Team April's Breast Cancer Blog

"Life After Lemonade" now available in paperback!!

2011-11-17T20:23:00.000-08:00

"Life After Lemonade"won't be available on Amazon.com for a week, but you can get an advance copy at the CreateSpace e-Store by using this link! https://www.createspace.com/3725848

- April

Long Time, No See!

2011-11-13T22:30:00.000-08:00

I know I haven't blogged in forever, life has been a little nuts! I've been spending all my writing time working on my second book, and I finished it tonight! Today was actually the three-year anniversary of my cancer diagnosis, which makes this accomplishment that much sweeter. :)

Life After Lemonade, the follow-up to Recipe For Lemonade, is now available at Smashwords.com: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/104891. I'm currently working on formatting the paperback, which should be available at Amazon.com in early December.

Since finishing the Ford contest (see post below), I've moved to Boulder, Colorado and am working full-time for a software company, but I still had time to put together this video update of my 40-by-40.

Enjoy!

April :)

FORD PICKS MY VIDEO & DONATES $10,000 TO FIRST DESCENTS!!

2011-01-26T00:44:00.000-08:00

So, it's official: I'm going to Madrid to test drive the 2012 Ford Focus as part of Ford's Global Test Drive Challenge! The campaign's slogan is "Start More Than A Car," and so, with $10,000 in grant money, Ford is helping First Descents, my favorite charity, send 10 young adult survivors to camp to learn how to cope and rebuild their confidence post-treatment. Check back here for *FOUR* upcoming videos about Madrid, how First Descents is using the grant money, and how we're Starting Something More together! (and yes, I'll also be posting the videos to My YouTube Channel and the First Descents YouTube Channel)

For more information about the contest and the other 39 members of our "Test Drive Team," check out the Ford Focus Facebook Page and click on the "Global Test Drive" tab.

You can also friend ME on Facebook to get daily updates on the trip and the challenge!

40-By-40 Update: My 2011 Schedule

2011-01-24T20:32:00.000-08:00

I wanted to share a formal update of my 40-by-40, since I've not only checked off a few of them, but there are quite a few I'm working on for THIS YEAR, and I want to invite as many people as I can to join me!

If you're interested in doing an athletic event with me, please consider joining my Team FD team and fundraising for First Descents, my favorite survivor charity.

If you're just interested in helping (or witnessing, and posting the video on YouTube), friend request me on Facebook and we can touch base!

Here is the list - things I have DONE are in italics; things I am DOING in 2011 are BOLDED and things that I still have to do are still in regular font...

1. Do a Komen 3-Day Walk.

2. Do an Avon 2-Day Walk.

3. Do the Peak Hike on Mt. Tam to benefit the Breast Fund.

4. Write & publish my manifesto (Recipe For Lemonade).

5. Rock climb in Moab, UT.

6. Run the NYC Marathon.

7. Have my own place again.

8. Inner-tube down the Russian River on Labor Day Weekend.

9. Run the Disney Princess 1/2 Marathon in Florida.

10. Go to an Oprah show with my friend Loren Madden.

11. Finish the Napa Tri with my friend Kristy Lundy.

12. Go on a Chocolate Tour of Paris with my friend Anne Barrow.

13. Skydive with my friend Ian Fuller.

14. Run the Honolulu Marathon 10 years after I first ran it.

15. Learn to roll a kayak with First Descents.

16. Speak at a major survivor event like the OMG Summit or the Young Survivor Conference.

17. Learn the 6 Basic Figure Skating Jumps.

18. Learn to play the electric guitar. Rock the Fender Strat.

19. Execute a Dusk-to-Dawn Dance Party Fundraiser benefiting a young survivor non-profit.

20. Go to Bora-Bora for 2 weeks with someone I love.

21. Learn to fly-fish with Casting for Recovery.

22. Perfect my chocolate-chip cookie recipe.

23. Go to the Telluride Film Festival.

24. Complete an event in Gatlinburg to celebrate the life of my friend Kevin Price's brother, who died young from cancer.

25. Hike Mt. Kilimanjaro.

26. Run a mile in under 8 minutes.

27. Start a garden again.

28. Do a Muddy Buddy event with my friend Katie Birkholz.

29. Secure a well-paying job I love, with great benefits (including health insurance).

30. Take my niece and her half-sister to Kaua'i to learn how to surf.

32. Attend a gravesite ceremony with Katy Chin in New York.

33. Build a Rube Goldberg Machine to light the candles on my 40th birthday.

34. Build a Bottle School with Eli Call and Hug It Forward.

35. Pay off all my medical bills.

36. Build a treehouse with Marlon King.

37. Play a zombie in a film or TV show (tell you a secret: I've wanted to do this ever since I saw MJ's Thriller video).

38. Go ALL OUT on Halloween (i.e., dress up in full costume, complete with makeup).

39. Go to Graceland on my birthday (which also happens to be Elvis' birthday)

40. Dance with Ellen Degeneres.

To watch a VIDEO about my 40-by-40, click here.

For my November 2010 Update Video, click here.

Deja Vu: What To Do When A Lemon Returns

2011-01-19T17:33:00.001-08:00

"You fell off the wagon AGAIN?"

"You're getting divorced AGAIN?"

"You have cancer AGAIN?"

AGAIN. It's the hardest word in the English language to hear. It fills us with shame and disappointment and fear and exhaustion. ANOTHER lemon. ANOTHER unmet expectation. AGAIN.

The day after I celebrated my second year of being cancer-free, I felt a lump in my healthy breast. Oh no, I thought. Not again...

My mind was filled with the ramifications and justifications associated with a recurrence: I'd have to get a double mastectomy. I'd never be able to breast feed. If it was in my lymph nodes, I'd have to go through chemo again and lose my hair - my hair, which I had just started to enjoy having again! And if they gave me Adriamycin, it would damage my heart, compromising my ability to even carry a child full-term. My mind raced until I had convinced myself that I had cancer AGAIN, even before I'd gotten the lump checked out by my oncologist. It wasn't surprising, I said to friends - triple negative cancers tend to recur in the third year post-treatment. I even send a long e-mail to my doctor, asking him for a plastic surgeon referral.

At the first sign of a familiar lemon, we fly into defensiveness. We gird our loins, man our battle stations, and prepare for the fight we know is coming. We might even be proud of ourselves, for being ready to face it! What we overlook is the sense of power our preparedness gives us. That's right - power. It feeds your ego when you tell yourself you know what's coming, and you might start to see the same lemon over and over - you might even resist making lemonade because if you can keep hanging onto the lemon, you never have to be surprised. You can keep living in a world where everything is predictable and controllable. When the same lemon keeps coming up in your life, ask yourself what would happen if you made lemonade - if you were honest with yourself about your expectations, about the evidence you were (or were not) paying attention to, and about how serious you are about living in a world where everything is predictable and controllable.

I have met women who joke that they keep dating the same guy over and over, which is funny unless he's a guy who beats the shit out of you. Men who keep quitting the same job, over and over. Why? Why do we do this? Because we know the routine. Because it's familiar. It's not uncharted, unknown territory. We would rather be stuck in a rut than get lost or hurt trying something new! Because why would you want to get involved in a relationship without a map, without the familiar stages and signs? BECAUSE IT MIGHT SET YOU FREE, THAT'S WHY.

The price of your freedom is courage - courage to step into a place where things are not predictable or controllable, where you don't know the routine, where there aren't any signposts or roadmaps and you have to blaze a new trail. And you know what? It's exciting, blazing a new trail. It's scary - it's scary as hell, trust me. But it's the only way out of a rut - leaving what you know behind.

Sometimes, our motivation is even darker than we think. We lose and gain the same twenty pounds again and again, and complain about it, but after a few years, those twenty pounds become a very helpful scapegoat - a reason why we didn't get the promotion, can't go out with the girls, have to buy new clothes. What would happen if we actually lost the weight? If we actually were the weight we thought would be the magic combination to a safe where all the happiness we could ever want was locked up? What if we lost the weight and we still hated our jobs, still couldn't talk to girls, still resented our mothers? What then?

When I went to my doctor, he sonogrammed my breast and told me I was fine. "But you have to understand," I told him, "That's what they said two years ago and eight months later I had Stage Three breast cancer!" He took me to his office and showed me my MRI, which, he said, can detect cellular activity a year before a tumor actually develops. I was talking to a man who worked with the woman who wrote the book on breast cancer, I realized. What did I think? That I had some magic cancer that an MRI couldn't detect, that a doctor with all his credentials would miss? I had to face the fact that I was in remission. That the other shoe wasn't dropping, and that, while it might drop in the future, it wasn't dropping anytime soon, and I had better get on with my life.

What if you're not gonna have another heart attack? What if you never date another hot mess of a woman? What if you never take a drink again, and you actually - not HAVE to, but - GET to be the person you always wanted to be? Would that be so terrible? So scary? What if the last time it all fell apart really WAS the last time? Could you build a life worth living, the life of your dreams? Will you let yourself? Because that's all you have to do: you just have to let yourself believe that you can do it, that you're worth it, and that it's time. Stop waiting for the other shoe to drop. Stop living this half-life where you're waiting for life to be the way you want it to be. MAKE it so, as Captain Kirk says. Make it so.

Now, there might be a little voice in your head that says, why do that, when it can all fall apart again? Why raise the stakes of my life, and take the risk that I will have that much more to lose? Why live big and fly high, when that means that if I fall, I'll fall hard?

Because no one really truly wants to live a life of fear and mediocrity. THAT'S why most men lead lives of quiet desperation - they're not desperate to keep something from ruining their amazing lives, but desperate to HAVE lives at all, to have more than the mundane routine of a life unfilfilled, untapped, unchallenged! Desperate because they're afraid one day they WILL go into the doctor and he's going to say STAGE THREE and you know what that desperate man is going to think about? The time he saw Bull Durham with his wife and thought about painting her toenails but was too chicken to ask if he could. The promotion he felt obligated to take right after they got married, because even though it meant a shorter honeymoon, it got us a bigger house, and isn't that more important? The summer after he graduated college, when he thought about Jack Kerouac-ing it through the Southwest, but got an internship instead. The fishing trip he took with his Dad that was too short, too short. Al the things he couldn't even DO "AGAIN" because he never did them the first time. Regret. Regret is why you should live your life now, and live it fully, without hampering it with thoughts of what if it happens again?

Paul Bowles said:

"Because we do not know when we will die,

we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well,

and yet everything happens only a certain number of times .

How many more times will you remember

a certain afternoon of your childhood

that is so deeply a part of your being

you can't even conceive of your life without it?

Perhaps four or five times more?

Perhaps not even that.

How many more times will you watch the full moon rise?

Perhaps, twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

Live NOW. Live NOW because it's all you have and when you are broke, the things you mourn are not the things you mourn when you are dying. Trust me, I KNOW. When I thought I had cancer again, I felt nothing but relief that I had taken a road trip, and spent too much money, and seen people I always meant to see. And while I felt sheepish and unsure when my doctor told me I was *still* cancer-free, in three days I felt relief, because I am back to living like I'm living.

In closing, remember, if you do find yourself in familiar waters, there is an antidote to AGAIN: BEFORE.

BEFORE is how you handled it when you didn't know what to expect. When you hadn't been there, and you were filled with fear about what everything meant, what you were going to lose and how you were going to handle it. AGAIN means you've been there BEFORE, and this gives you an advantage in the resilience arena. BEFORE makes AGAIN easier.

So climb. Climb high and climb far, and if the other shoe drops and you lose your grip, take the fricking fall. You've done it before. You can do it again.

FOCUS ON FIRST DESCENTS!

2010-12-29T17:47:00.000-08:00

VOTE FOR OUR VIDEO BY CLICKING HERE!

http://apps.facebook.com/globaltestdrive/showentry?entryurl=%2Fcontests%2Fshowentry%2F695578%2Fnull%2F4

Here is a video I made for First Descents to enter the Ford Focus Global Drive Contest - they have a chance to win $10,000 and send TEN young adult survivors to camp next summer. VOTE NOW at the link above - voting closes New Year's Eve at midnight! :)

First Descents teaches young adult survivors of cancer how to overcome the emotional, psychological, and physical challenges of recovery through whitewater kayaking & other outdoor adventure experiences. By providing an education in healing, couched in some of Nature's most beautiful settings, survivors are enabled to thrive post-treatment and live fuller, richer lives, unbound by the limitations of their disease. Help us send TEN young adult cancer survivors to camp this summer by voting for our video in the Ford Focus Global Drive contest! To meet the campers we serve, and find out more about how we help young adults get busy living after cancer, visit FD's YouTube channel or connect with us on Facebook. Visit our webpage, join Team FD, and read our blog at www.firstdescents.org.

Be Down For The Adventure! (November 40-by-40 Update)

2010-11-19T21:05:00.000-08:00

You may know me as April Capil, but in the First Descents family, my name is "Lemon Drop." I got my nickname because I wrote a book called "Recipe For Lemonade" - about how to rebuild your optimism post-disaster. If you *really* know me, you know I know a thing or two about survival.

For me, cancer came at the most inopportune time – after I had moved 3,000 miles from home to start a cacao farm on an island in the middle of the Pacific. After the bailout contracted my local economy and plummeted the value of my newly-planted dream property on said island. After my online business closed its doors, and before I realized I had crap health insurance that would not cover $250,000 of my medical bills. Yes, cancer was… inopportune, to say the least. Life gave me the ultimate lemon – a body that was not what I signed up for. A battle I hadn’t signed up for. Disappointment after disappointment – unrelenting unmet expectations, for weeks and weeks, until I looked around at all the lemons I had been dealt and realized that if I didn’t start making lemonade, life was going to get even more bitter. So I sought out other people who knew what it was like to have a chest port, who knew what it was like to lose your hair, chunk by agonizing chunk. I met women who were much, much stronger than me – and ones who were weaker, angrier, and more self-pitying. I woke up one day, dazed, and realized I had survived. I asked myself how - HOW, in the face fo so much? The answer was, I made lemonade out of lemons. "Recipe For Lemonade" isn't a cancer memoir, but a collection of the strategies I used to keep my sanity during a tough time. I love my "FD" nickname because it reminds me every day I am a survivor of more than just cancer.

First Descents gave me back the courage and fortitude that cancer stripped away, so I've made a commitment to fundraise for them as a way of returning the favor. Your gift to Team FD will not only support me in my endeavors to make my athletic achievements count for more than just my own blood, sweat, and tears - it will help give someone else their strength and courage back after cancer, and enable First Descents to continue to do the great work they're doing helping survivors like me. This video is a summary of what I've been able to do this year with the support and encouragement of First Descents, and a preview of what they have inspired me to put on my plate for 2011 as a member of "Team FD" - the organization's athletic-event focused fundraising arm.

If you'd like to join me at any of my races in 2011, click on the Team FD link below and sign up. You can fundraise as little or as much as you want to - no amount is too small and every little bit helps!

Thank you, with all my heart.

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TO DONATE OR JOIN MY "TEAM FD" TEAM, CLICK HERE:http://teamfd.firstdescents.org/2010/fd/teamapril/aprilcapil

Screening Options For Breast Cancer - My 2 Cents

2010-10-27T12:31:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of attention on mammograms for women as an early detection tool for breast cancer - early detection saves lives! - and yet, the American Cancer Society recommends against women under 40 getting them. With such an effective tool out there, many women are demanding to know why.

I just added an amazing physician as part of my "Cancer Team," Dr. Jon Greif, who actually wrote a journal article on the subject (http://newsfromthebreast.blogspot.com/), and explained to me how and why breast cancer develops and spreads, and how mammographies and MRIs are used as screening tools. I also had a thermogram with Dr. William Amalu, who started his practice after his sister died young from breast cancer that was missed by mammography.

As it turns out, yearly mammograms are actually NOT effective screening tools for women under 40 who are not at risk for breast cancer. They're not only expensive; they also expose you to radiation that is unnecessary if you're not at risk for developing cancer (i.e., you are under 40 and have no family history, no genetic predisposition, or no environmental factors that put you at risk). Another factor is, mammograms are not perfect screening tools. I had two "clear" mammograms in the 4 years prior to being diagnosed with Stage IIIA Invasive Ductal Carcinoma, most likely because they were film mammograms, not digital. Film mammograms are apparently notorious for "missing" cancer in some women (after hearing Dr. Amalu's sister's story, I wonder if she too was a victim of film mammography).

In addition to mammograms, there are two other procedures that image the breast. Thermograms are "heat pictures" that detect blood vessel development in the breast - and MRIs - Magnetic Resonance Imaging scans - which can detect cellular changes in the breast. Even these two screening options have their limitations, though.

So, what's a girl to do, when being surrounded by pink ribbons inspires anxiety about the Big C? There are a few things, with various costs and benefits, that you can do to improve your chances of detecting breast cancer, whether you are "at-risk" for it or not. Here they are:

1. Self-Exams. First, you should know your breasts. Every dimple, every lump, every little twinge-y area and how they all change during your menstrual cycle. I check my boobs in the shower every month, and it was during one of these self-checks that I noticed a little lump on my right breast. The size of a red seedless grape, it felt kind of firm and different from the rest of the tissue around it. I waited a month, and when it was still there, went to my OB/GYN, who recommended a mammogram and sonogram. At the end of the sonogram, the technician told me, "Well, we have a two out of three - there's something there, it's not cancer, but we don't know what it is." They recommended I keep an eye on it and come back if it changed. Two years later, I was getting a breast reduction and I mentioned the lump to my plastic surgeon, who recommended another mammogram, just to be sure. Back I went to the screening facility, and again, they told me, "No cancer, keep an eye on it." No biopsy, no MRI. All this time, I was still giving myself exams, still monitoring the lump, and it was still there, but it never occurred to me to demand it be removed - it couldn't possibly be cancer, I told myself - I was too young, right? When I developed a second lump in my armpit, and the lump in my breast started to feel like a wad of chewing gun instead of a grape, I went to another doctor, and because I had been monitoring it for four years, I knew with absolute certainty that it had been there, and that it had changed shape. My new doc recommended an immediate lumpectomy, and I was diagnosed with Stage 3A breast cancer. The diagnostic tools at my disposal failed me, but my own knowledge of my body saved my life.

2. Thermograms. Less expensive than a mammogram or an MRI, Thermograms are non-radiation based, non-invasive, and low-cost (http://www.breastthermography.com/breast_thermography_mf.htm). So, why don't we use them instead of mammograms or MRIs? Because there are things a mammogram and an MRI can detect that a thermogram can't. Thermograms are "heat pictures" of the breasts, based on the idea that tumors require a network of blood vessels to feed them, and that those networks have a different heat signature than the surrounding tissue. A tumor with a blood supply shows up on a thermogram like a starburst. I had a thermogram about a year after my first mammogram and sonogram, when the lump persisted, and it showed, clear as day, a small mass with a blood supply. Sadly, I doubted the validity of the report because someone told me doctors consider thermograms "fuzzy science." Had I ignored them and demanded a lumpectomy, I might have been able to catch my tumor early enough to avoid chemo!

In my opinion, thermograms can be extremely helpful in providing an additional level of surveillance, even for women who are not at risk for breast cancer. The fact is, it saw my lump when a mammogram didn't, and had I taken the thermography report to an open-minded physician, she might have recommended a biopsy of the mass, despite my "all clear." That biopsy might have detected my cancer before it spread. When you are under 40, with no history of cancer, a mammogram is unlikely to be covered by your insurance and can expose your to unnecessary radiation. If you can get information about anything that might be going on in your breasts (granted, not the same information, but still relevant information), with no risk to your health, for a low cost, that might be able to save your life, why wouldn't you?

I've chosen to get a thermogram every year, as an adjuvant screening tool that helps me document the changes in my breasts consistently. It's an affordable, non-invasive procedure that doesn't expose me to additional radiation AND gives me an another level of surveillance on top of my doctor-prescribed screenings.

3. Mammograms and Sonograms. When you have an identifiable lump, that you have been feeling for at least a two months, whether it is fixed, moving, painful, not painful, whether you have a history of cancer or not, you should have it examined by a doctor - at least your OB/GYN, or a breast surgeon if you can get an appointment with one. Usually, they will recommend a mammogram, or at least a sonogram. Keep in mind that while mammograms don't expose you to a dangerous level of radiation, it's enough radiation so that you don't want to get one unless you need it. And don't worry about the pain or discomfort you might have to go through during one - seriously! If you have a persistent lump, a mammogram can save your life, so you don't want to be scared of it or avoid it. Trust me - a few minutes of pain or discomfort getting a mammogram are NOTHING compared to getting a chemo port or Neupogen injections weekly for three months. That being said, ALWAYS request a DIGITAL mammogram. There was a Wall Street Journal article (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114894538244165778.html) back in 2006 that said the benefits of digital vs. film mammograms are negligible unless you're over 50, which, in my opinion (and, I think, my breast surgeon's) is complete crap. I got two film-based mammograms and neither one detected my cancer. When I compared the film images to the digital ones years later, it seemed ridiculous that they would even be considered a screening tool - the film images were slightly blurry, and my boob looked like a globby gray mess. By contrast, the digital images were sharp, distinct, and my doctor could literally zoom in and out and enhance areas of the image with a mouse click! Request a digital mammogram - fight for it if you have to - no matter how small your lump is, no matter how old you are, no matter what your family history is. It can save your life.

4. The BRCA Test. This is a genetic test you can have done - very easy (a cheek swab), but very expensive (about $2500-$5000) - to test for the presence of two genes which have been shown to pre-dispose women to breast cancer. If you have a family history of breast or ovarian cancer, you may or may not have the gene, but this test can give you a definitive answer, and some insurance companies even cover it. If you test positive for the gene, you also have a higher risk of developing ovarian cancer, which is even harder to detect than breast cancer.

A few months into remission for breast cancer, I developed lower back pain, irregular periods, and constipation for about two months. Coupled with my BC diagnosis, it made me a high risk for ovarian cancer, so my doctor ordered the BRCA test and a pelvic ultrasound. Luckily, my ultrasound was clear, and I tested negative for the gene, but without that information, she would not have been able to recommend an appropriate course of treatment.

5. MRI. MRI, or Magnetic Resonance Imaging, is a highly effective tool for detecting cellular changes in the breast.... but it's also highly expensive, slightly uncomfortable, and not really necessary unless you have a history of cancer (either personally or within your family) or symptoms that require further evaluation. Although MRI can detect things that mammograms can't (like tumor cell activity), mammograms can detect things MRIs can't (like calcifications, which are precursors to cancer). This is why doctors don't just order MRIs for every person who has lumpy breasts. It's not a money or reimbursement issue; it has to do with a doctor's review of his or her patient's history, symptoms, and the diagnostic tools at everyone's disposal. Usually a doctor orders an MRI for a specific reason, and it's important you communicate with each other to understand not only what you'll be looking for, but the ramifications of what will or won't be discovered. Which brings me to my last (and, sometimes, most important) tool....

6. Advocating For Yourself. Participating in your own care, by listening to your doctor and advocating for yourself, is SOOOO important. It is the one thing that, given everything else, can truly save your life. Nancy Brinker tells the story of her sister, Susan G. Komen, who did everything her doctor told her... and died. Nancy, by contrast, was a strong advocate for her own care, and survived. The fact is, all doctors go to medical school, but not all of them give every patient the same attention. Some doctors will see a lump in a 27 year old woman and tell her "You're too young to have breast cancer." Another doctor will immediately order a mammogram, sonogram, and schedule a biopsy. I am very lucky to have a Dream Team when it comes to my current health care, but I wasn't so lucky when I first found my lump six years ago. Back then, I had doctors who barely knew me, didn't take my symptoms as seriously as they should have, and dismissed my concerns.

Medicine is a two way street - listen to your doctor, but participate in your own care. Understand your diagnosis and your doctor's justifications for treatment recommendations. If you don't like what your doctor is saying, or he or she won't listen to you, won't support you, or recommends a course of care you don't agree with, get a second (and even a third) opinion. Now, if you talk to three people, they all say the same thing, your doctor might be worth listening to, but, if you still harbor concerns, do some research in the Internet. Reach out to other people who might be facing what you're facing. Get a nurse navigator to help advocate for you. Do your best to make an informed decision (which means, of course, doing your homework).

I learned the importance of advocating for yourself the hard way. When I first found my lump, I suspected something was wrong, but when one doctor told me not to worry, I stopped worrying. I didn't get a second opinion, I ignored the naggning voice in my head. I wanted to believe it was just my imagination! I didn't want to believe I had a tumor growing in my breast (who does?!). But if I knew then what I know now, I would have pushed for a biopsy, and if it was inconclusive, a lumpectomy, and then stopped worrying about chemo or cancer. My mistake wasn't relying on the opinion of someone who delivers babies all day (instead of an oncology surgeon) - it was being passive about my own health care.

If you have a lump, and people are telling you not to worry about it, but no one is telling you what it is, participate in your own care. Seek out a doctor who will listen to you, familiarize himself with your case, and give you an informed diagnosis. My breast surgeon thoroughly evaluated my case, and recommended a monitoring schedule that takes into account, my history, my cancer's pathology, and the current protocols in the medical community. I may not be able to predict the future, but I feel I am (finally!) safely in the hands of someone who wants me to have the most information I can have going forward, and is prepared for whatever course of action that information may dictate. That, to me, is as good as it gets.

To Chemo, or Not To Chemo?

2010-10-17T11:44:00.001-07:00

This is a response I wrote this morning to someone who e-mailed me about natural therapy for "disease reversal." I just thought I should share my opinions and motivations on the topic because many people have asked me why I went through chemo instead of various other alternatives (Essiac tea, going raw/vegan, giving up dairy, taking herbal supplements, etc.).

__________________________________________________

I have a Green MBA - that is, a Master's in Sustainable Enterprise. Over the course of my education, I learned almost everything you can learn about our dependence on petroleum and the chemicals made from it, the companies who manufacture, distribute, and sell those chemicals, and the infiltration of toxic products into the global economy and the costs (social, environmental, and financial) of those products in terms of our health and our planet's health. In short, I want you to know that knew exactly what I was doing when I chose chemotherapy as a treatment for my breast cancer.

About a year before I was diagnosed, my roommate's paddling teammate was diagnosed with breast cancer. She opted to pursue holistic treatment with a doctor she found outside of her oncologist's care. Every week, she went to this doctor for treatment (what it entailed, I cannot say), and every week, he told her that her cancer was getting smaller and her body was healing. After six months of seeing him, though, her husband begged her to see her oncologist to get a second opinion. When she saw him, he told her that her cancer had spread, and that there was nothing he could do to save her life. She died a month later.

The reason why I asked you if you had ever been diagnosed with cancer is, before cancer, I went to an acupuncturist if I got sick. I ate organic and hormone-free and didn't smoke, exercised at least three times a week. I still do all these things. But, before cancer, I thought that chemicals were bad, polluting, and that chemotherapy makes no sense - you are basically killing all the cells in your body, banking on the strength of an already weakened immune system to be able to repair itself better than the cancer cells can repair themselves. It is a complete crapshoot. BUT, it is the only crapshoot that we have years and years of hard data on, and my cancer - Triple Negative, Aggressive Grade Breast Cancer - has been shown to respond particularly well to chemo. And when a doctor tells you that you are on the safe side of metastatic cancer - Stage 3A - and that, by putting toxic chemicals into your bloodstream, you can save your life - as a human being, you choose the better odds.

I will tell you what I tell everyone who suggests I should (or should have) taken the non-chemo route to cancer therapy: call the Mayo Clinic. Call Sloan Kettering. Get whatever natural therapies you have been using into an organized, University- or Private Charity-sponsored clinical trial and ACCRUE SOME HARD DATA. Because when I sat down with my oncologist, I had mountains of evidence that chemo would work for me, and one piece of anecdotal evidence that told me if I went the natural route and was wrong, I might be dead wrong. And I didn't want to take that chance, because my life was at stake.

Update From The Road: California to Chicago

2010-10-16T11:51:00.000-07:00

"A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man." - Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell talks a lot about The Quest - the journey all Heroes take in search of a Boon that will heal their troubled Land. It doesn't matter if it's Percival seeking the Holy Grail or Harold and Kumar trekking to White Castle - Heroes go on the same Journey, requiring sacrifice, trials and tribulations, transformation, and, ultimately, a return to the place where their journey began. What I think is so beautiful about Campbell's work is his description of the elegance of the Quest structure - its rules, its patterns, and the necessary transactions along the way - and his insistence that we are all on our own Hero's Journeys. Although I've always been familiar with Campbell's work (having spent a few years screenwriting), his book, "The Power of Myth" became a light in the darkness of my cancer recovery, convincing me that there was a purpose to what was, for me, the ultimate transformative experience. You must look in to the abyss, Campbell says, because that is where you will not only find yourself, but your Boon - your gift of service to the world. It is no wonder, then, that I thought of him when I packed up my Ford Escape Hybrid, put the key in the ignition, and hit the open road in search of adventure and purpose.

Rather than regale you with rote-by-rote descriptions of the places I've been and the people I've seen, I'm going to use these Road Trip Update blogs to share a little of Campbell's work, and my favorite moments along the way (it helps that I can limit my typing to short windows as well). If you follow my Facebook Page, or my PlaceSnap SnapMap, you can see additional photos and status updates of where I am and where I've been, but in these Updates, you'll find the things that I'll remember most, and maybe a shout out or two.

Ready? Here we go!

Leg 1: California to Illinois, by way of Utah & Colorado

1. Stepping over a rattlesnake in Rick and Misty's garage and thinking, "That's weird; why would Misty have a toy snake in her garage?" only to have her turn on the lights, the snake rattle its tail, and all of us jump back as I realize it WASN'T a toy snake.

2. Delicious grilled lamb at Nas' house across the street, accompanied by other rattlesnake tales (who knew they were so common in Antioch?) and stories of Fiji.

3. Watching Rommel and Janice's 6 kids get excited over "The Amazing Race," and being there when they colored in all their houses on my Travel Curtains.

4. Talking with Rommel about God and how He's factored in both of our lives all these years.

5. Driving through the Sierras with hardly anyone on the road, passing sparkling rivers where I wished I'd stopped to take a picture.

6. Talking with Danny about road trips, cancer, and "the golden spike" while driving through Battle Mountain, NV.

7. Seeing the salt flats just outside of Salt Lake City, UT, and then, the Great Salt Lake, in all its glory.

8. Pasta I could not stop eating at dinner with Chelsea, and laughing over our "crack house" metaphor.

9. Kalynne's daughter, Reagan, inventing a kind of slo-mo horseshoe game with my foot and her bag of plastic bracelets.

10. A fellow diner at Little America stopping me and James to thank us for mentioning Jeremiah 29:11 in our breakfast conversation, because it was "just what [he] needed to hear."

