Finding My Invincible Summer by Muriel Vasconcellos (ebook reader with highlight function .txt) 📖

Book Excerpt – Finding My Invincible Summer, by Muriel Vasconcellos

On a warm fall day in 2001, I sat on the front stoop of a small hotel in one of Washington's older tree-shaded neighborhoods, waiting for Dr. Laird to arrive. Dr. Thomas Laird was the surgeon who first told me I had breast cancer back in 1977. He was also the one who concluded three years later that the cancer had spread to my bones and predicted I had less than six months to live. A mutual friend thought it was time for us to meet again, so here I was, more than twenty years after his prognosis.

When he arrived, Dr. Laird greeted me with a warm smile and an outstretched hand. Without any preamble, the first thing he said was:

“It’s times like these, I’m happy to be wrong!”

My cancer crisis happened a long time ago, and I have outlived many of the characters in the story. What makes my experience somewhat different is that I ultimately walked away from treatment when doctors were telling me I would not survive if I did. As I learned gentle approaches to becoming physically and emotionally healthy, cancer became a non-issue. I haven’t seen an oncologist since 1983, and as far as I know, I am cancer-free.

My episodes with cancer were intertwined with the story of loving and losing my husband Sylvio. His support made everything possible; his death shattered me to the core. In my vulnerable state, I struggled to deal with grief, guilt, and eventually, when I was told that my cancer had spread, helplessness and hopelessness. Then one day I had an experience that shifted my perspective, and glimpses of a bright new world opened up to me.

As I began to move beyond the limiting beliefs I had held for most of my life, new insights constantly expanded my awareness and understanding. They always seemed to appear at the moment I was ready for them.

While I wouldn’t wish cancer on anyone, for me it was the catalyst that changed everything. As I write these lines, it’s hard for me to recognize the person I was three decades ago. My journey led me to freedom, power, and, ultimately, deep inner peace—my invincible summer.

I discovered my lump on April Fools’ Day, 1976. I woke up early that morning, and as I stretched my arms, my fingers brushed against a hard knot on the inside of my right breast next to the bone. It was large, round, solid, and different. I felt it again, to make sure it wasn’t my imagination. And again. With each pass of my fingers, I came closer to the certainty that it was cancer. My thoughts began to spin into full gear. As I lay there, I worked myself into a high state of anxiety.

With no doubt in my mind, I was already processing the diagnosis. I was going to die, and I was only 42! People aren’t supposed to die so young. I couldn’t believe that this was happening to me. Cancer was for other people, that minority of—what was the ratio?—one in four? I didn’t know the statistics, but I was sure that many more people don’t get cancer than do. Not only was it cruelly unfair, it was unreal. I had been normal the night before, and now I was staring at death.

At the time, my life was going really well, after decades of struggle. I had met my husband six years earlier, and I was more in love with him than ever. Challenges had claimed our attention earlier, but now we were finally able to relax. We had come to a happy place, and we had earned it.

. . .

The lump that was so obvious to me turned out to be less obvious to the professionals. My gynecologist dismissed it and told me I simply had “lumpy breasts.” He did consent to ordering a mammogram, and to my surprise, the films showed nothing.

[Months went by.] All the while, my lump was getting bigger.

[Finally, after nine long months, I was referred to a surgeon and underwent a biopsy. After the surgery, I remember his report so clearly. My husband and I were waiting in my hospital room.].

Dr. Laird finally appeared. He [now had] the final lab results. Yes, he said, there was a tumor: an invasive ductal carcinoma, about an inch in diameter—2.5 centimeters to be exact.

. . .

My experience with cancer is part of a much larger tapestry of interwoven threads. At the heart and center of this tapestry was a beautiful love story. Until I met Sylvio, my life had been turbulent for as long as I could remember. With him, I felt secure, supported, and fulfilled. He became my anchor as we faced our challenges together. The story of our love began seven years before my partial mastectomy.

. . .

He showed up in my life quite unexpectedly. [He had come from Brazil to on a cultural mission and was] in Washington for meetings and interviews before he started out to visit cities around the country. [I will never forget the moment I first saw him.]

He stood a shade under 6-foot-4 and was the handsomest man I had ever seen. He looked like a Latino version of the Arrow shirt man: slim, with dark wavy hair and perfect features. Not only that, he had big, strong, beautiful hands and a deep bass voice. I caught my breath and thanked myself for the years I had spent studying Portuguese.

Although he understood written English perfectly, he couldn’t carry on a conversation. He had been assigned an interpreter to escort him during his scheduled program, but there were other things he wanted to do, and I was more than happy to take time off from work and accompany him in between his official appointments.

