Healing and Reeling

How do you care for yourself when the world is falling apart?

As I write this, American soldiers and innocent civilians are dying in the Middle East. Again. I’m horrified by the developments and don’t know what to do with my anger and grief about what has happened to my country and the world.

And I’m getting ready to leave on vacation. Which is just so—bizarre. Guilt-inducing. Navigating the horrors of these times has never been more difficult. How do we live our lives when there is so much evil and madness around us?

But I’ve learned the hard way, life just goes on. While terrible things are happening to others—headlines that rip out your heart—people are still having babies. Losing jobs. Getting married. Getting sick. Taking care of the deeply personal has to happen even when the world is spinning off its axis.

Last summer, my husband and I began our own personal journey. After a high PSA test, he was eventually diagnosed with prostate cancer. Now, this is where I leap to assure you that he’s going to be fine!!! He is! It was caught early and hadn’t spread, but he still needed treatment. There are lots of prostate cancers, caught at his age, which only require monitoring but his had inched over the line where some treatment was required. We joke that he only has “cancer-lite,” because his treatment has been so minor compared to what others go through.

Still, it has been a journey, one that has taken so long! In July you get a blood test, wait a few weeks for a specialist, then wait a few more weeks for another blood test, then wait a few more weeks for an ultrasound (that was the scary one because the results were pretty dire: “high probability of clinically significant cancer”), then wait a few weeks for a biopsy (which showed it hadn’t spread and gave us the Gleason scores that assured us it wasn’t aggressive), then wait a few weeks for a treatment plan and then wait a few weeks to begin that treatment. And suddenly it’s March.

He had 5 weeks of external beam radiation, which ended about 10 days ago. Other than fatigue, there were few nasty side effects, and now he gets to rest up before one more minor procedure in a few weeks, brachytherapy. Then, he’ll be done. Cancer all gone! We know how lucky we are. (And men – get your PSA checked! Even once you get to an age where your doctor might not automatically schedule it.)

So we planned a few days in the desert in Scottsdale to rest and recover, soak up the sun, visit our son and his best friend Niko (you can find him on IG - @nikothecattlecorg).

My husband needs this, we need this, yet all I can think of are the bombs falling on the other side of the world. And once you have a health crisis, you think of people being stranded, unable to get home, or bombed out of their homes, and you know that some of these people are missing medication or doctor appointments or cancer treatments. I never used to think of things like that. But now, I do.

How do we navigate this world, I ask again? When you concentrate on the personal, you can’t help but feel guilty for not paying more attention to the world and those suffering. Yet when you do pay more attention to the suffering it makes it that much harder to heal yourself or stay positive, when positivity is very important to your health, physical and mental.

I have no answers. Except for right now, we’re going to the desert and we’re going to try hard to shut out the horrors for a few days, anyway.

And on that positive note—

Ha. There are so few positive notes these days.

Anyway, I’m bringing books! I won’t read them all this week but books are like shoes. You can’t have too many!

And I recently started watching this series on Apple TV and it’s great! So I might watch that on the plane.

When we return, it’ll be less than 3 months before the launch of THE WINDSOR AFFAIR (available for preorder now) so apologies in advance; there will be self-promotion. But I’ll try to keep it entertaining!

Meanwhile, take care of your health, get all your checkups and preventative procedures, and try to find your own place in the sun.

Melanie