Yoga

A friend of mine suggested that I consider taking a yoga class. He was talking about Senior Chair Yoga, which is offered at a local wellness center. The class is constructed specifically to work with older adults, usually age 65+ or physically impaired in some way. I maintain a membership at our local YMCA, but I haven’t darkened their doors since my diagnosis. I haven’t felt up to walking the indoor track or hitting the workout machines. So I thought, why not try this alternative facility and Senior Chair Yoga.

The yoga movements are tailored for older individuals so the focus is on balance, stretching, and movement. The chair comes in for sitting postures and to use for stability when standing, if it is needed. I’ve only done two sessions so far and found them to be both uplifting and satisfyingly tiring. A couple of surgeries and a couple of accidents over the years have left me with some physical limitations. Add to those a good deal of osteoarthritis in my spine, and it’s easy to understand why a regular yoga class would be out of the question. Senior Chair Yoga is a good alternative.

As with most yoga practice, a good deal of attention is paid to breathing: inhaling during certain movements, exhaling during others. The class setting is calm, the group of 15-20 friendly and, most important, non-judgmental. Each person follows the leader’s movements to the extent of his or her ability. No pain, no strain. A bonus is that I can sign up and attend one session at a time, which allows me to fit it into my schedule.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I’m taking Sutent, which produces several side effects, one of which is tiredness. Starting the yoga class during the last week of daily meds before a break probably wasn’t the wisest timing. My energy, thankfully, has remained fairly high during this cycle but, still, each of the yoga classes took more out of me than I anticipated. And yet, in each instance I found the mindfulness of yoga practice calming as well as energizing. It is not too much of a stretch to think of yoga as a physical form of meditation.

I’m not sure these initial two sessions have been a fair trial. But they have been enough to convince me that I want to stick with the class, at least for a while.

“Mindfulness helps you go home to the present. And every time you go there and recognize a condition of happiness that you have, happiness comes,” according to Thich Nhat Hanh, the well-known Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk and author of The Miracle of Mindfulness and many other books on spiritual matters. Yoga practice is centered on one’s body and mindfulness when it comes to breathing and moving, and so it remains a way of focusing beyond everyday thoughts. I find that in itself is therapeutic.

Poetry

For the past 20 years, most spent as a professional in education publishing, I have been deeply immersed in writing and editing, both as profession and avocation. During my early career as a teacher and later a curriculum administrator, I also wrote, publishing my first professional journal article at age 24 and my first book at 34. However, my relationship with poetry has been less constant.

During the 1970s I wrote poems fairly often and even had a few published. But over the next couple of decades I largely abandoned poetry in the press of career, family, and other writing. Consequently, I returned to crafting a poem with some regularity only after I “retired” in 2006. I use quotation marks because I haven’t fully retired yet. I still write, edit, consult, and occasionally do graphic design work. Nowadays I write poetry simply for myself, with no thought to publish, though I will share a poem with family and friends.

I like Robert Frost’s definition: “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and thought has found words.” Mary Oliver calls poetry “an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.” For me, writing a poem is both meditative and stimulating. Like so many things that make writing powerfully therapeutic, crafting a poem offers an opportunity to take one’s interior voice and put it on paper to examine it and to work with it.

When I don’t feel motivated to write a longer poem, I often turn to haiku, which originated in Japan. In its English manifestation it is a three-line poem, loosely constructed with 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively in the three lines. (For an example of mine, see the previous post.) Typically a haiku offers an impression, usually involving nature. Haiku that have been translated, of course, often don’t follow the 5-7-5 scheme in the new language. Here’s an example by Basho, a 17th century Japanese master who gave haiku new popularity at that time:

Old pond…

A frog leaps in

Water’s sound

Distilling an impression—considering all the sensations of a moment—and setting it down in a mere 17 syllables provide a surprisingly satisfying but altogether gentle challenge. For me, it is a way to get out of myself, to focus outward on the world before me.

Stress

Psychosocial factors in cancer development, progression, and treatment have been little studied, although there is some evidence of benefits from having strong social support and lowering stress, particularly chronic stress. Of course, there’s positive stress as well as negative stress.

Positive stress may mean being busy doing things one likes to do, which argues for maintaining business as usual if that’s an affirming routine. I like writing and editing, even when it means there are deadlines to be met. I enjoy interacting with consulting clients, other writers and editors, and publishers. I don’t feel stressed doing what I like to do.

Negative stress, worry, depression, and social isolation are another matter. With any chronic illness, there is danger of falling into a pattern of negative stress: worrying about the illness, withdrawing from family and friends, and allowing negative self-talk to dominate one’s internal voice. I have found two (among several) activities are frontline stress reducers for me. One is walking; the other is meditation.

Even very short walks are refreshing because they allow me to focus beyond myself, beyond the walls and windows of my home. The other day I was feeling especially tired, which is one side effect of my cancer medication. Nonetheless, I pulled out one of my Alpine sticks (a cane with a pointed metal end, made for hiking), drove to some woods I like near a small lake, and slowly climbed a hillside path, knowing that at the crest there is a bench where I could sit. It was a slow climb, and I felt like a very old man making my way up the hill, aided by my walking stick.