11. Buying fresh peaches and apples from a roadside stand near Johnson's Corner, that were way tastier that JC's "famous" cinnamon rolls.

12. My Auntie Leigh's cooking! Moussaka, scrambled eggs, and the smell in her kitchen - like childhood, and camping, and Christmas.

13. The feeling of family, and how important it is to have, no matter where you are.

14. My Uncle Roger getting misty remembering my father, and laughing while he told me about a bar brawl they once got into over my Aunt in their twenties.

15. Recognizing Bear's skinny legs and hunched shoulders, even in the dark pre-dawn hours near Horsetooth Reservoir.

16. Donna and I talking about everything from the moment we met, like we've known each other for years! :)

17. The downhill on the way back from the Boulder Creek Trail.

18. The view from the top of Mt. Sanitas, and Barry saying, "I'm really starting to sweat...." LOL, Bear.

19. Being half-asleep talking to Ian about zombies and life lists and how to have fun with no money.

20. Hanging with Katie after not seeing each other for so many years.

21. Beaumont posing on the cement snail in Downtown Boulder - so cute you could eat him up!

22. Dinner at Rootdown in LoDo. Fan. Tas. Tic.

23. Being greeted by Brad at the FD office with the words, "Holy hair!"

24. Lunch with Rebekah, and feeling like Christian isn't a dirty word, because you share a childlike faith.

25. The loooooooong drive to Madison, WI broken up by a Runza (yeeecchhhh) and a nap somewhere in Iowa.

26. Forgetting what state Milwaukee was in, just outside of Watt's Tea House.

27. That friggin' frozen custard crack sundae they make at Leon's (and, apparently everywhere in the Midwest?!)

28. The Milwaukee Art Museum, and our tour guide, who said, "I think you can't truly understand something unless you know where it's coming from." So true.

29. Overcoming parking, roadblocks, crowds, overzealous police officers, and the sheer number of fellow runners to see Caroline Bridges, still going strong, at the 25th mile of the Chicago Marathon!

30. Canadian Thanksgiving at her parents' house (who knew rutabaga could be so tasty?), followed by mocking the 49ers in the basement with her college Wolf Pack.

31. The Grand Tour of Clarendon Hills, and a grilled brisket (with TWO kinds of cheese!) sandwich in La Grange with my (now) favorite Midwest Foodie. Anytime, Fridge. :)

BUT, I have to be honest. The most memorable moments of the last 30 days happened when I flew BACK to California, to follow-up on the thickening I found in my healthy breast just before I left for this road trip. I'll call it #32: Meeting my new surgeon, and hearing that I won't be needing his services after all, thanks to a clear MRI. :)

I look forward to our next update, hopefully post-NYC Marathon (November 7th).*

:) Apes

Life Throws You Curves... Learn to Swerve!

2010-09-21T09:05:00.000-07:00

I have been remiss in blogging here AND posting on my YouTube Channel these last few months. I'm afraid the online forums that so helped me during my cancer fight have somewhat fallen by the wayside in the face of a few recent medical challenges - challenges I was too cocky to ever think I would have to deal with.

First came lymphedema - swelling in my hand and forearm that makes it difficult to type, lift, or carry things for more than 20-30 minutes. You can imagine how frustrating this is for a writer - everything takes three or four times as long, and has to be worked on in pieces, rather than straight through. I have pushed myself to complete projects, only to have to wrap my arm for days at a time to get the swelling down again. It's ridiculously annoying, but I finally had to take it seriously because if left unchecked, it can be permanent and irreversible.

Next, I threw my back out in early August - probably a combination of stand-up paddleboarding and the physical demands of packing and moving. This not only sidelined my marathon training for a month; it kept me from my three-times-a-week boot camp schedule, which, frankly, I depend on to keep me sane. I guess I'm just one of those people who has to exercise regularly to maintain my mental health (magic pants aside, sometimes, I think exercise IS the cure for everything).

Lastly, to add insult to injury, I found a thickening in my healthy breast (the one that didn't have breast cancer). For a perfectly healthy woman, this could have been something stressful, but, as you can imagine, for a cancer survivor, it's a whole different kind of yucky. I went through the "you're overreacting" stage, the "it's cancer!" stage, and finally, the "let's just see the oncologist and get it checked out like a normal person" stage, which resulted in her telling me, yesterday, that I would need an MRI and an appointment with a surgeon.

A week before I leave on a nine-month cross-country road trip.

*sigh*

You see? Life throws you curves. You learn to swerve.

To complicate matters, I've met my insurance deductible ($4800) and am two months away from the new one kicking in, which means if I have this surgery ASAP, it will be free. And, if you've been a cancer patient, you know that free is good. Free is GREAT.

In the last 24 hours, I have processed just about every scenario. I'm pretty proud of myself, actually - I'm getting better and better at making lemonade. I might go so far as to say I now have a Ph.D in Making Lemonade! What has finally, FINALLY sunk in is, you can plan and plan and plan, but life will surprise you, every time. Every SINGLE time. And you can't get mad or frustrated about not being able to predict or plan the future. You just have to work on getting better and better at rolling with the punches, and you have to be okay with making the best decision you can, with the information you have at the time. I can say, "If I had just had a mastectomy, I wouldn't be dealing with this right now," but I might be dealing with some other nightmare! A leaky implant, a complication from my port removal, or worse - CANCER AGAIN! So, I'm not wasting my time playing the "If only I had..." game.

What's hardest, when life throws you curves, is not giving up. Some people swerve and fall completely off the path they're on, unable to recover. They get lost in the messiness and can't bounce back. Resilience - the kind of long-term bounce-back-ness you need to sustain your recovery - is the key to survivorship, and what helps you cultivate resilience is FOCUS and PURPOSE. When you know WHERE you want to go and WHY you want to get there, it doesn't matter how many times you get knocked off the path - you just keep getting back on and keep moving forward, because you're committed and engaged in the quest. You don't let anything deter you. THAT is why I have a 40-by-40. It's a map, with a time limit, and enough difficulty built in to help me cultivate courage and strength along the way. This journey will transform me and enable me to help other people map out THEIR journeys to recovery, and it's not worth giving up on because I have to schedule a couple of doctors appointments.

SO, #31 (Take a Road Trip Across the USA) is still ON. I'm juggling the long-term schedule, but it looks like the only change in the plan will be a 4-day hiatus in Chicago and a break post-NYC Marathon for the lumpectomy. After that, it's Thanksgiving in Dallas and a trip back home in December/January to shoot the documentary I'm working on, followed by the Princess Half Marathon in Orlando February 27th. I'll post a new schedule as soon as my surgery dates are locked in.

Once More, With Feeling: The Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie

2010-08-17T12:58:00.000-07:00

If you're attending my seminar tonight in Pleasant Hill, you'll get a taste of these...

Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe:

2 scant (barely) cups Trader Joe's "White" Whole-Wheat Flour*
3/4 tsp. baking soda
3/4 tsp. salt

1 1/4 sticks butter, at room temperature (1/2 cup + 2 Tbsp)
1/3 c. dark brown sugar
1/3 c. light brown sugar
1/2 c. white granulated sugar
1 egg, at room temperature
1 tsp. vanilla
2 Tbsp. milk

1 3/4 c. chocolate chips
1/2 c. pecans (if you don't like nuts, you can add an extra 1/4 c. chocolate chips)

*I've never tried this recipe with regular white bleached or unbleached flour, but I find that the cookies are just as tasty (and better for you) with "white" whole wheat flour, which has more fiber, but is not as gritty as traditional whole wheat flour. King Arthur also makes a version of it that is not hard to find, or you can get it in the Bulk section of most Whole Foods stores.

Combine the flour, salt, and baking powder in a bowl, separate from the remaining ingredients. Cream the butter and sugar together using an electric mixer on low until light and fluffy and all one color. Scrape down sides of bowl and add egg, vanilla, and milk, then beat (again, on low) until uniform in color. Add the flour mixture 1/2 cup at a time until just blended, then add in the chips and nuts. Give it a final stir with a spoon or spatula to make sure it's all blended together. The mixture will be stiff.

NOW, preheat the oven to 350 degrees, and let the cookie dough rest about 10 minutes. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and use a small cookie scoop (about 2 teaspoons) to drop the dough on the paper, about 2 inches apart. You want the cookies to be about an inch and a half across when they're done baking, so don't make the mounds too big (if you prefer bigger cookies, use a bigger scoop of dough, then press your thumb into the top of the mounds to make a little indent, so they will spread better in the oven). Bake the cookies for 10-13 minutes, depending on how crisp or gooey you like them, and when you take them out of the oven, let them cool ON THE PAN for 5 minutes to firm up, then move to wire racks to finish cooling (if they make it that long before being eaten).

NOTE: For a thinner, crisper cookie, add an additional 2 Tablespoons of softened butter and reduce the flour by 1/4 cup.

RECIPE FOR LEMONADE SEMINAR PREVIEW in Pleasant Hill this TUESDAY, AUGUST 17th at 6:00 p.m.!

2010-08-13T16:30:00.000-07:00

Announcing a new Meetup for Creating Health, Wellness and Success!!

What: When Life gives you Lemons, can you make Lemonade?

When: Tuesday, August 17, 2010 6:00 PM

Price: $5.00 per person

Where: Networking Lounge
1934 Contra Costa Blvd Upstairs Next to Starbucks in Safeway Plaza
Pleasant Hill, CA 94523
925-497-8295

Topic: When Life gives you Lemons, can you make Lemonade?

At this month’s meetup we have the pleasure of hearing from Author and speaker, April Capil as well as Healing Touch Practitioner, Pj Overholt.

April Capil is a breast cancer survivor and Green MBA who hosts a blog on survivorship at http://teamapril.blogspot.com.

At our Meetup, April will be sharing selections from a brand-new seminar based on her book, Recipe For Lemonade: What To Do When Life Gives You Lemons. The book, about how to rebuild your optimism in tough times, walks readers through the processes by which we triage evidence in our lives, and strategies we can use to find contentment, even when things are at their worst. This will be the first and only chance to see April's seminar in Northern California this year, as she will be taking it on the road beginning Fall 2010, and documenting her experience via her YouTube Channel, http://www.youtube.com/aprilcapil. Recipe For Lemonade is currently available in paperback and electronic versions at Amazon.com. For more information, visit her website at http://www.aprilcapil.com.

Pj Overholt, Certified Healing Touch Practitioner

PJ will be discussing how she uses gentle non-invasive touch to influence and support the human energy system within and surrounding the body. She will be showcasing how the goal of healing touch is to restore harmony, energy, and balance within the human energy system. Supporting the clients self—healing process of becoming whole in the body, mind, emotion and spirit.

Pj Overholt was a psychiatric nurse for 36 years, and worked in both inpatient and outpatient settings. After having breast cancer in December 2003, she learned about Healing Touch as a complementary therapy. She found it extremely beneficial in her recovery and has continued receiving and giving Healing Touch since then. Pj is certified with two organizations: Healing Touch Program and Healing Touch International, and has been a member of both Associations for 4 years. She is also a member of Healing Touch California, and American Holistic Nurses Association. For almost two years she has been in private practice in Walnut Creek and in Danville, and continues to spread the word of Healing Touch.

AGENDA:
6:00 - 6:30 PM Mixing and mingling, wine, and light appetizers    
6:30 - 6:45 PM Introductions and discussion    
6:45 - 7:45 PM Our guest speakers present
7:45 – 8:00/30 PM Q&A and more networking

Doors open at 6:00 PM. We will ask for your business card and $5.00 admission fee if you did not pre-register. Bring plenty of business cards and other marketing collateral.

RSVP here if you would like to WAIVE the $5 admission:
http://www.meetup.com/Creating-Health-Wellness-and-Success/calendar/14325821/

Thank you and hope to see you there!!

The Last Ten 40-by-40 Ideas

2010-07-31T13:31:00.000-07:00

So, you know that I've put together my first 30 of my 40-by-40, but what about the last 10?

Well, #31, I'm already doing - Take a Road Trip Across The United States.

As for #32-40, here they are.....!

32. Attend a gravesite ceremony with Katy Chin in New York.

33. Build a Rube Goldberg Machine to light the candles on my 40th birthday.

34. Build a Bottle School with Eli Call and Hug It Forward.

35. Pay off all my medical bills.

36. Build a treehouse with Marlon King.

37. Play a zombie in a film or TV show (tell you a secret: I've wanted to do this ever since I saw MJ's Thriller video).

38. Go ALL OUT on Halloween (i.e., dress up in full costume, complete with makeup).

39. Go to Graceland on my birthday (which also happens to be Elvis' birthday)

40. Dance with Ellen Degeneres.

Life After Lemonade: Stage Four - The Yellow Wood

2010-07-31T12:27:00.000-07:00

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

- The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost

Now that you've decided (hopefully) that you're done whining about how you almost didn't make it, now that you've decided that you DO want to be here, and that you're ready to craft this post-disaster life and embrace your survivorship, you must as yourself one last question:what kind of a life do I want to live?

Are you going to live a half-life, like Ricky Bobby, afraid to get back in the car again? Or, do you want to create something that's worth what you went through to save it? Because it's not going to be easy, to craft a life worth living for. It's going to be frigging hard work. But let me tell you: if you do do it, you'll never get to the end of your life and, as Thoreau once said, discover that you did not live.

When I was in my late twenties, all my friends were turning 30. They were whining about getting old, about 30 being some deadline for the end of their youth (it seems so ridiculous, looking back, now that I'm 36). At 27, I had taken up running again and was training for my first marathon, and one of my tenants was training for an Ironman - an insane triathlon that started with a 2.4-mile swim, followed with a 112-mile bike ride, and finished with a 26.2 mile run. She suggested I try a sprint distance triathlon (750 m swim, 20 km bike, 5 km run), and for the second time that year, I imagined what it would be like to do something that I thought might be outside my realm of capability.

Here's the thing: we all have ideas about what we think we're capable of. We tell ourselves stories, or believe the stories other people tell us, about the things we can and can't do, and when Nicole suggested that it was possible for someone like me to do even the shortest of triathlons, it was like a tiny crack suddenly formed in my head. Me? Do a triathlon? "You just ran ten miles last weekend, didn't you?" she asked, and the crack got bigger. Yes, but... "If you can workout for two hours, you can do a triathlon." And you know what I did? I believed her. It was that simple. And the next thing I knew, my assumptions about what I could and couldn't do began to crumble.

I did the tri, and the marathon, and two other events that year, and on my 28th birthday, I thought, "I don't want to hit 30 and be moaning and groaning about what I can't do anymore. I want to be celebrating what I CAN do!" I figured if I ran a 5K every four weeks for the next two years, I could do 26 by my 30th birthday. Added to my 4, that was "30-by-30" - an accomplishment that would not only make turning 30 worth celebrating, it would make turning 30 something worth looking forward to.

Over the next two years, the 5Ks were replaced by other triathlons, trail runs I had never done before, and bike rides in towns I had never been to. I did the Providian Relay three times in a row, the Big Sur Half Marathon, and a Muddy Buddy. I had so much fun in the last two years before I turned 30 that when my 30th birthday finally came, I rang it in like New Year's.

I know I'm only 36, but if there's anything I've learned in my time here thus far, it's that there are only two paths in life: enjoying it, or not enjoying it. As Frost says, the paths look "really about the same," but what differs is your perception - the story you tell yourself about the path you walked. "Somewhere ages and ages hence," you will be thinking of the path you took, and wondering if it should have been different, so take a moment to imagine that place and time, and ask yourself, "What will I want to remember about my life?"

When I first Googled survivor statistics for Stage 3 Triple Negative Breast Cancer, everything I read said I had a 67% chance of still being alive 5 years after my diagnosis. I did the math and realized that would be when I was 39 - about 3 weeks before my 40th birthday, in fact. While most women dread turning 40, I am really looking forward to it, because if I make it to 40, the odds of me living cancer-free for the rest of my life skyrocket - I become part of the general population, with no more risk of getting cancer than anyone else.

Lots of people live their whole lives just waiting to retire, so they can "get busy living." My dad used to talk all the time about what he was going to do when he retired: he wanted to move to Reno, into the house he and my grandparents owned, so they could live with him. He wanted to teach kindergarten at the school across the street, and buy a red Corvette, and plant roses all around the house. He said my sister and I could come visit and stay in the guest room, and we could go skiing anytime we wanted. It wasn't that my father hated his life or his job - he never struck me as an unhappy man, even though I know he must have struggled. It was just that he had all these dreams, that couldn't come true until later.

If you've been reading my blog, you know that my father never got to make any of those dreams come true. He died at 53, of a heart condition he didn't know he had. My grandparents sold the house in Reno and my grandmother died five years later. I didn't go skiing for ten years after my dad died - it was something we always did as a family, and I think a part of me just didn't enjoy it without him. When I finally got back on the slopes, I was just as good a skier, but it wasn't the same.

Why do we save our happiness for later? Why do we put off joy?

I call the last Stage of survivorship The Yellow Wood, because this is where your path will diverge. Don't think about what you can't do because of what you don't have. For once in your life, make a list - not a list of the things you couldn't live without, but of the things you couldn't die without - things you can't bear to miss out on.

When I came back from my First Descents trip, I made a list - my "40-by-40" - forty things I wanted to be able to say I had done, if I didn't make it to my 40th birthday.* It's not that I don't think I will make it; it's just that now, I'm acutely aware that our time here is limited. "Live like you're dying?" Newsflash: we're all dying. No one here gets out alive.

This "40-by-40" list, as simple as it sounds, is just something to keep me going, milestone by milestone, reminding me of the reason why I want to be here - to live the life I fought cancer for (and won). If you want to revel in your survivorship, make your own list. It doesn't matter if it's a Top Ten, a thousand places to see before you die, or a score you want to beat on a video game. Set a goal for something that you *almost* think you can't do, and it will, step-by-step, rebuild your hope about the future (and remember, you have to be somewhat realistic here - not everyone can walk on the moon just because they beat cancer, and setting an unrealistic goal can be a cop-out disguised as a "big dream").

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation - probably because of all those dreams they're forcing themselves to save for later. Don't be afraid to take the path less traveled by - it will make all the difference.

*Regarding not making it to my 40th - I'm not calling my 40-by-40 a "Things To Do Before I Die" List. I prefer to think of it as a "Things To Do While I'm Still Alive" List. ;)

Life After Lemonade: Sidebar - The Ricky Bobby Factor

2010-07-31T11:14:00.001-07:00

"Do you want to know why I think you should race again? It's because it's what you love, Ricky. It is who you were born to be. And here you sit, thinking. Well, Ricky Bobby is not a thinker. Ricky Bobby is a driver. He is a doer. And that's what you need to do. You don't need to think. You need to drive. You need speed. You need to go out there, and you need to rev your engine. You need to fire it up. You need to grab a hold of that line between speed and chaos, and you need to wrestle it to the ground like a demon cobra! And then, when the fear rises up in your belly, you use it. And you know that fear is powerful, because it has been there for billions of years. And it is good. And you use it. And you ride it; you ride it like a skeleton horse through the gates of hell, and then you win, Ricky. You WIN! And you don't win for anybody else. You win for you, you know why? Because a man takes what he wants. He takes it all. And you're a man, aren't you? Aren't you?" - Susan to Ricky Bobby, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

When I was getting ready to finish chemo last year, I scheduled a job interview with a recruiter. I was 36, had a Green MBA and a diverse resume - four years of managing commercial properties, a year grantwriting for a non-profit and developing an environmental internship program for at-risk youth, two years of running my own businesses - one online and one in my backyard, literally. I had even written a Youth-Driven Green Plan for the City of Richmond - something no one on the planet has done - and on top of all that, I had developed a blog and YouTube Channel that had gotten over 30,000 video views. Still, I had been having trouble finding a job, and thought I'd better bite the bullet and call in some reinforcements.

The meeting did not go well. She was late, hadn't reviewed my resume, asked if I had been looking on craigslist and other "Green" job boards - all of which I was familiar with (did I mention I have an MBA?). She suggested that my trouble was probably due to being out of California for a year, and that I might want to volunteer somewhere locally, to add experience to my resume. Experience to my resume? I wanted to say. I have a degree that less than 500 people in the world have, in the fastest growing field there is.

When I spoke to a friend about the meeting, who recruits in a different industry, he dismissed my conclusion that she was a moron. "April," he said, "I Googled you." Yeah, so? 30,000 hits on my YouTube Channel, a blog with tons of entries on how to survive a tough economy, how to green your business, ways to cultivate resilience. Who wouldn't want to hire me? "Honey," he said gently, "you had cancer. Why would I hire a 36-year old woman who changes jobs every year, especially one with a history of life-threatening disease?" But that's illegal, I said, shell-shocked. "Nope," he said. "It's not illegal if you never get an interview, babe."

All of a sudden, everything I'd done to make it this far - the last ten years of my life - seemed like a huge liability. By taking the road less traveled by, by sharing my cancer struggles and triumphs with the world, by making my very name into a BRAND, I had totally screwed myself.

A few days after my meeting with the recruiter, I was visiting Sports Basement, a locally-owned chain of discounted sporting goods, to get a new pair of running shoes. Everyone was so nice, and the store had such a pleasant atmosphere. I filled out an application, and, two weeks after my chemo was over, they hired me. They hired me even though I wore a baseball cap to work for two months, even though I wasn't done with my treatment (I still had 28 radiation treatments, which had been delayed by another surgery). They even gave me health insurance, despite the fact that I was a cancer survivor, and my coworkers made me laugh and inspired me to get fitter and healthier. For six months, I was happy every single time I came to work. I joked that I felt like the girl who has a "broke-ass" boyfriend she is crazy in love with, who keeps coming back despite the fact that she knows it can't go anywhere.

When I finished treatment, though, things changed. The holiday shopping season came, and with it, reductions in staff but twice as much work. I applied for a promotion, but it went to someone else. I gave them a proposal to green all their stores, at a higher salary, and was told they were only interested in projects that didn't take any extra time or cost any extra money (I wanted to say, "Well, if I specialized in THAT, I certainly wouldn't be working HERE, now, would I?"). The opportunities to "move up quickly" that were referenced when I was hired never materialized, and my two favorite coworkers reduced their hours and eventually quit. I was trying to stay for a year so I could keep my discount, but work was getting more and more frustrating and less and less enjoyable. I found myself wanting to stay at home and work on my book, blog, and videos, rather than drag myself to my "real" job. What happened to the place I couldn't wait to go to in the morning?

If you've seen Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, you know the story. If you haven't, here it is: Ricky Bobby is a race car driver who is cocky and arrogant. While trying to beat a competitor, he pushes himself too far and gets in a terrible wreck that shakes both his confidence and the confidence of his sponsors. His wife and best friend abandon him, and, broke and alone, he is reduced to living with his mother and delivering pizza on a bike (having had his driver's license revoked as well). Ricky Bobby's estranged father, seeking to rebuild his son's confidence, comes back into his life and pushes him to regain his confidence by learning to "drive with the fear" that debilitated his career, using unorthodox training like putting a live cougar in the car with him. Even when he can drive again, Ricky Bobby remains unsure of himself, telling his former assistant, Susan, that he has put racing professionally behind him. In an impassioned speech (above), Susan tells him he must be the man he was born to be, and Ricky Bobby returns to the track. In the end, he triumphs by refusing to give up, and committing to being the best version of himself.

In looking back at my frustration with my job, I realized, I was an entrepreneur - a dreamer who had jumped off a huge cliff, into an island in the middle of the Pacific, with big dreams of making a difference and changing the world.... and I was delivering pizza. Now, there's nothing wrong with delivering pizza - it's an honest job, and thousands of people do it every day and feed their family or put themselves through college doing it. Working at Sports Basement was, like Ricky Bobby's job, a safe choice in a world that had become very scary. At the time, I needed something reliable, dependable, and not too challenging - something that wouldn't present me with obstacles and fears that would make me feel insecure about my future. I just needed something easy to do and people I could laugh with every day,because I had just been through six months of chemotherapy. But once my treatment was over - once I didn't have to worry about getting sick again - working in an unchallenging, growth-less job felt like a waste of my time, and I could barely stand it.

I asked a friend of mine, who is a professional kayaker, if he knew any guys who went down a rapid the wrong way and almost died... then never paddled anything above a Class III again. "Oh, yeah," he said. "Definitely." How many people do you know, who have had their heart broken and vow to never love again? One of my best friends has been terribly disappointed by love twice, and yet, she is in a wonderful relationship that challenges her every day to have faith in love again. Every day she is still with her boyfriend is, in a small way, an affirmation - that this time won't necessarily be like the last. It takes a tremendous amount of faith and hope to go out on a limb again - believe me, I know - but if you want to survive, you cannot live a constricted life, for fear of it falling apart again. It's akin to depriving your body of oxygen, because you don't want to take a deep breath again.

My solution, for what I call the Ricky Bobby Factor, is the same as the movie's - you have to do what you love, even if that means (ESPECIALLY if that means) learning to "drive with the fear." And yes, you will probably have to get in the car with a cougar. Not a "real live cougar," of course - but something that really and truly scares the crap out of you. It's the only way to hit your "RESET" button - and that button is the key to reclaiming your courage and hope.

What I did - albeit unintentionally - was go on a climbing trip with First Descents, which runs adventure therapy camps for cancer survivors. They started as a kayaking camp, which I think is a perfect metaphor for life after cancer (or any other disaster). When you are kayaking, you are floating on an uncontrollable, unpredictable force of nature - just like life. You cannot control a river - it is going to twist and turn and there is nothing you can do about it but learn to ride the waves - to practice being unafraid of the rises and dips on the ride. You can learn to navigate, to paddle, to float, to rest, and all these skills will make the ride easier and more enjoyable, but once you are in the river, you are in the river, and there is no getting out. When I was climbing, the greatest lesson I learned is that your footing - your grip on the wall - is always more certain than you think. I would take a step and think, "That little crack is not going to hold my weight!" and miraculously, it would. I learned to trust my body, trust my instincts, and have faith in myself. After just a week with First Descents, I felt like I had come back home to myself. I realized that it was because for the first time in months, I had actually BEEN myself - a climber, a dreamer, an adventurer who took big leaps of faith and hung on for dear life when the ride got scary. I laughed, looking in the mirror when I got home, because I finally recognized the person staring back.

Life After Lemonade: Stage Three - To Be, or Not To Be (That Is The Question)

2010-07-30T11:27:00.000-07:00

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

- Hamlet, William Shakespeare

I post the whole of Hamlet's soliloquy here because there isn't a part I think I could take out without reducing the impact of it. He covers it all: to live, to die; suffering and why we suffer; how easy it is to end it all and why we don't. In a single speech, Shakespeare covers the dilemma of human existence: why do we bother going on, when life can be so hard?

The Third Stage of Survivorship is a serious stage; I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Sometimes, you stumble into it in the midst of your trauma. Most people get to it after, when the pain is over and their body has knit itself together and life is, for all intents and purposes, as it was. The only thing is, you're not as you were, are you? You're not Lance Armstrong, made stronger by cancer, winning Tour de Frances left and right. You're just a twenty-something cyclist, fresh out of chemo, dropped from your team with everyone wondering if you'll ever race again. Even YOU might be wondering if you'll ever race again, though you'd never admit it, for fear of letting everyone down. Your life is probably WORSE than it was before - harder, harsher, and more disappointing, because of what you've been through. Your family and friends are saying things like, "You look great!" in the hopes that you're back to your old self again, but inside, you're wondering if life will ever be worth living again.

That's the question you have to ask yourself in this stage. You don't want to, because you're afraid the answer might be NO. NO, I don't want to be here, because my lover is dead, because my breast is gone, because this FEMA trailer isn't as nice as my house was. NO, you want to say, LIFE IS NOT WORTH LIVING ANYMORE.

It's okay to think this. Believe me, I've thought this. People who go through tragedy think this all the time. Hamlet thought this, and it made him ask himself, "Why go on? Why be here?" But if you want to survive, you must think this, and you must ask yourself the question: do you want to be, or not to be? Because that IS the question.

Here's the rub: if you don't want to be here, you won't be for long. Maybe you'll take up smoking, or drinking, or drugs, and kill yourself slowly. Maybe you'll engage in risky behavior, and drive your car into a ravine or get mugged at gunpoint. Maybe you'll stop exercising and start eating junk and your cancer will come back in ten places and chemo won't work anymore. And you know what? There is no do-over. If you ask yourself the question, and decide you don't want to be here anymore, then change your mind later, it might be too late. So think carefully before you answer. Do you really not want to be here?

Now, I'm not saying that everyone who has a recurrence, or is in the wrong place at the wrong time WANTS to die. That's NOT what this is about at all. What this is about is allowing yourself to realize that whether you like it or not, you are having this conversation with yourself every time life isn't what it used to be. And you DO have a choice; you always have a choice, even if you have a terminal disease, because WE get to choose how we live, even if we don't get to choose how we die. Survivorship is about how you want to live the life you have left. Are you going to live like someone who wants to be here, or someone who doesn't?

The good news is, if you're still here, you're still here. You can tell yourself that maybe someone Up There thinks you still deserve to be here, or that you still have work to do here, or that there are still things in your life left to experience. Tell yourself any story you want - it's your choice. Because if you really think about it, if you look around at your loved ones and the beauty of this world, and all the things you'll miss out on if you leave it, I think you might want to stick around. Who wouldn't? Only someone who really didn't value their life would end it, and if you fought to survive something, there must be a part of you that wanted to live. If you want to live, and you're just afraid to, try to tap into that part of you, that fought so hard to survive. Life is scary, but that doesn't mean it's not worth living. It's not scary all the time, right? Just some of the time? So, if you want to live, if, when you ask yourself if you want to be or not to be, the answer is I want to be here, and the only thing holding you back is a fear that life will always be this hard, remind yourself that nothing lasts forever (just ask Terry Anderson) - except death.

The key is, once you make the decision that you WANT to BE HERE, you need to stop fucking around and LIVE LIKE YOU WANT TO BE HERE. Consider yourself FORTUNATE that you had the strength, courage, luck, whateverto make it through what you made it through in one piece and come out on the other side. Seriously. Think about how many people DON'T GET to make it - the people who picked the wrong seat when they booked their ticket and didn't make it to the emergency exit in time. Think about the literally hundreds of people who, each year, fall through the cracks of an imperfect medical system and are diagnosed too late to save their own lives. You're here and they're not. You're not in survival mode anymore. You survived. So count your (and pardon my French, but this is serious business) fucking blessings.

