“Mr. Alan, wahke up deahr, I need yu blood.”
It is three in the morning and Jeneka, my personal nurse who has held onto her native Jamaican dialect for two decades while working as a nurse in the States, had just drained me around midnight, but that is the way they keep you alive after a Bone Marrow Transplant here at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in NYC.
“Are all of you vampires or do you just like me?” I responded. Jeneka let out a hearty West Indian laugh. Then she sat on the side of my bed.
“I been werkin’ wit cansha patients foh goin’ on twenty yeahs now, ahnd I do declare dat yu gone ta’ make it sweetheahrt, yu is filled wit hope ahn dats’ what it takes. Yu be bahck up dere in Vermont teachin’ like a fool in no time.” We smiled at one another. She soothingly rubbed my left arm as she stood, gathered her samples, instruments and medical waste and went to leave the room.
“Now yu git a little sleep dahlin’,” she suggested as she silently left my Sterile Room. I touched my arm, still warm from her unstated compassion.
. . . . . . . . . .
As many of you may know I am now in my 14th month of my post-Bone Marrow Transplant, and except for numerous weird physical conditions brought on by the freight car loads of meds, toxic and otherwise, the specialists have pumped, pricked, and plunged into me in the past two years, I am on a very respectable trek to recovery. I have a certainty of hope that I will return to the classroom in the fall to play with many more young adult minds. Through forty years of college teaching I have bumbled and stumbled my way to the key of teaching. You teach what you need to learn. And what I have learned is that hope and perseverance will lead to whatever goal you set for yourself.
I would say that 50% of such a recovery is mental. I would also say that most of the legions of Doc’s, nurses, and techies I have met in one circumstance or another would agree. Anyone working directly with cancer patients for any length of time will tell you that the patient’s attitude has an enormous effect on whether they walk out the front door of the cancer hospital, or if they are carried out the back door, largely depends on the patient’s attitude and expectations. Even the most gifted oncology specialists will agree, but for years they have not known why this is the case. They had no way of quantifying one’s attitude, thus they were caught in their “Scientific Method,” with a mystery. Cancer professionals intuitively and anecdotally know attitude has a great deal to do with recovery and /or survival, but their methods of “knowing the truth” are solemnly wed to their belief in the Scientific Method.
Finally, finally, we have the technology to scientifically prove what many of us cancer survivors know. Let me explain, and I promise you that you will not be bored. And if you are bored with what I have to say, well, certain Aboriginal groups in the Australian outback have a saying, “Not all breathing people are alive.”
Let’s make this real for you. Think about where our world and nation are at this present moment in time. We are toxic, twisted, tangled, confused, confounded and scared. However, and let me shout out a huge however, that we also have hope. The election has given us all hope. We have, for the second time in my lifetime, a nation of hope, a community of hope. Granted, the dreams of the Boomers did not work out as planned in the 1960’s, but that does not diminish or isn’t even relevant to the present massive outpouring of hope that is evident, not just in the States, but throughout the world. And remember that the U.S. is a nation of hope. The U.S. has always been power-driven by communities of hope. It is a major element of our Cultural Ethos. This is the American Dream.
Now, let’s make this even more real and applicable for you by integrating these current events with my own personal story.
With my beloved wife Lynda off at work or on her Mac Book most of the time, my defense against my mind turning into over-cooked spinach, mid-western style, is to learn new things, spend time in self-reflection and meditation, and to constantly remind myself of the fact that nothing stays the same, nothing. Not the slightest of which are our own brains, bodies, feelings, emotions, interactions and what we perceive as being reality.
I have spent a huge amount of time during my “cancer era” studying the human brain. We all know our brains are literally incomprehensibly amazing and complex. However, you may not know that research in brain science is making giant steps in putting together some nearly unbelievable findings. The most exciting part is that these findings are so hard for us to imagine because we have been trapped in a paradigm of the brain as just another organ in the body. We now know that the brain is an integral part of the entire package, and that we, the user of that brain, have the power to control and even change our own brain in the way that it functions, produces emotions, and learns. Within the very recent past, experts have empirically proven a person’s ability to change the path and patterns of neural transmissions within one’s own brain. To me, this knowledge has unbounded potential. I am over the moon with hope and “irie vibes” as Jeneka might say, and you should be as well.
Think about it. Is your cup ½ empty or ½ full? Is the world a joyous and wondrous place, or is bickering, hatred, brutality, and war a given? Will you have a “good” life, or are you just another bio-carbon unit mucking around for a few decades only to decompose into a small pile of organic matter? You know what is even more exciting than the new First Family and our community of hope for a different way of living in this world? Given what science now knows about the brain, we have the power to construct the reality of the rest of our lives. We have the potential to be whatever we want to be and the scientific community, for the first time since empirical proof for seeking reality came into existence; the skeptical hard scientists believe it as well.
Over the past 2½ years, the 1,000’s of meds choked, poked and dripped into me sent me to wander around many playgrounds of reality. Hoping not to insult or marginalize my band of iridescent bright blue monkeys that sometime keep me company by running at top speed around the top of my room endlessly chattering away in one such reality, I have come to realize what indigenous peoples have based their cultural components on for tons of time, one irrefutable fact: the universe is not “out there.” Reality lies between your ears. However you want to live, whatever you want to do, is limited only by the “mental cage,” that culture fervently attempts to embed in our brain’s neural transmissions, through myths and rhetoric, and perpetuates through ethnocentric and myopic visions of the rest of the world. But this is a process that ignores what we now know to be true. The truth of how you will live, create, and be ~ in your life ~ is in your brain. What you do to construct your reality is totally up to you. Think about it. Think about the community of hope that is taking place. And most importantly, think about your role and where you want to be in the community.
Buddha, in the 6th Century, cast the idea as follows: “ Be a light unto yourself.” What I take from all of this is what my late father unendingly screeched at me, “Damnit’ boy, (my dad always called me boy), how many times you got ta’ get hit upside the head with a 2x4 before you get it?” Obviously, considering my 62 years on the planet, it took me a while.
