Navigating Western Medicine

I watched the lovely, short French film “Traces” last night, about a man who was a logger the old-fashioned way. He used a horse to pull logs out of the woods.

The film was poetry, his work a prayer. He was 75, the last of a long line of loggers. He knew when he was gone that the family tradition would not continue. 

In the woods while he worked was a young girl with a sketch pad. She was smitten with the forest, these deep ancient Alpine woods with tall, cascading waterfalls and timeworn rock formations. She visited often, studying, watching, believing that the woods had something to teach her. 

She discovered the logger at some point and began sketching him.

One day, as the man and his horse Nina were dragging a log home, the log slipped, the man slipped, the log landed on the man’s leg. He went to the ground and lay there, trapped. The little girl happened upon him and freed him. Still, he was badly hurt. The next scene is of the little girl, now being the logger.

I assume the man died. I assume he died as he lived, maybe even looking up at the trees that had given him life. This echoes a longing of my own soul: If only we could die, as we live, in our own way.

----------------

Twice in the last year, I’ve been admitted to the hospital for blood transfusions for the chronic leukemia I've had for 11 years. 

I believe in these emergency treatments. I am grateful for them and for the people who administer them. The treatments are not invasive. The benefits much outweigh any harm.

Anything beyond this, aka longterm treatment,  and the reverse is true: The harm could outweigh the benefits. 

To my body.

But also to my soul. 

Some day, the transfusions may backfire, as, I'm told, my body will reject them. At that point, doctors say I will have no options, not from their perspective. 

The only recourse will be to start — or to have already started — longterm drugs. These are not typical cancer drugs. They are not curative, only stop-gap. They don't increase longevity. They kill the bad stuff, but in the process set off other imbalances. Unlike chemo, these drugs I would stay on for the rest of my life, with serious long-term side effects, some of which have yet to be fully determined. 

There are two ways I believe modern medicine is good -- in emergencies and for diagnostics. 

Beyond that, when we are talking about curing disease, modern Western medicine is less effective, as it looks at killing off without addressing root causes, as it works at keeping the organism alive at whatever cost to the organism's overall wellbeing.

The doctors fight me on this when we talk about it. 

But not the nurses. 

The people in the trenches, the nurses in the room with me, the women in the lab who draw my blood, the people who are not as attached to the research, but who listen to us struggle with the side effects of harsh medicines, understand this.

I am part Native American. 

Cherokee blood runs through my veins. I resonate with trees, not with strong medicines that will churn my body into chaos, causing it to kill off aberrant cells, but also wreaking havoc, confusing my body, changing the course of my natural river, destroying my body’s ecology, damming up one area, causing other imbalances and unnatural changes in another.

I have often said I wish I could just hold onto a tree and turn into compost when the time came.

I tell this to doctors -- God bless them, by the way, for the good they believe they are doing. 

And while I am freed by the thought, they are horrified.

There are many times when I am scared, when I think “Maybe the time has come for drugs.” 

I believe that's because drugs is all the system has got.

What if there were to come a time when I was scared, and the next step on the path would be to ask me what I want, what is good with my soul? What if meds were only an option, only part of the discussion with the loving, trusted  doctor?  What if doctors realized that what they think is best may not be what I think is best? What if they fully respected that even though I may not have the science understanding, I have the self-understanding? What if wisdom stories about beautiful, and inevitable, endings were part of the approach to illness? 

I would not be truthful if I didn’t say I get conflicted by this, too. 

I get caught up in this, too, the “I want to live, give me the drugs.” 

But what if this other, more full-rounded approach was the system we found ourselves meeting when we faced illness? What if the system met the individual where the individual is? What if our bodies relaxed, knowing we were being cared for the way our instincts were calling for us to be cared for? And we healed? 

Instead, this is how it goes: On Wednesday, leaving the hospital, I was told that the fatigue I am feeling is what I will always feel, that I will never feel tip-top again. “Is this how you want to live? Does this make your life worth living?” 

The doctor asked me these questions and in the next breath, began to push on me to take the drugs.