‘Facing Cancer….with Love and Laughter.’
WHAT???? Don’t just HOLD the bus, STOP the damn thing!!! What??? Chill with the jargon and happy smiles folks. ‘Love and Laughter’??? Love, okay….but laughter?? There is NOTHING I’d find one damn bit funny about learning I had cancer. And don’t give me, ‘well, their sentiment.’ Morons. Really. I have more than a bee in my bonnet or burr in my behind!
So, my friend has cancer, it was affirmed today along with a measurement of severity. Not a ‘walk in the park’ day.
I hate most institutions. I don’t use the word hate often, but I’m pissed. My friend and I both were pissed. Not only did the beige walls, benign magazines and musac in the cancer waiting room insult my sensibilities, but the fact that the only food in the hospital break room was total junk and every nurse or hospital employee who came in while I tapped at my computer, (waiting for my friend), was fatter than pigs fed antibiotic induced Twinkie rations 8 times a day. They were enormous, unhealthy and spoke about NOTHING but dieting….EVERY woman who walked through those doors.
Our culture, our society, our institutions, are mindless. Generally speaking I’ll stick with that. I’d love to read the vision, mission and culture statements in that hospital. But I’m serious, as a heart attack or the cancer my friend was supposed to be facing ‘with laughter.’
I have mentioned my savvy and talented business coach, the delightfully mysterious (he thinks he’s mysterious…I think he’s funny and fun), and smart, (smarty pants really), tell it like it is, Brian Patrick Cork. I struggled last week trying to find the language for what I’m endeavoring to develop and uncover, not just as a business woman, (that’s an inch of who I am), but the other 11 feet and 11 inches which is packed full of other things; it’s the stuff you can’t name exactly, it’s the part that is with us when we die, it’s the part that makes us who we are…if we’re not numbed and dumb with food, alcohol, prescription drugs, too many kids to care for to think, or being ‘engaged’ in mindless, stupid jobs working for some big institution which has lost touch, or never ‘touched’ into anything dealing with more than a symptom or an axiom, their ‘truth’ proselytized by some coalition of numb-nutts out to rule the world.
I’m after something ‘bigger’, not for ‘biggness’ sake, but because I must. I must seek a truth that works for me. I must seek something which makes sense and makes me want to get up in the morning, to do good, to make a difference or why get up at all. It’s important to me.
So I took my friend to a restaurant called, ‘The Last Resort.’ Really. We worked on a strategy while downing a margarita….just cause we could…and it felt right. Noon on a Thursday, dealing with cancer at The Last Resort. Life is filled with irony. Iconic AND ironic!
Healing is about not just the whole body or whole person, it’s about the whole spirit. For cancer to get to be CANCER, a lot of other things have sadly been neglected, unattended, left to randomly spin out of control. Cancer is cells out of control, like the nurses, pounding Doritos followed by peanut M&Ms. I saw it.
Good God….Or the doctor who couldn’t look my friend in the eyes when he told her she had cancer swarming in her left breast….who had to tell her the mass had been there since 2001 but wasn’t big enough for them to tell her. They forgot early on to consider this whole and beautiful person sitting before them. And they forgot today as well.
I want my life to represent the part that helps us wake up to our own power to heal, to be in our passion, our truth, our glory whatever the hell that is. How do people get to the place where they can’t look another lovely human being in the eyeballs when they announce a possible death sentence.
Under all this anger….I’m really very, very sad. Disappointed. How did we all get so numb, stupid and out of touch? All these Christian ‘good people’. What happened? Really, what happened? When did it all get so skewed?
So yeah, I’m pissed, I’m bothered by an organization with so much money and so much influence and so much unawareness that their marketing department would consider putting ‘Facing Cancer with Love & Laughter’ on their flyer. I’m typing with my mouth hanging open ready to swallow a fly.
My friend will be fine. I have an arsenal of strategies to go with her chemo that’ll get her body, mind and that gorgeous, (albiet cynical) spirit of hers back and running. She’ll have to change a few things in her life, tend to taking care of herself in a different way.
If I end up in some institution because one thing or another happens to me, please, please do a Dr. Kavorkian on me and put me out of my misery. Oh, maybe the musac will do that on its own.
How I relish soul. How I relish ‘awake’. How I relish ketchup on my soy dog and filtered walter in my tap.
Wake up America. If we keep doing all the dumb, mindless shit that our neighbors do, we’ll get their same results. Go travel awhile…see other ways of living, being and doing. Wake up. Wake up and fill yourself with love and laughter. But please, please don’t end up in an institution where someone is so numb they’d expect you to deal with a life threatening malady with a platitude suggesting you THROW your head back in joy, embrace laughter as the drip, drip of chemo further pollutes your body temple while watching the overfed nursing staff pounding down their coca colas and pork rinds.
I’d say fill my tap with morphine and let me float with the angels….I’ve got other fish to fly with.
You’re gonna be fine my friend, have no fear…there are other ways…there are other ways to live and breathe.
P.S. My friend was last seen in a Dunkin Donuts with a water pistol shooting anyone who entered wearing pink. I think she was laughing.
BB Webb