Survivorship

I’ve been desperate for a book. Not any book, but the book, written for me and where I am now. So when another cancer survivor friend recommended Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales, I leapt at it. I bought it and also downloaded it on my Kindle so I could start reading right away. I also bought Gonzales’ other book, Surviving Survival: The Art and Science of Resilience. Because, like all of us, I want to be told who lives and dies and why and how exactly to survive surviving.

My friend is a scientist.

These books are not really what I was looking for. They are comprised of a series of tales about people who survived extreme conditions. You know, the two on the life raft who didn’t give in to thirst and drink seawater and lay there listening to sharks devour their two friends who went mad and jumped off the raft. The ones who get surprised by a snowstorm at 14,000 feet and yet manage to make a snow cave and survive. And on the other side, the rescue snowmobilers who for some reason ignore warnings not to drive up a mountain because of avalanche conditions and are buried in snow until spring. Why did some rafters put their boats in when the water was so high, and why did others hold back? (My question: Why would anyone put a raft in at any conditions to face Level 5 rapids??)

These stories are followed by an analysis of what was going on in their brain chemistry that allowed some to survive and others to make very bad decisions against their own better judgment.

Many of these survivors (including the author) put themselves into unnecessarily risky situations. I have a long history of calling these people (think of basically all the people written about by John Krakauer) idiots. It is clear to me that large parts of the earth are uninhabitable for humans, and so should be steered clear of and treated with supreme respect.

Think of the clear messaging of Werner Herzog: Don’t ever trust the grizzly. Or this, from Burden of Dreams, made while filming Fitzcarraldo in the Amazon jungle: “Taking a close look at what is around us, there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel.” 

From “Aguirre: Wrath of God” by Herzog. Another of his classics about the warring forces of man and nature.

What we have to fight the chaos of nature, per Gonzales, is this: our brains. Our ability to manage our impulses and also to be present mentally to find solutions even if they mean ignoring previous training.

What we have to fight the chaos of nature per The Truth about Cancer, are foods that take care of inflammation and free radicals. There are many sites and books like TTAC, and many speakers, too. TED talks. PBS specials. People are afraid of cancer and want to know what they can do to prevent it or, once they have it, to kill it without chemicals– often to beat a rather hopeless diagnosis they have been given. And so like pitting reason against emotion, these sites and speakers– many of whom have inspiring and stunning stories of their own survival– pit Western medicine against either Eastern medicine or an alternative theory of the body at the cellular level. They give people a road map to follow. I’m not saying they’re wrong. I’m just not at all helped by these answers. And though I’m conscious now of “cancer preventing” foods, I know that I was eating organic food, super foods, and food grown from my garden for six years, and in that time I got cancer, out of the blue, with no family history or obvious “causes.” I can say with confidence that my diet and my lifestyle helped me tremendously in the fight against the cancer, but it did not prevent it.

Of course, no one has the answer that can tell us who survives and why… or how to go on surviving once treatment is done.

The other day I was filling out our online forms for health insurance for 2017. I stopped at the question: “Does anyone on this application have a terminal illness?” Below it were the two graphics: a pink woman, like the figure found on a women’s restroom, with my name below it, and a blue man with Steve’s name beneath it. Do I click my box? I stared at it for five minutes, thinking about what a terminal illness is. In the end, I clicked “no.” When I told Steve he said: “We all have a terminal illness. It’s called mortality.”

I do wish Gonzales’s books had told the stories of more ordinary people and their survival. When I got the book Surviving Survival in the mail I went to the index and looked up “cancer,” and I found one story spanning three pages. It was a story as harrowing as any of the others in the book. Seriously, what some people suffer with cancer and treatment makes my nine months look like a cakewalk. The point of this story was that the woman looked forward to a bicycle trip in Turkey when she was finished her treatment. There was then an analysis of the benefit of travel for the survivor. Travel, it seems, stimulates our brain and nerves to make more pathways. Being in an unfamiliar environment stimulates growth in the brain. And we need that, particularly after chemotherapy has killed so many brain cells (it kills all the fast growing cells, not just skin, nails, and hair but also brain cells). I know lots of cancer survivors who take off afterward on a trip. It seems more about their bucket list than the need to rebuild their brains! In any event, it’s good to know it is therapeutic. I have several trips planned, though none of them to exotic, unfamiliar places. No biking across Turkey!

In the end, we write our own stories of survival. We live as long as we can, and then we die. Hopefully we’re not taken suddenly through violence or accident (stay out of the rapids and off the mountains, people). While we are here, we need to love one another and engage. We should do our best to be helpful. And eat well, enjoy food, and enjoy the natural world and each other. That is all I’ve got. Happy Holidays from me and Werner.

Quote from “Grizzly Man,” image from Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/chinquist123/timothy-treadwell/