June 2011: Mickeral Lawing

 A Warrior's Story: The Journey of a Lifetime

When you treat a disease, first treat the mind

From the Philosophy and Discipline of Chen Jen

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles...

by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it. ~ Mark Twain

Life is a shipwreck but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats. ~ Voltaire

Prologue:

Recently, while the Princess and I were visiting a relative, I was asked about my activities during the year.  As I hesitated in giving a response, the Princess began listing some of the things that I had been involved with since we had last visited.  her list did not include everything, but it surprised me to look back at all the activities that I had been able to participate in over the year.  The relative had received a copy of a newspaper that contained an article about me from someone that lived in my community and commented that he did not realize that I had faced all the things during this cancer journey that was stated in the article.

My fourteenth year of survivorship is well underway - it promises to have new adventures, opportunities, and without a doubt it will contain some obstacles as well.  While I seldom spend a lot of time recounting the past, perhaps some of the songs that have been sung in the lifeboats will be encouragement for others as they sing and row away from their own shipwrecks.

It is indeed an honor to have an opportunity to share a portion of my journey on the Kidney Cancer Warriors' site:  I am truly impressed with the "family feel" of this blog, of the commitment to "pay it forward" and the acts of "sharing because we care" that is proclaimed and practices in such a wonderful way.  I commend Leigh & Allen and all those involved in bringing their dedication and desire to reach out to those affected by Kidney Cancer in this blog and in all the related social sites that the KCW's are impacting.  Whether by accident or by an intentional visit to these sites, a person who pauses only briefly or who stays for awhile can receive inspiration, hope, encouragement, and strength; no matter what their life situation in life.

In case you have not "met me" previously in some of my rambling tales under the pseudonym of "Mickeral" or in some items that appear in various places from time to time under "Mike (B.) Lawing," please allow me to introduce myself, and bear with me as I share a portion of my Journey.

At the time when most of my high-school classmates are beginning to retie and to lament that they are bored with nothing to do and tend to sit or stand around and talk of "the good-old days," I find myself actively involved with so many projects that I do not have the time to wistfully daydream of the things that were - I am too involved with the things that are now; and I am excited by the prospects of things that will be.  Please understand that I see nothing wrong in a person looking back at the past, or even thinking of days gone by a great deal of the time if that is what they wish to do; it is just something I don't do a lot of.

My wife (The Princess) and I live in Western North Caroline, USA midway between Charlotte and Asheville.  I grew up in the country in which we reside; and I absolutely could not wait till I was old enough to leave it - never to return except to visit my parents and perhaps a few relatives. My basic philosophy of life was that it was a total shipwreck and that nothing good was in store for me.  If I sang at all in the lifeboats the tunes would be similar to "Nobody likes me: Everybody Hates me, Going down the garden eatin' worms." My songs and philosophy were much distorted and out of focus; for in reality, I was loved by my family and was a "dear little boy" to the neighbors and acquaintances in Small-town NC in the 1950's and early 60's.  Still, if anything bad was going to happen, it would happen to me - I was convinced of that.

As a child, I was given a present one year for Christmas by an elderly woman (everyone called her "Granny") who thought of me at that "dear little boy."  I was excited at first since the painstakingly-wrapped package appeared to be large enough for a cap pistol or something neat; - much to my dismay, the gift turned out to be a little Bible, complete with a zippered black leather cover with a gold cross hanging from the zipper.  To make matters worse, the Bible had a name imprinted on gold on the cover - Granny had special ordered this Bible just for me from a distant bookseller.  In her effort to give me a perfect gift she attempted to have my name "Michael (which I hated) Lawing" inscribed on the cover - as a final blow to what little pride and self-esteem I had, her attempted spelling of my name yielded the word "Mickeral."  With much shame and embarrassment, I had to carry that Bible to church for a number of years.

The shame and embarrassment of the "Mickeral Bible" was an internal struggle for me; one of many which dotted my young life.  Those struggles shaped my thinking and emotions into a self-limiting concept of usually expecting to fail and discounting the talents and abilities that I possessed.  Miraculously, I wound up in a lifeboat instead of sinking in the shipwreck of life; perhaps I sang defeated songs, but at least I was in the lifeboat.  At this point it is appropriate to point out that the "lifeboat" that I wound up in is fashioned with a lot of the tenets of the Christian Faith.  I have included some of those for they are a part of my journey; elements of faith empowered me to allow a transformation of my attitude and my outlook of life to take place - had that not happened, I firmly believe I would have succumbed to cancer long ago.