Once you have thought about it, and made the decision that you want to live, you have to get busy living. Stop acting like you're going somewhere, like death is coming for you or life isn't worth living. Life IS worth living, so make a decision to start acting like it. Then, you'll be ready for Stage Four - The Yellow Wood.

But first, a Sidebar: The Ricky Bobby Factor.

Life After Lemonade: Stage Two - Acknowledging Your Mortality

2010-07-27T10:44:00.000-07:00

Before you read this post, watch this video, from Superman II: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRRFMrzTYpE

The Second Stage of survivorship is what I call "Acknowledging Your Mortality." Really, it should just be called "Acknowledging Mortality," because the face is, no one gets out of here alive.

It's news to most people, that they're mortal. We act like Superman, staring dumbfounded at our own blood. I bleed? Yep, that's right - you bleed. You don't have any insurance against tragedy, against disappointment or unmet expectations or plane crashes. Pile up all the statistics you want - you can still be that one in a million person, and there's nothing you can do about it, because guess what? That's life.

Reckoning with life's unpredictability and uncontrollability is the second stage of survivorship because once you've acknowledged and accepted the loss of something you didn't think you could lose, you have to face the face that you can lose other things. When my mother died, and my father died twelve years later, I thought, "What, has God got a list? (and even worse, if He does, who's next on it?)"

Surviving means acknowledging that you almost died - and that's pretty heavy stuff, kids! Whether your life "flashes before your eyes" or not, you might think differently once it sinks in that this little parentheses we have here is just that - a window - and that there are no do-overs. Before cancer, I was Superman, but the moment my oncologist told me that not only did I have cancer, but that I had to do everything I could to keep it from coming back, I became Clark Kent, sitting in that diner, staring blankly at the blood on my hand. I can bleed?

The strangest part is, when you've survived something, you walk around feeling like Clark Kent in a world of Supermen: people start treating you like you're somehow more vulnerable than they are to the slings and arrows of life. You might want to scream, "You know, you CAN BLEED TOO!" Don't bother. They won't believe you. Another thing that happens is, you might start avoiding things you were never afraid of before, because you no longer harbor this delusion that you're Superman. It could be minor things - like hydrogenated oils or high fructose corn syrup. It might be major things - like, moving too far away from your oncologist or getting on an airplane. Men of Steel don't have to fear injury, but Clark Kent? Clark can bleed. And since you've already bled once, why tempt fate?

What's important to remember, as you reckon with this stage of survivorship is, you're not made of steel, but you're not made of glass either. Life is a terminal disease, yes, but remind yourself: you're not dead yet (cue Monty Python joke)! It's easy to walk around like the other shoe is going to drop, preparing for a future where cancer might come back, where another baby might be miscarried, where someone else can break your heart, but why waste what little life you have left on this earth preparing for disaster to strike again? Disaster may strike; it may not. Chances are, you probably won't see it coming, even if it does. I spent so much time post-treatment asking myself, "What happens if my cancer comes back?" - until a nurse asked me, "What if it doesn't?" I realized that I really was living like I was dying - but that I should be living like I was alive. There's a difference between knowing your life is going to end someday, and living like that end is imminent. So strive for that balance: acknowledge your mortality, but remember: you're still alive.

Life After Lemonade: Stage One - the Grieving Stage

2010-07-27T10:06:00.001-07:00

“At this point, I've got the confidence to know that I'll get through anything in my life given I have the motivation to do it, ... If it's an act of survival, we've all got a reason to keep living. It may not be pretty, but surviving is grit and determination in its highest form. I learned that I've got the capacity to do a hell of a lot more than I thought I could if I have the proper motivation.” - Aron Ralston

I've been working on my second book, tentatively titled, "Life After Lemonade," about the period post-disaster: survivorship.

There are a lot of resources out there on how to deal with a diagnosis of cancer, how to treat cancer you already have, and how to get through that treatment. What I had trouble finding, while I was fighting breast cancer, was advice on what do do after I beat it. How do I live, knowing it could come back? Not just HOW do I live, but how do I LIVE, instead of just walking through each day like I'm waiting for the roof to cave in again? Or, even less important than that, how do I do what everyone around me seems to expect me to do: to go back to being the person I was BEFORE cancer - someone I feel like I can never be again, having had it?

I've written before about "recovery" being an attempt to "return to the pre-disease state" - something I think that, at the end of the day, is impossible. You can never go back to being who you were, because 99% of the time, that person didn't believe they could get cancer, could confront death, could be in a life-threatening situation. That person was like most people, believing in a world where if you are good and kind and don't hurt anyone, nothing bad would happen to you. When you are good and kind and you get cancer, or hit by a drunk driver, or your child is abducted, it's like God telling you that all bets are off - life, as it turns out, is a crapshoot.

I have a theory about survivorship, of course - there are four stages. The first, let's call the Grieving Stage. It's the part where you acknowledge what you've lost and grieve for it. Maybe it's a breast, or your sight, or a fiance that you lost. Maybe it's your innocence - your belief in a world where good people don't get hurt. Whatever it is, you have to acknowledge that it's gone and it's probably never coming back. You can talk all you want about the stages of grief, but I prefer Freud's analysis of the process in his seminal work "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917), where he says (and I'm paraphrasing here) that the process of grief is not about wanting something that has been lost to return, but about transforming the feelings you have for the object (be they love, pride, or affection) into feelings that continue to exist, but for something that has been lost.

It took me years to do this with my father, who died when I was 21. Month after month, I was torn apart with sadness that he was gone, unable to look at pictures or revisit memories without revisiting the pain of losing him. I lived a half-life, wanting every day to wake up from what felt like a horrible dream. After reading Freud's essay in one of my classes, I gave myself permission to think of my father as a wonderful part of my life - but a part that was over. I thought, "I can be sad that he is no longer here, or I can be happy that he was at all." It still moves me to this day, to think his time here was cut short, but by learning to love him as something that has been lost, and is not coming back, I am no longer trapped in a world I want to be different.

Grief exists because of our connection to these objects and people we've lost - when they depart, a part of ourselves goes with them. It's narcissistic: grief is a form of reckoning with our own self-preservation. The irony is, the only way we can continue to exist is by letting go of this thing that we think we cannot bear the loss of. You can bear it, trust me. Losing something that is a part of you is not the same as losing yourself, unless you insist on going down with the ship. Imagine Aron Ralston, clinging to his dead limb, unable to let go of that part of himself. He would have lost his life, and not just his arm.

Next in this series, Stage Two: Acknowledging Your Mortality...

The Balance Between Under-Doing it and Over-Doing It

2010-07-19T16:35:00.001-07:00

The best advice I've ever gotten came from a Balinese surf instructor. I was in Seminyak to learn how to surf, because I'd heard there are no sharks in Bali (not true, unfortunately - on our last day, the same instructor laughed and said, "Who told you that?!"). Problem was, I kept falling off my board. Halfway through my second lesson, though, he jumped up and ran over to me in the water. "I know why you're falling!" he said excitedly. "You're trying to control the ocean!" Come again? He explained that my knees were locked, with my toes straining downward, gripping the board as a hand would grip a spatula trying to scrape frosting out of a bowl. Subconsciously, I was trying to bend the wave beneath me into something flat, using the surfboard. "Look, you can't control the ocean," he explained. "Trust me, it's too big - don't even try. Instead, try to control your balance on the board. Balance, and you can ride the wave. Understand? Just focus on your balance." I did, and caught the next wave, and the next, and soon I was turning right and left. "I turned!" I shouted to him, 20 yards away. "I TURNED!!" He gave me a big grin and a fist pump. And all I had to do was keep my balance. Who knew?

I've been loving boot camp these days - probably because I've actually been making an effort to reach "muscle failure," lifting until I can't lift any more. My logic is, the human body is designed so that you cannot grow a muscle without breaking down the existing fibers. You literally cannot get stronger without failing. How beautiful is that? Pretty poetic, this meat sack we live in. Fail a little every day and it will only make you stronger. The best part is - the hard part is mental (who isn't afraid to fail?). After that, your body just does its job.

Anyway, what's challenging, I think, is finding that balance between pushing yourself too far and not pushing yourself enough. We have two people in my boot camp that have, as of late, kind of represented the extremes, and reminded me of how tenuous that line can be. One is a girl I love, a runner and athlete who, sadly, ended up pushing herself too far and blowing out her knees. She's in her twenties. She would go to the gym in the middle of the night when she had trouble sleeping, and run ten miles, when I was barely working my way up to a 10K. Our coach warned her she was overdoing it, but she didn't listen. Like my father (who died of runner's heart), she thought more was better. Turns out, more was too much. Before her knees gave out, she was my rabbit - the person who could crack a smile at me in the middle of class and motivate me to squeeze out one more rep to keep up. Now, it breaks my heart that she can't run, and when I do a squat or a mountain climber, I wish I could loan her my legs, imperfect as they are, for 40 seconds because I know it must kill her to have to do back rows instead. Every time I lift a dumbbell with my lymphedema-swollen hand, I look over and wonder if I am playing with fire too. Where is my too much? Will I find it too late?

On the other hand, we have the guy I just want to smack every morning.

Now, I'm not a gym Nazi by any means. What saves me from overdoing it is probably my unwillingness to kill myself for a workout. But the exercises we're doing? Not rocket science. And not that hard, really, unless you max out your weights and reps. Yet, we inevitably have that one guy who doesn't pay attention when our coach is running us through the circuit, then waits for the 30- or 40-second timer to start to figure out what the exercise is. He wastes 10-15 seconds actually getting himself in position (if he ever does - I have seen him SKIP some exercises completely!), finally making a half-assed attempt at five or six reps before dropping the weights and faux stretch while he watches the clock eke out its remaining two seconds. This happens for three or four circuits two to three times a week. I am trying to remember if I have even seen him break a sweat. Class after class, I find myself wanting to go up to him and say, "Why the F are you even here, dude? That girl is killing herself to break a sweat without using her knees and here you are, dicking around like it's friggin' CURVES, flaunting your apathy in her face! I beat CANCER to be fit enough to make it through this circuit and you're not even TRYING!"

*sigh*

Why does this guy bother me? Why am I telling myself this story about who he is and why he does what he does? Why do I even care? Is it because when I first came to boot camp over a year ago, I struggled to lift even the five pound weights I wanted to lift, to do even ten knee pushups? Is it because I know real athletes tragically sidelined by injury (like my friend, the rabbit) who would give ANYTHING for the privilege of squeezing out 30 seconds of squats without pain? Watching him shake out his feet like the 15-second plank he did strained his Achilles makes me want to turn into Jillian from the Biggest Loser and say, "Hey, WINNIE THE POOH. You're not out of shape. You're just too lazy to push yourself. Your refusal to lift something heavy, for fear of actually reaching muscle failure, is the biggest symptom that something is seriously lacking in our society and I'll be DAMNED if I watch an able-bodied person SLACK in the face of more challenged people!"

BUT... balance, I remind myself. Balance is the key. And I don't want to let my concern with the way other people choose to live their lives throw my own compass off. What really matters is how I ride the wave. How I get out into the water and push myself. And if I'm so busy worrying about how other people are doing that I lose my balance, all I'm going to get is water up my nose and my shoulder in a sandbar - and that doesn't help anyone.

#31: Take A Cross Country Road Trip Across the U.S.A.

2010-07-07T20:34:00.000-07:00

When I was halfway through graduate school, I had dinner with a close friend and remember uttering the phrase, "I think it's much more insidious than you realize," (probably referring to some corporate greed-driven resource scarcity that had been denied mainstream media coverage), at which point she rolled her eyes and said, "See, now you sound like an eco-wacko." I laughed, nodded, and said, "I should take my act on the road!" The thought of traveling across the country, documenting and uploading corporate crime to expose it, like some character out of a Steven Soderbergh movie, seemed incredibly appealing at the time - and this was years before Twitter and Facebook - and even YouTube had even approached critical mass. It stuck with me, and I began collecting clippings - all the places I wanted to visit, people I wanted to meet - and the story I wanted to tell along the way.

I never got to take the trip, unfortunately - six weeks before I graduated, my sister left her husband, and the ensuing months were spent helping her pick up the pieces and rebuild what was left of her life. Ironically, I would go through a similar Nagasaki-like life reset years later - not because of a failed relationship, but a cancer diagnosis that rocked my world and shook my foundations. Gone were the green dreams, replaced by the pragmatism that comes from realizing the world isn't perfect, and never will be.

Now, with the dust settled in both our lives, and my future yawning before me, I stand at the crossroads in a yellow wood. One path leads to a studio apartment and the bottom rung of Corporate America, where I can start climbing up to Middle Management for the third time in my life. The other path - a path I seem to visit a lot, actually - leads to the unknown. I have an idea now - one that whispers to me these days, of the "key in having a key, and going". It says, "take your act on the road, kid, and see everything you want to see, because you're lucky if you get 100 years here." It says I can always rewrite my resume, always put down a deposit, and always grasp the bottom rung of that ladder, because that rung will be there, waiting for me, for years and years and years, no matter how many times I get out of line, and it always leads to the same place.

But how many times in my life will I be without a partner, without a child or a job or an illness to treat, or any number of things that will keep me tethered to one place ? If I go to my five year checkup at 39 and the doctor says, "I'm sorry, it's not good," what will I want to look back on? What will make me feel like I ate life up like an heirloom tomato in the heat of summer? I can tell you one thing: it isn't going to be three years as a data entry specialist at a real estate investment company, living next to a KMart. That is NOT what I went through six months of chemo for.

This, though - this idea: the "bright altar of the dashboard," as Stephen Dunn put it - quickens my pulse. Scares the crap out of me. And makes me feel, for the first time since I watched my dreams sink to the bottom of the proverbial ocean, like I'm following my bliss again. And is there a truer purpose in life? Does Ricky Bobby belong in suburbia delivering pizzas? I think not.

And so, the adventure begins: #31 in my 40-by-40, coming this October to a town near you: Take A Cross Country Trip Across the U.S.A. Stay tuned for dates, locations, and a timetable for my Next Big Thing. ;)

YOU and THEM

2010-06-29T17:08:00.001-07:00

I said to a friend the other day, "Things that really, truly change the world don't start with a corporate marketing campaign." I was talking about the Pepsi Refresh Project, comparing it to my recent disappointment with not being called back for the OWN "Your OWN Show" contest.* I was intending to paraphrase Margaret Meade, who once said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

Madge is on my mind because in the moment I realized I wasn't getting a phone call from OWN for a screen test, I deflated a little. My dreams of sharing this 40-by-40 journey with the rest of the country began to sway and shake, like a house of cards. Like most people, I thought, if they don't think it's a good idea, it probably isn't worth pursuing.

Of course, it doesn't matter who "they" are - your parents, your siblings, your kids, your coworkers, the media, the general public, the government. Even Oprah. When someone laughs or exhibits contempt (or even apathy) for your dreams, when someone just doesn't believe in you, your first instinct might be to follow suit, to dismiss your dreams as flights of fancy, to not believe in yourself. You make a choice in this moment - to agree with them - and in making that choice, you might be shortchanging yourself.

Now, not every dream is worth pursuing - if only because some are just plain crazy. How do you know when a dream is crazy? Here's my secret: when someone shoots it down, does it feel like you're dodging a bullet, or does it feel like you're taking a bullet? If you've moved on to a new dream a week later, consider it good fortune that you came to your senses before any real damage was done. But if you're lying in bed a week later, your heart sinking like the Titanic, trust your gut. Don't listen to them. Make a plan, and don't stop working it until you make your dream come true. I mean it - unrealized dreams are the stuff that illness and madness are really made of - this is serious business!

My father gave me one of the greatest gifts a parent can give a child, before he died in 1995. A year into college, I told him I wanted to change my major from Communications to Film Studies. He sighed in the way all parents sigh, when they imagine dollar bills floating out the window, but said, "Okay," and a month later, was sending me articles on Letterman Show internships and Jodie Foster's first directing gig. As Old Blue Eyes once said, "When somebody loves you, it's no good unless they love you All The Way." My father loved me "all the way," the way every child deserves to be loved. He showed me what someone believing in you looks like, and because of him, I can believe in myself when others doubt me.

Now, I'm not saying it's easy, this believing in yourself stuff. When I took a seminar last summer with my sister, I was still going through chemo - the only person in the room balder than me was the speaker, who had a shaved head! I didn't feel pretty, or worthy, or anything like my old, brave self. We did a hypnosis exercise where we visualized ourselves five years from now, where we got to talk to this "Future Self" and they gave us advice on how to get there. When I saw myself, I was onstage in front of a huge arena, fit and healthy and dressed in a crazy get up with pale pink spiky hair, playing an electric guitar. Everything stopped, and I turned to me (my "past" self) and said, simply, "Believe in yourself." When I came to after the exercise, all I could think was, "What the hell was THAT? How is THAT going to help me?!" I wanted concrete advice - "Get back into Property Management," "Write a book about cancer," "Lower the price on your Kaua'i house," and my Future Self gives me, "Believe in yourself."?! WTF?! I was ridiculously annoyed.

Now, though, over a year later, I get it. I get it because in truth, it's the only advice we should ever give children: "Believe in yourself." Believe in who YOU are - KNOW who you are, and not only BE that, but BELIEVE in that, because the hardest thing to BE in this world is yourself! The hardest thing to KNOW in this world is yourself, and devoting your existence to a pursuit that will connect you with who you really are is the best thing any human being can do with the time they're here.

*Interestingly, one of the things I appreciated about OWN's campaign was that you didn't have to register (and, therefore, give away your personal information) to vote, unlike Pepsi's campaign. I mean, Pepsi is amassing millions of e-mail addresses in exchange for changing the world. OWN, on the other hand, just wants your opinion. And website traffic, but I'm willing to give them that. ;)

#22: CHECK, Bitches!! ("Perfect My Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe")

2010-06-01T15:35:00.001-07:00

Like many women, I have devoted quite a bit of time to perfecting my own personal chocolate chip cookie recipe (#22 on my 40-by-40). I have made them from the version on the back of the Nestle Toll House chip bag, which, to be quite honest, simply does not work. I secretly believe there is actually something WRONG with that recipe on purpose, just so women will keep buying bags of chips in an attempt to get it right.

Why is it so hard? There's not even that many ingredients or steps, and I can't even count the number of times I've been to a potluck and come across a PERFECT cookie, only to have its maker say, "It's just the recipe on the back of the bag." LIAR! I want to say, YOU LIE! THAT RECIPE SUCKS! She (for, it is usually a she), will then shrug nonchalantly, knowing we all want to waterboard her until she confesses she substitutes coconut oil for part of the butter, or uses Tahitian vanilla instead of Bourbon.

Also, like many women, I have accidentally made a perfect cookie, only to forget what exactly I did differently. Did I use baking powder instead of soda? Medium eggs instead of large? What did I DO?! I'll attempt to replicate it, to no avail, and will inevitably end up blaming the humidity that day or some other nonsense. It's maddening to come so close to perfection - time and AGAIN! - and fall short.

You can see why this challenge is worthy of my 40-by-40.

In the end, I adapted a couple of recipes, added and took away ingredients via trial and error, and decided that MY "perfect" recipe would have certain elements - 100% butter, dark brown sugar, "white" whole-wheat flour, and Trader Joe's chocolate chips - distinctive to me, wile retaining the flavor of a "traditional" chocolate chip cookie. It wouldn't be a "giant" cookie like in bakeries, but on the smaller end - the width of a mug, to make it perfect for dipping in milk and packing in lunches. Lastly, I wanted a recipe for cookies that I could make with my own children someday, like the ones my mother made with me as a child (long since lost, sadly), so it would have to be mom- and kid-friendly and not too complicated (i.e., requiring overnight refrigeration or pan rotation).

I'm happy to say that not only did I achieve this goal today, but I achieved it in what might be the most awesome context I could have achieved it in. For weeks, I have been working on recipes, trying them out, deciding if I wanted to master an existing recipe or come up with my own, etc. There's a lot of variables here, and remember, I had my requirements (above) to consider. Last night, finally, I came up with an almost perfect recipe, so I decided that today, I would test-drive the final tweak of it while baby-sitting my friend Lisa's children - Molly and her brother, Carter. They would be the ultimate litmus test for the Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe.

Now, my sister and I have known Lisa and her husband for what seems like forever, and I've watched Molly grow up since she was a baby. After years in California, though, their family is moving to Portland, maybe for good. :( Having already planned to babysit Lisa's kids today, I decided I wanted to make this 40-by-40 memory with them, before they left. We had so much fun, and the batch of cookies we made was not only perfect; it was a memory I got to make that I'll definitely remember forever.

And so, without further adieu, I present #22 of my 40-by-40:

April's (and Molly's, and Carter's) Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe:

2 scant (barely) cups Trader Joe's "White" Whole-Wheat Flour*
3/4 tsp. baking soda
3/4 tsp. salt

1 1/4 sticks butter, at room temperature (1/2 cup + 2 Tbsp)
1/3 c. dark brown sugar
1/3 c. light brown sugar
1/2 c. white granulated sugar
1 egg, at room temperature
1 tsp. vanilla
2 Tbsp. milk

1 3/4 c. chocolate chips
1/2 c. pecans (if you don't like nuts, you can add an extra 1/4 c. chocolate chips)

*I've never tried this recipe with regular white bleached or unbleached flour, but I find that the cookies are just as tasty (and better for you) with "white" whole wheat flour, which has more fiber, but is not as gritty as traditional whole wheat flour. King Arthur also makes a version of it that is not hard to find, or you can get it in the Bulk section of most Whole Foods stores.

Combine the flour, salt, and baking powder in a bowl, separate from the remaining ingredients. Cream the butter and sugar together using an electric mixer on low until light and fluffy and all one color. Scrape down sides of bowl and add egg, vanilla, and milk, then beat (again, on low) until uniform in color. Add the flour mixture 1/2 cup at a time until just blended, then add in the chips and nuts. Give it a final stir with a spoon or spatula to make sure it's all blended together. The mixture will be stiff.

NOW, preheat the oven to 350 degrees, and let the cookie dough rest about 10 minutes. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and use a small cookie scoop (about 2 teaspoons) to drop the dough on the paper, about 2 inches apart. You want the cookies to be about an inch and a half across when they're done baking, so don't make the mounds too big (if you prefer bigger cookies, use a bigger scoop of dough, then press your thumb into the top of the mounds to make a little indent, so they will spread better in the oven). Bake the cookies for 10-13 minutes, depending on how crisp or gooey you like them, and when you take them out of the oven, let them cool ON THE PAN for 5 minutes to firm up, then move to wire racks to finish cooling (if they make it that long before being eaten).

NOTE: This recipe makes the cookies on the RIGHT in the picture above. For a thinner, crisper cookie like those pictured on the LEFT, add an additional 2 Tablespoons of softened butter and reduce the flour by 1/4 cup.

I can honestly say, these are the BEST chocolate chip cookies I've ever made from scratch. Bon Appetit!!

Hygeia

2010-05-30T22:50:00.000-07:00

We did an exercise in my cancer writing class a couple of months ago that, I think, will stick with me forever. Our instructor passed out different pictures of paintings and images, and we wrote for ten minutes about them.

What I noticed first about the image (above), and prompted me to write the story, was the woman's seeming mastery of the snake - a typically duplicitous and manipulative creature. The gold of her dress, mixed with such a vivid red, struck me as powerful and brutal, symbolizing both life and death, and I particularly resonated with the look on her face - one of calm power and peace. I had been reading Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth, so I decided to write a fairy tale:

"Once upon a time, there was a woman who lived at the bottom of a mountain. At the top of the mountain, there was a beautiful castle, where a handsome prince lived alone. The woman, seeking his favor, put on her most beautiful dress, made of gold, and began to climb the mountain. The rough terrain and sharp crags of the mountain soon tore her dress, then her skin. By the time she reached the top of the mountain, her beautiful gold dress was in tatters, and covered in blood. When she arrived at the front door of the castle, a snake greeted her. 'I've come to seek the favor of the prince,' the woman said. 'Looking like that?' the snake asked, scoffing at her ragged, wounded appearance. 'You must be joking. Go home and leave us alone.' 'But I've come all this way,' the woman said. 'Well,' said the snake, 'then you've wasted your time.' The woman was crestfallen, but the snake closed the castle gates, leaving her outside. Left alone after such a long and exhausting journey, the woman took a seat on a rock and began to cry. As she cried, her tears fell on her face and dress, and the more she cried, the more blood and dirt was washed away. As the last of her tears fell, the sun came out from behind the clouds and shone on the woman, illuminating her dress. The light from it caught the eye of the prince, who was standing on his balcony in the castle above her. He turned to the snake, who was by his side, and said, 'Snake, what is that shining so brightly at the foot of my castle?' he asked. 'Oh,' said the snake, 'That is some woman in a tattered dress who climbed the mountain to come seek your favor.' 'She climbed the mountain just to see me?' the prince asked. 'Surely she is worth meeting,' he said to himself. And with that, he went down to the castle gates and opened them to greet her. The woman got up, dried her tears, and turned to greet him, and in that moment, they fell in love, and lived happily ever after.

The image I got, though I did not know it at the time, was Hygieia - a detail from Klimt's Medicine panel. Hygieia, in Greek mythology, was a goddess representing the prevention of sickness and continuation of good health (particularly relevant to a cancer survivor, right?)! The snake around her arm represents Aesculapias (her father, the God of Medicine) and she holds the cup of Lethe in her hand. In Greek mythology, the River Lethe is one of the borders of the Underworld (Hades), and is known as the "River of Forgetfulness," because as the shades of the dead enter Hades, they must drink its waters to forget their earthly life. Says Wikipedia, "In the Aeneid, Virgil writes that it is only when the dead have had their memories erased by the Lethe that they can be reincarnated."

I'm still mulling over the story - the symbolism, survivorship, and what it all means - but it got my gears turning about reincarnation, rebirth, and the Hero's Journey into the belly of the beast, where he (or she) is transformed, usually by a kind of death. It is only through death that life comes, Cambell talks about in TPOM - says every great story, every great culture - Mother Nature, in fact! Animals die to give life, whether it is by becoming food or by decaying and nourishing soil. Everything is this great circle of birth and life and death and rebirth in Campbell's book. My own journey, where I killed something (my cancer) to give myself new life, and the woman in the story's, where she sort of baptizes herself in tears so she can be reborn as another version of herself - as beautiful as she was when she started out her journey, but stronger, higher, and more brilliant because of it. I could not help but think that in this little ten-minute exercise, I was seeing some deeper-knowing part of myself that wanted its voice heard. Not bad for a Saturday morning, eh?

Are You With Me? These Guys Are.

2010-05-25T09:50:00.000-07:00

So, maybe you've read about my 40-by-40, and noticed I mention a lot of people by name. Who are these guys? People who have been with me on my survivorship journey, and reminded me along the way of who I am, what I can accomplish, and how important I am in their lives. Here are a few of their stories.

Go to an Oprah show with my friend Loren Madden.
I met Loren while interviewing for a property management job. She has reminded me time and again to be myself, follow my dreams, and never even entertain the thought that I will not beat cancer. Whenever I start to doubt myself, Loren checks me, and GOOD! Add to that, she is an amazing singer and so funny I have practically peed my pants in her presence laughing over some observation she has made about people. Of course, she is the biggest Oprah fan I know, so I had to add seeing a show with her to my 40-by-40!

Finish the Napa Tri with my friend Kristy Lundy.
Kristy has been a friend since high school, and we have been through some amazing challenges together. She has a husband and two wonderful daughters, is one of the "greenest" moms I know, and she got into triathlons a few years ago. Before I was diagnosed, we talked about doing the Napa Triathlon someday - it's one that we've actually both done before separately - together, and we could not do it last year because I had cancer, or this year because she had to have major surgery herself. Now that she is doing great, we are both excited for next May, when we'll be side by side (well, maybe... her legs are way longer than mine so I may be several feet behind!) making two dreams come true.

Go on a Chocolate Tour of Paris with my friend Anne Barrow.
My friend Anne is a food blogger and amazing writer (here is her blog: The Kitchen Mirror) and cook. We both share a love of good food, and she turned me onto David Lebovitz's blog and books, which chronicle his life in Paris. Paris is the only city I've ever been to in Europe, and although I've dreamed of going back (for the food alone!), when I was diagnosed, there was a part of me that thought, "Well, you can kiss that dream goodbye," because of the financial burden I was facing paying for treatment. I don't know how or when, but going on a David Lebovitz chocolate tour of Paris with Anne would definitely be on a Bucket List even if it wasn't part of my 40-by-40, and it would definitely give me proof that having cancer can't take away any dream, no matter how big.

Skydive with my friend Ian Fuller.
Ian is a wild animal trainer I met while he was Couchsurfing in Kaua'i. I put him and his friend Ryan up for a few days, right before I found out I had cancer, in fact, and we have kept in touch ever since. He is definitely one of the coolest guys I know, and not just because he has like 300 friends who also train tigers, dolphins, and sea lions. He skydived when he was in Oahu and told me I should definitely do it, so I'm hoping we can get together next year after I run the Honolulu Marathon and share another adventure! It's important, when crafting your survivorship, to build a life that you can look forward to, and challenge the idea that something is unavailable to you because you've had cancer. Being in Hawaii again, recovered and healthy and strong, with a friend who was there when I was on the precipice of everything falling apart, is a deliberate memory I'm looking forward to making, because ten or twenty years from now, I will know that no matter how bad things get, they always get better. Whenever I see Ian, I remember where I was, and am reminded of how far I've come.

Do a Muddy Buddy event with my friend Katie Birkholz.
I met Katie when I was doing my 30-by-30, while she was working in our office in San Francisco. She is from Georgia and at the time, was dating her now-husband. I have seen Katie transform from a girl to a wife and a mom, thanks to Facebook, even though we haven't seen each other in person in nearly ten years! Her brother-in-law has been battling cancer himself, and when I was putting together my 40-by-40, I remembered how fun the Muddy Buddy we did in California was, and knew I had to add one for this round, if only to pay a long-overdue visit to an old friend.

I'll update you more on my events as they happen - if you'd like to join me for a 40-by-40 event, tell me your story, how it's inspired you, and we'll make it happen!! :)

"Opening Your Heart To Compassion" by Kurt Brewster

2010-05-25T09:31:00.000-07:00

I got this sweet message from one of my new Facebook friends and wanted to share it with my blog audience at his request.... :)

"Opening Your Heart To Compassion" by Kurt Brewster

I was on April Capil's site today. I am not a friend by meeting but was drawn to her story as a breast cancer fighter. April has reminded me, yet again about compassion.

