After a brief vacation, I am now back, refreshed and ready to write for you again! On a separate, but related note: my audio recording system hasn’t been working. I’m hoping to get back on track with the backlog of read-alongs once I can solve the issue!
The memorial to David Patterson, a merchant who was lost at sea at only 27 years old is one of my favorite cenotaphs (empty tombs) at my work. The beautiful marble engraving shows a caterpillar on a leaf engulfed in flame, rising above and transforming into a butterfly. Although utilized by many cultures, in the Christian canon the flame represents eternal life in heaven and the miracle of resurrection. The caterpillar/butterfly represents the triumph and levity of the soul over the weight of the physical body, and thus symbolizes death, but as a rebirth into something new: a metamorphosis.
The implication of the flame has always fascinated me. Of course, as I mentioned before, in Christianity the eternal flame of the soul is not a concrete interpretation of pain, but only the suggestion of it. Does it hurt to change irrevocably? To melt down into goo and then re-form unrecognizable – a beautiful, mysterious, and violent natural phenomenon. Does it happen instantaneously or do we linger in the primordial soup, formless and powerless? Do we always change into something beautiful, or sometimes do we turn into monsters?
On this substack I write a lot about cancer-treatment and chronic illness, but I haven’t spoken much on diagnosis and the time between receiving the fateful call and the beginning of treatment. From experience, I can say this lingering in the soupy-purgatory is an uncomfortably long process and very painful indeed.
I had been waiting 5 days for the results of my biopsy to come back. I was sitting alone on the couch when I saw the number of the hospital pop up on my phone. I briefly thought about calling my family in to the room, but then considered I was being dramatic. Up until this point everyone had assured me it was going to be fine, the mass was benign. So alone in my living room I picked up the phone and started my descent into that formless, powerless pile of goo.
There are endless words to describe the chaos and calamity that ensues in the direct aftermath of a cancer diagnosis, but a word I keep coming back to in my recollections is “unsafe”. I had never felt so unsafe in my entire life.
My body had suddenly betrayed me in a clandestine murder plot. I sat in the blood draw chair as my nurse described to me the radioactive injection I was receiving to scan my bones, or the rancid, cloudy “water” I had to chug to illuminate my internal organs, or watching my heart beat in my chest on ultrasound in a quiet, dark room, as the realization of the fragility of my life sunk deeper and deeper into my stomach.
As someone who had never had a serious medical event in their life, these routine procedures assaulted me and my iron grip on the autonomy of my body, as my clearly overwhelmed and under-compensated nurse, anxiously scribbled “Medicine Averse” and “Uncooperative” on my chart.
But the most unsafe I felt was in my own mind. This has always something I’ve kept very close to my chest, but I guess I’m coming out with it now. For as long as I can remember, I’ve struggled with debilitating contamination OCD that manifests in a crippling phobia of getting sick, specifically vomiting, but really all forms of sickness.
The pandemic a year earlier had pushed me to the teetering edge of psychosis. Daily panic attacks, not able to leave my house, the development of an eating disorder because I was too terrified to eat anything. This condition enflamed the days of my early diagnosis in 2021, as I dropped weight rapidly unable to eat, or take my medicine, for fear of having nausea.
Tears are coming to my eyes writing this because I had truly convinced myself my life was not worth saving. That cancer treatment was too scary to suffer through. My body was trying to kill me in more ways than one.
I am lucky that my oncologist and my family grasped the seriousness of my mental state, as they are probably the only reason I am still here today, I was assigned an onco-psychologist who I met with twice a week (sometimes more) and a social worker who I met with once a week (sometimes more). This intensive therapy lasted for my first 9 months of diagnosis, as they broke me down and built me back up with a deeper understanding of my mental illness, my physical illness, the medicines I was receiving, and coping mechanisms for my anxiety.
It’s because of this therapy, and these medicines that I am who I am today: a much stabler, more grateful, and happier person. Because of my brain chemistry, I’ll never be 100% neurotypical, but I feel for the first time in my life that I have a confident hold on my condition and how it manifests.
For the longest time I told myself that a better life wasn’t possible, that change was so terrifying it wasn’t worth the risk to leave the house, or try the food, or make new friends. I’m trying my hardest to be a better person in the aftermath of the fear that turned me into a husk of a human.
Maybe I’m still in that formless goo phase, but I feel like for the first time I’m feeling the metamorphosis happen, and I can see who I want to be past the flame and it’s a butterfly, not Kafka’s “monstrous vermin”.