Even with health insurance, however, her entire financial cushion disappeared during her illness and recovery. Alice turned down a recommended bone marrow transplant because insurance wouldn't cover it, and she would have had to sell her house to pay for it. "If I had to give up everything I owned, it wasn't worth living," Alice says. Following chemotherapy and a modified radical mastectomy, she endured radiation treatments, then more chemotherapy this time with taxol, which resulted in the permanent pain in her feet. She's now on a lifelong course of the estrogen-blocking drug tamoxifen.
Alice, ironically, has long specialized in helping people cope with serious illness. "Intellectually, I know I shouldn't feel singled out," she says, but her emotions were not so amenable to reason. She was--sometimes still is--tormented by the question of why cancer has chosen her. After the initial diagnosis, she fled the oncologist's office, ready, she says, "to let the cancer take its course." As Alice reflects now, "Sometimes it's easier to think about dying than to consider the difficulty of continuing to live."
But continue to live she has. Retirement, now, is financially out of the question, so Alice has had to build an income-producing practice. She is far from bitter about the direction her life has taken. On the contrary, she smiles, "I've made lemons into lemonade." She has a sharpened sense of time, and in the past two years has experienced an explosion of productivity. She coauthored a memoir and handbook about living with cancer. Last fall, she waged a vigorous campaign for president of the American Psychological Association (she lost). She has established the Academy for Cancer Wellness in Tucson, a nonprofit organization devoted to recognizing the courage of cancer champions and their families, and to supporting research into living with cancer. And she's just had a public reading of a play she's co-written, Trees Don't Mourn the Autumn. "Every fall trees shed their leaves, and every spring they have a rebirth. That continual cycle of loss and renewal is what it's like to live with cancer,'' she explains. |
" Sometimes it's easier to think about dying than to consider the difficulty of continuing to live"
To detect a tumor that might emerge in her remaining breast, once a year Alice goes for a mammogram. At that time she also has a bone scan, since breast cancer often metastasizes into the skeleton. And every three months she has to go for a physical examination and blood work. "I'm not anxious about the checkups," she says. "It's the symptoms that get me." What she means are the false symptoms her hypersensitivity to every ache and pain. "It happened to me just last night," says Alice. "I had headache. I knew it had to be a brain tumor.'' A gas pain? Stomach cancer! A backache? Don't ask.
Alice knows that her cancer, which is in remission, could flare up at any time. She tries to practice what she preaches as her patients reminded her she must do, in cards and letters they sent after she first became ill. "I've always told my patients, and now I tell myself: Keep on plodding. It's a very relaxing mantra--keep on plodding, keep on plodding..."
And, if need be, she blows up an imaginary balloon. "I ask myself, 'Can I do something about what's worrying me?' If the answer's yes, then I do it. If the answer's no, I visualize a hot air balloon, put my worry in it, and let it go." Sometimes Alice's ceiling is dense with imaginary balloons.
And her desk is thick with projects. In the Chinese alphabet, Alice is fond of reflecting, the character for crisis consists of two parts: one for danger, one for opportunity. |
