Tag: PET scan

TOUCHING GOD WITH MY HANDS

by Maasaisis

The result of my most recent PET scan did not give me the clarity I sought. It’s so easy for the mind to think it has things all figured out, running scenarios, making assumptions, seeking assurances that only ever show up wearing a different face. I wanted the result to say “significant reduction of disease” or “evidence of effectiveness of treatment” — something that would feel like confirmation, that I’m on the right track.

The right track to where, exactly?

“You should be happy that you are stable, this is good news,” says my doctor as he ran his pen to speed-read over my result. “You have no new spots, and the spot on your sternum seems a little better. Although the diminishment of disease is minuscule, we have to assume that the treatment is helping.”

Seems. Assume. I don’t like those words. Not solid enough where my life hinges.

“But what about the areas where it has enhanced slightly?” I asked.

“It’s not a lot,” he said. “PET scans can be ultra sensitive, even to a fault, affected by your lifestyle, what you’ve eaten, and metabolic shift on a daily basis.”

Then what can we make of any of this, if all it gives me is a weird grey zone? My mind circles around a child stomping her feet. So what does this mean? Is it working? Do I need the full dose? But… I’m leaving for Spain next month…

Thoughts that feel like a noose tightening around my neck.

On the outside, I’m looking healthy and strong. Even my doctor notices it. As I rest my arms behind my head, taking the weight of it — so full of heavy thoughts — my biceps flex and bulge, bare out of my sleeveless vest.

“Wow, look at you looking buff!” he says, trying to lighten the mood.

“Ya, I’ve been working out,” I reply. But the outside is the easy part. It’s the inside that persists.

My main oncologist was supposed to go over the results before proceeding with my 4th round of treatment. She was on holiday, and I felt slightly annoyed to be put on the back burner without her to consult. We’d hoped the scan after 3 rounds would give us something to work with. Instead I’m left squinting at ambiguous data, trying to find a foothold.

“Let’s just keep going with the current dose for 2 more rounds until I go on my trip. No point rocking the boat before I go,” I said. By now I know I have the power to shape my treatment plan. Every case is uncharted territory. No two bodies, no two paths, the same. To my doctor, stable is good enough. My glow and zest for life tells him what the scan cannot, and he knows I need this trip to keep the lamp of my spirit brightly lit.

And yet, the pain in my spine is becoming more noticeable. Is it more noticeable because I’m paying attention to it, or because it’s where the cancer is most active?

What happens next is my choice. I can sabotage it with thoughts that spiral and lead nowhere. Or I can exchange them for something that keeps me free.

Where is my peace? Not in the mind where there are land mines everywhere.

I must have been in my mid-twenties when the title A Course in Miracles first grabbed my attention. What enticed me then was my perception of what a miracle would be, some grand act of supernatural power that would give me what I wanted. The miracles I wanted at that time were nothing but ego boosters: recognition, world goals, jet-setting around the world as a wellness leader of some sort.

It wasn’t until the framework of my own making had to be examined, when my physical framework began to break down, that I finally began to understand what a miracle truly is. The book landed in my life at exactly the right time. It is saving my life by teaching me how to live no matter what is going on.

A Course in Miracles is not a religion. It is a retraining of the mind, teaching us who we really are as love created us. The Course comes with 365 lessons, one for each day of the year. On the hard days, I hang onto it like a lifeline. It has given me an antidote to every fear I could ever conjure, and the steps to help me solidify it. Some days I have to come back home every thirty minutes. That is the power of fear. But fear is no match for Truth.

The Course truly landed for me in 2022. On my birthday, January 7th, I wrote this in my journal, a line from the Course that felt like a direct message from God:

“You are perfectly safe as long as you are completely unconcerned about your readiness, but maintain a consistent trust in mine.”

My mind accepted it as Truth. I no longer felt I could trust my own way. I am made up of temptations and contradictions that will snatch my peace away. The judgements I hold and the identity I’ve constructed always want more, and are never satisfied, no matter how much I feel I’ve accomplished. I need help to walk my walk, so I’ve entrusted the way to the One who knows.

This forgetfulness is a cloud that would have me wandering aimlessly in its shadows until I remember that I am still shining bright, as I have, and as I always will be, forever unchanged. I do believe that our earthly experience is designed only for our awakening. We each gravitate towards a life and a path that will bring us home to our godly state when we are fully awake. To realise that the safety of our true home was always within reach.