One day I realized that the fruits and products of negative, "stinking thinking" were producing rotten results - the glimpses of opportunity and possibilities that had sometimes presented themselves to me were soon overwhelmed by the "failure syndrome" that had been so firmly entrenched in my mind.  The realization that I had to overcome those negative patterns became so real and imperative that I started immediately to dismantle the thought process that had dominated my thinking for years.  Soon after I began that process of dismantling, I found the "Mickeral Bible" and picked it up for the first time in a long while.  There on one of the first pages of the Bible that had been such a source of consternation for me was a verse of scripture in Granny's scrawled hand that she stated was her prayer for my life: "Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that need the not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth."  The verse from II Timothy 3 (KJV) was something that I had not been doing (or even attempting to do) most of the time since Granny had painstakingly written that dedication to me some eighteen years earlier.  Any statement that has truth in it can be divided correctly or incorrectly - it was a revelation to me that truth divided incorrectly lacked power and strength - while it indeed may be a rainy day - an improper division dwells on gloom and despair, while a correctly divided observation of a rainy day sees life-giving rain, the refreshing to a parched earth, the growth that will come, and many other positive aspects of a rainy day.

Some 24 years prior to being diagnosed with kidney cancer, a key component to my survival began:  I unknowingly began a practice of Chen Jen: When you treat a disease, first treat the mind.  While I later discovered that Chen Jen is a Buddhist or Taoist term which is translated to mean various things including True Person, my "treatment" of the mind was accomplished by learning and accepting truths that were contained (and long ignored) in the Mickeral Bible.  Not long after reading in Proverbs 23 For as he [a man] thinketh in his heart, so is he.  I ran across a book by James Allen As A Man Thinketh that deepened my realization that my thoughts in the midst of a crises or in any situation could help to determine the outcome.  I did not become a "religious fanatic," thumping everyone with Bible Verses; but I internalized the powerful forces of positive thinking from the Gospels as well as other sources reinforcing the revelation that while so many things were literally beyond my control, my thoughts were largely controllable by me.

What came as a revelation to me proved to be a revolutionary event in the lives of others as well.  Over the next decade I had the opportunity to develop and implement a "behavior modification program" that met with some measure of success in a local state prison unit.  I also wrote and narrated a radio series entitled "The Next Sixty Seconds can Change Your Life" for a friend of mine who owned a local radio station.  My involvement in those projects deepened my understanding of how much our thought process affects so many factors in our lives.

Life may be a shipwreck as Voltaire observed - but Mark Twain's edict to "Drag your thoughts away from your troubles..." puts us in a position to "sing in the lifeboats," to gather our wits about us and decide to stay put or to head for the nearest outpost of civilization.

How many of us have been faced with the following choice?  Do I remain where I am and hope for the best, that rescue will come to me: or do I head for a place of refuge?  Our choices may be limited,, or they may be many; they may involve a few (or a lot of) unknowns.  The voyage may be clearly defined or it may be vague with the prospect of treacherous elements.  No matter what our situation - if we learn to develop and strengthen our Chen Jen - our True Person - we are more able to deal with the shipwrecks; we are more able to drag ourselves away from focusing on the trouble we are in and to focus on finding solutions.  If we spend our time looking at the problem, contemplating the shipwreck and the loss we have suffered, it is impossibly difficult to row away to a safe harbor or to figure out an action plan as we await rescue.

In the journey of survivorship, there have been many ingredients that have allowed to me to reach the point that I now occupy.  I am listing a few of many, and I am not necessarily listing them in the order of importance that they have been to me.  Each of us in a survivorship mode has to prioritize our own list of ingredients.  For me, my medical team, my wife and family, my friends, God's mercy and grace, opportunities to be an advocate, and the years of throwing out the negative thoughts and replacing them with thoughts to build up the True Person have been invaluable in coping with the challenges and adversities of a diagnosis of cancer and the life that follows.