I wish medical school could teach it, but likely most students (like me) couldn't absorb the lesson. If anything I was a self interested late 20 something, like most self-absorbed 20 somethings getting into medical school.

A classic book "House of God" (Shem) really mirrors my early doctor physician. It is one characterized by lack of sleep ,some self-interested CYA teachers and a "treat 'em and street 'em" approach by the working docs. I don't hold myself as any model. I'm ashamed that I ran with this paradigm.

My changing point came when a sort-of friend of mine showed up, had coffee then told me he had metastatic colon cancer. It had gotten to his spine and ribs. He didn't know who to talk to because he felt rushed by his GP and specialist. I didn't really "know" this person, but because most of his other "friends" abandoned him, I and a core group became his support.

He didn't become a good friend. He became one of my closest friends. My heart was opened to compassion. I can't explain it, other than I wanted to be a drastically different physician than the one I was.

The day before Charles died I took a shift sitting by his bed. The room was silent except for an old fashioned clock. I just sat there putting liquid into his eyes because he was so weak he couldn't blink anymore. Other than the profound silence, the only thing I could think was "I hope I have someone that will be there to help my tears when I can no longer make them".

I have learned about selfishness and self-centeredness almost as an abstract concept. What unlocked my heart was being thrust directly into accountability.

Anyways, I will never experience what a person with cancer faces unless I have the disease. The best I can offer is I am aware of the intensity of what supporters face and I admire anyone who is a true friend.

Humpty Dumpty

2010-05-15T22:40:00.000-07:00

I was watching my favorite Kristen Stewart movie, Speak, and it occurred to me, the journey of survivorship is really a process of putting the pieces of yourself back together. Watching Melinda walk home after her attack, shaking and disoriented, I was reminded of the feeling all survivors have - that something has come in and shattered any illusion you had of security, or divine protection or cosmic insurance against annihilation. It doesn't matter if it's rape, war, divorce, or cancer - anything that undoes your innocence suddenly and violently will knock you off your wall and onto the ground below, breaking you into pieces like Humpty Dumpty. Surviving, then, means doing what all the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't even do - putting yourself back together - so you can get on with your life.

There's a ceremony we did at our First Descents camp that didn't resonate fully with me until today. It's called a baci, and mimicks the Laotian ceremony of the same name, where elders call back a person's kwan, or protective life forces, that watch over the 32 organs of a their body. At the end of the ceremony, a cotton string is tied to the person's wrist to bind the kwan, securing them back in place. The string (or strings, as is sometimes the case) is then left on and not removed until they fall off on their own.

In Laos, baci ceremonies are performed to cure illnesses, recover mothers after birth, and commemorate the arrival of a newborn into the world. Interestingly, all of these events seemed to happen simultaneously over the course of a week at First Descents - we were all survivors of a disease that threatened our lives, filled with various levels of fear of recurrence (something even Lance Armstrong lives with). In challenging ourselves again and again, we gave birth to our new lives, and celebrated as people reborn - from fighters to survivors.

I feel now, looking at the white string around my wrist, as if our baci ceremony began the process of calling back all our broken pieces, that scattered when cancer took away our innocence. It is as if I am knitting myself back together, stitch by stitch, feeling more whole with every returned piece. There is a moment, in Speak, when Melinda - who has been mute for months as a coping mechanism - finally speaks up for herself, demanding for the first time what she wants, and that someone listen to her. I had a moment like that a week after I got back from camp - it was as if I had looked in the mirror and suddenly recognized my own reflection. In an instant. I realized that I had been hiding for a year after I finished treatment, afraid to be myself for fear that I would end up at the bottom of the wall. The thought of putting myself together, only to fall apart again, had terrified me into living a safe, restrained existence. It wasn't scary, but it wasn't me.

It's not like I don't fear falling off that wall again. What I realize now is, being in pieces isn't the worst thing in the world - living a half life is. If you have been through something that has torn your world apart, don't be afraid to rebuild. Call back your kwan, bind them tight, and remind yourself that just when the caterpillar thought its life was over, it became a butterfly.

White-Knucking It, or, This Must Be The Record For Lemons In A Single Day

2010-05-08T02:47:00.000-07:00

What a day. What an effing day.

So, yesterday, I thought I was getting my port removed today. BIG event. HUGE. Because, if I'm getting my port taken out, that means my cancer's not coming back, right? Because why would I need my port unless I'm waiting for an opportunity to use it?

This is pretty common with cancer survivors, I've heard. You're like someone living in a half-totaled house in Northridge, who doesn't want to rebuild until you're sure there won't be an aftershock. You live a half-life, waiting for the other shoe to drop. As a survivor, the moment you can let go of your port, because you realize you don't need it, don't want to need it, is the moment you find your first bit of freedom. Me, I had that moment on a deck, in front of a little kiddie pool filled with floating candles. I looked at this tiny little flame in my hand and I thought, "When I put this in that pool, it means there's another life I've got to start living, and I'm not going to need a chemo port for it." I cried and cried, because it's scary, letting go of this perverse security blanket, this piece of plastic in your chest that says, "I'm ready if it comes back." What I realized was, I'm ready anyway. I've been there. I lost my hair, lost a gallbladder, got shingles and an abscess and went broke and had to sell my house and leave my home and get a job in retail. What the hell, if I get more lemons, I'll just keep making lemonade, right? But, I digress.

So, yesterday, my surgeon called to cancel the surgery I was supposed to have today - I wasn't getting my port out after all. An hour later, my oncologist called, saying there was an opening today for a PET scan I'd asked about weeks ago. It's a scan that is sometimes routine for cancer patients, but that she was reluctant to schedule because it exposes you to a lot of radiation and she wasn't sure I needed it. Apparently, my insurance had approved it and she'd changed her mind.

In a strange twist of fate, this week I also gave notice to my work that I wanted to go to part-time, sacrificing my health insurance (and, I thought, the PET scan) so I could begin the process of crafting this new, port-free life. Now, this scan - which isn't cheap - was not only available immediately, but schedule-able in time to be covered by insurance. So, I said yes. And that is how it came to be that today, I didn't get my port taken out, but I did get a PET scan.

Now, I wouldn't say I'm a superstitious person, but I do have a strong belief that everything in life balances out. For every shitty thing that happens, something good happens, and usually, when something good happens, there's bound to be some shit down the road. It's just a story I tell myself, I know, but it helps a lot when I worry about bad things or get too cocky about good things. I guess I think it helps me be more like that old man in the "Maybe, Maybe Not" story (you can Google it) and not get too ahead of myself. It didn't surprise me, then, when I came home from my PET scan to an e-mail about my Kaua'i escrow falling through for the THIRD time (it was SO close!). After bawling my eyes out for an hour, I told myself, perhaps something REALLY good is coming into my life - something that will make buying this money pit nightmare of a property that stole so much of my time, energy, and optimism seem like a bad pina colada hangover.

It's easy to think the opposite, of course - that everything I lost in Kaua'i was payback for the friends I made there and the life my chemo nurses saved. It would be worth it, for sure. But no, I tell myself, this is just too much of a hurt locker. I am seriously not exaggerating when I say that selling this house has almost been as hard as cancer was. I have cried almost as much, lost almost as much money, and wanted to kill myself almost as many times, just to make it go away. I'm not kidding! What's worse, there isn't even going to be a payoff - it's scheduled for a foreclosure auction in a month; this buyer was my last chance. I mean, at least with cancer you go through treatment and in return, you get a clean bill of health. The house, on the other hand, has caused everyone horrible stress and everyone involved is STILL going to lose - me, my Realtor, the guy who wants to buy the house, my lender. EVERYONE! And NO ONE at the bank even CARES, especially not the underwriter. All because of a fucking retaining wall that no one will sign off on, that no one had a problem with when I was dumping MY life savings into a pipe dream!

*sigh*

Now, I know what this is really about, of course. It's about me being mad at myself for not being as careful as the bank's being. It's about me feeling stupid for using a moron Realtor when I bought the house, and lying about my income to get a mortgage I couldn't afford for a property I didn't need on an island that didn't roll out the red carpet just because I had a charitable heart and a big green dream. I know, I know. Believe me, I KNOW - I wrote a book on this stuff! Accordingly, I have pulled out all the tricks in my little toolkit to calm myself down tonight. I have watched my 40-by-40 video. I have looked at pictures from my Moab trip. I have cleaned out my e-mail InBox and sobbed until my eyes swelled (crying is an incredibly undervalued pressure release valve) and, of course, I've blogged about it. I have looked lovingly at my new bike and told myself that yes, indeed, this will all seem like a bad dream in three years, when I am celebrating my cancer-free anniversary (perhaps I should celebrate a house-free anniversary each year, when it finally has been auctioned off?). The process - squeezing, diluting, adding sweetener - has taken the edge off, even if it has not fixed anything.

The reality is, sometimes, there is just nothing you can do. It doesn't matter if someone has died who wasn't supposed to, or a house hasn't sold that was supposed to, or a diagnosis has come that you didn't want. Life will give you lemons, over and over. The only thing to do when they seem overwhelming is make the best lemonade you can and white-knuckle it until it gets better - move through your grief, putting minutes and hours between the heartbreak and where you are. Time heals most wounds, even the ones that feel like road rash.

40-By-40 Update... Sort Of...

2010-04-29T08:31:00.001-07:00

Mulling over organizations like First Descents, i[2]y, and the upcoming OMG Summit, I have felt the need to redefine my 40-by-40. It hasn't helped that Susan G. Komen recently partnered with KFC (yes, KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN) to raise money for breast cancer with their "Buckets For The Cure" campaign. Truth be told, pinkwashing has left an icky taste in even this BC survivor's mouth. This last year has just made me see so clearly that survivorship is more than wearing a ribbon... it's about learning to love - and really live - your life after cancer. That, for me, is what making it to my 5-year survivorship anniversary is really about.

Young (15-39) survivors in particular are an underserved population, and the only one whose survival rates haven't changed in 30 years. Nearly 70,000 of us are diagnosed each year, literally in the prime of our lives - we are either just getting ready to come into our own career-wise, or starting to think about having children. Many of us have just had children (if I had a dollar for every "I found my lump breastfeeding my first child" story...) or are thinking about it. Cancer is the word that brings your future to a screeching halt, when you're under 40.

In light of all this, I'm finding it hard to motivate myself to raise $40,000 for causes and organizations that will not necessarily help people who are going through what I went through, as a young survivor. Yes, research is important; yes, support services are important, and YES, awareness is important, but youth are already marginalized in society. If I'm going to spend the next 4 years committed to promoting cancer survivorship, I feel obligated to spend it committed to promoting the survivorship of MY demographic - young adults affected by cancer.

The question, of course, is how?

Now, I'm still working this all out, but it did occur to me this week, there's a reason why Lance Armstrong hasn't had a recurrence. First, he takes care of himself. Second, he has literally declared war on cancer - the man is relentless when it comes to the cause. Third, he's an inspiration - positive and driven, with a commitment to doing whatever it takes to win the battle. In my post-cancer journey, I've often wondered, how many times must Lance have thought, "I'll never win the Tour de France now. I will be lucky to even be alive after this..." And yet, this man won it SEVEN times AND had a naturally-conceived kid post-treatment. If that doesn't inspire a survivor to think anything is possible, I don't know what would.

The 5-year survivor mark, as I've said, is the statistic that trumps all other statistics. If you can make it to 5 years, you have the same chance of long-term survival as anyone else, no matter what stage or what cancer you've had. So I asked myself, what would the five years after cancer have to look like, to make 40 a goal I'd want to get to? If I found out the day before my 40th birthday that I'd had a recurrence, what would make the last 5 years worth living? The question that really drove the definition of this new 40-by-40 though, was born directly from my First Descents experience. It was "What do I think has been taken away from me, or is now unavailable to me, because I've had cancer?" In answering it, I made a list whose only goal was to blow that assumption to smithereens.

THAT is how you get busy living, my friends. :)

And so, without further ado, here is my NEW 40-by-40, or, at least the first 30 of them (I'm reserving the right to add more as I think more about this). It's designed to challenge me physically, emotionally, spiritually and mentally, and is kind of a cross between a Bucket List and a Fear Factor schedule. In upcoming blogs, I'll take you through the whys and hows of choosing them, and invite you to join me in being a part of them. And yes, I am giving myself credit for 3 events I did last year. ;)

1. Do a Komen 3-Day Walk.
2. Do an Avon 2-Day Walk.
3. Do the Peak Hike on Mt. Tam to benefit the Breast Fund.
4. Write & publish my manifesto (Recipe For Lemonade).
5. Rock climb in Moab, UT.
6. Run the NYC Marathon.
7. Have my own place again.
8. Inner-tube down the Russian River on Labor Day Weekend.
9. Run the Disney Princess 1/2 Marathon in Florida.
10. Go to an Oprah show with my friend Loren Madden.
11. Finish the Napa Tri with my friend Kristy Lundy.
12. Go on a David Lebovitz Chocolate Tour of Paris with my friend Anne Barrow.
13. Skydive with my friend Ian Fuller.
14. Run the Honolulu Marathon 10 years after I first ran it.
15. Learn to roll a kayak with First Descents.
16. Speak at a major survivor event like the OMG Summit or the Young Survivor Conference.
17. Learn the 6 Basic Figure Skating Jumps.
18. Learn to play the electric guitar. Rock the Fender Strat.
19. Execute a Dusk-to-Dawn Dance Party Fundraiser benefiting a young survivor non-profit.
20. Go to Bora-Bora for 2 weeks with someone I love.
21. Learn to fly-fish with Casting for Recovery.
22. Perfect my chocolate-chip cookie recipe.
23. Go to the Telluride or Sundance Film Festival.
24. Complete an event in Gatlinburg to celebrate the life of my friend Kevin Price's brother, who died young from cancer.
25. Train with Team in Training to complete an Ironman as part of IronTeam.*
26. Run a mile in under 8 minutes.
27. Start a garden again.
28. Do a Muddy Buddy event with my friend Katie Birkholz.
29. Secure a well-paying job I love, with great benefits (including health insurance).
30. Take my niece and her half-sister to Kaua'i to learn how to surf.

*This is a program that is only run in Northern California and requires a major fundraising commitment for an organization that does not directly serve young survivors - I reserve the right to replace it with something else if I run into the Komen-KFC factor and it rubs me the wrong way. Alternately, I would set a goal to hike Mt. Kilimanjaro, which would probably be just as strenuous and as expensive.

Well, that's it so far. Again, I reserve the right to review and revise! This is just draft 1. Lemmeneaux whatcha think. ;)

Room For Weakness

2010-04-27T23:00:00.000-07:00

I used to be the kind of person who had no room in her life for weakness... no room for someone who could not pull their own weight, who could not stiffen their own upper lip. If you admitted your failures around me, it would not endear me to you; instead, I might become slightly embarrassed for you, and feel awkward in your presence. I did not know how to relate to people who could not handle things, because I Knew How To Handle Things. I was raised by someone who Knew Everything and made it his mission to teach me Everything I Would Need To Know. The only problem was, he died too soon. Like Edward Scissorhands, I wasn't finished.

Between then and now, my sister has mastered the art of Pulling Her Own Weight. She Knows Everything. I thought I did, until I had cancer.

What cancer teaches you, first and foremost, is that you are not in control. Of anything. Of any cell in your body. Cancer laughs at your big dreams, your sense of security, your positive affirmations. It reminds you that you're human, and mortal, and capable of being flawed, and if you are wise, in the end, you are the richer person for it. You become, after cancer, someone with Room for Weakness.

I am different after cancer... better, I think, because of this space allowance for people who err, who don't know, who trip over cracks. My life, instead, has little room for perfection. Excellence has become redefined in this new life as courage instead of flawlessness, bravery instead of confidence. My heart goes out to the shaking knees that stand anyway, to the sweaty palm that holds on tight despite its dampness. I have room in my life for weakness now, because it charms and soothes me in its familiarity. I see myself in people who are unsure, but push on, who don't pretend to know everything and, perhaps, have realized they know nothing.

The hardest part, I think, is the space between my sister and I that has grown in the face of my tolerance for imperfection, for less-than-stellarness. I think she sees it, not as a personal development, but a chink in my armor, a vulnerability that renders me unreliable, uncount-on-able, un-understandable. She cannot accommodate an Achilles' heel in her world, built on certainties and promises of security. It interrupts her future show like a band of static on the screen, marring its perfection. I feel so much now like the rough patch on a fingernail, catching everything, much to her annoyance.

It started before this, I think, with my wild garden in the backyard, my wall-to-wall posters in the room we shared as teenagers. I read through letters she sent me years ago, trying to find the person she admired so much, trying to see if there was anything I did to contribute to her intolerance of imperfection, and am lost. I cannot even find the person I used to be; perhaps it is a good thing I do not mourn her.

In the end, perfection is too much for someone who has been forced to recognize their own flaws. It instills a sense of failure, and what survivors thrive on is faith - the blind kind, usually - in them, in their future, in life. Knowing that others err and fall and get back up again is food for our souls - it reminds us we haven't missed our window or blown our chances, and that strength is something that is not untested, but tried again and again, and better for it.

Fred's Team - NYC Marathon 2010!!

2010-04-25T20:06:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to remind y'all, as part of my 40-by-40, I am running the New York City Marathon this November and raising $3,000 for Fred's Team, benefiting Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital. Memorial Sloan-Kettering, in addition to being the place where fellow survivor Geralyn Lucas was treated, is the nation's preeminent center for research and treatment devoted exclusively to cancer.

Fred's Team is a group of dedicated runners of all abilities who participate in athletic events to raise funds for cancer research at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Since its founding in 1995, Fred's Team --

has raised more than $38 million to benefit vital research at MSKCC.
is the primary source of support for the Aubrey Fund for Pediatric Cancer Research, established in 1997 to benefit ongoing research for childhood cancers, including leukemia, neuroblastoma, brain tumors, and certain forms of sarcoma.
attracts thousands of members who participate in marathons and athletic events of all types, in New York, Chicago, Boston, and worldwide.

Here are more stories of Fred's Team runners: http://mskcc.convio.net/site/PageServer?pagename=ft_stories_main

You can help the cause by donating to my Fred's Team run. Your support will help fund new research and new treatments that bring true hope to people affected by cancer.

My Participant # for this event is: 999934646.

Here is the link to my personal donation page: http://mskcc.convio.net/site/TR?px=1760262&fr_id=1310&pg=personal

First Descents

2010-04-25T18:41:00.000-07:00

I just came back from my first First Descents camp and it was, in a word, amazing.

Transformative.

Rejuvenating.

Phenomenal.

In fact, I think this photo pretty much says it all:

But, if you want to know more about the camp, check out this video, or, listen to me share my experience TOMORROW NIGHT on the Stupid Cancer Radio Show at BlogTalk Radio.

Barbara Ehrenreich and Positive Thinking

2010-04-14T22:30:00.000-07:00

I wanted to share this interview with Jon Stewart and Barbara Ehrenreich, whose new book "Bright-Sided" discusses the dark side of positive thinking: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-14-2009/barbara-ehrenreich

Many times, when you are coping with an unexpected disappointment or particularly challenging time in your life (like cancer), people (even people you love) try to help you feel better by suggesting you just "think positive" and "don't dwell on the negative." I talk about this in Chapter Five of my book, Recipe For Lemonade.

I can't tell you how annoying this is for someone going through cancer.

Now, there is a difference between a heartfelt, "It'll get better; hang in there," (which I love) and a somewhat self-righteous, The Secret/Law Of Attraction-motivated attitude that implies a person can bring misfortune on themselves deliberately through a combination of their thoughts and the science (or magic) of quantum physics.

I myself have been buoyed by hugs, e-mails with supportive, encouraging messages, and belly laughs brought on by joking coworkers. Whether these things have changed my white blood cell counts remains to be seen, but I do know that they have given me a reason to get up in the morning - something to keep living for - which is very motivating when you're fighting for your life. To put it frankly, these things can be the difference between wanting to live and wanting to die. What they cannot do, however, is cure cancer.

We don't want to believe this, of course. We want saving someone's life to be as simple as the power of prayer. We don't want to believe that sometimes, people die and there is nothing you can do to stop it. That's a terrible world to live in, isn't it? A world where someone you love, no matter how much you love them, or how much they love you, can be beaten by their own genetics or a lack of T-cells. And yet, this is the world we live in, and no amount of happy thoughts can change it. Why is it we can believe positive thinking can cure cancer, but it can't cure AIDS? Why do scores of people bash chemotherapy when it has saved millions of lives? I know it's not perfect, but it's ALL WE'VE GOT. If you have a better solution, for God's sake, get some medical training and go prove it at the Mayo Clinic, because we could certainly use an alternative. But don't sit there when you haven't had a doctor tell you that you could die if you don't do what they say, and then suggest I meditate on rainbows to shrink my tumor.

When people I love tell me not to be so negative (i.e., realistic) about cancer and the ramifications of having had it, I wish that, for just a moment, they could be in my shoes. That, for just a moment, they could feel the fainting heart and nauseous stomach that comes with a cancer diagnosis. The sinking feeling that accompanies the realization that the life you thought lay before you - the one you were working towards, hanging in there for, and getting up in the morning for - has been utterly wiped out, like Nagasaki, in a split second. I wish they could go through week after week of treatment - each chemo drip reaffirming the unavailability and inaccessibility of that future - and know how hard it is to keep getting up in the morning, despite your uncertainty about the future. But mostly, I wish they could feel the way I feel when someone suggests in the face of all this that staying positive can not only cure cancer, but keep it away. Are you fucking kidding me? I want to say. You do four rounds of AC and twelve rounds of Taxol and tell me how to stay positive when I look like Uncle Fester and my future looks like Hiroshima (circa 1946). It is taking everything I have in me just to keep waking up in the morning.

Now, all that being said, there is a way to come out of cancer without hating your life and the people who have loved you through it. The first is, recognize that there is a pro and a con to nearly everything. Sometimes, the only pro is this will not last forever, and that is what you must hang onto if you want to make it to the other side of disaster. Sometimes, the cons build up so much that all you can do is curl up in a ball and cry. When this happens, cry. Cry, cry, cry. Cry till your eyes are swollen shut. Stay away from drugs, alcohol, and anything else that's self-destructive, and curl up in bed until you fall asleep. When you wake up, that crappy day will be over and done and a new one will have started. When you get out of bed, on this new day, don't think of it as one more crappy day to get through - think of it as one day closer to the end of a crappy week, crappy month, or crappy year. It won't stay crappy forever - sooner or later, things WILL get better. Your job is to make it to the end of the crap. Trust me, it will come.

When the crap breaks, take a breath. Entertain the possibility that, even if this amazing life you were working so hard for and imagining every day is not to be, that there might be some alternate, happier (or just-as-happy) future available to you now. This is all you have to do - drive the wedge into your crap-centric thinking - to jump the track. Find the things in your life you can be content with, even happy about, and you will feel the crushing despair of impossibility lift, if only slightly.

This is the path to rebuilding optimism - not faking it till you make it, not pasting on a smile when you feel like giving up, but seeking out the reasons to keep living, keep hoping, keep dreaming. Giving yourself permission to imagine new happinesses and forgiving yourself for having a bad day, or a bad month, or a bad year. We only blame ourselves for misery because we don't want to live in a world where anyone can fall apart at any time for no good reason. We have to believe that people bring it on themselves, otherwise we're all vulnerable. When someone tells you to "stay positive" instead of worrying about a recurrence, they're either afraid of their own mortality, or grasping at straws because they don't want to imagine a world without you. Chances are, they have no idea what you're going through, so unless they're being a pushy jerk, cut them some slack.

Especially if they bought you a pink bear.

Stupid Cancer

2010-03-27T17:54:00.000-07:00

I'm catching up on my Stupid Cancer Show episodes, hosted by Matthew Zachary, founder of the I'm Too Young For This Foundation (i[2]y) and journalist Lisa Bernhard (former Entertainment Correspondent for the Fox News Channel).

What I love about the show is summed up in this quote from Zachary: "the art of survivorship is how you choose to get busy living."

Tune into the show April 26th, when I'll be telling my story and talking about Recipe For Lemonade (now available in paperback and Kindle versions on amazon.com).

- A.

Go Go Speed Racer

2010-02-26T18:40:00.000-08:00

"[It] felt as though he had his hand inside my chest... and he was trying to crush everything in my life that mattered to me."

"You think you can drive a car and change the world? It doesn't work like that!"

"As the cars take to the field, you can feel the anticipation mounting in the audience. Something is different. There's an electricity in the air... the presence of Speed Racer has completely changed the equation."

"It doesn't matter if racing never changes. What matters is if we let racing change us."

- Speed Racer (2008)

My favorite song as of late (replacing, yes, even DJ Earworm's "United States of Pop") is the theme song to Speed Racer. Whenever I hear it, the beat brings to mind Bangkok University Cheerleading Team-Level acrobatics and the final Grand Prix race scene in the movie, where Speed closes his eyes, finds his center, and, in finding it, rejoins the race and wins. The song gets my heart pumping and makes me feel like shifting into high gear. When it plays, I am suddenly a rocket, shooting for the sky. Amazing what a 3 1/2-minute piece of music can do, no?

The Olympics have been on my mind, understandably. Some people think competition is about beating other people - coming in first. At the Olympic level, though, where the difference between first and second can be three hundredths of a second, most of the competitors have already come in first - first in their class, first in their region, first in their country. When you are ALL the fastest, the competition becomes about who can, in one moment, bring the best of themselves to the table. Taking the gold becomes all about who wants it most, who has the most heart, who can look into themselves and find the champion that they have been working to be.

What I really love about competition, though, is the underdog - the Venus and Serena Williamses. The ones who come onto the scene and kick the crap out of our expectations. The ones who have been waiting for this moment to come into their greatness and shatter ceilings and records and boundaries. They are the ones that make you want to shout, "GO! GO! GO!" The ones who will let no one come between them and their dreams.

Here's to being unstoppable, peeps. :)

Of MacQueen and Mullins

2010-02-12T19:07:00.000-08:00

The tragic suicide of Alexander McQueen, on the eve of his mother's funeral, has surprised and shocked his family and friends. What breaks my heart even more is the difference between McQueen and one of his most famous models: Aimee Mullins, whose TED talks have made be both laugh and cry.

When we lose something in life, we sometimes convince ourselves that we cannot be happy without it, that life will simply not get any better. It doesn't matter if it is our breasts, our mothers, our homes, or our jobs. We convince ourselves that without this, we will live a lesser life, a sadder life. A life, some think, that is just not worth living at all.

It is this refusal to belief in a future that could be worth looking forward to takes lives, as sure as random acts of violence.

Aimee Mullins, a double amputee at age one, is a world-class athlete, model, actress, and motivational speaker. She was in one of MacQueen's shows, famously wearing a pair of intricately carved wooden prosthetic legs that everyone thought were wooden boots. In her first TED talk, she detailed the story of her climb from beginner athlete to Olympic competitor in 15 months. Despite (or maybe because of ) her challenges, Aimee is funny and resilient, and has an amazing ability to see the possibility in things where other people see only dead ends. "A prosthetic limb doesn't represent the need to replace loss anymore," she said in 2009, "It can stand as a symbol that the wearer has the power to create whatever it is that they want to create in that space....so that people society once considered to be 'dis-abled' can now become the architects of their own identities and continue to change those identities."

What is it that Aimee Mullins can do, that MacQueen couldn't? What is it that I can do that my own mother, who took her life following her mother's death, couldn't? It can't just be that one of us is more resilient, that one of us can move on. It must have something to do with imagination, with this ability to let go of one story we've been telling ourselves and create a new story, with a different ending.

I think, it is not the things, the people, the jobs we lose that break our hearts, but the future that we imagine is impossible without them, that is so hard to get over. It's not as simple as, "If I have a mastectomy, I'll never have cleavage again." It's about the children you'll never breastfeed, isn't it? We've taken something as basic as an appendage, a lump of skin, and turned it into something so much harder to lose: motherhood. Can I be a mother without breasts? Can Aimee Mullins be a runner without legs? Of course. Of course.

Perhaps what saves lives is something you say to yourself, when the world you were supposed to be heir to is turning to dust in your hands: You can go on. You can be happy again. It's possible.

To High Street and Back Again

2010-02-05T11:34:00.000-08:00

I've started running again.

Remember how I said the world teaches you something about yourself every day? Yesterday, my run taught me a few things, so I thought I'd share.

First, I haven't run in weeks. I'd been doing the Avon and Komen Walks and was kind of giving myself a break, but since I'm training for the Napa Triathlon (May) and the NYC Marathon (November), I thought I'd better start running again. Thanks to an AWESOME song from DJ Earworm, I cranked up my iPhone and hit the road with a spring in my step.

About a mile and a half into my run, I looked up to see what I thought was a chain link fence across my path, just as I was trying to decide if I was going for a "short" (30-45 minutes) run or a "long" (> 1 hour) run. "Aw, man," I whined... only to see that my path wasn't actually blocked off; there was a new fence but it didn't even come close to blocking me. There I go again, I thought. Seeing obstacles that aren't there. I chuckled and thought, how often do we make up roadblocks in our head? How many times would we see a clear path before us, if we took a second look. Lucky for me, I kept moving.

Next, I told myself I was going to run up every hill I could. I run/walk, running for 3-4 minutes, then taking a 1-2 minute walk break, sometimes with music, sometimes with actual Walk Breaks I've recorded myself, so I don't have to interrupt my music. I usually walk the hills, but yesterday, I felt different. The music I was listening to gave me energy, and it was beautiful outside. I felt strong, and proud of myself for getting up early to workout.

There is one stretch of my route that always makes me want to sprint - it's long and straight, and right in the middle of two hills. When I got to it, a remix of The Fray's "You Found Me" came on, and when I heard the line, I found God, which is in my favorite DJ Earworm song, I suddenly choked up. I thought of all the times, before my battle with cancer, that I said the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, that I asked God to make me a channel of His peace, and how cancer was a kind of an answer to a prayer, but not the answer I wanted! The words of the song, as my feet hit the pavement over and over, as my heart beat harder and harder, both hurt me and strengthened me, making me think about how far I've come, how I'm not in a hospital today getting my gallbladder taken out or having a bone marrow transplant, how I was running, running for Godssakes! As the song finished, I hit the bottom of the hill, and there, sitting on the edge of the trail, was a black cat, looking at me.

Now, I'm not superstitious, but as I ran by it, I was so exhilarated - by the run, by the song - that I said, "I DARE you! I DARE you!" The cat, of course, just looked at me like I was nuts. What can I say? In that moment, I felt invincible.