There is no right path. Only that whatever way we take, we recognise that truth is truth and it is the same for everyone. There is never a sacrifice in reaching truth. The only things we sacrifice are the things we cling to that were never real to begin with. What we release is what was standing in the way of really living, the kind of life that doesn’t end.

I feel this in the tears that stream down my face, love’s guarantee that nothing can take away what I already am.

It is not God that sets our curriculum. It is our soul that chose to forget, so it can experience God through remembering. Why on earth did I choose to have this earthly experience? Perhaps in the ultimate power of creative expression given to me, I wanted to play God in the world of my own making. Who needs God when I can be my own God?

And the light of me that is always connected to my creator is nudging me, sometimes shaking me wildly, to wake up from this dream I am dreaming. And when I land home, even if only for an instant, my heart bursts into an expansiveness that is not of this world. I’ve landed in this space through connection, not just with others, but with nature that reflects the purity of my mind so beautifully.

These are the miracles I now speak of.

God reminds me that my only job is to love another as I am loved. When I feel my Creator’s love, I want to collapse into the immensity of that gentleness, that eternal patience, those arms always open for me to fumble into, with just the slightest willingness to reach for truth. This is the true meaning of forgiveness: to forgive the world, to forgive all outer appearances and actions, and to remember we are all just waiting to fall into the most perfect embrace of who we really are.

And because that love is so kind and generous and gentle, its way brings me peace. Difficult decisions become easy, because the fears that are amplified dissolve, knowing that ultimately none of the problems I think are an issue is really a problem. No matter what, my safety is guaranteed, and nothing in this world can offer me that. It is only the split mind that suffers. The return to wholeness is only one thought away.

In the modern world, there’s so much focus on self-care and building boundaries to keep us safe. What I love about the Course is that healing often comes through relationship.

I am in a beautiful position through my massage work. I am constantly reaching strangers through my touch, where my hands become an expression and an extension of my heart. If I am struggling, it is evident within the first moment of contact. Perhaps I’ve had a hard day. Perhaps there is a judgement. Perhaps my client said something that made me shut down. And in the time we have together, I return to my lesson for the day and remember that my only job is to love them as love meets every single one of us.

When I am there, I know it is accepted, because it is returned back to me. In those moments on the table, I reach for a meeting place in our minds. A place where I can say, without words: there you are. I see you. And in that timeless space of connection, we are both being nurtured by something far deeper than touch. We have landed in peace.

So I invite you: the next time you’re stuck in the storyline of discontent, go out into the world and extend your love to someone else. I’ve found it surprisingly easier than sitting with my raging mind. The act of getting up and giving to someone else, when I can barely give to myself, is how I paradoxically give to myself.

If we pray to be of service to others from a place of genuine care, integrity and authenticity, truly miraculous things can occur. Not just for them, not just for us, but for everybody. Because we are one.

Even if you are not physically with someone, place somebody in your mind who is struggling. And instead of trying to fix their problem at the earthly level, hold them with all of your mind to the perfection of who they really are, as love created them. Hold them in the light of their love, healed, untainted, pure, and whole.

Hold them there until you can really feel it.

This is how I touch God with my hands.

LESSON: I RECEIVE WHAT I GIVE

POLKA DOT ORANGE LIGHTS

by Maasaisis

“I’m happy about your results,” my oncologist says over the phone. She’s relaying the radiologist’s report from my recent PET scan. I’m surprised by the felt sense of release, even though I had convinced myself that this time I wouldn’t let it get to me. I wouldn’t let the anticipation of the result become an invisible weight I carried. But it was still there. The difference is, I’m stronger now, and I can carry it without letting it drag me down.

Still, my light-as-a-feather release moment was short-lived. My quick translation of what she said was, “I’m done, I’m cancer free! Whoopee! Finally!!” But then she proceeded with what I didn’t want to hear which meant: it ain’t over yet.

The Coles Notes version is that there are lumpy remnants of disease bound up in my scar tissue. There are still a few small nodules left over from the breakdown of the big tumour. I focused on the positive: it’s no longer in my other breast, sternum, liver, lymph nodes, or in the suspicious activity that showed up in my right lung several months ago.

“There is a new lesion in your spine at T4 that we are going to have to keep an eye on,” she continued. It’s a game of give and take, and what is left over is where I have to count my blessings. My mind quickly grasped for an explanation.

I had two terrible falls last year where my heels went over my head and I smashed hard onto my back. Both involved slipping and landing on solid slabs of wet rock. The first time, I broke my fall with my left arm, which fractured my humerus and left me with a frozen shoulder I’m still patiently thawing out.

