Zen like me

I panicked when the table on which I lay slid inside the narrow steel tube of the MRI and the blasts of sound began reverberating as if I were surrounded by jackhammers and dentist's drills, interspersed with random loud raps, like the worst knock-knock joke ever.

"Get me out of here," I screamed silently. But I knew that would just prolong the inevitable, so I tried to get through it by focusing on the most calming subject I could: kitties and how cute they are. I reflected on my boys Yogi and Boo Boo and wondered if they'd ever develop a talent like Nora, the piano-playing cat, who has her own line of merchandise. I thought of the surprised kitty and the ones that flush the toilet over and over and over.

And it worked. I calmed down enough to make it through the 50-minute MRI of my breasts back in July. At the time, the test was portrayed as likely to rule out the possibility of cancer and the need for a surgical biopsy. Instead, two days later, Dr. C called to say that the pathologist thought my little lump was "highly suspicious of an invasive malignancy" and she recommended that I have surgery right away. The very next day, my dad died.

Today I returned for another MRI, this time to see if cancer has spread to my brain.

This time when the panic gripped my chest and clenched my throat, I thought of Thich Nhat Hanh saying, "Breathing in, I see myself as a flower. Breathing out, I feel fresh." I synced my inhalations and exhalations to the memory of that melodious voice I'd heard a dozen years ago at Berkeley Community Theatre as I sat among hundreds of meditators manifesting calm.

See, cancer has already made me a deeper, more spiritual person.

I think this proves that I should get to skip right past the next four months of chemo, just like skipping a grade in school, since I've already learned An Important Life Lesson.

In case I can't get the teachers, er, doctors to agree that my newfound moral superiority should win me a Get Out of Chemo Jail Free card, I also had a one-on-one orientation on side effects by one of the nurses.

I won't dwell on every single gruesome possibiilty. The basic overview is that chemo kills all fast-dividing cells. That includes cancer cells (the only ones you really want to die), hair cells (hence that Kojak look), mucous membrane cells (hence food tastes crappy and you can get mouth sores), gut cells (hence the dread nausea). The drugs also wipe out your white blood cells, which ward off infection (so you're much more vulnerable to getting sick), red blood cells, which provide oxygen to your blood (without it, you feel extra tired and sometimes light-headed and short of breath) and platelets, which control clotting (say hello to spontaneous nose bleeds). The toxic "cocktails" can sap the strength out of your heart and bones.

And finally, they can cause neoropathy, numbness and tingling in your fingers and toes, which sometimes doesn't ever go away. Since I depend on my flying fingers to earn my living (er, and my brain, and we didn't even touch on the phenomenon called "chemo brain"), somehow that one worried me the most.

"Do people ever end up unable to type?" I asked, waving my fingers in a lame approximation of air keyboarding.

"Yes, that can happen," the nurse said evenly.

Look, I promise to stay more spiritually evolved. I'll even give up all the cute kitties on YouTube and spend my online time watching edifying TED videos and clicking on buttons that donate to charity. Just let me spring right ahead to radiation therapy.