I ran/walked ten miles yesterday, in about an hour and fifty minutes - an eleven-minute mile. Pretty frickin' awesome, considering I could barely run/walk two miles in June, at 16 minutes a mile. I guess it shows what you can do, with the right music and the right motivation. ;)

Recipe For Lemonade: Chapter Twelve

2010-01-30T13:04:00.000-08:00

PART XII: COOL IT

It started with a conversation about a club.

"Well, I don't want to go there if it's going to be a bunch of geezers sweating to the Oldies."

"It's not going to be old people! Kathy says it's Eighties Night!"

"See?! It's going to be old people!"

"It's not! Come on, it'll be fun. We can have drinks with your friend before, Kathy will be there till 10:30. Oh, but there's a $15 cover charge."

"Okay, but we can't go to drinks before because I can't spend $15 twice. I just spent $25 in the city yesterday and $300 on Xango last night."

"You spend $300 on Xango? Why?"

"I gave Gina the last of my Eleviv so I ordered two more bottles and then I got two more cases of Xango so we have it."

"Wait, we have plenty. Why would you do that?"

"I was going to send a case to Meryl as a thank you for Joe talking to Mike about the fireman thing."

"Well, do you know if she's going to drink it? 'Cause if she isn't, you're just wasting your money."

Wasting your money. It's funny how certain phrases have the ability to take us from zero to sixty in a matter of seconds. When life hands you lemons, sometimes the only way to explain their presence in your life is telling yourself a story that YOU brought them into your life. In a twisted way, this kind of magical thinking gives us a sense of power over our lemons. We think, "If I brought them IN, I can take them OUT." You can't get rid of a lemon, though, even by passing it off onto someone else. All you can do with a lemon is make lemonade. Your only power over lemons is what you do with them.

My sister had been building a pretty successful business selling Xango, a whole-fruit mangosteen juice that reduces inflammation, and Eleviv, a dietary supplement that "promotes vigor" (the succinct way of saying, "improves mental clarity, increases physical energy and instills a sense of well-being"). It was a multi-level marketing business, with guidelines and rules on how to build it, and I'd just broken the biggest rule: don't give anything away for free, because people don't value free things. And yet, my sister had been paying for my four bottles of Xango a month since October, so I wouldn't be debilitated by joint pain caused by my clinical trial drug (Bondronat). I was being generous, I thought, just as she had been generous to me. And now, suddenly, I was tearing up, and feeling defensive.

Why do we escalate? Why is it that, even the most rational, sound-minded person can suddenly turn a conversation about doing laundry into a tirade on how their mother never loved them? It's because of all that evidence we're building, for the case called "My Happiness Is Never Coming Back." We have plenty of exhibits for this case, of course: Exhibit A, "Things I Can't Do Right," and Exhibit B, "Mistakes I Can't Stop Making," and Exhibit C: "Ways I Go Wrong All The Time." Every time we get handed a lemon, every time we hand OURSELVES a lemon, either inadvertently or on purpose, and someone corrects us, we add a little piece of evidence to our case file. We open up the case file, and are suddenly face-to-face with all these stories about who we think we are, what we think we're capable of. Instead of it being a conversation about laundry, it becomes a conversation about every mistake we've ever made and how we suck because of it.

Here's the thing: warm lemonade doesn't work. You can dilute the bitterness of the lemon's juice by watering it down, you can find something to sweeten it up, but to be refreshed, you have to learn how to COOL (it) DOWN. When you find yourself escalating and overheating, the most important thing to do is STOP right where you are, and think a moment about the case you're building - what are you gathering evidence for? In my case, the phrase you're wasting your money got added to the "Why I'm Always Going To Be Broke" case file, under the evidence, "Things I Can't Do Right," and everything my sister started saying to be helpful - how to properly introduce someone to the product, why you shouldn't give it away for free - kept getting added to the file. The evidence for me being a moron was piling up, and my sister didn't even know she was adding to it - she was just trying to be helpful.

Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to stop my mind running in the middle of the conversation, to take a deep breath and remind myself that I wasn't on trial. I felt myself start to overheat, start to lose my cool, and immediately recognized what I needed, what anyone trying to disprove a case needs: evidence to the contrary.

My friend Lisa is a brilliant mother. The thing I have seen good mothers do, so effortlessly, is misdirection. One time we were at a playground and her daughter, Molly, fell and skinned her knee while running with her Snow White water bottle. Headed for Defcon 4, Molly limped over to Lisa with the face all mothers dread: that red, scrunched, I'm-About-To-Have-A-Total-Meltdown look. Lisa let her wail for just a second, then immediately turned her attention to the water bottle, and said, "Oh my Gosh, is Snow White okay?! Look at Snow White, is she okay?!" Molly, hiccuping, suddenly stopped and turned to the water bottle, inspecting it. Sniffling, she turned it over, mirroring her mother's concern. Molly had completely forgotten about her knee. I looked at Lisa, mouth open, and she winked at me.

What works for kids can work for us, if we can stay present and in control of our reactions. We can't control the world; we can't control what happens to us, but we CAN control our reactions to it, by being mindful of the stories we tell ourselves, and the evidence we're gathering for the cases we're building.

I said that what I needed, to keep cool, was evidence to contradict the case I was building, the case of "Things I Can't Do Right." Most of us, finding ourselves in this situation, instinctively attempt to convince the person we're defending ourselves to that we actually DID do something right. This is about as effective as trying to convince a child who's skinned her knee that her knee actually doesn't hurt that bad. The knee DOES hurt. You DID do it wrong. You WERE disappointed by something you didn't expect. So admit it to yourself; admit it to the person you're talking to. Own the lemon. Then, so you won't have a full-on meltdown, anticipating newer, bigger, scarier lemons, immediately start looking for evidence of Things You Can Do Right in a completely different context.

When you're on a roll, tearing yourself down, escalating your own worry, you're like a runaway train. By changing the subject (and your objective) in your head, you force your brain to "jump the track" and give you a chance to regroup. You're like the crying child, getting carried away with the knee and the hurt and the pain, who suddenly turns a corner and sees a dinosaur with an ice cream cone. Your brain suddenly thinks, "Wha...?" and immediately forgets where it is and starts focusing on something else. Misdirection. The saving grace of mothers, it's just as effective for grown-ups when used properly.

In my case, I told my sister I would talk to her before I shipped the case anywhere, and then got up and went into the kitchen to make myself breakfast. She, being helpful, wanted to continue the conversation, sensing an opportunity to teach me about her business, but I, sensing it would only add to my own feelings of inadequacy and ineptitude, said, "Listen, I won't ship it, but I don't want to talk about this anymore." Hurt and confused, she left, but I stayed, and made myself a cup of chai tea (something I'm pretty good at). Then, I started to write, which always makes me feel smart and capable. I did two things that reminded me I was not a moron - just enough to help me "jump the track" and cool off.

You have to prioritize your cool. When you find yourself starting to overheat, starting to build evidence against your own goodness and possibility, you MUST STOP, immediately, and either start to build evidence to the contrary, or misdirect yourself, like a mother taking a child's attention away from a skinned knee. Human beings are very good at making cases for things, and if you are not conscious of how you do this in your own life, you can inadvertently build a case for something you really don't want, just because you're not aware you're doing it.

About a half an hour later, my sister came back. "Are we still friends?" I laughed. She had been in the other room all this time, telling herself a story that I was mad at her. "Of course, I'm just working on my book," I said. She walked over to me. "Well, can I have a hug?" I hugged her. "It's all right," I said, "I was just working through my own stuff." In one piece of evidence, I gave her the proof she needed that we were okay. Sometimes, it really is that simple.

Making lemonade is simply this: taking an experience that disappointed you, learning from it, recognizing it for the isolated incident that it is, moving past it by paying attention to the sweetness of life, and keeping your cool by checking yourself when you start to overheat.

It's not rocket science, but it does take work, and attention, and being conscious of the stories you tell yourself. Lemons aren't all bad. They can teach us a lot about ourselves and our expectations. The important thing to remember is that life is an adventure - sometimes it's awesome and sometimes it's awful, but if you can make lemonade out of lemons, you will never want for refreshment.

SWEATING IT OUT

2010-01-28T12:37:00.000-08:00

(a break from the book to blog!)

It occurred to me this morning, that the world teaches you something about yourself every day. I've been doing Bikram Yoga for a few weeks, starting off with a "10-Classes-In-10-Days New Year's Challenge" my studio was sponsoring (presumably to "jump start" 2010), and it was sooooo hard! SO hard. But, I did it. I only missed one day of Boot Camp (yes, I did both simultaneously. no, I have not lost my mind). One of the teachers said something during class that sounded like, "Bikram says, every day the body is new," akin to the idea that you never step in the same river twice.

Every DAY is new. Every day, the world teaches you something about yourself. But, you have to be present. Like any classroom, you have to pay attention to learn. You can't just chew bubblegum and let your eyes glaze over.

In Bikram yoga, the room is initially so hot, you can't listen to mind chatter and go through each pose. Some people can't handle it. They can't stop thinking, "itssohotitssohotitssohotimgoingtopassout..." and so, they sit down. Even I have had my moments on humid days or with teachers who really crank the thermostat up. The trick is, you have to BREATHE! It works like a charm. Antonie is my favorite teacher; she is constantly reminding us to breathe, and when a pose it over, she doesn't say, "Change!" - she says, "RELEASE!" like a drill sergeant. BREATHE and RELEASE... could there be better advice for someone in a hot room?

When you focus on breathing, when you really pay attention to your body, Bikram becomes a journey of discovery, of listening to your muscles and your lungs and your heart, your knees and feet and ankles and shoulders. You notice your body, look at it in ways that you never get a chance to the rest of the day. This week, I got into a pose I've never been able to hold before... and promptly feel out of the pose after it, which I've rarely had trouble with. Why did I rarely have trouble with it? Because I'd never held the pose before it - by not doing it completely, I had been inadvertently giving myself a little rest between poses! And so now, my practice (because yoga is, above all, a practice) is going to be about building the stamina to hold both poses, one after the other.

Some people don't like Bikram because they think it is monotonous - the same poses, over and over. In fact, I think it can be a lot like life - we get up, we go to work, we come home. But, you never step into the same river twice, and your body is a different body every day. Every day, your practice becomes a new challenge, because change is the only constant. You are stepping up to the same starting line, but you are running a different race every time - a race against your last best effort. The world will teach you something different today; you just have to pay attention.

End of Treatment - (Just) Dance.mov

2010-01-27T01:27:00.001-08:00

Recipe For Lemonade: Chapter Eleven

2010-01-26T23:57:00.000-08:00

PART XI: LA DOLCE VITA

You've squeezed the lessons out of your lemons. You've watered their bitterness down by adjusting your perspective. Now, it's time to add one more ingredient: sweetness.

All of us have our own definition of "the sweet life" - some existence where work is easy and we haven't a care in the world. The wonderful thing is, you can find sweetness in your life now, if you look for it. You don't have to win the Lotto, or be famous, or marry a prince. The sweetness you need to transform your lemon water into lemonade is right here, all around you.

Throughout this book, I've talked about our gift for storytelling, our tendency to collect evidence, and our ability to combine the two to make cases that support our beliefs. If you think life sucks, it's not because life sucks - it's because you believe it sucks, and you seek out evidence to support that belief, and ignore or dismiss evidence to the contrary. The process of making lemonade out of lemons requires you to shift your mindset, to entertain new beliefs and look at the world with new eyes. You have to use your evidence-gathering skills to build new cases that are completely contrary to what you're used to. It may be difficult at first (old habits do die hard), but with enough practice, you will get good at it. This final step, the step that turns a semi-bitter tonic into sweet refreshment, will require all your investigative skills and the full commitment of your imagination.

Remember when I talked about how we sometimes make a case that we are living the "wrong life," the "worse life"? To make lemonade from lemons, you must make the opposite case - that you are living the "right life," the "better life". If you've gone through the process of diluting your bitterness, you will have the perspective that comes from being thankful for what you have (having "an attitude of gratitude," as they say). If you've been journaling your appreciation, you have pages of evidence that the world is a place where you are exposed to blessing after unexpected blessing. Now, you must take it a step further, be seeking out and truly relishing the sweetness in your life.

You might say, "There is no sweetness in my life. I have cancer. I'm underemployed. I'm broke, in debt, and I live in a small house in a boring town." To that, I would say, "Wow, you're really good and finding evidence to support your belief that your life sucks. What if you used those investigative skills to find some evidence that your life doesn't suck, and that it is, in fact, filled with sweetness?" You might look around you and see chemo nurses who work hard to make sure the four hours you have to be in Infusion Services are comfortable and stress free. You might appreciate the warmth of a blanket you're lucky enough to have, when there are people sleeping on the street in cities across America. You might look around at your $10 an hour job, and see a coworker who makes just as little as you do, but manages to make you laugh so hard you nearly pee your pants. Even a moment watching a child dance to Rick Astley with a popsicle in his hand can make you appreciate that you have eyes to witness him, that you are able enough to have a job in a tough economy. Every time you laugh, every time you are moved experiencing the natural beauty of the world around you - a sunrise, the smell of rain, a snow-covered mountain or a clear blue sky - you have a chance to taste the sweetness of this world, of your presence in it. Your small house, seen through refreshed eyes, might not look so disappointing, and your boring town, re-examined, might not seem so boring. They might, in fact, seem like Heaven, when you compare them to a collapsed apartment in an earthquake-ravaged Third World country like Haiti.

When you catch yourself in a moment of thankfulness, hold onto it. Drink it in. Make it last. These moments of gratitude sweeten your newly-adjusted perspective, but only if you really pay attention to them, and recognize them for the opportunities they are. They are sweet because of bitterness of the lemons life hands you. Without sugar, lemonade is just an astringent. Without lemons, it's just sugar water. You need both elements to experience true refreshment. Practice being glad for your blessings, and you will find the sweetness in your life, to balance the bitterness it gives you. This is the way to make lemonade out of lemons.

Recipe For Lemonade: Chapter Ten

2010-01-25T19:54:00.000-08:00

PART X: DILUTION (AND A LITTLE DELUSION)

If life gives you enough lemons, you're bound to get down. And I don't mean, get down in a James Brown "Get On Up" get down kind of way. I mean, downtrodden. Filled with despair. Hopeless. Beyond disappointed. Even after gleaning the lesson from your lemon, you might be angry - either at yourself, or the world, or at God - and unable to snap out of it. The bitterness, the sourness of the experience might feel so fresh, it stings without abatement. When you're in this place, even reminding yourself that "a lemon is just an unexpected disappointment" might fail to lift your spirits.

The thing is, you can't make lemonade with just lemon juice and sugar. It's too strong to drink straight up, even with sweetener. You have to water it down and dilute its bitterness. How do you do this? By widening your perspective.

When we finally get the lesson in a lemon, the realization is apt to make us feel foolish, ashamed, resentful or depressed. We start to tell ourselves the wrong kinds of stories - that we should have known better, that it was some kind of sick justice that brought a lemon into our lives, that our future will only hold more lemons, so we'd better get used to them. When you hear this soundtrack playing in your head, you must remind yourself that it's just a story you're telling yourself, and it's not true. Start looking for evidence that it's not true if you have to. Build a case that a lemon is just an unexpected disappointment, nothing more. It's not a sign that happiness, joy, and contentment aren't in your future.

The worst part about lemons is this phase - the one right after you squeeze them - because what you've distilled from them is so raw, so bitter, and so fresh, it's hard to imagine it could produce anything palatable, let alone refreshing. Our habit of gathering evidence struggles against our desire to see things differently, and it's hard to change perspective. If you look for evidence that tells you a positive, constructive, forgiving story, though, you will find it, even if it takes a while.

When life hands us a lemon, we sometimes think that it means happiness is no longer available to us, just because things didn't work out as we'd hoped. It's like we have this idea in our head of what our happiness should look like, and when life doesn't serve it up, we assume, not that THIS version of our happiness is no longer available, but that NO version of happiness is no longer available to us. It's crazy, but we still do it!

The first step in diluting the bitterness of a lemon is convincing yourself that there isn't just ONE kind of happiness, or joy, or contentment available to you. This is a big step, and your mind will fight against it, but if you want to make lemonade, you HAVE to believe it. Entertain the idea that happiness comes in more than one form than the one you imagined.

The second step in watering down lemon juice involves... a little bit of dilution by delusion. Let me explain: people have a tendency to compare themselves to other people. The thing is, we always seem to compare ourselves to people who are more fortunate than us - people who have more money, better jobs, younger wives, smarter kids, healthier parents.... the list goes on and on. And what happens when you compare yourself to people who have it better than you? Naturally, you feel like crap! Everything you have seems LESS impressive, LESS valuable, LESS worth having. You start to feel deprived and denied! Add a lemon to the mix and it's a recipe for bitterness and resentment.

This process, of "dilution by delusion" starts with one phrase: "It Could Be Worse." Now, fans of the Law of Attraction stay away from this phrase because they fear they will "attract" bad energy by thinking of how it could be worse, BUT this phrase, to be frank, has saved my sanity, time and again! It is a phrase that will allow you to change your perspective in an instant.
When you find yourself with a load of lemon juice and it seems like things can get no worse, instead of comparing yourself to people who are MORE fortunate than you, who have FEWER lemons, deliberately compare yourself to people who are LESS fortunate than you, who have MORE lemons. Don't go so far as to tell yourself that it will get worse, simply acknowledge that it COULD be worse, but it ISN'T. Imagining how it could be worse, you might appreciate how good (by comparison) you have it, lemons notwithstanding!

You might say that using your imagination to "trick" your mind into appreciating minor misfortune is nothing short of delusion... but that's exactly my point. You have already deluded yourself into thinking an unexpected disappointment is the end of the world; why not use your storytelling powers for good?!

Thus, the way to dilute bitterness (aka, lemon juice) is simple: put things in perspective by appreciating what IS good in your life, what you CAN be thankful for and happy about. If you cannot do this successfully, try imagining how things could be worse and see if that helps (but, don't go so far as to tell yourself things will GET worse, which will only depress you). Lastly, if you want to take things a step further and cultivate an appreciation of your life, so that lemons have a lesser effect on your peace of mind, I recommend keeping a gratitude journal: once a day, write down five things you have to be thankful for, that you cannot attribute to your own actions - good things, that are beyond your control. They may be as simple as lights turning green when you approached them, or finding a penny on the street, or getting an unexpected visit from a friend. Remind yourself how fortunate you are, to be who you are, where you are. There is always something you can be thankful for, even if it is only waking up this morning without a tube to feed you or help you breathe. Keep this practice and over time, you will come to see life as a series of happy accidents, instead of a litany of misery. You will start to see yourself as blessed instead of cursed.

Recipe For Lemonade: Chapter Nine

2010-01-23T21:43:00.000-08:00

MAKING LEMONADE

As I mentioned, Making Lemonade isn’t Rocket Science. There are three steps:

1. Juice a few Lemons.
2. Add Water to Dilute.
3. Add Sweetener to Taste.
4. Serve over Ice, preferably in a Tall Glass.

That’s it. Three ingredients, and you have one of the most refreshing beverages on earth. Best of all, you can customize it to your own palate.

Ready? Let’s start with the hard part.

PART IX: THE LESSON IN THE LEMON

Wrapped up in a Lemon is a whole lotta stuff - the pith, the rind, the oil that comes out when you press one into a cutting board. Now, we’re not Hot Dog On A Stick, so I’m not going to go into using the whole lemon to make our lemonade. What we want is the essence of the fruit - the "lesson in the lemon," so to speak.

Squeeze comes from the Latin, “quies,” meaning “quiet” - presumably, to squeeze something is to quiet it. Extract, also from the Latin, means, “to draw out” (ex- “out” and trahere, “draw”). To extract the juice from a lemon, then, is to quiet it and draw out its essence by squeezing it. Then you’re not messing around with the whole lemon - just the juice, which you can then dilute and sweeten until it’s palatable, even refreshing.

Now, I know it’s easy to just let a lemon sit around in your life. Sure, it’s allowing you to harbor a kind of low-grade simmering resentment over something, but it’s not overtly hurting anyone by just sitting there, right? Squeeze it, though, and all kinds of things can happen. Your hands could get dirty, juice could get in your eye. Plus, it’s hard work, reaming lemons, and you don’t even get that much juice from each one. The thing is, if you want to turn this lemon into lemonade, you need to roll up your sleeves and bring on the elbow grease. Lemonade doesn’t make itself.

To squeeze a lemon and extract its juice (to get the lesson in the lemon) you must first ask yourself, “What is this lemon really about? What was I expecting to get, that I didn’t get? Why am I so bitter over it? Who am I blaming for this lemon? Why is it their fault? Do I think I could have somehow prevented this lemon from coming into my life? How?”

Inevitably, you will find that what the lemon is really about is some case you’re building for How The World Always Screws Me, or Why Other People Are Better Than Me, or Ways That I Keep Not Being Able To Predict The Future. Faced with the ridiculousness of the story you realize you keep telling yourself, you can then let go of the lemon and find something useful in the experience to teach you about your expectations.

Let me give you an example. Since the first time I visited Kaua’i, I had always envisioned starting a farm and sustainable education center there. After getting a Green MBA, I started an online business selling cardboard playhouses for children, and simultaneously found a property on Kaua’i that I could afford, thanks to an inheritance I had. I told myself all kinds of stories to make my dream seem well-thought out and reasonable - that my business would be successful, that the non-profit I was in conversations with would be supportive and that there was a market for the venture I envisioned. Just two months after my arrival in Kaua’i, though, the non-profit I wanted to work with lost its major donor and ended its relationship with the farm internship program I hoped to duplicate on my property. My small business faced a shipping crisis that forced me to shut it down, and the U.S. government bailed out all its overextended financial institutions, shrinking every funding alternative at my disposal. As our economy massively contracted, my home’s value plummeted, and I found out that a lump I had been ignoring for months was Stage 3A breast cancer.

That year, as you can imagine, was full of unexpected disappointments.

I could have stockpiled my lemons - my bum house, my bum shipping company, my bum business partner, my bum government, my bum breast - and blamed everyone around me for my misfortune. I could have cursed my bad luck, or a God who didn’t answer my prayers, or a community that didn’t beat a path to my door, or a prince who didn’t show up on his white horse. None of my blaming would have changed a thing about my situation.

Luckily, I finally had the sense to ask myself, “What did you expect, April?” I realized that I expected everything to work out perfectly. I expected, like most small business owners, that nothing would go wrong. And, predictably, I was bitter, because I thought I deserved for my dreams to come true overnight, like they do for everyone on TV. I was blaming myself, for not being psychic, for not having my lump removed sooner, for listening to doctors who said I had nothing to worry about. I blamed the doctors for telling me I had nothing to worry about. I blamed Realtors for letting me buy a house for $200,000 more than it was worth, and for mortgage lenders for being stupid enough to lend me the money to, then arrogant enough to demand MY tax dollars to cover their bad debts! I was bitter because even as billion-dollar companies were getting money from the government, my small business was folding for lack of capital. Everything seemed unfair, unwarranted, and unjust.

What all those lemons were really about, though, was my expectation that, if I followed the right dream, in the right place, at the right time, nothing would ever be hard in my life, ever again. But that’s just not the way life is! Life is a roller coaster, no matter who you are. There are ups and downs, and that’s what makes it an adventure. What I expected, what I thought I deserved, was all the ups, and none of the downs, and when everything went downhill, instead of reminding myself things would look up again, I got resentful and angry. In the midst of my distress, thankfully, I realized all I had done was tell myself a story. I had, with that story, created expectations, and reality had fallen short of them. That was all. I wasn’t dealt a bum hand - I dealt myself a hand, and imagined it wouldn’t have any bad cards, and when they weren't all that great, I was (of course) disappointed. People do this every day. Every single day.

The juice from my lemon? It was this: following your dreams is a guarantee of only one thing: you will never wonder what if I had (you might, of course, wonder what if I hadn’t)? In the end, I took comfort that, despite everything, I would never harbor resentment over choosing to not follow my dreams, and would never again take my health for granted.

We often find ourselves, in a moment of unhappiness, looking back on a turning point in our lives that, we imagine, could have gone a different way. Maybe it was a decision you made, or an accident that you think could have been prevented, or a person who came (or didn’t come) into your life. Do you sometimes believe your life would be better, fuller, or richer, had things gone a different way? It’s important that we pay attention to the story we tell ourselves about this turning point; it shows us the lemons we are holding onto, that we are refusing to make into lemonade.

By acknowledging that my situation was not the result of me being handed a “raw deal,” by accepting that I was only where I was because I made choices and had expectations, and that my disappointment was only because those expectations were not met, I was able to forgive myself for not being psychic. I had simply told myself a story that, despite its implausibility, I wanted to be true. Sometimes, you tell yourself a story and it turns out to be true. Other times, it doesn’t. Maybe you lie to yourself a lot; maybe you have unrealistic expectations. Maybe you’re just doing the best with what you have, and sometimes it’s enough and sometimes it’s not. But holding onto the idea that someone or something has screwed you out of a better life that you deserve will only keep you from seeing the lessons in your lemons. Life will keep giving you lemons and you will keep not making them into lemonade, because you will forever feel you are at the mercy of fate, or other people, or a vengeful God. You will never be able to look at a lemon, see it as the unexpected disappointment that it really is, and use it to move on to the happiness that is possible for you in this life.

The fact is, there is no “better” life you “should” be living, in an alternate reality where you made a different choice, where things went a different way. There is only THIS life, and you are missing the happiness you could be having here by investing your time and energy in cultivating regret.
Even people I have talked to who say they have “no regrets” admit that, in their dark hours, they think back on one decision, one moment in their life that, if they could go back, Fantasy Island-style, they would do differently. We only think about this moment, this decision, when we are dissatisfied. We imagine that, had it gone another way, life would be easy, free of the problems that complicate it. Get this through your head: NO ONE lives a life without problems. EVERYONE struggles with something, even people who appear happy and carefree. Imagining that you would have some perfect life without this lemon in it is destructive and demoralizing, because it allows you to maintain a scapegoat - a vessel for all your bitterness that keeps it in your life.

What truly breaks my heart about the time we waste being resentful over this “better life” we “should” be living is that so few of us recognize that, if all lives have problems, in all universes, in all dimensions, this other life could be just as trying, just as frustrating! It is entirely possible that, had I not followed my dreams, I would have still gotten cancer, still had to close my business, still been disappointed. Maybe even more disappointed! What makes our existence here so hard to bear is not our unmet expectations, but this delusion - that “it would be easier if I had only...” Of course, when you compare your life to an imaginary “better” one, you will feel short-changed! We forget that this “perfect/better/easier” life is a daydream, a fantasy. We talk ourselves into believing that our imaginings are truths, and instead of admitting it is only our expectations that fall short (and not our lives), we make a case that we are living the “wrong” life, the “worse” life. This is not true, people. It is simply not true. Daydreams can be a nice vacation from tough times, and can even be a motivation for goal-setting, but they are not evidence, and they should never bar you from appreciating the life you ARE living.

Recipe For Lemonade: Chapter Eight

2010-01-23T15:04:00.000-08:00

PART VIII: LEMONS

Now, we get to the heart of it all: Lemons. What is a Lemon? Lemons are anything in life that you see as a raw deal, anything that makes you feel like you were cheated out of something better. Of course, when you maintain an idea about the kind of life you think you deserve, and maintain a belief that the life in your imagination is a better one than the life you’re living now, you might be apt to look around and see a lot of lemons! You might start to see your car, your job, your family, your wife, your children - maybe even your own genetics - as things that could be better, SHOULD be better. You’re in a state of constant dissatisfaction, because your life is not what you want it to be. This would be bad enough on its own, but over time, your dissatisfaction becomes resentment, and your resentment becomes anger. You start to get self-righteous about things. You tell yourself (and, sometimes, others), “This isn’t what I signed up for! I don’t deserve this!” And the next thing you know, you look around and it feels like your life is FILLED with lemons - dozens of things that didn’t turn out to be what you thought they should be.

What’s important right here, right now, is that you STOP, and see Lemons for what they really are: unexpected disappointments. That’s all. I’m not going to give you a pithy self-help acronym (like False Evidence Appearing Real = FEAR) to explain why or how lemons get dropped in your lap. Lemons are just things you didn’t see coming, and it’s not unusual for a person to be faced with one, because most of us aren’t psychic.
Now, of course you can tell yourself, I should have known. You can say, “It looked like a duck, it walked like a duck; I should have known it was a duck,” but the fact is, hindsight is always 20/20. Of course, knowing what you know now, you can look back and tell yourself it was obvious! But cut yourself some slack. Most of us aren’t one of Dionne Warwick’s psychic friends. We’re human. We make mistakes and we pull the wool over our own eyes when we want to believe something bad enough. We tell ourselves stories and we want them to be true. Sometimes they don’t turn out to be. That’s not part of some nefarious plot to ruin your day; that’s LIFE.

What’s also important to acknowledge is, when things don’t turn out to be what you thought they should be, it’s YOU who made the case for what you deserved, for what you signed up for. YOU tell yourself a story about what you deserve. YOU create the expectations in your life, and, when they aren’t met, YOU tell yourself a story that you were cheated out of what you deserve. This is a choice YOU make, to create an arbitrary definition of happiness and then get mad when life doesn’t serve up what you want. Even when someone else leads you to believe a story they’re telling you, you still make a CHOICE to either believe that story or not.
Let me explain. We are sold a car by someone who tells us it’s great - only in need of minor repairs, should last at least another five years. We drive the car home, and it breaks down on the way. We tow it and find out it needs major repairs and is on its last leg. Classic Lemon, we tell ourselves. We were screwed by the sales guy; he’s a cheat and a liar.
What we ignore, in this whole interaction, is our own part in it. We chose to believe the salesman. We told ourselves a story that matched his story, and it turned out, we were wrong. It’s not his fault we wrote the check and put the key in the ignition - we have free will, we make our own choices. The best salesman in the world is still not a mind controller. It doesn’t make his behavior okay or justified (or legal, for that matter), but if you want to make lemonade, you cannot tell yourself a lemon is someone else’s responsibility, or you sacrifice your power to transform it into something better.

Now, it’s certainly NOT okay to intentionally deceive people. If you knowingly lie, if you deliberately pull the wool over someone’s eyes so you can profit off their ignorance, you are not taking responsibility for your own situation. Justifying the process of taking advantage of people by telling yourself that “suckers deserve what they get” is just you making a case for a cop-out. Defrauding people is not the way to contentment; you’re only cheating yourself by perpetuating an inauthentic life.