Mark Twain and his stories of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn captured my imagination as a boy.  Somehow I missed the great nuggets of wisdom that he frequently dispensed such as his quote "Drag your thoughts away from your troubles..." that appears at the beginning of this story.  How can a person possibly drag their thoughts away from the diagnosis of cancer; of the uncertainties that lie beyond that shipwreck - how can one manage to do what Twain suggests?  After all, despite the constant developments and evolving "best practices" in cancer diagnosis and treatment, there are those who will not survive.

Kidney Cancer, particularly in the United States has benefited from many innovative therapies receiving approval and coming into widespread usage.  As the "learning curve" increases with these medicines, even more survivors should enjoy longer survival times and a better quality of life.  Twain once gleefully remarked to an audience not long after an article about his untimely death appeared in a newspaper that "The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated."  It may be appropriate at this point to add a statement by Dr. Norman Cousins:  "Don't deny the diagnosis, Try to defy the outcome."

When a diagnosis of cancer comes, the thoughts that immediately follow that diagnosis often focus on an outcome of death.  Certainly cancer is a killer; but to surrender after the diagnosis, to accept the rumor as true without defiance denies the ability of the individual to fully muster their mechanisms of defense.  I remember the diagnosis very well.  Days of intense pain such as I had never experienced before.  A trip to the emergency room for what we presumed was kidney stones (which I had never had before); a phone call that something had been found; scrambling to go to another doctor; a trip to a hospital on a cold rainy Friday in November; tests, waiting, more tests, waiting in a crowded waiting room; and a doctor kneeling beside the Princess and I giving us preliminary test results that instantaneously changed our lives forever.  Words familiar and unfamiliar blurred together.  Huge mass, carcinoma of the kidney, encapsulated, nephrectomy - suddenly these phrases that attempted to convey a serious condition became unintelligible as my brain turned to mush in its inability to grasp the finer points of the conversation.  I had interpreted enough to understand that I was in a situation that was beyond I had ever experienced; that the safe and secure ship of life in which I had been riding had struck a reef that had ripping gaping holes in its sides and had begun to sink.  It was time for the lifeboats.

Despite the crowded condition of the hospital that late Friday afternoon before Thanksgiving 1997, the doctor found a bed for me in the corner of the emergency room.  Privacy curtains were drawn around the bed as if the woven cotton panels could shield the rest of the world from my diagnosis.  We were waiting to have more tests as if the doctors were waiting on a second opinion of their evaluation.  It was almost if they did not want to admit to themselves the size and severity of the mass and the situation I was in.  The Princess, ever by my side, sat stunned, her world crumbling and devastated as much as mine, enduring a pain and discomfort far different from mine but every bit as intense, held my hand tenderly and smiled at me.  Words came from both of our lips offering comfort, hope, resolve, and love; but the words blurred into the grayness of the rainy cold afternoon.

As I lay on that gurney, in a very unfamiliar place, my True Person began to assert itself.  It was as if it took control of the situation, and it began to put things into a perspective far beyond the events of the afternoon.  I turned to the Princess and spoke from the heart, telling her of the love that I had for her, and then I changed the subject.  I spoke of the recent diagnosis.  Basically, I said that I was glad that this had happened to me instead of to a person that did not have Faith in God or the ability to look at the situation in a positive light.  (In my mind, I had accepted the diagnosis as true; I had kidney cancer, a huge tumor completely enveloping my right kidney, and it would have to be removed.  I also knew at the time that there was great risk, that while it was severe and extensive that there could be even more problems that had not been detected.  I knew that there was a possibility that I would not survive the surgery or have a long life afterwards.  Those were things that I no longer had to wrestle with.)  My acceptance of those facts did not mean that I had "given in" or "given up" to the cancer, it meant that I could devote my energies and actions to the challenges that lay beyond the events that would play out in the next week as tests, consultations, a Thanksgiving get-together, and surgery the day after Thanksgiving would take place.

