Category Archives: A Son’s View

Cameron talks about Inge, his mother, and the Camino.

The Verdict: Cancer. Again.

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A few days ago, Mom must have been having thoughts of mortality again, because she arranged for me to have power of attorney over some funds she has in an account in Germany “in case anything happens to me”.  She also mailed me her “UBC [USB] stick”, which has her notes on her life story, illness, and, not least, recipes.

Today she Facebooked this:

Dr. just called with Pathology report. Yes. It was cancer but he’ll send it off to Mayo clinic as he disagrees with pathologist [who erred in one of his key premises, that Mom’s lung cancer was her “primary” cancer, when her primary is the one from ten years ago:  ovarian]. It was “clean” without any others in there.

And she sent me a message from there too:

Just got report and it’s what I knew. Will now start the ‘Gerson method’ for sure. Need a different juicer. Mine’s crushing and not expelling the juice.– Will you start checking on flight cost? Where are we starting? French side? It’s the prettiest. :-)

In other words, she’s as determined as ever.  So here’s where things stand:

1.  We expect a report on the actual kind of cancer, and type of cells, from the Mayo Clinic within several days’ time.

2.  She’s throwing herself into the Gerson Method.  We’re looking into juicers that actually facilitate the whole point of juicing – at costs of around $1000 on eBay, but stay tuned to see who – we humble deserving sorts or the faceless eBay masses — wins the next auction (I’ll even take bets on who wins the betting).  Pricey, but we think it’s worth it.  Penny-wise, pound-foolish – and Mom’s pounds, so to speak, make up some very precious cargo!

3.  Mom is now clear that she wants to spend six weeks in Europe, walking as much of the Camino as she’s able, and then – and this thrilled me to hear it, Alp-lover that I am – reward herself with a few days in some Alpine spa, a la the old-fashioned “rest cures” popularized in Nobelist Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.*

4.  I’m researching online and asking Don Julio, our Man on the Ground, what city to fly into, where to begin, what to bring, what it should weigh (a critical consideration), and so on.  As I do that, I’ll build our Resources page . . .

 

* Except that, if I recall correctly, Mann’s hero, Hans Castorp, a symbol of [pre-WWI Germany? European bourgeois society?] was sort of in love with being sick and dying. Though he visited the Swiss sanatorium of the title (based on the famous Waldsanatorium in Davos, Switzerland) only to see his tubercular cousin, his health got mysteriously worse and worse, so that he spent seven years there before being called up for World War I and, presumably, his end.  Mom is the anti-Hans.

On the Coincidence of Spaniards Met in Brussels en Route to Israel

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Back in May, my good friend (and partner at Charles River Recruiting) Adam Weiss and I traveled to Israel.  A problem with fuel in Tel Aviv, by various machinations no one could adequately explain, left us stranded in Brussels.  “Neat,” Adam said.  “And second prize is two days in Brussels.”  But Brussels has its charms, especially the Grand Place (French for “the Grand Place”), not to mention that while we were there we met an irrepressible Spaniard named Julio, who was also stranded en route to Israel, and who accompanied us on our second day of drinking in the sunny, French-accented Grand Place.

That night, we were back on our flight, and just after midnight we all said goodbye in the Tel Aviv Airport.  Julie stayed on in Tel Aviv, and Adam and I took a taxi to Jerusalem.  We toured the great old city for a few days, took a train to Haifa, then a bus to the mystical hilltop village of Tzfat.  And it was there, about five days after we’d arrived in Israel, that we ran into . . . Julio.

Now, at this time, I had no knowledge of the Camino de Santiago.  “Santiago,” I have learned, means St. (Santo) James (Diego, which is how the ancient Hebrew Ya’akov ended up being rendered in Spanish).  My acquaintance with the term “camino” was limited to the following:  (1) my mother’s 1972 2-door El Camino (2) my 1992 study of Spanish for an aborted trip to Patagonia – “camino” means “way” or “path” and is frequently used as English speakers use “road” or “street”, and (3) the Gipsy Kings’ dreamy, meditative “Caminando por la Calle”, or Walking in (or down) the street, which, interestingly, turns the camino or “path” into the gerund for “walking” itself – caminando (and, probably so as to avoid the repetition of “caminando por el camino”, substitutes calle for street).  It deserves your listening to’t:

So anyway, who does Julio turn out to be?