Now, I know lemons are frustrating. It’s disappointing when something doesn’t turn out to be what you hoped it would be. But it is our own expectations that cause our suffering, not the events themselves! When I meet someone angry because their lover died of a preventable disease, angry over the promotion that went to someone less qualified, angry over the house destroyed by a freak hurricane, I have compassion for them. Of course it’s painful to be surprised by heartbreak. Of course it’s hard to lose, to fall short, to be swindled. But the truth is, that’s life. That is life, and it is not easy all the time.
My aunt was told by the National Guard that she could come back to her Port Sulphur home in 24 hours - 48 at the most. She packed a small bag with clean underwear and socks, and came back in two days. Nothing was left of her house but the front porch. Katrina had wiped it out in a few hours. Was it her fault for living in Louisiana? Was it the National Guard’s fault for believing the weather reports? If we could attribute blame to someone, would it bring her house back? No, of course not.
Bad things happen. They happen to good people, all the time, without warning. That is the world we live in. But you know what? Good things happen to people, all the time, without warning. Life is not easy all the time, but it’s not hard all the time either. People beat cancer. Children escape war-torn countries. Women on the verge of bankruptcy win the lottery. Men come home from war with all their limbs intact. Inexplicable miracles happen every day. Every single day. But we’re so busy counting our lemons, we never stop to count our blessings.

Right now, remind yourself that a lemon is not the end of the world. It is not a barrier to your happiness, or a sign that you are doomed to persistent misfortune. No matter how many lemons come into your life, big or small, they are all the same thing: unexpected disappointments. Nothing more. And the sooner you can see a lemon for what it really is, the sooner you can make lemonade.

Recipe For Lemonade: Chapter Seven

2010-01-22T13:43:00.000-08:00

PART VII: THE BLAME GAME

So, we've talked about the stories we tell ourselves, about where those stories come from, and about how they affect our beliefs about the world and how it works. We've also talked about our expectations - what we think we deserve - and the idea that there are the lives we think we have a right to be living, and the lives we're actually living. Now, we're going to continue the conversation, and talk about how we react to disappointment when our expectations aren't met.

Most people don’t want to believe that bad things happen for no reason. It makes the world a scary place to live in, doesn't it? You can live a good life, never being deliberately cruel to anyone, and your daughter can still be abducted on her way home from school, never to be seen again. It's terrifying to imagine a world with no cause and effect, because it's a world where no one can be held accountable for their actions, where no one takes responsibility for their lives or how they can influence other people's lives. It's also a world where you cannot control what happens to you, no matter how good or brave or resilient you are.

On the other end of the pendulum, there is the world we are living in now, where, it seems, no one is responsible for their own actions, but everyone is responsible for everyone else's. It is not a diner's fault she cannot feed herself safely; it is the restaurant's fault for serving too-hot beverages. It is not a disturbed man's fault that he shot and killed another man, but the fault of the junk food he ate the week prior. Certainly there are situations in the world we live in where people have extenuating circumstances, but more and more, we are getting in the habit of shifting blame.

The concept of blame is very attractive. It absolves a person of the responsibility to deal with a situation, and allows them to transfer that responsibility to another person or entity ("my mother," "the government," "Mother Nature," etc.). BLAME concentrates and galvanizes all the bitterness associated with an event or situation, embedding the responsibility for that bitterness in a single place. We can blame the mess our life has become on "being a middle child," or blame the destruction of a city on a hurricane, instead of acknowledging the dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of decisions and events that have, together, led us to a place of unhappiness.
What blame doesn't do is actually solve a problem, get us through a challenge, or erase what happened. Blame is not penance. It doesn't change the fact that something bad or hard or unfair happened; all it does is give us the illusion of control over our situation, so we can absolve ourselves of the responsibility of it and either a) make it someone else's problem, or b) demand compensation (again, re-affirming our belief that the world operates on a cause-and-effect basis). Also, note that we're only talking about blame here, because when good, easy, and just things happen, the responsibility for them is called credit, and while no one wants to take the blame for anything, everyone wants to take credit!

Because BLAME is so handy when it comes to consolidating and deferring responsibility for unexpected disappointments, it's one of our favorite ways to deal with lemons. When life hands us lemons, instead of making lemonade, what do we do? We look for someone to blame. Why deal with a lemon when you can toss it, like a hot potato, at someone else? It's hard work, making lemonade! Better to just add the lemon to the "Me vs. The World" Case File. And thus, the lemon, and the person (or entity) you blame for sticking you with it, becomes your scapegoat for everything that's wrong with your life.

The word “scapegoat," interestingly, comes from the Hebrew words “ez ozel” - literally, “the goat that departs.” The “e-scape-goat,” essentially. In the Bible, the story goes that two goats are presented to a priest, who casts their lots. One goat gets cooked and offered as a burnt offering. The priest takes the other goat and confesses all the sins of the people of Israel onto its head, then sets it loose in the wilderness as a sacrifice. Now, you might think, “The goat lives? How is that a sacrifice?” This is a common misconception - it’s not the goat that sacrifices its life; it’s the community that sacrifices the goat. The goat is allowed to escape because it takes the sins of the community with it when it goes. With its absence, it absolves them.
Now, obviously, there are some pluses and minuses to this scenario.
On the plus side, the community isn’t allowed to hang onto past mistakes. When the goat leaves, their screw-ups go with it. Everyone gives themselves permission to forgive each other for their transgressions, letting go of all that emotional baggage. No blame!
On the minus side, the community can (theoretically) continue to lie to, cheat, and steal from each other, knowing that once a month, this goat is going to metaphorically evaporate their bad behavior and give them a clean slate (again, no blame!). Thanks to a little sympathetic magic, the community members are no longer personally responsible for their decisions.*

The thing is, scapegoating is kind of what we do when we blame others for the lemons in our lives - we look at the evidence (they sold us the car, they stole our husband, they were born at the wrong time) and make the case that it’s their fault we don’t have everything we think we deserve. We tell ourselves a story: it’s their fault we’re unhappy. This logic makes perfect sense to us (as, I’m sure, this whole sending-the-goat-into-the-wilderness-to-erase-our-sins scenario did to the Israelites), but as an unfortunate side effect, by externalizing our role in the whole transaction, we actually believe we are no longer responsible for our own happiness. We blame the scapegoats, and put the burden of all these lemons on them. The worst part is, when you absolve yourself of responsibility, you also deny your own power. If you make someone else responsible for your happiness, how can you ever be happy without them?

Make a decision now to stop blaming. Don't blame yourself; don't blame your parents or your job or your country for the lemons in your life. Lemons are a part of life. Instead of wasting time trying to figure out why you got a lemon or whose fault it is you have to deal with one, grow up. Take responsibility for your actions. If you see injustice, of course, bring it to light. If you're disappointed, accept it, and adjust your expectations next time. But don't make up a story in your head about what you deserve, and try to blame someone else when you don't get it. It's not their fault you're disappointed and it's not their responsibility to make you happy!
Remember, life doesn't hand you lemonade; it hands you lemons, and your job is to MAKE lemonade out of them.

*Obviously, I’m not trying to imply that early Israelites were heathens that were only good once a month. The metaphor I draw here is for the purpose of illustrating the difficulties present in any process that externalizes our transgressions. Absolution is a double-edged sword; on the one hand, you carry no guilt, but on the other, you carry no responsibility. A better process, in my opinion, is to accept responsibility for your mistakes (“own” them), ask forgiveness (from yourself and others), and, being conscious of what has happened in the past, commit to making better decisions in the future. Goats are, of course, optional.

Recipe For Lemonade: Chapter Six

2010-01-21T12:16:00.000-08:00

PART VI: WHAT WE THINK WE DESERVE

So, this might be the part where you hate me even more. And that is OK. I'm okay with that. I'm not trying to take away some dream you have of a better life. I'm just trying to get you to see that you can make the life you're already living feel better, simply by adjusting your perspective. You know those Magic Eye pictures that just look like television static, until you shift your eyes a little, and suddenly it's a prehistoric scene with a brontosaurus? That's what this is going to be like. And what I'm hoping is that, like I did, once you see the order in the mess, you won't be able to UN-SEE it. You will be able to see the beauty and the happiness that is right here, right now, no matter what's going on outside. Once you can change your perspective at will, making lemonade becomes second nature, and that's when you really start appreciating the opportunity to be here, alive, now, no matter what happens to you.

Okay, we're almost there, so let's talk about one more thing: What You Think You Deserve.

All of us, I believe, have this idea about what we think we deserve. Whether it comes from our parents, our friends or coworkers, even our popular culture, this singular notion - that there is a life we should be living, that we, in fact, have a right to be living - controls most of our attitude towards our daily experience. If we’re living the life we think we deserve to live, or something close to it, we’re pretty content people. If we’re not living the life we think we deserve to live, though, we find ourselves a) depressed, b) angry, and/or c) discouraged. We then ask ourselves WHY we aren’t living that life (because, we think, there must be a reason), and what do we do? Being the storytellers that we are, we start to build a case. And what is the first thing we do when we start to build a case? We look for evidence.

Sometimes, the way we build a case, and the evidence we look for to support that case, is entirely based around a dogma - a belief system with rules, guidelines, and established consequences. A strong believer in Catholicism (which is one dogma) might make a case that he is not living the life he deserves to be living because God is in charge of making things harder or easier for him, and if he is “sinning” or not praying enough, or breaking any number of rules set forth in the Bible, God will withhold this “good life” that he deserves. And so, our Catholic prays more, he sins less, he goes to church... but still, he lives a life that is not as full as he wants it to be, as rich as he wants it to be, as beautiful as he wants it to be. He prays more, he sins even less, he goes to church even more, and still, life remains a challenge, never getting to a place where everything comes easily to him. He's following the rules of his dogma; what's the problem?*
Typically, when a dogma is not working out for people - when its logic does not produce the results they want - they either switch dogmas, or they re-examine the evidence and adjust it to fit their dogma. In the Catholic’s case, he might get angry at God and decide that organized religion is a bunch of hooey. He might become an atheist, or a New Age crystal-worshipper, or a Pagan - all, of course, with the same intent: to gain access to the life he thinks he deserves to be living, as if the "right" religion will somehow become the combination to a safe where it's kept.

Personally, I think there are two ways to believe in a Higher Power. The first is to believe that a Higher Power is somehow more powerful than you are, but that you can somehow control its decisions by adhering to a set of rules. Sacrificing a fatted calf, in this sense, is really an attempt to control God by following His rules. Is this what you are really doing when you pray? Rubbing a lamp to release a genie that will grant you wishes? This kind of religion, sadly, is self-centered - reflecting only our own desires, focusing on those things in our lives that are not the way we want them, never entertaining the idea of a higher order that is not dictated by our desires, but by the need for balance in a large and complicated universe.
The second way to believe in a Higher Power begins with the acceptance that the world is, for the most part, uncontrollable. Initially, this recognition is terrifying, especially for a mammal running from a saber-toothed tiger (it might even be terrifying for a financial adviser who’s just passed his Series 7 exam). It is the truth, though, and the sooner we start accepting it, the more we can appreciate our lives and the gift we have in being able to live them. When you accept the inevitability of surrender in a world that will disappoint you (but, also amaze you) time and again, religion is no longer a dance for rain. By acknowledging the world's unpredictable nature, your supplication can become an attempt to find peace in life's chaos through faith.

Let’s say that the Catholic doesn’t want to believe in another God. He turns to the Bible (again, looking for evidence to build his case), and he reads the Book of Job. Job faced trial after trial, losing nearly everything. Throughout it, Job is baffled. His friends say he must have done something bad, that Job should petition God. Only Elihu points out that God is God, and can do whatever He wants. God Himself finally appears and agrees, telling Job and his friends that they weren’t there when He made the world, and that their job is not to tell Him what He should do, but to trust Him, because He is God. Finishing the chapter, the Catholic might decide that the case he has been building - for why he is not living the life he wants to live - is missing a key piece of evidence: God’s will. Perhaps the life he is living IS the life he is supposed to be living, and the sooner he accepts it, the happier he will be. Instead of focusing on having the life he wants, he can focus on wanting the life he has. Instead of feeling deprived, he can feel attended to; instead of feeling like there is nothing he can do to access the live he feels he deserves to live, he accepts that what he thinks he deserves and what God thinks he deserves are two different things, and that his best route to happiness is to trust God to know best.

Thinking about this, you might conclude that I am saying there is no difference between accepting the world as an unpredictable, uncontrollable place, and believing that it is, in fact, controlled by the will of an unpredictable, uncontrollable Higher Power. You would be right! Perhaps the Catholic has simply adjusted his dogma to fit his situation? EXACTLY! He has told himself a different story to make himself feel better. It is no different than a wolf telling himself that lost grapes are sour. BUT, if believing there is a benevolent force in the Universe, that ultimately has your long-term happiness in mind, makes it easier for you to make your way through this unpredictable, uncontrollable world, does it matter if you are "right" or "wrong"? As long as you’re not hurting anyone over your dogma, as long as it gives you peace of mind and makes it easier to manage the ups and downs of life, I don’t think it does! We get wrapped up in ideas of "right" and "wrong," forgetting that we may never know what is right and wrong, or that right and wrong change every hundred years! Whether it is the truth, or some psychological construct we retain to make navigating our existence easier, believing that things happen for a reason can make dealing with lemons easier, and telling yourself a story that enables you to use your lemon to make something refreshing, like lemonade, will dilute the bitterness in your life. Awareness about the stories you tell yourself, especially the ones about what you think you deserve, are the first step in changing your perspective.

*Note: ONE problem might be all the messages he's getting about how his life could be better. See Chapter Four ("Magic Pants")

Recipe For Lemonade: Chapter Five

2010-01-20T07:52:00.001-08:00

PART V: PLAN FOR THE BEST... AND JUST DON’T THINK ABOUT THE WORST

This might be the chapter where you start to hate me.

Stick with me, though, okay? I promise it will make sense later.

I believe, to a certain extent, in the principles of “Law of Attraction,” and in things like vision boards and statements of intention and wish lists. Used properly, I believe these things can motivate us to “plan for the best.” What they don’t do, unfortunately, is prepare us to deal with the worst.

In case you haven’t seen a movie or read a book about the Law of Attraction, here are its basic tenets:

1. The world is made of vibrating waves of energy - down to the tiniest molecule.
2. Energy and matter have a relationship that allows them to affect each other.
3. Human beings are capable of “transmitting” and “receiving” energy, both positive and negative.
4. Positive energy attracts more positive energy; negative energy attracts negative energy. Like attracts like.
5. Because of the relationship between energy and matter, positive energy can also attract positive matter (or events, or circumstances) and negative energy can attract negative matter (or events, or circumstances).
6. As such, the “Law of Attraction” states (roughly) that good or bad, whatever energy is dominant in your life will attract more of itself.
7. There is no “Law of Repulsion,” because energy is inherently attracted to itself, regardless of its positivity or negativity. In order to “repulse” energy (or events, or circumstances), you must, effectively, starve it for attention by ignoring it or removing it from your life.
8. Being conscious of how you manage your positive and negative energies can give you some degree of control over your life, allowing you to “attract” more of what you want by focusing on it, whether through “setting your intentions,” meditating on your desires, journaling, creating vision boards, making wish lists, etc.
9. Note that, although conscious attention to managing your energies is the most effective way to use the Law of Attraction to your advantage, because it IS a “Law,” it is always working, regardless of our consciousness about our energies. Thus, even if we are unconsciously focusing on something, more of it (positive or negative) will come into our lives, whether we like it or not.

This all seems very - forgive the pun - attractive. I can have control over my circumstances just by thinking happy thoughts and surrounding myself with positive imagery? In a world that is unpredictable and uncontrollable, it almost seems too easy.

It is.

Here’s the rub: according to most proponents of the Law of Attraction, we’re not supposed to even think about the worst-case scenario, or we might “attract” it. When things don’t go our way, when the world rains on our parade, when life gives us lemons, The Law of Attraction says that we attracted them, like a magnet. It’s a kind of schizophrenic belief system - on the one hand, you have control over your future, because you can use this irresistible force to draw the things you want to you. On the other hand, if you have unconscious desires you’re not in control of, those will flood into your life too (sometimes when I listen to proponents of the Law of Attraction, they sound a little like The Sphinx from Mystery Men).

The Law of Attraction says, if we aren’t where we want to be in life, it’s all our fault, because we didn’t clarify our intentions enough, we wanted something else more, or we let some fear of success creep into our daily affirmations. A fervent devotion to this dogma, while helpful in opening us up to the possibility that our dreams can come true and encouraging us to take responsibility for our actions, just doesn’t prepare us for lemons. It doesn’t! It only makes us feel like we brought our misery on ourselves, and we end up hating the person in the mirror for not being a good enough manifester.

If you really want to be capable of true alchemy, of turning lead into gold, a vision board will not be enough. An intention and a meditation journal will not be enough. This may not be what you want to hear, but making lemonade out of lemons is not easy. You have to roll up your sleeves, bust out some elbow grease, and work at it every day until it becomes second nature. That’s why it’s called making lemonade, not manifesting or attracting lemonade.

The good news is, it’s not rocket science. Anyone willing to do the work can turn a lemon into lemonade. So, are you with me?

Recipe For Lemonade: Chapter Four

2010-01-19T14:45:00.000-08:00

PART IV: MAGIC PANTS

Do you ever feel like your life could be better? Do you harbor a tiny bit of discontentment, even in moments when life is really good, because you feel like there's probably something that could make it even better? Have you ever wondered why you always feel like you're chasing your happiness, and it always feels just beyond your reach? Like, every time you think you've reached it, you're only happy for a second, before that discontentment sets in, marring your enjoyment of it? It's no wonder. You've been conditioned to not be happy with yourself, your life, your behavior, by the messages that flood our lives day in and day out.
We are told, every day, that what we have is not enough. Through movies, through television, through billboards and bus stops and magazines at the checkout line, we are bombarded with the message that the life we are living is not the life we should be content with living, that we deserve more, better, happier lives. We are then presented with solutions offered by companies promising to give us these more, better, happier lives - in the form of eye creams, online degrees, shiny new cars, and mail-order meal plans. What’s wrong with all this? The biggest thing: implied in the message of you deserve better is the message, because what you have right now is not good enough. Every time you see a commercial or an ad in a magazine, the underlying message is you are not good enough as you are, so buy this to make yourself better. It’s like a worm in a shiny apple, and it’s a recipe for insecurity that can only be cured with consumerism. You buy and buy, and you never reach the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, because the recording in your head, the story that you have been telling yourself is, I need this to do better, to live better, to be better and the underlying belief that this story reinforces is I am not good enough as I am.

What breaks my heart about this situation is our own denial of our goodness, our enough-ness, at the hands of people and companies that are just trying to sell toothpaste. They're not trying to cultivate a population of people who hate their teeth. They just want to give you a reason to buy their toothpaste instead of a competitor's, so their third quarter looks good to a bunch of shareholders. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with self-improvement - with wanting to be smarter, thinner, richer or happier. There is room in all of our lives for more happiness. However, what you must do, if you want to achieve a state of sustainable happiness, is recognize and truly believe that if you are always doing your best, there is no reason to be dissatisfied with yourself. If every time you come to the table, you are doing the best you can, with what you have, with where you are, then give yourself a pat on the back, because that is enough. YOU ARE ENOUGH.

There’s a joke tell myself sometimes, working in retail. Women will come in and try on every running capri in our store, searching in vain for a pair that will make their legs look lean and their butt look smaller. They will ask all the sales girls to review their choices, and check the tags to see what each pair is made from - spandex, lycra, cotton, polyester. This will go on and on, and I inevitably want to say to them, “Look, we don’t sell Magic Pants, okay? We don’t have any pants that are going to magic away a belly that’s grown three children, or give you the butt of a Pilates instructor. We Do Not Sell Magic Pants.” Women come into our store looking for something that will make them love their bodies. If you hate your body, it doesn't matter what pants you're wearing. Pants are not Magic. They will not make you love your body.
If you want to look good in pants, here is the only magic you need: pay yourself a little compliment, recognize that you are doing the best that you can, and give yourself permission to wear something that fits you NOW. THEN, you look in the mirror, and you say, “This is the best my butt is going to look today, and that's okay.” If you're still unhappy, and you really want your butt to look smaller or tighter in a pair of pants, you will just have to eat healthier and get some exercise. There's only so much that a positive affirmation can do.

And, a Sidebar: we also get women looking for Magic Pants that they will “someday” look good in. Don’t, don’t, don’t do this. This is just another way of making it okay to hate your present self, while you wait for some skinnier/prettier/younger self (younger? really? what are they, Time Machine Pants now?) to magically appear in the mirror. Don’t expect a pair of pants to magnetically draw you into a “better you” - instead, be the best you that you can be today, and let that be enough. Tomorrow, be the best you that you can be then. That person might be stronger, or thinner, or fatter, or weaker, but if she is the best you can do in that moment, then be proud of yourself and acknowledge your awesomeness. Trust me when I say that if you are trying to fit into smaller pants, constantly subjecting yourself to trying on too-small pants is much more demoralizing that constantly tightening your belt around your old pants. Be proud of where you've been, and look forward to where you're going. Don't beat yourself up for not being there yet, or not being there sooner. As Bryon Katie says, LOVE WHAT IS. If it's your best, it's enough.

In closing, I would just say that instead of looking for Magic Pants, make an effort to love what you are, where you are. Even if you are on a path to improvement, don’t wait until tomorrow to be proud of yourself, to forgive yourself, to love yourself. When you find yourself saving your compliments for a “future you” that is somehow “better” than who you are now, STOP. Give yourself permission to be content with where you are right now, and forgive yourself if you’re not where you wanted to be yet. Have goals and dreams, of course! Feel free to imagine a future life that is filled with more joy and happiness and contentment, but MAKE A PLAN to achieve those goals and dreams and take steps every day to get there. Always be doing your best, and your best will keep getting better, moving you towards that better you that you want to be. That way, you can't deny your present self the celebration and appreciation it deserves now, for being on the journey. Happiness comes in all shapes and sizes. You don’t have to wait until you’re thin or rich or married to be happy; you just have to give yourself permission to be happy with who you are now, with where you are now.

Recipe For Lemonade: Chapter Three

2010-01-17T22:26:00.000-08:00

PART III: YOU'LL SEE IT WHEN YOU BELIEVE IT

So, we’ve talked about our habit of telling stories, about the most powerful story we tell ourselves - that our world is predictable and controllable - and how this story comforts us. We've also talked about the ways we choose to seek (or ignore) evidence to support our belief in that story. What we haven’t talked about is all the other stories we tell ourselves - the hypotheses we have and the cases we make, throughout our lives, to support the other beliefs we have about the way the world works.

Whether we realize it or not, we analyze evidence and construct stories every day. We do it because when things happen, we immediately come up with a hypothesis about why or how they happen. These hypotheses are based on many things: pre-conceived notions, existing belief systems, educated (and uneducated) guesses... and yes, even past experiences and facts. We then put together a story, using all this stuff, that not only helps us make sense of the world, but reinforces other beliefs we have about it.
For example, when someone cuts us off in traffic, we might assume he’s a jerk and that karmic payback will ensue. This is based on dozens of beliefs and assumptions: that there is some Higher Power in the world that sees every good and bad deed, and doles out punishment or rewards accordingly, that the person driving the other car was in control of his actions, that he saw us and chose to ignore us, and that because of his actions, he will face retribution. In a split second, we have told ourselves a story about what happened that may have nothing to do with what actually happened. Yes, the man may have been a jerk, and karmic retribution may ensue, but maybe, he just found out his wife was in labor, and was lost on his way to the hospital. Maybe he’s usually a kind, excellent driver, but was in such a panic, he neglected to check his blind spot. We don't know, but we think we do.
We examine evidence, make a case, and pass judgment in a split second, and most of the time, it happens so fast, we don’t realize that there is a process of examination going on. What’s worse, the more cases we build with similar circumstances, the less likely we are to apply critical thinking to each new case, and the more likely we are to pass judgment without thoroughly (or even adequately) examining the evidence presented to us. Once we get to this point, it becomes very difficult to come to a different conclusion, even if the evidence is overwhelmingly supportive of one.
The problem is, what we end up doing, as we get better and better at quick judgments, is fitting evidence to match our belief systems. This is the equivalent of a detective wanting to believe someone is a murderer, and lying to himself about what the evidence in a case means, just so he can re-affirm some belief he has about "knowing" what a murderer is like. Like this detective, we keep these hypotheses in our head about how the world works, about what people are like, or what they want from us, or what they're going to do to us. These hypotheses, in reality, are just one story after another that we made up at some point to help us make sense of the world. Because of the pace of the world, and the onslaught of information that we have to analyze every second of every day, very few of the stories we tell ourselves have had any critical thinking applied to them, and they have been around so long, most of us take them for granted. We treat them like facts, because we have never questioned their validity, and when their validity is actually questioned, we resist, often manufacturing or ignoring evidence so we can maintain our beliefs!
Here's an example: have you ever ignored someone's advice, then talked yourself into believing a different truth, because it was a “truth” that you wanted to believe? Have you ever manufactured evidence in your head to support a belief that you couldn’t support otherwise? If so, don’t beat yourself up; everyone has at some point! It’s what we do as humans, and we’re really good at it, because we get a lot of practice. What’s important though, is that starting right here, right now, you make a promise to be honest with yourself, and be fully aware in those moments when you know you are choosing to ignore or manufacture evidence.
Lastly, I want to clarify: it's not BAD to make up stories, or manufacture evidence, or ignore advice. What matters is your AWARENESS of this process, that allows you to pick and choose what you believe about the world. Pretending that something is what it isn't can serve you, but not unless you are consciously aware of how it can affect your reactions to events.
If you want to learn to make lemonade, you have to start by recognizing the choices you make every day to triage evidence, and how those choices affect your beliefs about the world.

Now, you might ask, what's wrong with telling myself a story about a stranger I'll never see again? Going back to the driver who cut us off, the real damage our assumption has done is not to the driver - he will get to where he’s going and keep living his life regardless of what we think. The real damage is done to us, because in telling ourselves a story that has given us one more reason to be angry with the world, we have reduced the amount of goodwill we are willing to extend to our fellow man, and reduced our faith in a world where things can work out for us in a positive way.
Tell ourselves enough stories like this, and we will start collecting evidence from multiple cases to manufacture bigger ones, that support bigger beliefs. “That Guy Is A Jerk” gets thrown into the case file of, “People Who Drive SUVs Are Jerks,” which then gets thrown into the case file of “People Who Live Here Are Jerks” and then, it’s just one big case called “People Are Jerks.” Before you know it, you have a giant case file that looks a lot like a chip on your shoulder about how the world’s always screwing you over. Believe me; the world is not always screwing you over, and the sooner you STOP looking for evidence that it is, the easier your life will be.

Recipe For Lemonade: Chapter Two

2010-01-13T22:21:00.000-08:00

PART II: THE CASES WE MAKE

When we are children is, perhaps, the only time we see the world for what it truly is - a place where very few things are certain, where anything can be lost at any time, and our continued contentment is neither promised nor insurable. Now, because it would be understandably terrifying to wake up every day in a world like this, and not have a set of skills that allow us to function in it, our dinosaur brains learned to respond to our tenuous existence in one of two ways: fight or flight. We controlled our destiny, in our evolutionary years, by sheer instinct.

The funny thing is, even though we’re not running from saber-toothed tigers anymore, we tend to still respond to present-day situations that scare or threaten us in the same way - by becoming defensive or evasive. With the development of language and the advent of storytelling, we've also developed another way to protect our sanity and make life easier to manage when we're not fighting or flighting: we tell ourselves a story that makes us feel better. And the biggest story we tell ourselves is that the world we live in is not only predictable, but controllable.

Now, we know in our heart of hearts, even at a very early age, that this story is not entirely true, and if we applied any rational logic to it, we would be forced to doubt its validity. The thing is, we don't want to believe in a scary, unpredictable world. We want to believe in a safe, controllable one. So what we do - actually, anytime we want to convince ourselves that something is true - is we go on a hunt for evidence, so we can build a case that makes it easy to believe the story we tell ourselves. If you look hard enough for evidence of something you want to prove, you WILL find it, an if you can't find it, you will likely fabricate it. Because want to believe the world is predictable and controllable, even if it is magical thinking, we build our own little case for it, admitting and dismissing evidence, oftentimes regardless of its relevance or validity, in an effort to convince ourselves that what we believe is right and true. And keep in mind, we don't just do this with one story; we tell ourselves stories every day that we want to be true, and we build cases for those stories that help us believe them.

Case building comes pretty naturally to us because humans are storytellers. What do lawyers do, when presented with a mountain of evidence in a case? One side’s lawyer picks through it. Then other side’s lawyer picks through it. Finally, each side presents their evidence, tells a story, and the Jury decides which story they believe the most. Usually, to make the stories more convincing, each lawyer comes up with reasons why the other lawyer’s evidence isn’t relevant, admissible, or otherwise worth paying attention to. They point out inconsistencies in the stories, or bridge gaps with plausible explanations.
The important thing to note here is that often, two people can work with the same evidence, and craft two completely different stories. What matters most is the fact that, as individuals, we make a choice about what evidence we accept, and what evidence we dismiss, and that is what determines the way our stories go. The choice is made based on our own individual beliefs and experiences, not on some universal, non-negotiable truth. Lastly, just because we've made a convincing case for something does NOT mean we've somehow discovered (and proved) this universal, non-negotiable truth. What's true for you is not always true for everyone else, and just because you strongly believe in it doesn't mean it's right - it just means you've built a pretty convincing case. Back in the day, there was a pretty convincing case for the world being flat - a case Columbus blew open when he sailed his ship into history.

Recipe For Lemonade: Chapter One

2010-01-12T22:30:00.000-08:00

PART I: THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES

When humans first came on the evolutionary scene, we did not have the olfactory prowess (aka smelling skills) that other predators had, so we had to find another way to feed ourselves. What did we do? We learned how to track game. The process for tracking game, actually, is the same as the one we use today to solve crimes: we look for evidence, analyze our findings, and construct a story, based on what we think happened. Language, then, developed as we formed teams and learned to work together. The hunters of our early years were like the forensic scientists of CSI, inferring a chain of events from residual clues - putting "two and two" together to draw conclusions about the word around them.

The stories we construct, of course, are dependent - in large part - on our individual histories and perspectives. Our assumptions about future events are almost always based on our past experiences and our observances of others’ past experiences. While this is helpful in many situations, it can also be detrimental to our development as human beings in other situations. Past experiences can preserve our safety by teaching us to, say, stay away from open flame when we're been burned before, but they can also bias us against new opportunities, like opening our heart to new people after a rough breakup.

