The Magic Cancer Taught Me

At Samhain, in 2019, I learned I had colorectal cancer.

It wasn’t a surprise. It was a shock, but it wasn’t a surprise.

As part of my annual physical, I ran one of those in-home stool sample test kits that looks for hidden blood. The results came back positive a few weeks after Lughnasad. To take this back even farther, I’d been having premonitions of myself being sacrificed since Ostara. They weren’t fun to experience, and presaged some major re-evaluations of how I was following my path. That said, trying to be an optimistic Sag, I shrugged off my unease, chalked it up to something just not agreeing with me that week, and asked my primary care doctor to schedule a colonoscopy, which she did for mid-October, the earliest date available. And I tried, pretty successfully, not to worry. My spouse and I had recently moved, and I kept myself busy, in a space without air conditioning, bringing order out of the usual moving chaos. So, it wasn’t much of a surprise that I lost weight.

By Mabon, it really was noticeable that I was losing weight. Clothes I’d made within the past couple of years hung on me. New bras had to be replaced because they were too big. It was harvest season, for crying out loud, the time of year when you’re supposed to start putting on weight. Instead, it fell off me. Then the nightmares began.

My family background is mostly Celtic fringe, lots of Irish and Scots, a touch of Welsh thrown in, with a dash of good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon and who knows what else. The first tradition I studied included Celtic, Egyptian, and Greek pantheons in worship on a pretty regular rotation. So believe me when I tell you that seeing the Pooka and the headless horseman repeatedly in my dreams right after Mabon just made my blood run cold. I was in trouble, and I knew it. I prayed to Brigid and Mother Holle, my patronesses, meditated, practiced yogic breathing, burned candles, played my harp, worked on needle arts, and journaled my dreams. It wasn’t enough to mute the warnings, and they got scarier. Two weeks before the colonoscopy, a new image popped up: a black jackal, symbol of Anubis. Now, I have two black shepherds, and their ears stand upright. The first time I dreamed of the jackal staring at me, I woke up instantly, and checked on the dogs. Both were sound asleep on the floor. The jackal showed up again almost as soon as I fell back asleep, and I had a few more nights of this dream image. Every time, all the jackal did was look at me. It was as if I were lying on a table, with the jackal looking over me. On the day of the colonoscopy, I wasn’t surprised when the gastroenterologist said she took a sample of something unusual for analysis, and would refer me to the head of gastroenterology.

A few days later, after seeing this new specialist, I was scheduled for a biopsy the week before Samhain. After the biopsy, I went home and waited, as patiently as possible, for the results to come back. I was expecting a call, but due to some sort of communication snafu, what I got was an email, literally on October 31, stating that I was being scheduled to meet with the chief gastroenterologist who did the biopsy, a medical oncologist, and a radiation oncologist. That’s when the panic hit.

And then I turned absolutely numb.

I was 10 again, 13 again, 17 again, 46 again, 49 again, the deaths of father, grandmother, grandfather, mother, brother, all with malignant or aggressive tumors, echoing through my brain. I knew that I was walking the same shadowed path as they. The thing I’d feared all my life had come to me. There is a special terror that haunts those whom cancer bereaves, when the disease visits so many of your own kin, when you share those genetics. Now, four years later, at 62, I just helped mourn my youngest cousin, who died of adenocarcinoma of the lungs at only 47, diagnosed too late to do anything for her. It is a haunting reality. You wonder if the same weaknesses slumber in your DNA, and when you’re finally diagnosed, it is the loneliest feeling imaginable. You realize that you stand upon a knife’s edge. What you decide— the choices you make—determine, literally, if you will live or die. The sense of isolation can crush you. Believe me, you want to be numb. It is a mercy.

I don’t really remember the Samhain circle. I know the craft-sisters gathered over that weekend. I know we talked about my diagnosis, and about how I was coping with fleeting moments of pure terror that punctuated the numbness. I know that there were hugs, wine, tears. We discussed a journeying that I might make, that I did eventually make. I know that I asked that they not tell the one craft-sister who wasn’t there, because of the insane number of losses she had suffered the previous summer. I needed to tell her myself, once I had actually had the medical team meeting and knew for certain what I was facing.

