worked rather like that old Mouse Trap game. First a ball rolls down a channel and that triggers a lever, etc, until at last a mouse is caught in a cage.
But in this dream, in the last step, my cancer was removed, and the child was thrown into a pit. The pit was like a narrow steel shaft deep in the ground. In the “real” world, I live in a mining town so it is not hard to imagine where my subconscious came up with that image. I did not know, in the dream, that this was how the child was to be used in the cure, and I was horrified when I saw the child thrown into the pit. I screamed at the shaman to pull the child out, that it didn’t matter what happened to me, I was an old lady, but the child should not be hurt.
On the shaman’s face was the same look I see on my doctor’s face when I ask him questions about my prognosis – about whether I will lose much muscle in my leg, about how soon I will walk again, etc. That look that says that you are too stupid to know what you are asking , and you have no idea what you are in for, and what you are asking is probably impossible. He and his helpers said they would try to get the child out of the shaft, but I knew they would not be able to and the child would die all alone down there of heat or water loss, or starvation, or go mad. And I would be cured.
Of course, the dream was so horrifying, I woke up. And yes, I know it was just a dream. But all day long, as I go through the treatment in my Canadian health care system, I keep wondering, is there a child being hurt somewhere in the world, in order to cure me, to keep me alive past my best before date?