Because of our history, we can also make false assumptions, especially if we expect our future experiences to mimic our past ones. We may even go so far as to create future experiences that duplicate or mimic our previous ones, just so we can reinforce our beliefs. Why would we do this? Fear. We don't want to be caught off guard; we don't want to be surprised or scared about our future, and convincing ourselves that we are somehow capable of predicting the future (as crazy as it sounds) gives us a sense of security. We tell ourselves, "This city will be full of crime and rude people, just like the last one I lived in was," or "He will cheat on me, just like my last husband did." These assumptions are not always wrong (after all, humans do have a habit or falling into old patterns), but they are also not always right, and can be detrimental when they hold back your personal development. Always expecting your future to duplicate your past creates biases, hampering your judgment (any CSI can tell you about the perils of biased judges!)

What's important to understand is the fact that the way we see the world depends largely on the stories we tell ourselves, based on the evidence we observe in it.

I want to also note that this way of navigating our path through the world via stories we construct is not some magical, mystical process; it is simply a pattern of behavior that we have adopted because of the way we evolved as a species. We make sense of the world around us by examining evidence and telling ourselves a story that makes sense of that evidence, based on beliefs we have about the way we think things work. These beliefs themselves are based on assumptions, which may or may not be valid, because, again, they are based on our expectations resulting from past experiences, and subject to bias.

Let me give you an example: A child, when it is very young, tends to believe that its sole source of comfort is its mother’s presence. Because children have limited exposure to the love of other people, they have no basis of comparison, and are likely to assume that mother’s love is best. Should such a child find itself alone for an extended period of time, it might also assume (incorrectly, one would hope) that its mother is never coming back. Threatened with the possibility that its sole source of comfort is now gone forever, the child becomes distraught. Based on the evidence (an empty room, a history of being unable to be comforted by others, and its own feelings of abandonment), the child cannot imagine a future existence where any comfort is present, and cannot be consoled.

To us, this scenario seems infantile and ignorant, yet we act out the same play as adults in various incarnations. We believe, at many times in our lives, that our happiness comes in one form and one form only. When that source of happiness is removed, we tell ourselves a story, based on the evidence around us, that there is no possibility for future happiness.

Over time, of course, children learn that mothers do come back, and that they are not the only human beings capable of providing comfort. The child (again, one would hope) might even learn methods of self-comfort, many of which are comparable to mother's. As adults dealing with bigger challenges, however, not all of us believe in - or are able to find - a comparable source of comfort or happiness if we lose our original source of it. When this happens, we often remain stuck in that moment of loss, regretting a decision made, which actually bars us from accessing any future peace of mind. We replay the moment over and over, imagining a different result.

As we will discover later in this book, it is not these events - these "lemons" life gives us - that keep us from enjoying our lives, but our refusal to move past them - and make "lemonade" of them - that hinders happiness. Life is not about finding a way to never get stuck with a lemon (they are, I believe, inevitable when it comes to the human condition), but about how to make the best of one when it's handed to you.

For now, though, let’s focus on storytelling, and how we use it.

TUNE IN TOMORROW FOR PART II: THE CASES WE MAKE!

Stuck In A Moment That You Can't Get Out Of

2009-12-04T07:38:00.000-08:00

Ever feel like you're stuck in a moment you can't get out of? Like, you keep going back to it and telling yourself, "Had I only done THIS," or, "If only I HADN'T done THAT"? Do you harbor anger and resentment over that moment, or do you often find yourself blaming all the unhappy or unsatisfying things in your life on that ONE decision?

Throughout this last year, I have been taking notes.

Why? Two words: Joseph Campbell.

Campbell was a proponent of the Monomyth, also known as "The Hero's Journey," a literary structure he's said shows up in nearly every story, whether it's Gilgamesh or Glengarry Glenross. In an effort to navigate the stormy waters of trial and recovery, I've found myself turning to Campbell for guidance, seeking some kind of roadmap for my journey. Of particular importance to me is what Campbell calls the "boon" - the elixir of life, the Golden Fleece, the healing balm the Hero faces trial after trial to obtain and return to his (or her) home. I've wondered, time and again, "What is my boon?" I'm happy to say, I think I know now.

Many people have gone through what I've gone through. They might not have had cancer, or lost their business, or had to rebuild after a tragedy. Maybe they busted their knee in a homecoming game, dashing their hopes for a collegiate scholarship. Maybe they miscarried after a car accident, or married someone who didn't turn out to be what they thought. It doesn't matter; many of us have had to watch our dreams vanish, and imagined that with them, we've lost our ONE chance at happiness. Afterwards, we end up living a half-life, hating our reality while convincing ourselves that the life we ARE living "would be happier if only..." We hate ourselves for making the wrong decision, taking the wrong path, loving the wrong person. We beat ourselves up, for what? For not being psychic? It's ridiculous, but people do it every day. I did it for months, imagining that, if I had my lump removed earlier, if I hadn't bought a house in Hawaii, if I hadn't started a business three months before the economy crashed... if, if, if. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride!

My boon is this: a way back to happiness after you think you've lost everything. A road map, to navigate the waters post-shipwreck. I put the beginnings of it here now, for all of you who have helped me make it to the Other Side of this.

1. Make a decision, today, to entertain the idea that happiness - YOUR happiness - can come in an alternate form than the kind you always imagined for yourself. Is it possible for you to find happiness without the things you've lost? Is it possible that there could be some other happiness in your future, that you can't even imagine yet?

2. Forgive yourself for not being psychic. We can never know our futures, no matter how carefully we plan them. Trust me! And no amount of beating yourself up will change the time space continuum enough for you to go back and know then what you know now.

3. Because you're probably already in the habit of comparing your life to everyone else's, and, let's face it, you probably don't know what's *really* going on in their lives (just as you can't possibly know how fantastic or crappy this "alternate" life you'd be living, had your life gone a different way, would be), make a decision right now: if you're going to compare yourself to other people, look to people LESS fortunate than you, as opposed to people MORE fortunate than you. It seems logical, but we get caught up in what we DON'T have (which 99% of advertising has conditioned us to think about, in order to drive consumerism), and we neglect to appreciate what we DO have. Comparing yourself to people who have more challenges than you have will cultivate within you the perspective of someone who is more fortunate than most. Cultivate this habit, and you will feel blessed instead of cursed.

4. Now that you are 1) open to the idea that your happiness can come in a way *different* from the ONE way you thought it could ONLY come in; 2) you've forgiven yourself for not being able to predict the future; and 3) you're feeling a little more grateful for the life you DO have, make a decision to STOP telling yourself that your life cannot ever hold the happiness that some alternate, imagined reality (where you made different decisions) could. You simply don't know that, and beating yourself up about what you think you've lost will only keep you from being open to happiness in THIS reality.

5. When you start worrying that you HAVE missed out on your one chance at happiness, and that you future couldn't possibly hold anything as good as what you *could* have had, remind yourself, YOU'RE NOT THERE YET. And, you're not psychic. So don't get yourself worked up over a part of your life that hasn't even happened yet, or a part of your life that might never have happened anyway.

6. Lastly, recognize that, no matter what mistakes you've made, we all do the best we can, with what we have at the time. Give yourself some credit. The only mistake you've made is believing that it's no longer possible for you to find happiness. Happiness comes in all shapes, sizes, forms, and times, and we can never know when or how it will present itself. Only shutting ourselves off from joy, as some form of self-punishment for mistakes we think we've made, keeps us from finding it again.

And that's what I've come to so far. :)

Swimming Lessons

2009-11-27T00:38:00.000-08:00

As you know, I've often compared fighting cancer to swimming. Many people say, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step," but when you are fighting for your life, it's more like swimming than walking. You cannot stop and sit down when you get tired; if you stop, you drown, and start to sink. Fighting a life-threatening disease rarely gives you the luxury of rest - you must keep swimming, keep paddling for the shore, for the safe port in the storm. This video is what I've learned on my journey.

Skeletons and Scars

2009-10-24T16:49:00.000-07:00

I'm watching Jason and the Argonauts. Have you ever seen it? The scene I'm watching now is the skeletons fighting Jason, at the end, after he's captured the Golden Fleece. He's CAPTURED the Golden Fleece! He should be home free, right? Wrong. This is the part Joseph Campbell calls The Flight. Watching the skeletons rise out of the ground from the Hydra's teeth, accompanied by creepy dark music, my stomach churns. Even though I know they're fake, even though I know it's just cheesy 1960s stop-motion animation, these skeletons are freaking scary. They seem cold, calculating, then vengeful and snarling. Their expressions, like Hugo Weaving's Guy Fawkes mask in V for Vendetta, never change, yet I find myself imbuing them with sneaky, vicious malice.

I wonder what I am doing, imagining a career as a breast cancer survivor. Reviving the skeleton again and again. Inviting it back in. Why would I do this - turn myself into Ron Kovic? Am I trying to overcome breast cancer, to make my peace with it, to profit from it somehow, to make it all worth it? I tell myself, if I hadn't gotten breast cancer.... and go blank. There is no benefit right now. I am not (yet, I hope) at that place where I am thankful for it. It's out there, I know - that other side - but how and when will I get there? Paddle, paddle, paddle. I'm still swimming.

The only place I feel comfortable talking about my disease is among other survivors... they're the only ones who get it, who I can talk to without feeling like a freakshow. My port's bothering me. Oh, your port? Mine too. Say that to someone who has never had chemo and they look at you like an alien. Your port? What the fuck, your port?! Yeah, the plastic port, surgically implanted in my chest. The one I can't afford to remove because I have a $26,000 insurance deductible. The port that I can feel under my the skin just above my heart, the one that makes me dread letting a man touch my chest, for fear it will totally gross him out.

Last night, I sat in a room of models getting ready for a fashion show - at a BREAST CANCER FUNDRAISER - and felt utterly self-conscious of my scarred-up abdomen, my imperfect breasts, my chemo hair, my aching feet. I watched the friend who came with me make a wig out of a pink boa, a kerchief, and a stapler, while a young, thin blonde was having her hair curled and sprayed to Fem-Bot perfection. The models were lovely and sweet, but it was surreal; I felt like a couple of Saint Bernards at a Pomeranian convention.

Why would I subject myself to this feeling, of being utterly disconnected from everyone around me, over and over, for a living? Why would I want to face down this skeleton in my closet time and again, to make friends with it, to bring it onstage with me and wave to it in the crowd? A survivor told me yesterday that because she tested positive for the BRCA-1 gene, her healthy sister got tested for it and, when she was positive too, immediately had a prophylactic double mastectomy. I started to cry, not wanting to imagine the possibility of my sister having to go through what I've been through. Seeing the skeletons on the screen rise up from their hydra teeth, I immediately remembered the conversation. DEath coming back for me, coming for the people I love. Should I get tested? Why? So I can make this fight that much harder?

I was in the car with my father once, on the way to church, listening to the Forrest Gump soundtrack, and California Dreamin' came on. He suddenly burst into tears, scaring the shit out of me. Drying his eyes, he said, "I'm sorry. When I was in Vietnam, there was a kid with us who used to sing this song over and over. All he wanted was to go back home. He never made it; he died before we came back." This pain, of surviving something horrible and terrible, and being grateful to be alive and sad that not everyone got to live, had been in my father's heart for almost thirty years. He never talked about it, not even after that morning. I wonder now if I could have related to him, even though my fight is different. We forget this is a disease that kills people, and when we remember, it reminds us how close we came. Why do we cry? For not being the ones that don't make it? Or for having had to fight at all?

How does Jason escape the skeletons? Remarkably easily, strangely enough. They back him to the edge of a cliff and he jumps off, drowning them (how can they drown? why wouldn't they walk on the sea floor like those Pirates of the Caribbean skeletons?). He swims to his ship, embraces the girl, and lives happily ever after. Really? Really? It's that easy? A leap of faith. If only.

Ron Kovic said once, "The scar will always be there, a living reminder of that war, but it has also become something beautiful now, something of faith and hope and love. I have been given the opportunity to move through that dark night of the soul to a new shore, to gain an understanding, a knowledge, and entirely different vision. I now believe I have suffered for a reason and in many ways I have found that reason in my commitment to peace and nonviolence. My life has been a blessing in disguise, even with the pain and great difficulty that my physical disability continues to bring. It is a blessing to speak on behalf of peace, to be able to reach such a great number of people."

I can only hope one day I will feel the same way about my port scar....

Rebuilding, One Brick at a Time

2009-10-12T10:49:00.001-07:00

Avik: Why do you want to bomb Dresden?
Walter Russell: There's a monster in a room. Once that room was filled with everything that was valuable to him. His train sets, his puppet theatre, his model planes. They're all broken now. All that's left untouched is his beautiful collection of Dresden china. You go into that room, you smash all his crockery, then you have broken his spirit.

I realized today that what cancer did. It came into my life and, like an American B12, bombed my Dresden to hell. I was left shell-shocked, looking at the wreckage of what was left of the future I had planned, unsure of how to rebuild it all. When something is vaporized before your eyes, how can you even imagine a day when it is whole again?

What breast cancer does to women is attack them at the center of their femininity - the symbol of female nourishment, sexuality, and beauty. If they are unlucky enough to catch it late, or face aggressive chemotherapy (as I did), even more is taken away - their hair, the blush of their cheeks, their energy. When the dust settles, your ability to survive the aftermath of a cancer diagnosis depends 100% on your belief that life can be good again, that you can feel good again.

Day after day when you are fighting this disease, you feel like crap. You feel like crap for months. The treatment that is supposed to me saving your life is actually killing you - not enough to produce a system collapse, just enough to get you to the brink, because healthy cells can repair the damage, but cancer cells give up. That is how chemotherapy works - it relies on your body's ability to rebuild itself. You must attack it sequentially, repeatedly, until every last cancer cell is destroyed, even if your healthy cells are brutalized. It's like a Dresden bombing every week.

I have asked, nearly every day, Lord, what am I supposed to be learning from this? In moments of pain and struggle, I have wondered how losing my hair or being hospitalized or going broke could possibly be helpful to me, let alone someone else. The answer came to me over a few days of Boot Camp, crystallizing this morning when my coach and trainer pointed to the back of my T-shirt with an enthusiastic grin and said, "See? That's what I'm talking about! SPINE sweat!"

Lou always calls the last set in a workout circuit the "Transformation Set". It is the set where you feel like you are going to throw up, where you try to summon your strength and your muscles refuse to contract. You're doing mountain climbers or burpees and your quads are numb, as if to say, "Yeah, sorry, kid, that is just not gonna happen." Just five or six seconds later, though, they tighten, and you can squeeze one more rep out. That is the part where your body transforms itself, becoming stronger and more resilient, cell by cell. Ironically, am doing to my body what chemotherapy did to it: breaking it down so it can build itself back up.

Looking back in an attempt to construct a Hero's Journey from my history, I see that Lou has been my unwitting Obi Wan. By challenging me 30, 40, or 50 seconds at a time, he has trained me (as Marshall Sylver has) in chunking it down. Taking a task one piece at time, bearing a weight one pound at a time, crawling through a tough period of my life one day at a time. It is a lesson I could never have learned without going through it, just as the lesson of "this too shall pass" could not have taken root in my heart, had I not used it every day to envision a brighter future. He is my Mr. Miyagi, and I'm not even sure he realizes it. :)

If you can truly manage to live in the present moment, you will inevitably always either be cherishing or white-knuckling your way through life. We imagine perfect futures where there is no pain, there are no problems, and everything works out. Dreams like that make me think of a parable Bernie tells in his second book - a Congressman meets a friend for lunch and bemoans the state of the world. His friend says, "I know a place in Virginia where there are 300,000 people with no problems." The Congressmen says, "Where is that?!" He answers, "Arlington Cemetery." Life is hard, but it's easy too! The sweet tempers the bitter, the bitter tempers the sweet. Relish a diverse experience because we pass this way but once!

I know it is easy to have a philosophical perspective when you have made it to the Other Side of tragedy. Trust me: this peace was hard-won and not easy to cultivate; it took a thousand strokes to paddle to a place where I can look back and see meaning (and even beauty!) in the destruction of so many of my dreams. What I realize now is that, with every stroke, I told myself, keep swimming and you will get there. Miraculously, I was right.

For more on this topic, see my video, "Nothing Lasts Forever," on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AacAg3eCsCM

My Favorite Boot Camp

2009-10-09T13:17:00.001-07:00

An awesome video from Lou Kristopher, who runs Prime Body Boot Camp in Walnut Creek, which helped me rebuild my body after chemo practically destroyed it. Going to Boot Camp 3 times a week (for just half an hour!) helped me finish the 11.5-mile Mt. Tam Peak Hike for Breast Cancer just three months after I finished chemo. Lou taught me the most important thing though, which was that the last round of every circuit is your "Transformation Set" - the set that takes you to the next level and helps you reach your goal. So now, whenever I have to "muscle through" something, I find myself saying, "This is your Transformation Set, April!! Come on, you can do it!!" :) Thanks, Lou!

Channeling My Inner Max (or, Where The Wild Things Are)

2009-09-29T21:59:00.000-07:00

Like many children of the 70s, I love Maurice Sendak's book Where the Wild Things Are. I was at a party a few weeks back, talking about the upcoming movie, when someone asked, "Why are they even making that into a movie? It's such a short book!" My heart softened, remembering the story, and I answered, "Because it has everything: gluttony, imprisonment, adventure, domination, loneliness, longing, love, redemption!" A boy runs away from the discipline and restrictions of home and finds power and freedom, only to return for the comfort and love that he left behind... It's a beautiful story, an allegory for everyone. No wonder we love it.

I have been thinking, throughout this journey, about this idea of "the other side" of disaster, of recovery. I read a poem post-9/11 by Judyth Hill called Wage Peace:

Learn to knit: make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries.
Imagine grief
as the outbreak of beauty or gesture of fish.
Swim for the other side.

Swimming for the other side: it is exactly what it is like, this journey of recovery and survivorship, because it's not the shore you just left that you must head for - it's some other shore, on the other side of a great body of water (water being the most symbolic of all gateways). Your future suddenly changes, and a forest grows in your room; an ocean laps at your feet, and you must make a choice: swim or drown. Sometimes, you are lucky: a boat sails up, to carry you to the opposite shore, like Max. Sometimes, you are not so lucky: you must swim, or sink.

The journey of survivorship is not like putting one foot in front of the other, because you won't die if you stop walking. It's more like swimming, because stopping means sinking, into the dark waters that threaten to swallow you - depression, recurrence, metastasis. You must keep moving. Moving puts distance between you and the moment/experience that changed your life forever. You have to keep swimming for that other side, because it is the side where your new life awaits, where you can dry off, regroup, and regain your strength without being surrounded by collateral damage. Turning back for the shore you left will not (and, in fact, cannot) save you.

My roommate in Kaua'i often walked with me on weekends around a loop near our house, where there was a view of the ocean. Walking it, you were never more aware that you were on a rock, in the middle of the Pacific, miles from a major continent. I feel a little like Max now, like someone who sailed, over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day, to a place where wild things were, things with terrible teeth and terrible claws, that threatened to eat me up.

I have said it before: cancer does not play. It IS a Wild Thing, and it will eat you up if you let it. Perhaps this is what I am trying to do with my 40-by-40: to say BE STILL, and tame it with the magic trick of looking into its yellow eyes without blinking once. To let it know that I don't play either, and frighten it into making me its King.

Yesterday, my doctor's nurse told me my labs were normal, showing me the report with a flourish. "You should frame this!" she said, smiling. "You know, in this office, we get used to seeing levels that are not in the normal range, but when I saw yours, I said, 'they're all normal!' look, no Hs (for 'high') or Ls (for 'low')!" Now, I don't usually put much stock in statistics, but in that moment, it was as if, like Max, I could suddenly smell my next life, on the other side of this adventure, like a hot supper waiting for me. I told my sister this morning, "I feel more like myself again. Not like that fake-it-till-you-make-it positivity, that is just supposed to carry you through the hard part; it's real, genuine optimism, the kind you have when you believe in your own power." It's the kind of self-assuredness, I think, that allows Max to say to the Wild Things when they protest his departure, NO, to wave good-bye and sail away without regret.

There are moments of calm (usually post-wild-rumpus) where I feel a kind of peace, knowing in my heart that the time to leave this place I have been in for nearly a year is out there, that the other side of my journey is waiting, like Max's still-hot dinner, for my arrival. I once told my roommate, on a walk, that it felt like I had survived a shipwreck and was now floundering in the ocean, not knowing which direction to swim. She said, "Maybe you don't have to know. Maybe you could just swim towards the place where you're done with chemo, and then think about your next leg once you get there." I swam and swam, and here I am: beached on a kind of "Health Island." Where the Wild Things Are.

The Burning Bush

2009-09-28T20:59:00.000-07:00

For a time during my battle with breast cancer, I felt like God had forgotten me. I saw my future laid out before me - unemployment, foreclosure, bankruptcy - and could not imagine that this was His plan for me. "Really?" I wanted to say; "Really? This is the plan?"

Personally, I think of God the way you think of a parent; I imagine Him making some decisions for me, and letting me make the rest. Watching with a benevolent eye and hating to see me screw up, but understanding that sometimes, I need to in order to learn a hard lesson. It's hard to watch someone you love fall down, but sometimes you have to stand back so they can learn how to pick themselves up. The hardest part of being the parent, I imagine, is making your kid do something they don't want to do, because you know it'll be good for them. I can't count the number of times my own father forced me to buckle down on my schoolwork, and truth be told, it took me 15 years to see that all the good times I had in college were a direct result of both of us working together to make that future possible for me. If I wasn't blessed with a diligent dad and faith in his plan for me, I might have walked a different path in life.

Faith is so hard to have, especially in things you can't see, hear, or touch. I mean, Moses at least had a burning bush! All I have is the feeling when I walk into the building I work in - that I'm in the right place - and two pieces of Scripture: Jeremiah 29:11 and Job 8:21, to reassure me that the future ahead of me is worth living for. So often, I feel like I'm blindfolded, walking by faith, not by sight. It's terrifying to love a job that can't pay your bills, to wake up every morning not knowing if something is growing inside your body that could kill you. But what else can you do if you want to maintain your sanity? You tell yourself, "God knows the plans He has for me; plans to prosper me and not to harm me. Plans for a hope and a future." You say, "He will yet fill my mouth with laughter, and my lips with shouts of joy." You remind yourself of other times in your life when you thought disaster was imminent, and you survived. You survived. You take comfort in knowing that you can't take anything with you when you leave this earth - not your riches, not your debt. We come in with nothing and we leave with nothing, and no one knows when their number will be up. Not even people with millions of dollars or perfect health. All we can do is be thankful for each day, and the blessings in it. Wake up each morning and be glad for one more day - one more chance to breathe and live and love.

What gives me faith is not only gratitude for the blessings in my life, but giving God credit for those blessings. I keep a journal, and every evening before bed, I fill a page with things I'm thankful for - a light that stayed green long enough for me to get through it, a penny I found on the street, a kid who made me laugh at work. Little things, big things, it doesn't matter - the important part is giving God credit by thanking Him for bringing them into my life. The distinction is important because it helps strengthen my belief in a benevolent, caring Creator who watches out for me. It's hard to hate or fault someone you've been thanking night after night for all the good things in your life. I've found that, after months of keeping this very specific kind of gratitude journal, I'm more likely to ask God for strength to get through something than ask Him why it's happening, or be angry with Him for bringing it into my life. Since I started crediting God with all the good things in my life, I trust Him more, and question Him less. You may say it's just a psychological trick or religious hoo-doo voodoo, but if it gives me peace of mind, does it matter?

Yesterday, I sat in a sunlit meadow after hiking 11.5 miles with two of my best friends, catching up with the first boy I ever slow-danced with, who just happened to run into us on the trail. We were eating a delicious lunch and listening to great music, and I suddenly teared up, counting my blessings. How many survivors, three months after chemo, could hike Mt. Tamalpais, and enjoy the company of two friends (one who came all the way from Catalina Island!) who raised nearly $800 to hike with them? Who else but the Creator of the Universe could negotiate such a logistical miracle? To ensure that we all came to the right place, at the right time, in the right frame of mind, so that all our needs could be met in one sunlit moment? Breathing the sweet air of the Marin Headlands, all I could think was, He will yet fill your mouth with laughter, and your lips with shouts of joy. It wasn't a burning bush, but that moment, I knew that God counted me, that He has a plan for me, and that it IS a plan to prosper, and not to harm me.

It is the hardest thing, especially for us Type As, to entrust our future to something intangible, unprovable. It is the biggest gamble, to believe in a Higher Power that is greater than ourselves, and the scariest part is the possibility that His plan might be different than Our plan. What helps me is reminding myself that I don't know everything, and cataloging those moments when things work out so beautifully that no amount of human planning could have produced the same result. That, to me, is proof of Divinity, and its role in my own journey.

Recovery: The Pre-Disease State (Not)

2009-09-18T07:46:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking lately about the word recovery. In medical terminology, recovery is "a return to the pre-disease state." A return to the pre-disease state.

We have, in our culture, an erroneous idea that we can somehow avoid change. That, should disaster strike, we can rebuild, take medicine, start over, and miraculously return to our previous ("pre-disease") state. But we can't, can we? We can't ever return to the pre-disease, pre-divorce, pre-disaster state. The truth is, we can't ever get back what we've lost, and that is what breaks our hearts in the aftermath of a tragedy.

I did the Avon 2-Day Walk this weekend (I'm still fundraising, if you'd like to donate) - the first event in my 40-by-40 series - and I guess I thought that completing it would represent my "return to normal life," the first step on the road to being my old, active self again. I thought, if I do the things I used to do, I will get back to being the me I used to be. Before we even started to walk, though, I felt like a Vietnam vet at a Peace March. And for two days, everyone around me was walking to support or remember someone who had gone through what I went through, but I felt utterly disconnected from all of them. Only the survivors who cheered from the sidelines reached me - the women without eyelashes wearing baseball caps. Walking past them, I wondered if this is what concentration camp survivors felt like post-World War II, if they saw other skinny people with short hair, if they reacted to wrist tattoos the way I react to port scars, their heart sinking in the knowledge that their pain is not a solitary one.* On the walk, I would see a woman on the route, sometimes with her friends and family, sometimes alone, and think, I've been there. Every time I recognized someone clearly still in chemo, I would leave the walk to hug her hard and say, it comes back; it all comes back. What I realize now is, I was wrong. It doesn't come back. Your hair regrows and your scars heal, but you will never, ever get to be the you you were again after cancer. The idea that you can take medicine and be the person you were before is a terrible illusion, one we maintain for the sole purpose of just getting through it. That is the tragedy of surviving something - you come out the other side of it different, unable to return to the life you had before.

The Hero's Journey is the story of all survivors. It doesn't ring true unless the Hero is changed by his experience. What happens, though, when the you that you are after cancer is not a person you ever wanted to be? I remember being in an ACS office earlier this year, staring at a poster for the Relay for Life, when someone said, "You can walk in the Survivor lap." She meant it as a compliment, I'm sure, as an affirmation of my victory against a potentially terminal illness, but I started to cry, thinking, I never wanted to be in that lap. I wanted to be the one walking in support of the people in that lap, but I never wanted to be in that lap.

Women, like my sister, who never imagined themselves as divorcees, fumble in their newfound singledom. My Aunt Audrey, who survived Katrina, sounded detached and confused when I talked to her after the storm, saying, "They said we would only be away a day, two at the most, and when we went back to the house, there was nothing left but a wall and the front porch. All my jewelry was in my bathroom drawer, and I don't even know where that is anymore." We tell divorced women to start dating and hurricane victims to rebuild and cancer survivors to wear pink ribbons, and it all feeds into this idea that we can somehow get back what we've lost, but the truth is, WE are the Orpheus in the story, NOT the Eurydice. We think that we can go into Hell and bring our old selves back with us to Earth, but we can't. Try to look back, and we lose her forever.

In the opening remarks of the Walk, the announcer said that every three minutes, a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer. Moments later, she said that there are two million survivors in the U.S. alone. I thought, Jesus, that's not very many. Dr. Bernie Siegel, in his books, talks about cancer being a manifestation of unrealized potential. The idea is that, if you deny your sense of purpose, your true path in life, all that energy manifests in your body as cancer cells that refuse to die. Cancer gives many people a new start: an excuse to be the person they never gave themselves permission to be. For others, though, the fallout is unsettling, disorienting, and discouraging. All they want, despite their very existence being threatened, is to go back to the way they used to be. When they realize they can't, they have one of two choices: build a new life, with a new future, or give up. To be or not to be, Hamlet said. I wonder, though: who is the coward - the one who sleeps, or the one who chooses not to?

My grandfather said to me once, regarding his bypass surgery, "I sometimes wonder if it was worth it." He struggled in his last months with horrible edema in his legs, which got so bad he couldn't walk or drive a car. This man, who was the captain of a Navy ship, could not even go to the bathroom by himself. Realizing he could never be what he was before, that his future could never be the future the old him saw for himself, he took his own life. I often wonder if my mother felt the same disillusionment; if her suicide was the result of her life ending up in a corner she could not see how to paint herself out of. She was 39, divorced, without custody of her children, unemployed and mourning the loss of her own mother, with two failed careers behind her. To justify her decision, I tell myself that she was simply incapable of imagining her recovery from what must have been the hardest year of her life. Many women can't, after disaster. They simply cannot see how life can get better, cannot summon the strength for another climb up the ladder. I have been there myself. Perhaps what has saved me is the other half of my genepool - my father was such a wonderful example of resilience. Twice divorced, laid off at 53 from a company he had worked with 24 years, he died from an enlarged heart the weekend before he was to open his first small business, six months before his first child graduated from a 4-year college. That he died because his heart was too big is ironic, and, I guess, appropriate. This was the same man who always told me, "Look 20 miles ahead," perhaps to remind me that the solution to one's problems may be far away, but if you can at least imagine it, you can get there one step at a time.

I play a game on my iPhone sometimes called BPop. There are five levels, each with the potential for scoring 10,000 points. I have gotten such a high score on it (29,000) that now, if I do not get 7,000 points by the first level, I reset the game and start over. Why play through four more levels if I cannot beat my highest score? Some people see a reset as a step backwards - a starting over at square one - and some see it as a second chance, to best your highest score. Your resilience after tragedy depends on your perspective, always.

