Today I offer my initial reflections on our navigating a major life change and embracing the complexity of emotions this entails. My journey through liminal space continues. The pace of our transitioning between continents is that of a snail. And for the time being, that still feels mostly okay, even as the days on the calendar whizz by, as they have been for many months, even years, now. Our...
Our bodies are amazing. When every part functions well, it’s easy to take them for granted. And perhaps not to take as good care of them as they deserve. It’s when something goes wrong, when I feel pain or get ill, that I am called to look at how I could do better to sustain this thing we call the temple of our soul. What happened to me last week is my upper back—somewhere in the right middle...
PET-CT scans, a fourth ophthalmologist… and still no firm diagnosis for my eye. The future is murky. Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability. William Osler This post is a brief update on what’s been going on in my little bubble since my medical oncologist expressed doubt about the my blurry vision being caused by metastasis of my breast cancer that was near stage 0. That...
I’ve never been one to do a year-end review or set resolutions for the New Year. And I won’t be doing so now, in these first days of 2023. Rather, I’ve long thought that each new day offers a new beginning. I declare my intentions, decide on my priorities, and take action accordingly. More a plodder than a planner by nature, I typically take steady baby-steps towards my chosen goals. If he give...
“Judging that your breast cancer was caught at an early stage – my index of suspicion is low.” That is what my oncologist wrote to me after the first ophthalmologist examined my left eye and told me I have early signs of cataracts, but also a raised area on my retina that “may” indicate the return of my breast cancer. In my eye! In just the last few weeks, my left eye developed a cloudiness...
When the Trickster throws me lemons, I can do better than make lemonade. A week ago, my operating system, Win10, seems to have decided I had worked it too hard and went on strike. Stopped functioning. Kaput. And didn’t want to repair, nohow. My honey spent days installing, wiping out, re-installing the system and all my programs. At least three times, it crashed again. Meanwhile, I had sporadic...
I don’t stop to think about death often. But when I do, as I did today, it triggers no anxiety in me. I’m not talking about the dying part of the process, the cause of death, the time—minutes or months—before the moment of death. That, we all know too well, can be gruesome. None of us wants to suffer in pain or die in an undignified manner. It’s the key reason I submitted my...
Life keeps me on my toes. For instance, I stay alert to observe instances of coincidence. And lately there’s a whole batch of them! Synchronicity is a concept the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung first introduced in 1932. His 1952 essay was titled Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. As he defined it, synchronicity is more than simple coincidence. Synchronicity is the coming together of...