The second time was a classic ass-over-teakettle slip down the stone steps to my garden. That time I remember lying there motionless, afraid to move, praying that I hadn’t broken my back.

“Could a fracture or major trauma in that area cause a higher glucose uptake in the scan?” I ask. I can hear the desperation in my voice and feel my heart squeezing around panic. “It could,” she replies, “but the formal report says that it is likely a metastasis.”

This is how it starts: fear finds a crack to get in. If I look away and let it in, it will take hold—and that is what metastasizes and spreads. That is what alters my experience from being free to becoming a prisoner. I know I have to nip it in the bud—not with denial, but by shifting my awareness to a greater Reality that will guarantee my safety.

This is the thing: the radiologist is commenting only on the supposition in cases like mine. The last PET scan was done over a year ago, when the orange glows of sugar uptake in my report were polka dotted in too many places. Assuming that cancer “spreads,” all the orange glows led to the presumption that it was all cancer — even though healing tissue also takes up sugar. This is my own disclaimer on these super sensitive machines that pick up everything. I was never completely sure that was the case, but I didn’t want to biopsy bones and organs, so I went along with it, hoping it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. It was most likely denial, but at the time, it was the only defense I had to keep going.

The radiologist comments on my scarring as a “surgical site,” which it is not. The scar tissue was not from a clean cut surgery. I wanted him to know what I endured—that I didn’t have the option for a quick and easy removal of my problem. It’s more like a mesh of healed tissue from a decomposition site. I find it mildly annoying that the guy writing this report has no idea what I’ve been through and writes without considering my falls as a possible explanation for the T4 light-up. I recognize my annoyance is guarding what I want to keep safe, so I let it go with my next out breath.

My oncologist is thorough and pulls up the last three PET scans, spanning two years, to compare them on her screen. “Maasa, you really should see the changes in the imaging. You can literally see those orange globes of light around your body dissipating with each scan. I think you would feel really encouraged if you could see what I see,” she says. I love this woman, especially because she wants me to just keep doing what I’m doing. And even though there is no real end to talk about in terms of treatment, I decide that this is good news—because really, it doesn’t change anything. I can keep living the way I am.

I had decided I wouldn’t live suspended on “what ifs.” There will be more tests, and the only constant is change in whatever direction life flows, so I’m training my mind to anchor to what is steady and forever. It’s ongoing daily work — practicing permanence in a world that only guarantees impermanence.

I was nervous when I signed up for a workout class that I used to do in my twenties. I’d been feeling the nudge to get strong, to push healthy oxygenated blood through my system for a house clean. To feel those endorphins combat the restrictions in my body, to be told what to do by a guy that inspires me.

Coach tells me not to ask questions and just do what he says. That is exactly what I need: just show up, do the work, and get on with it. I survived the first week of a strenuous, sweaty workout, which confirmed for me that so much of how I feel depends on the limits I place on myself. Sure, I have to modify here and there, but my body followed the state of my mind that chose not to let anything get in the way.

My monthly treatment in the chemo lounge was right after class on Friday. My veins were so pumped that, for the first time, the nurse couldn’t get an IV into me. It gave me a funny sense of satisfaction—even though it hurt to have her poke and prod until I finally relaxed and let her in.

It’s helping my mindset to know that the cocktail of two drugs for my targeted therapies does not damage my healthy cells. Instead of attacking fast-dividing cells like chemo, they target and block the receptors that fuel the cancer cells. The hope is that, without fuel to grow, those unruly cells will weaken. With me strengthening my own immune defense through everything I’m doing—mostly mindset, herbs, supplements, and exercise—they may eventually remember their true function and return to behaving like healthy cells.

My life can easily be defined by tests and the shifting statuses of this disease. What I’ve learned from the latest PET scan is that I’m still reaching for the finish line — and I don’t want to be in a race. My path is the one I’m on, and anticipating it to be any different will only cause me grief.

Tests come in three-month increments. Thankfully, the next one is an MRI, which I requested because I need a break from the radiation of these nuclear medicine machines. Rather than reaching for a different kind of life or pinning my hopes on a better scan result each time, I’m practicing being here now — finding perfection even in the nooks and crannies. To be an expression of the good stuff I want to share — and for the rest, I place the future in the hands of God.

LESSON 194 ACIM: I PLACE THE FUTURE IN THE HANDS OF GOD.