fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Chaos

Feel free to call me Dorothy—you know, the girl in the Wizard of Oz who was consumed by a tornado and deposited in an alien land with no anchor but her dog Toto.

Chaos consumes me. As I sit typing this, my desk is littered with a full water bottle, a pill box, bills, scissors, a calendar, a mouse, some essential oils, pens, a Kleenex box, an empty water bottle, a stack of who-knows-what-they-are papers (actually, three stacks), some stuffed animals, an eyeglasses holder, a keyboard duster, some jewelry—I can’t even continue to list all the items.

This is a microcosm of my mind. Piles of shit everywhere, nowhere to put them, and no energy to deal with them. I pick things up and put them back down—both within and without my mind.

I went to a local oncologist last week. He was educational and straightforward.

Chemo is not indicated for my rare internasal squamous cell cancer. Immunotherapy ( 1.5-hour infusions of Keytruda, every three weeks for two years) would be palliative—that is, they wouldn’t cure my cancer, just prolong my life … maybe. But my insurance won’t cover that until a PET scan in October says whether or not I still have cancer.

So while I’m waiting—and battling, and a full-out assault it is—I am trying to boost my immune system naturally. No sugar. No processed foods. No dairy. No gluten. Currently no fruit. Celery and cucumber juice every morning. It’s good I can’t taste much since my two nose surgeries and 37 radiation sessions over the past 17 months. I won’t even count the supplements I’ve ordered.

I have a very expensive second water filter that supposedly oxygenates my water. I have a sauna infrared blanket. I have an air purifier. I have a nose steamer. I have a fancy eye apparatus. Essential oils permeate my house. I still can’t smell a thing.

I’m really tired of living these last 16 months with CANCER. I want to not think about it and get on with life. But it consumes me in a chaos of machines and madness.

I’m about an hour and a half from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. I can see it from my deck—the trees, the buildings, the history: now consumed by fire and smoke.

Then into my email in-box comes this statement from DailyOM: “Sometimes a part of us must die before another part of us can come to life.”

And so I wait.

Claudia Presto
Kanab, Utah

Subscribe

Get the latest issue of Pulse delivered weekly to your inbox, free.

Comments

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related More Voices

Chaos

More Voices Themes

Scroll to Top

Subscribe to Pulse.

It's free.