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Are You Living Or Dying From Your Cancer?

What Choices Do You Need To Make To Handle What Cancer Evokes?

Issues: … living or dying … the choice … living purposefully … staying alive … committing suicide through having cancer … fighting cancer with purpose …

• Why is this question of vital importance to you and to me?

Take off the cancer part for the moment. Up until my 75th birthday I played good tennis with about eight of us retired men in the local tennis club. So I knew these men to be retired and good tennis players still.

Playing skilled tennis, when you finally reach that level, gives you some wonderful experiences to enjoy. On the other side of the coin my last match with the guys was just awful. I was mishitting the ball regularly and not making the points I normally did. Two of the guys got a bit angry at me. I knew right then my tennis playing days were over, and soon announced my ‘retirement.’

Each of these older men will someday face that they can no longer play good tennis either. They were all younger than I by at least a year but often by ten years.

So it goes in life. You become useless as you go into old age. All these men were retired managers, accountants, professors, coaches, professionals, workers, farmers. The society had made them redundant and paid them retirement but gave them no purposeful work. When they first retire they tell you their plans to do consultancy. They will organize a little firm to give good ideas and guidance to people much younger than they who are building businesses or organizations. This never works out. No one wants them …

For me, had I stayed in California, my native language area, I could have, like other therapists I knew, kept seeing a few clients every week with life counseling and dreamwork, and therefore continued to feel useful and earn income.

This is the problem. When you get cancer, like I now have, you feel even less useful than before.

Those close to you see you as a problem to take care of, and you may be so. They have to accompany you to the doctor’s meetings, pick up medications and food for you both to eat. They see you as a liability, a danger even.

What if you get dizzy and fall over, and they are at work and you are lying on the floor with a broken hip and dying?

These things happen, you know.

So you are now old and retired and you have cancer.

My God, I am rereading and editing. This is a strong reality. I get up now for a moment and get some of that good chocolate that I love. And I better make me a glass of healing tea. I’m supposed to take three cups a day.

Ah, good chocolate!!!

Cancer is a disease of the dying. It is meant to kill you in your old age. Cancer means certain cells in your body are no longer working right and so your bodily functions begin to cease to function right.

Yet, you are still alive, as I well know about myself right now. What do you possibly do?

When first faced with your cancer diagnosis your cancer specialist says, ‘yes, you are 75, but you look healthy still. You are not too old to operate on. Don’t you want to stop this cancer and get better?

Who ‘owns’ your cancer? You or your doctor? Note the struggle!

Oh yes you do want to get well, you find yourself saying. But wait a minute. Who says you will get better? How can the surgeon say you will get better? How many patients do they lose and how many do they save? I have asked and they won’t tell you. We don’t keep statistics, they say.

This is why I wrote this report. As a Cancer Teacher I bring to you the facts as I experience them so that through this report I may teach you the reality of the present day cancer treatment situation in the western world.

In the news recently Senator Edward Kennedy died at age 77 of brain cancer and they gave him a state funeral because he was a Kennedy and laid him to rest beside his slain brothers in Arlington National Cemetery. But also in the news was the item that Kennedy had been diagnosed with brain cancer ten months earlier and he had opted to be operated on to see if the surgeons could remove the brain tumor.

In fact a number of brain surgeons debated in public wether it was the right thing to have done to operate on Senator Kennedy? Obviously the operation did not cure Kennedy’s cancer or make him that functional in his senate job. Will Kennedy’s surgeons claim their operation on him was a success or a failure? See how statistics go?

Senator Kennedy still had symbolic value because he was the longest serving member of the Senate and a Kennedy, that tragic family. So you could argue that maybe the doctors did give Kennedy a few months longer of life, though other doctors did not seem to think so.

But Kennedy was a celebrity and rich. What about us, the poorer, ordinary sort of folk? What do we do when we get brain cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer, skin cancer, colon cancer, ovarian cancer, bone cancer, bladder cancer, stomach cancer, kidney cancer, liver cancer, pancreatic cancer, and so on?

Sound more that human beings are born into magnificent health and live most of their lives that way, but when a natural age limit is reached we humans start deteriorating in body and dying. Or, if we start dying early some halt in our developmental process is occurring.

So we talk about one segment of the cancer population, the old people, of which I am one.

However, many younger people also get prostate cancer, breast cancer, liver cancer, lung cancer, skin cancer, pancreatic cancer, brain cancer and on and on.

What is their story? Why do younger people also get severe cancers that can kill them?

Two of the local doctors I have interacted with seem to have had prostate cancer. One seems embarrassed by it, and even denies it, though my tennis friend says, no, it was prostate cancer.

In older age should you be embarrassed by getting cancer? No, because cancer is a natural dying process that you should accept naturally as an end-of-life process for you.