* a Spaniard

* who lives near the Camino de Santiago, in Bilbao, home of the world-famous Guggenheim Museum,

* and is the most experienced walker I have ever met.  In fact, he was in Israel precisely to walk from north to south, a distance of several hundred miles. He does these long walks several times a year.

And now he is not only offering advice on the Camino, he is walking parts of it himself, right now.  What are the odds?

Here is his latest:

Hi Cameron,

I´m still in bilbao, we suppose to move to Pyrenees already but problems last minute … always women problems … we´ll probably start next week.

Suggestions : In my opinion the most beautiful part is the begining , means one side of the mountain Saint Jean Pied de Port (France Basque country ) o Roncesvalles ( other side of the mountain , spanish basque side ) from here you walk to Pamplona , now huge fiesta going on – San Fermín – Bull fighters on the road , and many people injured because they are extremely ” brave pepople “.

From Pamplona to Logroño still nice, we are talking about Rioja´s heart.

After Logroño, temperatures in summer are a little bit like Death Valley, you must start every day really early otherwise , you risk of ” melt ” , dry part of Spain… from Logroño you could get bus to Burgos, beautiful cathedral, place to sleep pilgrims fifty yards from cathedral, you could get bus again to Leon , less than two hours, again another beautiful cathedral; the way out from Leon is disgusting, pick up the bus again and depending of how you feel , you could get near Santiago or few kilometers away.

Information concerning buses can be provided all around places where pilgrims spend nights, some people get the bus to Sarria, only 100 kms away from Santiago and that way you could get your ” title ” … you deserve the diploma , and only waiting a funny queue at
the Pilgrims Office in Santiago, you will be very proud of it.

How to decide, It depends how exhausted you are after walking under the sun.

In my case after this delay, we suppose to star walking next week, i dont feel confortable if i depends on other people decisions…  thisis going to be an ” special case ”

Well, let me know what you decide and make sure if i am around we´ll share a couple of San Miguel´s ( one of the most popular spanish beers “)

In the meantime, keep fit.

Hasta pronto,
julio

“It wasn’t a minimally-invasive procedure after all”

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Mom called me today, having just gotten out of the hospital.  My first reaction to her voice was concern:  she sounded . . . sad.  Or emotional.  Turned out she was, in fact, in “a lot of pain.”  One of the first things she said was that the procedure “wasn’t minimally invasive, I can tell you that.”

“I don’t know why I thought it was going to be a simpler procedure,” she said, in that slightly higher, sleepier tone.  “But I guess I’m glad I didn’t know what it was going to be.”

“You probably would have just worried more, to no effect,” I agreed.

“I just wanted you to know I’m going to be out of commission for a while.  Julie” – a close friend of Mom’s who is around my age – “is here and she’s helping me.  I have to go now, though.  I need to lie down and just rest.  The pain is really terrible.”

“Okay,” I said.  “I’ll talk to you later.  I love you.  And have someone read you my blog article!”

She said she would.  And off she went, probably to sleep.

Musings of The Son as the Mother Lies in Hospital

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An attitude of gratitude. That’s what I am trying to cultivate today. Generally speaking, I 2010-10-13 14.38.10am nothing but annoyed – an attitude of ingratitude, I might point out – by nifty-sounding phrases like “attitude of gratitude”. But the rhyme clothes an important and skillful way of being, one often overlooked by people who wonder, as a result, why they’re not happy. More on that later . . . For now, I am simply cultivating these positive, grateful, appreciative thoughts that, by definition, crowd negative thoughts off the stage:

I’m grateful that Mom came out of the surgery without incident. (As I write this, I still haven’t heard from her personally, so she’s probably still woozy; I know what I know from Monica, one of the members of the Montrose Deutscher Posse).

and

She’s such an inspiration to so many people.