After the medical team meeting took place, things moved fast: MRI, CT scans with and without contrast, extensive blood-work, mapping and tattooing the area to be subjected to radiation therapy, preparing food for freezer storage, and laying in assorted supplies such as masks, gloves, wipes, extra vitamins, recommended soaps. It all had to move fast, for it was a sizable tumor, 2 cm by 5 cm, and the very real fear was that it might have already metastasized. The tests came back with tumor type and stage. Lucky me, it hadn’t spread. The oncologists said the miraculous word: cure. These are men who do not toss that word around lightly. Still, they warned me that the road to that cure would be rough, intense. They didn’t lie. There was a port surgically implanted in my chest, with a tube running to a vein that feeds into my heart so I could wear a pump that would continuously push the chemotherapy cocktail for each of two five-day stretches. I played silly word games in my head with the names of that cocktail. Mitomycin became Might-Omycin, my new superhero coming to save the day! 5-FU inspired an outrageously, profanely hilarious rant on cancer patient rage. Oh yes, there is such a thing as cancer patient rage, along with the fear —no, terror — and despair. You want a dive into your shadow world? Get diagnosed with cancer. I promise you a journey into your own personal underworld like nothing any meditation or rite of passage can give you.

Between tests, I started doing specific meditations on Brigid as healer, leading up to a lengthy pathworking one night. The goal was to journey to Tir na mBan, the Island of Women, to meet with Brigid for the spiritual healing and strengthening I knew I needed to get through treatment. Whether you call it my subconscious, supraconscious, collective unconscious, Higher Self, or the will of the Gods, that journey took a different turn once my visualization arrived there. Olwen of the White Track instead led me beyond the cave-shrine, and up the Milky Way to a circle of stars. The image that came into my mind at that point terrified me: Arianrhod, seated on a throne like a comet, eyes like ice, a cat-claw smile that froze me, and yet I dared show no fear. The next set of images that came were of being armed with cap, shield, sword, spurs, of being told to collect my horse and make a journey further still. To collect the horse, I had to withstand the challenge of the headless horseman trying to trample me. Once mounted, the journey imagery shifted to a desert. In the doorway of a mastaba, Anubis waited, with the same remote stare as in my dreams. The sense of His voice was deep and still as He led me through the mastaba into a temple garden to a pool of lotuses, and Isis waiting, unveiled. What She told me was for me alone, and it did give me the strength to endure.

And oh, how I needed that gift of strength. The recommended treatment for my type of cancer is six weeks of radiation, bracketed at both ends by a week of chemotherapy overlapping with the radiation treatment. Supposedly, my chemo cocktail is usually well-tolerated. You could have fooled me. I was so impossibly sick, from the very first night I was hooked up, that I wasn’t sure I could endure it a full week. The pain of the chemo circulating in my body the first night was unimaginable. I actually felt it seeping into my bone marrow, and I’m still not certain how I kept from screaming. I remember waking up wailing from it. Then the nausea hit. I threw up eight times in 48 hours during that first week, nausea cycling all the way through vomiting to dry heaves. I could keep down water and ginger ale, but that was it. I threw up dinner that first night. Over subsequent days, I threw up chicken noodle soup, I threw up ginger snaps, I threw up Saltines. I wound up in the emergency department, an IV jammed into my arm for the fluids necessary to rehydrate me, even as the pump kept cycling the chemo cocktail through the port into my body. I spent two nights in isolation, one in a separate ER room, one on the oncology ward. Radiation began the same day as chemo. A mild sore throat turned into one of the worst chest colds I’ve had in years, lasting all through December.

Within two weeks, I was so tired, so dispirited, I almost wished I could just go ahead and die. My white blood cell count crashed, then so did my red blood cell count. The idea of having an immune system became a joke. Foods that I loved, that were part of my Yuletide traditions, were completely unpalatable. Coffee tasted horrible, so I switched to green tea. My usual small glass of red wine with dinner went out the window the first week, for it tasted like vinegar. My fresh fruit and salad-heavy diet changed to bread and meat and dairy almost exclusively, as the chemo and radiation just made everything else run through me. If I wasn’t on my way to treatment or home, I was horizontal on the couch or in bed. I slept 12 hours or more every night. I raged in bitter silence over the undetected HPV infection that caused the cancer, over the terrible cruelty involved in that infection so very long ago, I and knew beyond doubt that forgiveness is forever beyond my capacity. Somehow, I found the strength to endure that knowledge, and knew it to be Arianrhod’s gift. And I prayed, oh how I prayed for healing. I asked my craft-sisters, family, and friends for healing, so there were Christian prayers being said for me, incantations to Apollo and Aesclepius, and reiki poured upon me from afar. Sometimes, in meditations and dreams, I could feel Brigid wrap Her cloak around me, or the soothing cool of Isis’s hands, or hear the icy voice of Arianrhod telling me to fight, for She had given me my arms, that I must not lay them aside, that I must not let my tormenter win so long after my escape. So fight I did, even as I sought rest and sleep. I fought the despair. I fought the utter exhaustion. I fought to take care of the burned skin from the radiation treatment, to force the food I needed past my taste buds and down my throat, and fought to keep it down.