I had already moved past the diagnosis on that hospital gurney to the events that would happen after surgery.  My Chen Jen had placed me in the lifeboat; we were rowing away from the shipwreck of a cancer diagnosis to an island of great beauty and peace called Survivorship.  And, as I rowed, I sang songs of victory and hope.  A week later, on another Friday, on another gurney, I was being wheeled down a long corridor to the operating room.  As the orderly pushed me toward an unknown outcome, a warming sensation seemed to cover me with a great peace; I knew that whatever the results of the surgery that "everything would be okay."  In that instant I realized that whether I lived or died in that operating room, I would be alright.  Perhaps I didn't sing out loud in my lifeboat (really a hospital gurney), but my Chen Jen was in full song.

that feeling of "alright" has remained with me throughout the ensuing years of this journey; it has rarely been subdued by test results, side effects, or the setbacks that we have encountered along the way.  As an example, almost three years after my initial surgery, I felt a swelling on the side of my neck which turned out to be a lymph node that was removed and had a concentration of cancer cells inside.  The results were discussed and an appointment was made with my urologist for a few days later.  On our way home from receiving the results from our surgeon, my wife commented that if we had to have a lymph node removed every year in order to survive, we could do that.  Both of us laughed about that comment, for it was I that would be having the surgeries.  At the time we knew very little about renal cell carcinoma; for we had found sparse information on the subject.  My urologist was fairly knowledgeable of the disease from the standpoint of a practitioner in a small community, and he had committed earlier to refer me to a specialist if we ever had metastatic spread.  It was time to point the lifeboat in a different direction; toward a specialist who was a surgeon, an oncologist, and an immunologist who dealt with kidney cancer and melanoma patients almost exclusively.

That was in October 2000.  In June 2001, we would find another lymph node that contained metastatic disease; this one deep in the abdominal cavity in a location not easily "resectable" - which is doctorspeak for a tough operation with risks which may have unexpected outcomes.  That enlarged lymph node is now back to normal size, presumably cancer-free or with cancer cells which are no longer viable or thriving.  The journey from the June 2001 scan results to the present has been a challenging one - with numerous changes in directions, setbacks, and successes.  In that decade, I have been blessed by being with a medical team that has been on the cutting edge of the treatment and follow-up of kidney cancer.  I have been able to drag my thoughts away from my personal battle with kidney cancer to use those insights and the knowledge gained from my medical team and powerful organizations such as Kidney Cancer Association to assist others in their journey.

I have not found any hard and fast answers to pass along to anyone dealing with kidney or any other cancer; for what has occurred in my situation in only "anecdotal," meaning that it may not work for anyone else.

With that disclaimer, I encourage each individual to learn to communicate with their Chen Jen.  I would encourage survivors and caregivers as well as others who are involved in this cancer journey to adopt some version of the "Serenity Prayer," for while that prayer is often associated with Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous, it is a powerful affirmation that can strengthen and encourage everyone who utters those words.  I say that it can, for the person who says that prayer has to act on it as well as to say it.

I will at this point that while I believe in miracles, I cannot point my lifeboat toward them.  Miracles, whether personal, medical, or Divine "happen" as opposed to being "conjured up" by some certain action.  A medical "breakthrough" that is indeed miraculous comes quite often as the result of tireless research.  If a "miracle discovery" occurs when a researcher makes a mistake in a process they are following, would that "discovery" have happened if the researcher were sleeping on a coach in the break room instead of doing research?  I cannot begin to list all the things that have occurred to me in this journey that can correctly be termed as miraculous; but I am deeply appreciative of each of them.

my time with you is rapidly drawing to a close.  Perhaps I did not include enough details of medical events in this story to satisfy you, or perhaps I included too much.  I have attempted to balance the medical with the mental; the scientific with the soul and spirit; and the diagnosis with the dealing of it.

No matter where you are in your journey of life - whether you are in perfect health or afflicted with a condition that is advanced and serious - I would offer my encouragement to you to communicate with yourself, as well as your circle of family and friends.  I would encourage you to allow yourself the great pleasure to sing, to laugh, to find joy and sunshine in spite of whatever adverse situations you may be facing.

I would like to leave you with a thought by Orison Swett Marden which captures the essence of what I have been fortunate enough to do for fourteen years.  It is something that I plan on continuing to do; If you have not been practicing this completely me dear friend, I invite you to join me.

There is only one thing for us to do, and that is to do our level best right where we are every day of our lives; To use our best judgment, and then to trust the rest to that Power which holds the forces of the universe in His hands.

Thank you for allowing me to share these thoughts with you.

Warmest Wishes - Best of Success

Mickeral - Mike Lawing

(See PDF for Mickeral's entire story with photos)


A Warrior's Story: the journey of a lifetime -