“Touch your tongue lightly against the roof of your mouth. Expand your belly and the small of your back as you breathe, and open and close the huiyin cavity between your genitals and anus at the same time. Okay, good… now relax.”
Ramel, my meditation teacher, recited the familiar list of instructions for The Standing Post meditation known as Embracing the Tree. I’d practiced it almost every day since I’d met him, and could maintain the position for one hour without lowering my arms.
That seemed like a major accomplishment—when we first began our private lessons six months earlier, pain from the tumor in my right shoulder prevented me from even lifting my right arm to chest level, never mind holding it there. Since then I’d undergone months of preliminary chemotherapy to eradicate the cancer and prepare for the bone marrow transplant designed to “cure” the disease forever. I’d practiced the art of Qigong—which means “energy study” in Chinese—every day to keep my mind and body strong.
Qigong (pronounced chee-gung) has been practiced and developed by the Chinese people for more than 5,000 years. The exercises and meditations are designed to integrate the mind and body to stimulate the unimpeded flow of qi (pronounced chee), or bio-electricity, through meridians and channels in the body. The Chinese feel that this vital energy permeates the universe and can be controlled in the human body through various means such as meditation, herbal medicines, diet, and acupuncture. When this qi flows properly, good health is maintained.
Bio-electricity? No one has ever proved that it flows throughout the body. But the brain operates by a combination of electrical and chemical means, as does the heart. Why not the entire body?
Acupuncture—inserting needles at various points to stimulate this bio-electric flow—has been shown to work. Chinese doctors have used it successfully to treat patients for many diseases. They’ve even used it in the place of anesthesia during major operations.
Many Western experts scoff at the notion of regulating this energy flowing throughout the human body. They feel that acupuncture, for example, works because of the power of suggestion: the Chinese expect it to work, so it does. But Asian veterinarians use it as anesthesia before operating on pets. Those Chinese sure have gullible dogs!
Other experts say that the existence of qi can’t be proven under laboratory conditions, hence it doesn’t exist. But what about the force known as gravity? No one denies its existence, yet no one ever has seen gravity or captured it in a test tube or beaker. But we measure its effects every time we walk across the lawn without being sucked up into the atmosphere, weightless.
When it comes to this energy known as qi, experience is the best teacher—you have to feel it operate in your own body. You have to see the puzzled looks on the doctors’ faces when your immune system and you should be as dead as the Hittites, yet the both of you are doing okay.
If it could be talked about, everyone would’ve told his brother.
But never mind qi. Look at the benefits from a Western point-of-view: the deep abdominal breathing calms the body and mind, provides more oxygen to the blood and better pumps the lymphatic system—a vital component of the immune system. Stretching and slow Qigong exercises are exercises one can do when, because of cancer/chemo fatigue, lifting weights or jogging is impossible.
People from the East exercise from the inside out, coordinating the mind, body, and breathing. They feel that a strong body starts with the torso, as most people eventually will die from organ malfunction, not from a problem with the arms or legs.
People from the West exercise from the outside in, using the mind and breathing in a rudimentary way, if at all. You get bigger muscles, but they don’t help much fighting disease. I never even thought about my internal organs and bodily processes. Facing my third bout with cancer, it was time I did.
THERE ARE DOCTORS….
Cancer, again, for the third time. Five years earlier Stage Four lymphoma cancer had appeared in my right hip and pelvis; six months of intensive chemotherapy eliminated it. Eighteen months later it relapsed in my left hip. Several months of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant at Beth Israel hospital in Boston eradicated it. A year or so later a tumor materialized in my right shoulder.
This relapse took my doctor, my family, and me by surprise. While normal chemotherapy treatments are like heavy artillery used to bombard the cancer, the chemotherapy used during the bone-marrow transplant I’d undergone was the equivalent of an atomic bomb.
Why should the cancer return if it had been eliminated by this nuclear blast? Why should it appear in my shoulder, instead of my hip/pelvic area, the original site of the disease? What is the sound of one hand clapping? No answers exist to these questions.
But the cancer had reappeared, in the early stages disguising itself as a sports injury of sorts. One day, after cutting some small trees from the pond’s edge behind our home, I felt a twinge in my right shoulder. The consensus was that the ache came from some type of tissue injury, perhaps a torn rotator cuff.
As the weeks passed, the pain intensified until I couldn’t lift my right arm. It felt as though a hive of angry wasps had been disturbed in my shoulder, repeatedly jabbing their stingers into the bone, pumping poison into my marrow. I gulped Tylox painkillers around the clock to take the edge off.
An MRI test detected a tumor, and a needle biopsy proved it to be malignant. Dr. N., my oncologist, was at a bit of a loss. People who relapse after undergoing a bone marrow transplant usually do not respond to additional chemotherapy.
Why? Apparently it’s survival of the fittest; the cancer cells that reappear are the ones most resistant to the treatment. They lurk somewhere in the body, dormant, a time bomb waiting for a fuse to be lit. One day the trigger’s pulled, they awaken and multiply with alacrity. The chemo drugs may have no effect, because these cells have developed a sort of immunity.
Dr. N. recommended another bone marrow transplant. She feared that the normal CHOP chemotherapy, already used earlier to fight my original cancer, would be ineffective. She called Beth Israel hospital in Boston to see if the oncologists would take me into their program for another transplant.
The Boston doctors refused even to interview me. They didn’t think another transplant would be successful, as the first procedure failed to cure the cancer. Apparently, there was nothing they could do for me. But I’d been told that before, at the time of the first transplant….
“…I don’t think there’s much we can do for you,” the radiologist from Boston had said, shaking his head and staring at the MRI picture of my left hip and pelvis. He had entered the diagnosis room a minute earlier, holding the MRI in his hand and staring at the floor as he slowly crossed the room to sit in the chair opposite me.
“But I don’t understand—they said I would be a good candidate for the transplant to work…” I stammered. It was the day before my first bone marrow transplant in Boston, and up until that point I’d been encouraged by both doctors and nurses.
“Maybe radiation after the chemotherapy could help—but there’s no guarantee. Of course it would have to be administered here in Boston….”
“You think that would do it?” I muttered, trying to collect my composure. “But why radiation here in Boston? My doctors in Hartford all were trained in Boston….”
“We’d have to watch your blood counts carefully and even then....” His voice trailed off, he sighed, got up from his chair, limply shook my hand and exited the room. Amazing: he hadn’t made eye contact with me the entire time.
That radiologist was like the doctors who recite statistics to patients: “As you can see on this multi-colored computer-generated bar graph, patients with your grade and stage of cancer have a life expectancy of three to six months” (apparently the attractively printed chart is meant to soften the blow).
For many patients, this news becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They