There’s no one with an attitude of gratitude like a cancer survivor. We ignore at our peril the elixir of life with which they emerge from their hero’s journey, telling us, in so many words: This matters. That does not.Guess what “this” and “that” are.

A Cancer Survivor (yes, first caps) is what Mom is, about ten years strong. But cancer is something that’s never entirely gone from a survivor’s life. For a decade now, she’s lived with the tests and the doubt and, more happily, the new and healthy ways of thinking and eating.

In fact, it’s ways of thinking and eating that work that are among our interests here, in this blog.

She had cancer in three places a year ago: pelvis, stomach, lung. (It is the measure of the power of a son’s denial that I cannot call up these locations with any confidence). She put herself on a gourmet cancer-killing diet (and if that sounds like an oxymoron, then my mother has a new definition of ”gourmet” for you), lost over fifty pounds, saw one cancer spot disappear, another get smaller, and the third stay the same. We cheered her success.

Over half a year later, it appeared that one of the spots might be getting bigger – it was hard to tell. Cancer tests, especially after one has had cancer and the resulting floaties – a technical term – remain in the blood, are notoriously unreliable. She was disappointed, bowed, but unbroken. And she still had no desire to put toxic chemicals in her body ever again.

So one spot was operated on today, in a pretty routine procedure. “It’s not the surgery I’m worried about,” she told me on the phone this morning, “it’s what they tell me afterward.”

Camino versus Chemo

I’m hoping they will tell her she can do the Camino. That’s the Camino de Santiago, a thousand-year-old path that stretches from western France across northern Spain, and that’s the Way she wants to travel this September, in lieu of the dread chemotherapy. The Camino, or Way, is said to lead to the bones of St. James, apostle of Jesus, who, like other friends and family of Jesus, is claimed to have left Israel and made his way into European lands more convenient to Catholic churches. In any event, the legend is a minor detail; neither of us is religious.  Mom, after an upbringing that prominently featured violent Catholic nuns, hasn’t any Catholicity left in her.  So it’s not a religious journey. But it is one in which people can, and do, find their own meaning, and I’ve read that it quite often becomes a spiritual journey, as anything does when we do it mindfully.

I know the last thing in the world she wants to hear is that she needs chemotherapy. I’m hearing of more and more people who have endured the horrors of chemo and who refuse ever to do it again – the horror! I hear Kurtz saying, in “Apocalypse Now,” a movie about the Vietnam war that prominently features chemicals that kill. The horror!

Over the last year, whenever Mom has tried to talk about chemotherapy, she’s begun to cry. It’s one of the freshest ten-year-old wounds you’ll ever see.  “I can’t do it again,” she says. “I just can’t.” So she has turned the power of that emotion into the passion with which she exercises and disciplines herself to a super-healthy, natural diet in a world of fake food and other gustatory gimcrackery.

The Purpose of the Camino

About two months ago she got the idea of the Camino from a documentary, and that idea burgeoned into her new purpose. (Researchers into all manner of illness, and even longevity, will assure you that it’s a sense of purpose that separates the happy from the less so, and the healthy or long-lived from the sick and early-dying.)

So she bought herself some hiking shoes and began to “train” for her pilgrimage through Spain on the trails around Colorado’s Black Canyon – at nearly 7800 feet high, that’s more than enough altitude for the 5000-foot Pyrenees.

“Instead of doing chemo,” she reported thinking a few weeks ago, while she hiked near the Canyon, “I’m walking the Camino.” Now you know why this site is called what it is, or at least the limits of my imagination.

What will the doctors tell her after the biopsy on the removed mass? Will they say “Chemo”?

And if they do, will Mom respond, with a shake of her head, “Camino!”?