Today’s Qi Gong class was canceled, but I had my first meditation session. I wanted to sign up for an ongoing weekly meditation class, and they require that you have an individual meditation session first before joining the class. The instructor (let’s call him James) took me into his office. At first we talked about my history and why I was there. It’s interesting what you choose to reveal about yourself when you have to sum it up in a couple of minutes. I told him that I was a doctor, that I had been treated for Stage IV lymphoma, and that since treatment was finished I was finding it hard to adjust to my “new normal” because I liked my “old normal.”
Author of I Signed As The Doctor
Committed, by Elizabeth Gilbert
On the Stairmaster today, I finished Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, the sequel to the mega-bestseller Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. In EPL (which will be a movie with Julia Roberts), the author describes the one-year voyage she took after a bitter divorce in which she went to Italy and partook of the pleasures of the body (“eat”), to Indonesia to partake of the pleasures of the soul (“pray”), and to Bali to experience both (“love”). At the end of EPL, she fell in love with Felipe, an Australian citizen born in Brazil who lived in Bali. They plan to live together, traveling between Brazil, America, and wherever else the spirit moves them, in unwedded bliss forever after.
Time Stands Still; and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Today I went to a play called “Time Stands Still” by Donald Margulies, which is in previews at the Friedman Theater. The story is about a couple named James and Sarah, a journalist and photojournalist, respectively, who return to their apartment in New York after covering war-torn Afghanistan. The play is about the challenges of returning to “real life” after being at war, about what covering war does to family relationships, and about the impact of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on individuals, families, and friends. The acting was wonderful, with Laura Linney, Brian d’Arcy James, Eric Bogosian, and Alicia Silverstone. The writing was also wonderful, as to be expected from the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who wrote Dinner With Friends.
The Happiness Project
It’s been a great week at Barnes & Noble! Tonight I saw Gretchen Rubin, who wrote a recently published book called The Happiness Project. I saw the book in the bookstore on January 2 (the day after New Year’s) and made a beeline for it– the turquoise blue color on the cover leaps at you from across the room. And who can resist the subtitle– “Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun?”
Anticancer
Last night I went to another reading and book signing at Barnes & Noble featuring David Servan-Schreiber MD PhD, who wrote the book, Anticancer: A New Way of Life. In the book, the author describes his personal experience as a doctor and cancer survivor. He was a working neuroscientist in his early 30s, studying functional MRI of the brain, which was at that time a new technology for determining which parts of the brain are activated while performing certain tasks. One night, he and his research partners were doing brain scans on students who had agreed to be subjects, and one of the students didn’t show up– so he went into the scanner instead. After a few preliminary pictures, his colleagues stopped the scanner and told him there was something in his brain. That’s how he found out he had a brain tumor.
Love, Loss, & What I Wore; Carver; and Qi Gong
I saw the play “Love, Loss, and What I Wore” on Sunday. It’s adapted from a beautiful little book written and illustrated by a woman named Ilene Beckerman, who tells the story of her life in the context of the clothes she or others wore at specific times. There’s a rotating cast of five members, all dressed in black, who play different characters. It was the first time I saw Carol Kane live, after admiring her on TV and in films from Taxi (where she played Simka to Andy Kaufman’s Latka) to Annie Hall (where she played Alison Portchnik, married to Alvie Singer– played by Woody Allen). She hasn’t aged a bit.
The New Year
It’s been two and a half years since I went into remission from Stage IV lymphoma. Since that time, I wrote a book about my experience as a cancer doctor and a cancer patient called I Signed as the Doctor. I’ve started to give seminars and to maintain a website for individuals with cancer, their loved ones, and their caregivers. I’m still working at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), now three days a week, running a program for women doctors and scientists as well as doing clinical work, research, and teaching in breast imaging. This weekend marks the beginning of a new year and a new decade (2010). It’s a good time to answer the question I posed at the end of my book: what’s next?
An opportunity to get new hats
One of my suggestions for coping with cancer is, “Find silver linings. Don’t look at this as losing your hair, but as an opportunity to get new hats!” Early in the course of treatment, I went on-line with my daughter and found the website of a milliner named Christine A. Moore who makes fabulous hats. We went to her Manhattan studio, where I proceeded to buy 15 beautiful hats to prepare for losing my hair.