Broken, OR, The Power of Ideas

I am on the first day of my solitary retreat at the SFBC land in Lake County. I have come into town to buy a few things and check on email from Spirit Rock. (I am on a waiting list, and also requested a private room.) Sadly I didn't hear anything from them.

Most of this I wrote in my tent last night:

The Power of Ideas sounds like a corporate marketing slogan. But the thing is, ideas are powerful. And slogans are often true. By an idea, here, I mean a thought. A thought like one I had today, my body is broken. By which I understood myself to mean, hurt. Very deeply hurt from the machine- and chemical-generated abuse it underwent.

Random sign in Lake County

Part of thinking is re-thinking, discovering what you were thinking before, that you didn't even know you were thinking. I thought of my treatment as temporary, with temporary effects. Dr. Patel told me the side effects would go away after a month or so. But here it is, two months down the line, and side effects abound.

For example, I had a hot flash tonight. I have never had a hot flash before. The occasional stabbing pain deep in my gut. Soreness in my hips and knees. Arthritis...was it caused by the radiation? I don't remember hearing about that as a possibility. Painful urination. More gassy, less bowel control. Some of my teeth are sore. I sleep 10 to 12 hours per night. An occasionally intense need to be alone, inarticulate, can't quite explain, a deer in the headlights. Confusion. A dream about driving, trying to get home, and everything moving around, home is getting further away and the route more confusing. Finding being around more than one other person, even people I know and trust and love, stressful. Strange effects from food. Like sometimes after I eat certain foods, normal foods that people eat, like breakfast cereal with wheat in it - but it's not normal because it doesn't have any sugar - my vagina itches for a while, which makes me anxious. First the itching and before you know it you have cancer again. (This is also a thought.) Or sometimes my face will itch.

The Order posse trying out ideas for
next album cover

One morning, say, I feel better, energetic, and I think I am done with recovery. I am done. But the change seems to be non-linear. The next day I feel broken, weary.

I thought that on around March 22, all the pain and trouble would be over, or close to being over. And that thought keeps getting friction. It seems that in some ways my body is irreparably damaged...or is that just an idea? In any case, my body feels different - behaves differently - than it did a couple of months ago. They aren't differences anyone would wish for.

Idea: The inevitable deterioration of my body took a great leap forward in the last three months.

Facts. Grief coming from my body today, crying and crying. It's a relief to let some of it it out. Meditation feels emotionally healing.

...I just googled "radiation side effects arthritis" and found more online forums from cancer survivors. Here is a quote from a man who had anal cancer and got 26 radiation treatments:

...The collateral damage has been enormous. It's been over 5 years now since I had this done and it is only getting harder to move around as the years pass...I was only 43 when this happened - the radiation "aged" my body exponentially. 

Geez, why didn't anyone tell me how badly my body was going to be messed up? I have to start doing YOGA!

Vagina. Vagina. Vagina. It used to be a sexual word. It used to be a private word. Now it's like Leonard Cohen's broken hallelujah.