But it was worth the effort. Sitting alone on the bench among the trees, I savored the gentle breeze, the whispering leaves, bird songs, the noisy geese on the lake below, and sounds of small creatures skittering among last fall’s leftover leaves. I took the picture above, sitting on that bench, and then took a moment to compose a haiku, jotting it into my smartphone. Later, I shared both with my friends on Facebook. Here’s the haiku:

Birds twitter spring songs

Geese laugh on the lake below

I sit, listen, breathe

Meditation is another way I find to relax. I don’t attach any religious or even, necessarily, spiritual connotation to meditation. I simply find the practice of conscious breathing and focused thinking to be deeply relaxing. I prefer guided meditation to self-directed efforts. There’s an excellent resource to be had at Fragrant Heart (fragrantheart.com).

Stress reduction improves my quality of life at any time. I find it to be especially important as I deal with cancer treatment.

Statistics

“There are lies, damned lies, and statistics!” Mark Twain popularized the saying, which he attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, perhaps the most illustrious of England’s Victorian Era prime ministers. It’s an admonition that should be taken to heart when looking at cancer statistics, particularly survivability statistics.

Cancer stages typically run from 1 to 4, which can be summed up as: 1 (Bad), 2(Worse), 3 (Worst), and 4 (Oh hell no). My first brush with renal cancer was Bad; this one is Oh hell no. The five-year observed survival rate a year ago was 8 percent for the Oh hell no category, which sounds ominous. But here’s where the scourge of statistics raises its ugly head.

The 8 percent figure is from the National Cancer Data Base. It doesn’t take into account folks who, because renal cancer tends to affect older individuals, died of causes other than the cancer. Consequently, the percentage of people actually surviving cancer is likely to be higher.

UCLA uses an “integrated staging system” that looks at low- and high-risk groups within stages. For Oh hell no folks, five-year survival was noted as 8 percent only for the high-risk group, while the low-risk group had a five-year survival rate of 41 percent. That’s an enormous range. And there are so many variables that arriving at an actual number—a statistic—involves considerable guess work.

This alone should give anyone pause to question whether statistics is a reasonable lens to view one’s own experience—or likely future experience with the disease. Statistics sound scary until one looks beyond the numbers.

Add in another factor: time. Five-year survival statistics rely on cases of individuals who were diagnosed and began treatment (or didn’t) five years ago. Cancer research is a rapidly advancing field, and the manner of diagnosis, treatment protocols, and drugs available today, in many cases, weren’t the same five years ago or even two years ago. Survivability is increasing, even for dire diagnoses.

Finally, factor in the individual. Everyone responds differently to diseases and their treatment. Statistics are based on averages, not individuals.

I’ve worked to stop scaring myself with statistics. Every time the meteorologist says, “There’s a 50 percent chance of rain,” I remind myself that the flip side is, there’s also a 50 percent chance we won’t get rain.

I survived my first brush with renal cancer by 17 years; the other, earlier cancer by 22 years. I have been a cancer survivor far longer than I have ever been a cancer patient. So what I tell myself is this: Forget statistics. No one is ever merely a statistic.

Living With...

I chose the title “Living With…” for this blog because I think it’s important to affirm the idea of living with cancer, not dying from cancer. From the moment we’re born, we are dying. That’s a fundamental aspect of life itself. And people tend to die from something. Few keep going until their bodies simply wear out and stop. So why focus on death?

If I were omniscient, I might sit in my favorite coffee shop and notice the people around me. The college boy hunched over his computer will succumb in a few hours from a fatal drug overdose. The woman giggling over scones with her teenage daughter will be the victim of a head-on car crash in a couple of weeks. The older man sipping a latte and reading a novel is a month away from the sudden heart attack that will claim his life.

But none of us is omniscient. That’s the point. And until science can pinpoint future death with some certainty, which can’t usually be done until days or hours before the event in the case of any disease, then there’s no point focusing on dying. A person living with cancer may have an increased probability that the cancer will prove fatal at some point, but I or anyone else in that situation could just as easily be hit by a bus long before the disease proved fatal. Life is uncertain.

Each of us, I remind myself, should be focused on living each day to whatever constitutes its fullest. Living with a cancer diagnosis quickens that realization. Focusing on death, whether one is ill or not, is unproductive and life-diminishing. Recently I ran across a 1993 novel by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. He came to prominence in the early 1960s as the voice of a new generation of poets. He was among my late wife’s favorite poets. I picked up the book as much for its title as anything else. It’s called Don’t Die Before You’re Dead. That’s sound advice.

I look around and see many people whose life conditions are more dire than my own. I have cancer. So I’m dealing with it and the issues that come with treatment and side effects and all that. I’m living with it.

Since childhood I’ve claimed an old Sanskrit proverb as guidance. It goes this way: Yesterday is but a dream and tomorrow is only a vision. But today well-lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope.

I’m endeavoring to make every day well-lived.