. . .

During his three-week tour around the country, he phoned me several times and sent me notes and post cards. By the time he returned to Washington on May 4, the weather was hot. It was the day before my birthday, and he asked his interpreter to help him buy me a gift. He decided on an ounce of Chanel No 5 surrounded by a bouquet of pink roses. The interpreter disapproved:

“That’s too much,” he said. “You hardly know her. We don’t do things like that here.”

But Sylvio had plans. He proposed to me on my birthday. He had applied for a two-year job in Mexico City with the Organization of American States, and he asked me to go with him if the job came through. I was stunned. We had never held hands, let alone kissed. We had been together only ten days, not counting the time he was traveling. I still knew nothing about his personal life.

I was as bewildered as I was swept away. I asked him about his family, and he told me what I needed to know. I listened to my heart, and without hesitation I said “yes.” It was by far the best decision I ever made.

. . .

[We went to Mexico, and while we were living there he developed a recurrence of a tuberculosis he had had in his late teens. He was treated and we returned to Washington. While our lives were full of challenges, we faced them together, and he was at my side throughout my first bout with cancer. We thought our troubles were behind us, but two years later, on New Year’s Eve he had an inkling that luck was about to run out.]

As the ball dropped in Times Square, Sylvio hugged me hard and declared that 1978 had been the happiest year of his life.

“Our love gets bigger each year,” he added in English.

I agreed.

But when the confetti settled and the last notes of Auld Lang Syne had been sung, his mood got more somber: he pointed out that 1979 was an odd-numbered year. According a long-held theory of his, it meant that something bad was going to happen. Good things happen in even years. For example, we met and got married in 1970. But every catastrophe of his life had occurred in an odd year. The record of calamities went back to his childhood and included his imprisonment in 1965.

. . . He had a premonition that something really awful was going to happen.●

[A few weeks later, I was calling an ambulance to take him to the Emergency Room.] By Tuesday, March 13, Sylvio had received 136 units of blood. He had had 63 bedside chest X-rays and 767 laboratory tests. His hospital bill was the size of a telephone book.

[He never came home.]

. . .

Keeping out the pain became all-consuming. I saw it as something “out there,” waiting for a chance to get inside. The harder I tried to keep it out, the more it tried to get in. When I took a breath, I was sure I could feel it traveling down my windpipe into my lungs. Keeping out the pain meant keeping out everything. Letting in air and food became a conscious effort that I had to convince myself I had to make.

. . .

As the months wore on, I lost a lot of weight. My clothes no longer fit. I had thought my grief would eventually pass, but it was only getting worse because I was finally allowing myself to feel it. Everything seemed more challenging than before.

. . .

By September 1980 I had developed a pain in my hip that made it difficult to walk. I also felt a stabbing pain in the groin and mentioned it to my gynecologist. To my surprise, he ordered a bone scan. I couldn’t understand why, because the pain wasn’t near a bone. The report that came back was a shock:

The bone scan demonstrates a well-defined lesion in the right lateral margin of the 5th lumbar vertebra.

The most likely etiology would be metastatic disease. If there is any clinical question, a bone biopsy may be useful.

Metastatic disease! The words jumped out at me from the page. They looked technical and impersonal, but I felt their force. I knew instantly that they had the power to change the rest of my life. I felt certain that my cancer had spread and I was going to die. A storm of mixed emotions came over me: fear, panic, helplessness, and, at the same time, a sense of resignation—even relief. After Sylvio died, there were times when I thought that dying would be easier than the struggle to keep on going. Now I had permission to give up. I didn’t have to decide whether or not I wanted to die. The decision had been made for me. I had something real to think about. It was a distraction from the endless tapes that kept replaying inside my head.

[Over the months that followed, I developed unremitting pain. My life closed in on me, and I began to see no way out. I even tried to kill myself. My doctor referred me to a biofeedback lab, and that was my turning-point. Here is an entry from my diary.]

Tuesday, March 10. “I got to use the headphones for the first time! The real biofeedback. The noise was a gentle clicking sound that began to race and get louder when my muscles tensed up, turning into a storm. First I listened with my fists clenched as tightly as possible; then I relaxed and got the clicks down to almost zero, just few and far between.

“Then the therapist told me to stay completely relaxed and think of something stressful. I thought about my diagnosis. To my amazement, the sound came rushing back just as loud and fast as when I had clenched my fists, even though I was certain that my body was totally relaxed. There was no difference!!”

It was almost too much to