As a devotee of Mother Holle, it was hard to give up keeping up my home, doing the baking and cooking and laundry, continuing the sewing and fiber arts. Treatment sapped so much energy that there was no way I could do so much as heat a can of soup on the stove. I struggled to decorate for Yuletide, to give Her that much honor for Her most sacred season. In my meditations, Mother Holle urged me to rest, told me that what I could manage was good enough, that the desire to honor Her was honor enough. In my yearnings lay the magic of the season. It was a balm to my pride to hear my spouse say that he finally realized how much work I did to keep the household running, to care for the dogs, to make a rented space into a home.

By Yule, the irradiated skin had become dry, leathery, a grayish brown that had the texture of sunburn ready to peel. I was halfway through treatment, and I wasn’t sure how I would make it through the rest. I only knew I had to continue. I had to walk through a valley of pain, I had to have faith that I would be sustained, I had to trust that my Deities would not abandon me, that the turning of the wheel would see me through and emerging into the Light. As treatment wore on, and my skin dried out, it cracked, bled, and began to peel. Sometime during the last days of Yuletide, I began to feel reborn, renewed, and, weak as I was, there was also a conviction that not only did I have to make it, but I would, indeed, make it. I began to believe it. More, I began to believe in my own strength and power within.

There is something both beautiful and terrible in this phase of the journey through cancer. It is the core of the magic that my illness taught me: This life is short, and there is no time for prevarication, for sidestepping, for silencing your conscience, for people-pleasing. Certainly not if it means sacrificing your integrity, the core of your beliefs, the deepest needs of your heart, or the calling of your spirit and your Deities. Surrendering your power-within, letting another be the keeper of your conscience, walking a path dictated to you by anyone else, no matter how beloved they might be… these things waste your life, your energy, and your magic. Your magic is the gift of the Deities, given to you so that you can shape the world anew and do the work that is in front of you; the work needs to be done, the tasks that only you can do, that have been entrusted to you. To waste that gift? You can’t be having with that, ain’t nobody got time for that. Do what you must, speak as you must, wield the power within you to make this world a better place, no matter how small your contribution might seem. Your words and your actions must conform to your truth, or you waste your life. You waste the magic that is in you.

By Imbolc, treatment was over, and my recovery from illness began. I still had to be patient with my body. The last round of chemotherapy had been difficult, if not as brutal as before, and I was physically weak, constantly tired. But I had gotten through it. As the months passed, I found I got a little stronger every week, that the days when I felt drained were fewer than those when I felt energetic and capable. For this is the other magic that cancer emphasizes: You can know all the cycles of sun and moon, the tides of the stars, and yet, the most important determinant of your devotionals and rituals must be the state of your health, the centeredness in your being, the strength to channel the energies around and through your body, the ability to concentrate your mind. The truth is that there is no one right time to expend your magic. While some specific times provide easier currents to work with than others, there are many right times. So be gentle with your physical and emotional self and work your magic when you are capable of giving it your fullest energies. Honor the limits your body and mind place upon you, for they are your most essential magical tools on this plane of existence.

Before my journey through cancer, I began mulling over the notion of starting a new pagan tradition. I sidelined that idea during treatment. I simply couldn’t concentrate long enough to tackle that large a project. As of summer 2020, however, I could. And so I decided to begin, in partnership with other witch-priestesses who found themselves dissatisfied with the rigidities of British Traditional Wicca. Lotus Rising is that project. It is informed as much by journeys through the mental health system, domestic violence, serious medical illness, and debilitating injury as it is by comparative mythology and religion, yoga, feminist studies, antiracist activism, postcolonial criticism, and progressive politics. It is meant to be both sanctuary and haven, free of hierarchy, predicated upon sharing and honoring diverse backgrounds, contributions, and gifts. We have formed a tight core, and welcome friends whenever they can show up. It is the work I was meant to do, I have done it to the best of my ability, and I feel a great sense of peace and joy from it.

The magic cancer taught me is that I am truly enough, truly free, and truly able to rely upon my own wisdom and intuition. That while my experience was mine alone, and solitary, I was sustained through the love and heartfelt hopes of friends and family near and far, and by the certainty that my Deities were with me. Cancer taught me that one can feel steely determination to not give an inch to the darkness within and without, and still maintain gentleness, extend compassion, accept others’ and one’s own vulnerabilities and frailties, and live for each moment as if it were your last. That your worth is measured by the love given to you, not by your accomplishments, wealth, status, or influence. We are all works in progress, none of us is perfect, and it takes all of us to lift each other up. Tearing each other down through extreme call-out culture, treating others as projects rather than as people, valuing family members only as appendages to pride and prestige, and feeling ashamed of someone for being who they are, all of these are what destroy dignity, love, trust, and common humanity. Lotus Rising seeks to blend justice work with personal mercy, and clarity of conscience with compassion, to correct and guide with lovingkindness, and to behave at all times as though the divine spark in all living beings matters.

Thank you for reading, and may the Deities bless your journey.