This is what post-cancer looks like: resetting. Resetting everything. You make lists of things to get through, things to check off. Each time you reach a hiccup (an unforeseen infection, a claim rejection from your insurance), you start over at square one. Two steps forward, two steps back (sometimes three steps back!). The progress from diagnosis to remission is mind-numbingly slow, and all you can do is count the days that pass, the days that mark the distance between treatment and non-treatment. You cannot say "between illness and health," because you never feel healthy when you have had cancer. You are always acutely aware that it is something that can come back, despite your efforts, but the necessity of feeling safe in the world forces you to at least note the distance between the meat of your illness and this post-illness state where you are at least not being treated for it. As the distance increases, so does your security. At moments, you can even forget, during this post-treatment life, that you were ever sick. Time inevitably marches on, and I tell myself, I will have a day in my future when I do not have a doctor's appointment next week, when I am not taking a pill to treat something that threatens my life. Perhaps on that day, I will feel, not like my old self, but like a person who has reached the other side of some deep lake I had to swim across.

Will I ever recover? I ask myself. No, I realize, but I can survive, as someone else. I can swim for the other side, where a new me awaits.

Getting to the Top

2009-09-05T18:07:00.000-07:00

This afternoon, I hiked the Lafayette Reservoir Rim Trail - a trail I haven't hiked since I left California over a year ago. At 4.7 miles, it's not that far, but it has six pretty steep hills, including one that looks almost vertical! I did the loop twice, to prepare for my Peak Hike to Mt. Tam for breast cancer at the end of the month (you can see pictures on my Twitter Page). That hike is 11.5 miles, and I want to be ready.

Alone with my thoughts on the trail, I realized something: when we fall down, and have to pick ourselves back up, the hardest part is believing that things can be okay again. We might start to think, maybe I'm not special or destined for greatness after all. Maybe I've just been lucky the last few years, and my luck has finally run out. When I hit my bottom in Kaua'i, I thought to myself, if all I have left to look forward to in this life is unemployment, foreclosure and bankruptcy, why am I still going to chemo? I could not even imagine myself, in just six months, employed at a job I love, surrounded by people who make me smile every day, hiking a double loop of a trail a mere 10 weeks after finishing chemotherapy. I would have missed all this, had I allowed myself to check out of life.

I was thinking today about Persephone and Eurydice. In Greek mythology, Persephone is the daughter of Ceres. Hades, the master of Hell, falls in love with Persephone and kidnaps her to be his bride and live with him in the Underworld. In another story, Eurydice, the wife of the musician Orpheus, dies after treading on a snake. Orpheus travels to the Underworld to bring her back and plays music for Persephone, softening her heart. Persephone tells Orpheus he can lead Eurydice back to the world above, but only if he walks in front of her, and doesn't look back. At the last moment, though, his insecurities plague him, and he turns around, only to watch Eurydice vanish forever.

When you find yourself in Hell, you must ask yourself, am I a Persephone or a Eurydice? Is your Hell a place that you think you will just have to get used to, to learn to live in? Or is it a place where, with enough love and devotion, you can climb out of? And I'm not talking about pining away, waiting for some Orpheus to come and rescue you. You must be your own Orpheus. You must rescue yourself, one step at a time.

With every step I took today, I imagined myself climbing up and into my new life, the life that, at one time, I had no hope could even exist. I look in the mirror now and there are eyelashes that weren't there two months ago, a body that, thanks to Lou Kristopher's Boot Camp, is stronger and healthier than it's ever been. For the first time in months, I can not only see the light at the end of the tunnel, I'm there, standing on the threshold.

All I have to do, it seems, is keep looking forward, to the life that is waiting for me on the other side.

How to Advocate For Yourself With Your Doctors!!

2009-08-26T09:58:00.001-07:00

In this video, I share two lessons about why you should advocate for yourself if you have been diagnosed with a potentially life-threatening disease (hint: it could be the difference between Stage I and Stage III cancer, or between $9 a month and $600 a month in prescription bills!!)

What are Walk Breaks?

2009-08-24T09:38:00.000-07:00

So, if you're training for a marathon using the Jeff Galloway Method, you're welcome to check out my Walk Break Album on iTunes (just search "April Capil" in the iTunes Store from your iTunes Main Window. It's a collection of one-minute (give or take a second) spoken-word interludes you can insert into your workout mix (or MY workout mix - I've loaded a couple of them on iTunes as iMixes). The idea is to run for a song, then walk during the walk break, so you're walking about every 3-4 minutes.

Now, you may ask, "Why would you want to do that?!" Well, Jeff Galloway, Olympian and marathon runner (http://www.jeffgalloway.com/) advocates the use of walk breaks during long-distance training to reduce muscle fatigue, increase stamina and yes, even improve your speed! I used the Galloway Method to train for my first marathon, and now that I'm training for NYC in 2010, I'm using it again.

Check out Jeff's website or follow him on Twitter for more info on his training method and how it can help you run better (and easier, from my experience), and look for more Walk Break Albums on iTunes from me in the coming months - I have two more in the works, one that draws on Scripture (yes, from the Bible) for you Christian runners, and one that draws on Bernie Seigel's "Love, Medecine, and Miracles," for those of you getting back into shape after recovering from illness. There'll be lots more iMixes too, with great music to keep you going on your run!

The Cost of Cancer: Stacks of Medical Bills

2009-08-23T14:30:00.001-07:00

I'm starting to think the battle between doctors and insurance companies is akin to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. There are ideological battles over who needs what to survive, cheating, stealing and greed on both sides, and helpless, blameless people are dying every day over it, regardless of their role in the conflict. Doctors say insurers pay late or not at all, insurers say doctors overbill and order unnecessary tests to line their pockets, and patients are left wondering how they are ever going to afford to get sick, let alone come down with a life-threatening illness. Just one of my bills this month was over $56,000 - for a Radiology prescription (where they set up the tomography machine for your radiotherapy treatments). I don't know how an insurance company could recoup this cost, or how an uninsured patient could pay for it. My insurance company claimed I had a pre-existing condition for months after my lumpectomy, and only admitted I didn't when I reminded them I had two clear mammograms and two clear sonograms for 4 years before securing coverage with them (even though they HAD the results of all four). They refused to pay for extra days in the hospital following my lumpectomy until I quoted the Breast Cancer Patient Protection Act, passed last year by Congress! Imagine if I was uninformed or uninsured.... I could easily be taken advantage of by either side, a pawn in their conflict for power and money. What makes a sick person any less vulnerable than a marginalized minority in a country at war?

Wows

2009-08-12T22:33:00.000-07:00

I look in the mirror these days, and while I sometimes still don't recognize the person staring back, I know I am in there somewhere. I think about this journey I am beginning, of survivorship, and all kinds of metaphors come to mind.

A woman in my support group here asked me, while we were at our second radiotherapy appointment together, "Do you know what it means when the machine is clicking? Are those the radiowaves shooting out, or is it scanning us?" She was a sweet and somewhat nervous woman, young like me, and had been struggling with a stressful work environment where she felt manipulated and under-appreciated.

We had talked before about her job and how hard it was, but also about how good the money was, and I had asked her, "I've read about women with cancer saying, 'I will make this work if it kills me,' when it comes to difficulties at their jobs. But what if it does? What if it kills you?" She replied, "I know, I know, but I can't afford to quit right now." I know. I know. I thought, at the time, yes, I knew once too. Yet here I am. Stage IIIA. Just shy of metastatic breast cancer.

Some people who fight cancer take comfort in knowledge. White blood cell counts. Survival odds, based on statistics, culled from years of Big Pharma data. You can find these statistics online at various websites devoted to the numbers of cancer. If you have x number of treatments of y drug at z intervals over a months, then you have a b percent chance of being alive after c years. Numbers comfort many people, because it gives them something to hold onto that has been verified by the very industry that is treating (and, they hope, curing) their dis-ease. In a land of uncertainty, numbers comfort us.

The thing is, if you ask any scientist what a fact is, they will have to agree that a fact is simply an opinion that most people agree on. At one time, remember, it was a fact that the earth was flat. All science can really tell us is that x number of people have tried y, and it worked for z of them. Drugs work for some people, and don't work for others. Why they work is just an assumption, based on other assumptions. It's also important to remember that why they don't work is an assumption too. For all we know, listening to Queen's "We Will Rock You" cures cancer, but because someone isn't asking people in chemotherapy if they've heard it during the course of their treatment, we don't really know, do we? My friend Greg ignored all his doctor's advice when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma at 20 years old. He drank Natural Light nearly every weekend with his fraternity brothers, believing he was going to go out of this life with a bang. Six weeks later, his tumor had shrunk. Six months later, he was in remission. Does Natural Light cure cancer? We don't know. We don't know.

The truth is, I have never put much faith in facts or numbers. My opinion is, my body will either heal itself or it won't. I will either live or die, and only a certain amount of my life is really under my control anyway. What fighting cancer has taught me is that wrapping myself up in judgment over whether my numbers are "good" or "bad" this week or this month can only serve to increase my anxiety, and ultimately, make my life less enjoyable. What keeps me going, instead, is to spend what time I have left on this earth - be it 5 months or 50 years - taking comfort in what makes me feel good, strong, and proud, and not wasting time or energy worrying about being weak, unhappy, or guilty. There will be times in the years ahead (I hope, many years ahead) when I feel weak, unhappy, and even guilty, but they will pass. They will pass! As the Good Book says, this too shall pass.

I have been very careful, in my cancer fight, about surrounding myself with people who have positive, constructive energy. I realized very quickly that people with negative, destructive energy - even when it is unintentional - bring me to a place that drains me of my strength and positivity. I can almost feel my immune system weakening in the face of negative energy. Of course, I knew that, if I was going to be in a giant, clicking, radioactive machine every day for six weeks, I would have lots of time to think about the tumors that had grown in my breast, the likelihood of them growing back, and my long-term odds of surviving breast cancer. I knew that I would need to use the time constructively, not destructively, to help me heal (because ultimately, it is not doctors who heal us, but our bodies that heal themselves). Sitting in the waiting room, next to this woman that I realized I would see every morning for the next month and a half, listening to her worry about her job, about the machine's effectiveness, I struggled with how I could possibly be supportive and encouraging, and still protect myself from her clearly unintentional drain on my energy.

"I guess I'm just wondering how it works," she asked, almost to herself, as we sat waiting for the nurses to come get us. I visualized the scene I had been picturing the first couple of days of radiotherapy, that had been carrying me through my own worry, and debated on sharing it with her. "Well...." I said, "You know that part in Lord of the Rings, when Frodo is weak from being stabbed byt the Nazgul, and Arwen has him on her horse, and they're running from the Black Riders?" She nodded, presumably wondering where I was going with this. Suddenly, I found myself tearing up. "Well, I imagine that there is this part of me, that is weak like Frodo, from being wounded, and that the things that wounded me - my cancer cells - are chasing me, but that there is this also this stronger part of me, that is like Arwen, and she is carrying me away from them. That she is riding for her life and mine, you know? And when I hear the clicking of the tomography machine, I imagine that it is the sound of her horse, galloping with everything it has, to carry us both away to a safe place. And when the clicking stops, I visualize Armen calling the river to come and drown the Nazgul, and I imagine that the radiation is washing over me like the river, melting my cancer cells like the Wicked Witch of the West. And when I open my eyes, I'm like Frodo, opening his eyes after being healed." I collect myself, wiping my eyes. "I'm not sure what's really going on," I tell her, "but that is what I think of when I hear the clicking."

She looked at me, a little beweildered, almost as if she had not really been listening, but before she could say anything, the nurse came in and called her to come down the hall. I sat there, wondering if she pitied me, a woman who invested in daydreams rather than science, and if I had helped at all by sharing my story. There are some people, I guess, who just don't find comfort in what they cannot touch or measure. I am thankful, though, that I am not one of them.

Oddly enough, within 48 hours of our conversation, an abcess I had in my breast swelled and became infected, forcing me to halt radiotherapy. After draining it, my surgeon told me it would be at least two months before I could resume treatment. I wasn't surprised.

The Big Bang

2009-08-11T00:15:00.000-07:00

A few days before I left Kaua'i to move back to California, I went to Borders to pick out a journal. It was going to be my "new chapter" journal - the one that I would start when I closed the book on what was probably the hardest 9 months of my life. The one in which I would write a new story, with a happier ending.

At the time, I was hanging on by a thread. I was in one of those places where you feel like God has forgotten about you. Not in a mean way; more like He's been really busy with getting Obama into the White House and keeping Palestinians from fighting with Israelis and making sure one less human rights activist is being arrested in Myanmar (in considering time-space arguments that explain how Santa is able to get into billions of chimneys in a single night, I often think that God's ability to evaluate a trillion prayers a day, and still have time tolisten to mine, must have something to do with an as-yet undefined unified field theory). In any case, when I walked into Borders, I said a tiny prayer that He would help me fine a journal that would, perhaps with its cover or pages or binding, give me a sense of hope about the year ahead of me, which I so desperately needed to be better than the year behind me.

As I walked towards the giant wall of journals, I immediately spotted a pale pink/peachy-colored one, nearly in the center of the wall, covered in iridescent butterflies. For numerous reasons that I will have to explain in a future journal entry, butterflies have been a kind of lietmotif running throughout my life, and as I closed in on the journal, I relaxed just a teeny bit. On its cover was a quote from the Bible, a quote I had read just a few days earlier in a card from a Christian friend and 3-time breast cancer survivor: "For I know the PLANS I have for YOU (Jeremiah 29:11)." And wouldn't you know, I nearly burst into tears right there in Borders. I took the journal off the shelf, my hands (yes) shaking a little, and opened it, only to find another quote inside from the Book of Job: "He will yet fill yoyr mouth with laughter, and your lips with shouts of joy." How does He do it? I wondered. How does God hear you, and let you know He hears you, when you need it most, despite all the other things on His plate? Perhaps Stephen Hawking, a man who shares my birthday, knows.

In any case, tonight, as I open the journal to write in it, the quote at the top of today's page makes me smile. It is (of course) from theoretical physicist Edward Teller, and is another one of my favorites: "When you come to the end of all the light you know, and it's time to step into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things shall happen: Either you will be given something solid to stand on, or your will be taught to fly." The quote is particularly appropriate, considering I just registered for my first 40-by-40 event: the Avon 2-Day Walk in Los Angeles September 12-13. Which means, I have about 33 days to raise $1800 and be able to walk 40 miles in 48 hours. This is the part that feels like the top of the roller coaster.

All yesterday, I kep thinking, "Oh my God.... Oh my God...." It's starting. My 40-by-40. My next five years. My journey to survivorship. Considering this, the first chapter in Part II of my story, I can't help but hear the faint crack of a starting gun, somewhere in an alternate universe where I am becoming everything I want to be.

Taking My Hat Off

2009-07-28T11:14:00.000-07:00

The truth is, I baby-stepped into it.

First, my sis and I went to see the latest Harry Potter installment in the theater, then we met friends at Sweet Tomatoes (aka Souplantation) for an early dinner. Next, it was running errands and hanging out at my favorite coffee shop, Pacific Bay, and finally, work on Sunday (forgive me, Lord).

By yesterday afternoon, though, after six months of covering my head, I was finally comfortable without a hat, scarf of wig.

The thing they don't tell you about chemo is that not all of your hair falls out. You kind of look like a nuclear fallout victim, because hair grows in cycles, and it falls out in cycles. You end up with like, two hundred or so sad little hairs poking out of your scalp, six or seven sad little eyelashes hanging onto your lids for dear life, three or four eyebrow hairs askew above them. I think women going through chemo shave their heads for the same reason men shave theirs - because it just looks better without any hair at all.

It was hard watching it grow back in, but not as hard as watching it all fall out. When I lost my hair, the first week of 2009, it was heartbreaking. I mean, I had like, Julia Roberts hair - long, brown, thick, gorgeous. I could wear it curly or straight, and even though I had cut it in anticipation of it falling out, when it finally did, I was horrified. I cried every time I took a shower, every time I looked in the mirror. I couldn't even hold it together during my last haircut, and made the hairdresser cry (albeit, notintentionally).

It's not like it all falls out at once, either. It's more like, when you brush a dog or a cat, and tons of hair comes off in the brush, only, you can see where it's come off your head, and it just gets thinner and thinner every day. Every time you take a shower and run your hands through your hair, there's a toupee-sized clump in the drain. Every time you wake up, there's hair all over your pillow and shirt. You scratch your head under your hat, and there's hair on your hand when you pull it away, or a clump sitting on your shoulder that you don't even know about. I lost most of it in a week, and still went through a whole lint roller in just under a month. I tried to reassure myself that it was just temporary, but somehow losing my hair made cancer real, even more real than surgery or chemo. Suddenly, I looked like a cancer patient.

I kept my eyelashes and eyebrows through most of Taxol, and only lost them halfway through - about two months before chemo was over. Now I really looked freaky. I felt like one of those vampire extras from I Am Legend - dark bags under my eyes, patchy hair, no facial hair. I never wanted to go outside, because even when I felt good, I looked sick. Even my goddaughter stared at me strangely - this sweet child I had known and loved for 6 years, admitted, "It's kind of weird," when I asked her what she thought of my "new look." I started spending more and more time holing up at home, in my pajamas, in front of my computer. Outfits had to be coordinated with baseball caps (I hardly ever wore my wigs because I was afraid they would fall off, or they would make my head sweat as summer kicked in). It was just easier to never go outside. I was becoming a victim of my own reluctance to share my illness with the world.

They say that when the student is ready, the teacher arrives. My sister dragged me to a seminar in Las Vegas with her mentor, Marshall Sylver - the world's greatest hypnotist and a fantastic motivational speaker. It was only two days, but, as always, clothes had to carefully be coordinated to go with hats, makeup had to be applied to warm up my chemo pallor and nearly invisible eyes. It was the first time in months I had been with a group of strangers who didn't know my story, and I felt like Dolly Parton, having to put on her face to greet the public.

I asked Marshall, in the Q&A, "How can I forgive myself for the mistakes I've made?" and he responded with encouragement and awareness, making me see how I was punishing myself for, essentially, not being psychic. Hindsight is always 20/20, yet we blame ourselves all the time for not being able to prevent disaster. I realized the silliness and futility of wanting my situation to be different, and the necessity of me moving forward in it as positively as I could, with what I had. I couldn't change that I had cancer, or lost my hair, or all the dreams I had for the future. What I could do, though, was dream a new dream, that started where I was already, and do it without beating myself up anymore.

I took a good, long, forgiving look in the mirror, and realized that there must be other women out there, feeling self-conscious about their appearance, wanting to hole up until it was "all over," and, as Marhsall suggested, thought of how I could help them in their struggles. I saw the danger in my own reclusiveness - by separating myself from society, I was fighting alone. I remembered Rowena's telling me to "call in the troops," to fight my cancer, and knew that I was doing exactly the opposite - instead of calling in for reinforcements, I was in denial about the seriousness of the battle I was facing. It was time I reached out.

The YouTube videos started, initially, as an idea I had to be more comfortable with the way I looked. I was so, SO scared, during my cancer fight, to let other people see me weak, ugly, unsure of myself, or incompetent. I was always the rock and the resident genius. It was enourmously challenging to admit I was struggling. Marshall teaches that you must confront your fears, or they will always hold you back from greatness. I thought, "if I can let the people who love me see me vulnerable, perhaps I will finally be okay with it, and will not spend the rest of the time I've got left on this earth in fear of people thinking I can't handle a challenge." Many of my friends admitted later that they wondered how I was holding up, and feared I was putting on a brave face (as I always did), while being in denial. I told myself, "Okay, I'll record a little makeup tutorial for women in chemo, and I'll just let everyone see what I look like under all that makeup, and they'll see it's still me, and the friends who are freaked out will fall away, and the friends who still love me will stay, and that will be that." In the process, hopefully I would inspire a few cancer-driven agoraphobes to put on some mascara and rejoin the world.

The beauty was, no one fell away. All my friends voiced their encouragement, support, and sometimes amazement, over my videos, and I felt so blessed to have a veritable army of supporters around me, urging me on.

I made video after video, and got a real job. I chose a sales position in a healthy, fitness-focused environment, where I would interact with strangers every day, helping them get fit, or equip themselves for athletic journeys. It allowed me to draw on my history and experiences, and gave me something to do to feel useful every day, instead of feeling like a hopeless cancer mercy case, sitting at home waiting for somone to e-mail her with something to pay the rent. The money was waaay less than I was used to, but the environment more than made up for it. I kept uploading videos and people kept watching them, commenting and sending me encouragement. Every time I felt down or depressed, inevitably someone would post a response to one of my tutorials encouraging me to keep up the fight, and thanking me for my inspirational messages.

Finally, my eyelashes started growing back! It started as one dark little stubbie a week after chemo (my sister blames the Xango she made me drink when it ended; I say my body was just reeeeaaally glad to be drug-free again). Then there was another stubbie, and pretty soon, I didn't have to wear eyeliner every day anymore. My hair was growing in too, and even though it bore a curious resemblence to Willian Shatner's, I celebrated every new little strand that came in. I joined an awesome boot camp early in the mornings, and saw my running times improve. I told myself everything was coming back; everything was getting better. With each new gain in health, I celebrated, reminding myself I was coming back.

And so it was that I went to my second or third day of radiotherapy and sat next to Susan, a woman in my CA support group, who was totally bald - hatless and scarfless, going about her business. I looked at her and thought, "Why am I so self-conscious about my head when here she is, walking around bald without thinking twice?" I realized I was being ridiculous, and decided right then to spend the weekend easing myself into a hat-free life.

Sure, when we went to Sweet Tomatoes, a lot of little kids gawked. My friend's daughter, Molly, more than made up for it. When they came in, she ran up to me, surprised and smiling, and shouted, "April!!" wrapping me in the best kid's hug ever. It was like I was finally letting her see me, without the hat, without the eyeliner, and she was happy as only a four year-old can be. I said, "Do you like my hair?" and she nodded, smiling shyly. Two days later, I was at work, equally shy and still nervous about my monk-like hairdo, discussing my comfort level with a hatless existence, when my supervisor (who rides for Team In Training) said, "You look adorable. It's a celebration of life!"

A celebration of life. Indeed. :)

Waking Up In Vegas

2009-07-13T13:32:00.000-07:00

I've been fascinated by the Bernie Madoff case.

I've had my share of disappointment in the last couple of years, and in truth, I think a person's longevity is in direct proportion to their ability to right themselves after each storm (thank God for changes in weather!). Imagine, though, thinking you have $30 million in the bank and finding out, after three years of watching the $30 million grow to $60 million, that you have... nothing. Nothing. At all. Zilch. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is empty. And, P.S., the guy who sent you your account statements every month? He's just been exposed as... the world's biggest grifter. Did your stomach just fall into your bladder?

My stomach, actually, didn't fall into my bladder right away when I found out I had cancer. I think it was because I had kind of known for a while - I just had a feeling; a woman knows her own body. While it was scary because it ended up being staged later than I thought, I had had so many scares in the years before my diagnoses (all of which were always immediately followed by doctors showing me clear scans and looking at me like a hypochondriac), that when a doctor finally looked at me and confirmed it, it wasn't exactly a surprise. What did made my heart sink later was realizing, in the two months after my diagnosis, that I was: new in town, 3,000 miles from my family, unemployed, physically compromised, over-mortgaged, and in danger of watching my savings dwindle in value at an alarming rate, thanks to a receding economy. Looking at my own account statements, I saw myself losing the future I had been working three years to make possible. It was the inconceivable, manifested. I felt like someone who had bet everything on an underdog pony, watched it pull into the lead... then fall back to 4th place seconds before the finish. I had gambled on my future... and lost?

Money is magic, isn't it? That's what we think. We think, "If I just had enough money, I wouldn't have any problems!" or worse, "If I had enough money, I could solve ANY problem!" Every time I hear someone allude to this, I'm reminded of a quote from indie director/composer Robert Rodriguez's 10-Minute Film School: You can get rid of a problem one of two ways - you can do it creatively or you can wash it away with the money hose. Of course, as he said in Men's Health later, "buying away problems is not the same as solving them." As someone who has been broke, then rich, then broke, then rich, then broke again, I can assure you, money is a freaking hydra. As soon as it solves one problem, it creates another. I have been miserable broke and miserable rich, and happy broke and happy rich. Don't get me wrong, money is nice; it's just that we forget - people are what make life hard or easy. I had so much money three years ago, I though I would never, ever have to worry about it again. And I didn't even have that much, compared to Madoff's investors. What I did, though, was the same: gamble bigger and bigger chunks of it, hoping to "win" my way to perpetual affluence, through higher-yielding (and higher-risk) investments. True, I was investing in a small business, a home, and a farm, but were those any different from the myriad "sure things" Madoff promised to sink his clients' life savings into? What did I believe, I now wonder? That I needed $3 million to be happy, instead of $300,000?

Talking to my former roommate about this Joker's victims, she attributed their downfall to pure greed. I thought of the pension funds and charities who lost everything, and rich people I've met who are perfectly nice and not at all bloodsuckers (as for me, about 50% of my money was invested in "green" or socially-conscious mutual funds and stocks, with the rest in my home and business). There are plenty of wealthy people who are not greedy bastards, I thought, and took offense at her generalization. Reading the Wikipedia entry on those involved in the case, however, my opinon changed.

As Joe Nocera put it in the New York Times Executive Suite Blog, "most of the people investing with Mr. Madoff thought they had gotten in on something really special; there was a certain smugness that came with thinking they had a special, secret deal not available to everyone else. Of course, it turned out they were right — they did have a special deal. It just wasn’t what they expected." What's more, I realized, anyone getting a 40% (or sometimes, even as high as 300%) return on their money in tough economic times should probably check themselves to see if they might have a case of the Emperor's New Clothes. I mean, isn't this the world's biggest lesson in "if it seems too good to be true, it probably is" and "don't put all your eggs in one basket"? Perhaps a better lesson is, "when you lay down with dogs, be prepared to wake up with fleas."

Who doesn't want to believe in a silver bullet, though? That there IS some magic equation for happiness, and it amounts to just "getting in" with the right investment adviser? That there is ONE PLACE, where, if you buy a house right now, you will make a ton of money and be set for life. That there is ONE DRUG or ONE FOOD or (my personal favorite, owing to annoying internet ads) ONE RULE that, if you follow it, will give you the body of your dreams? Who are we kidding? We LOVE silver bullets! They're so much easier than critical, systemic thinking, aren't they? But, you know, the thing about silver bullets is, they're kind of like roulette. You bet big on one number, and if it wins, it wins big, but if it doesn't win, you lose big. Sometimes, you lose everything. The only way to win at gambling is to be the House, because, as we all know, in Vegas, the House always wins. Sometimes, it even walks away with a life sentence in a white-collar prison with three squares a day.

So I guess the question is, what do you do, when you come to the morning after a night spent high as a kite at the Roulette table, with nothing but an empty stomach and a wallet full of dust bunnies? I suppose you can either jump off the roof of the casino, and throw away the last thing you have left, like Madoff investor Thierry de la Villehuchet, or, you can sober up and, as Katy Perry says, "Get up and shake the glitter off your clothes now/that's what you get for waking up in Vegas."

How YOU Can Join ME in Making it to My 40th Birthday!!

2009-07-03T20:33:00.001-07:00

5 years is the barometer by which most cancer survivors are measured. If you can make it 5 years without a recurrence, your long-term survival odds are much higher.

Because I'll be 40 in 5 years, I've decided to complete 40 breast cancer fund-raising events (i.e., walks/bikes/runs/triathlons) by my 40th birthday, to celebrate not only my survivorship, but my commitment to my long-term health. To find out how YOU can join me on this journey, visit http://www.teamaprilonline.com, and to see my schedule, click on the link at the top right side of my Blog's front page.

Simple Stretching Exercises

2009-06-29T09:19:00.001-07:00

I found a great site sponsored by BumbleBee Foods, and while I am not a fan of canned tuna (it's pretty much all full of mercury, sadly), they do have a program now where you can log your miles for breast cancer, and helpful tips from "Coach Jenny." Here is her latest, on stretching: http://www.beewellmiles.com/SimpleSteps/EasyMoves/ViewBlog.aspx?BlogPost_ID=167

Missing My Father

2009-06-26T18:06:00.000-07:00

Reading an excerpt from Bliss Broyard's book, One Drop, I suddenly tear up. The book is about her father, literary critic Anatole Broyard, who, on his deathbed, confessed his greatest secret: he was part black. My own father was Filipino, and reading about Anatole watching Bliss' brother run a 5K, I suddenly felt sad, wishing he was still here to go on this 40-by-40 journey with me.

In the book excerpt, Bliss says that her father once wrote, of the "critically ill, 'it may not be dying we fear so much, but the diminished self.' He reasoned that by developing a style for their illness, a stance that incorporated it into the ongoing narrative of their lives, sick people could 'go on being themselves, perhaps even more so than before.'"

Is that what I am trying to do, by repeating a challenge I met five years ago? Recapture a me I used to be, that, it feels like, cancer has tried to "diminish"? Perhaps... perhaps it is a kind of reincarnation, this effort, this journey I am embarking on. I am also willing to explore the idea that it may be this exact effort that heals my illness, moreso even than the drugs I've been given. Medicine comes in all forms.

My father was a runner. He ran every day, rain or shine, and when I was 12 and got a D in Pre-Algebra, he sat me down at the kitchen table and said, "Do you want to work at McDonald's?" I shook my head, holding back tears (oh! the wrath of a disappointed father!). "I mean," he said, "I don't mind you working at McDonald's; it's an honest job, but at 18, you are out of my house, and it's hard to pay the rent on minimum wage." I told him I didn't want to work at McDonald's. "Okay then. Go upstairs and get your sneakers on. You're coming running with me." I was suddenly confused. "What?" He stood up, looking down at me. "You need some discipline, so you are coming running with me until these grades get back up."

At 12, you are still in that vague area of adolescence where you do what your parents say. At least, that's the way it was when I was 12. In the 80s. So I put on my sneakers, and I ran with my dad. Every day, rain or shine, until I was 16 and, of course, occupied with Drama Club and Track and various other afterschool distractions. I never ran with my father again, sadly. I Rollerbladed with him once, but his pace was much, much faster by the time I was in college, so I always ran on my own after that. Later, he took up cycling, but he died of runner's heart, ironically, when I was 21 and about to graduate. I think now, he would have gotten into triathlons eventually (he was a swimmer in the Army), and probably surprised himself.

It's not the present that I think we miss when we lose someone we love, but the future - the future they were supposed to be a part of. I miss my father most, not when I look at old pictures, but when I think of something I wish he could be there to see: my first solo marathon, my wedding, my first child. I'll miss him at every one of my 40 finish lines, I know, because without him, I think, I would not even be a runner.

My favorite quote from the excerpt? "[A] person's identity [is] an act of will and style." I totally agree. :)