Maybe there is no embarrassment in dying of cancer in old age?

But what about all the younger people who seem to get serious cancer? Some recover from it and live a good many years yet, while others die younger of their cancers. The doctors are unable to fix them, to save them from their cancers.

Here we get into the psychological aspects of cancer afflicting younger people who start dying before their natural aging cycle has started.

When I have worked with these people as a dreamwork psychologist I have had their dreams as a diagnostic resource. I have taken some of these cancer people through a symbolic-emotional release process and their cancer symptoms went away without their taking cancer medications.

Just as an aside, I could resent society who has me, still a dreamwork psychologist that has done amazing work, but no one uses me, no one pays me and gives me the opportunity to pass on my work to younger psychologists.

I have one Romanian psychologist who has recognized my worth for years, but he has fallen on hard times and so has no time or energy yet to organize a dreamwork psychology organization and trainings for me to do, and to generate professional money for me so I can live at a more decent level of prosperity.

My own case then shows that in terms of society, just like my tennis buddies, I have been rendered useless.

My response to this situation is to refuse to be rendered useless, so I took up the Internet, learned how it works, and got my wonderful partner to also learn the Internet and build me a respectable blog.

WHEN YOU HAVE CANCER, EVEN IN OLD AGE, REFUSE TO BE RENDERED USELESS IF AT ALL POSSIBLE.

• When you are made useless it is in the nature of your psychology to simply want to give up.

Cancer is a respectable way to commit suicide because everyone thinks that cancer is happening to you and you are not causing it yourself.

Please get the point.

You are reading this Report. You or someone close to you has cancer. Watch out that you do not neglect the person in a way that they neglect themselves.

If you render a person useless in life they will then see themselves as useless and most likely want to die.

In life, in the young adult years, in the middle years, in the older years, and in the ready-to-go years, it takes real effort, real will power, to make yourself live on further in full vitality.

WILL POWER IS SUSTAINED, FORCEFUL ACTION TOWARDS ONGOING GOALS, TASKs OR DIRECTION IN LIFE, NO MATTER WHAT.

DON’T GIVE UP – FORCE YOURSELF INTO PURPOSE AT TIMES!

Recently a tennis player friend invited me out for cherry pie and espresso coffee at his favorite little restaurant in the woods here. I enjoyed the pie and the coffee and the conversation, all of which lasted almost two hours. This tennis friend, whom I did not know hardly at all personally, talked about his readings in Roman and Jewish history, a hobby of his. I also, because of all the research I have done for my Jesus novel, knew the area fairly well myself. We had found common ground.

But what was the point? This tennis friend had said that we two might get together regularly for conversations. I was full of vitality myself that day and lasted well the two hours. Maybe I didn’t appear to be so cancer sick after all? He said at the end maybe we would get together again about a month later. This was a change, but maybe he was right?

What possible purpose could it serve for he and I to get together say weekly?

Dying, vital men still, passing the time?

What could we do together? We have both been rendered by older age and society fairly useless. He gets good retirement income and I don’t. He paid for the cherry pie and I thanked him for it. But what else could there be between us?

PRINCIPLE: YOU ARE IN OLDER LIFE NOW. MAYBE YOU HAVE CANCER OR YOU DON’T. MAYBE YOU WILL YET GET CANCER AS PART OF YOUR OWN DYING PROCESS. THE POINT IS: LIVE PURPOSEFULLY OR DIE. THERE IS NO IN BETWEEN.

Nobody is going to help you that much to live your life now or before. If people are going to continue to relate to me I must prove myself interesting and valuable to them. People who read at least some of my blog entries say they get good ideas and values from them.

People are not going to read my books and blogs just because I want them to. When people paid me good money to train them in dreamwork psychology it was because I was the best trainer and psychotherapist around for them. Now I am too old for that kind of energy expenditure, so no one asks me for regular dreamwork sessions.

Some ask me for wisdom sessions because of my age and insights. That’s great! That I appreciate if I can actually create the right kinds of insights that help a certain person in a life transition.  But if I am ineffective and useless, then how am I going to feel?

I know this is hard on you because the issue is hard on me at times. I am now alone at home days at a time for many hours. My partner has her work and also the after hours work of getting our new apartment ready with her volunteer friends. She must take good care of them first because they help out and the work should be a fun thing for all.

For me I need to feel purposeful. Getting an average of 50 blog visitors a day, rather than the average of 20 visitors a day a few months ago, means that I am being more effective in my writing perspective on life, which others also find rewarding.

Now adding full reports and ebooks for sale, if people value and buy them, will prove my effectiveness still in the world.

IF AS A CANCER PERSON YOU WANT TO CONTINUE LIVING, AND EVEN GET HEALTHY AGAIN, FILL YOUR DAILY LIFE WITH STRONG PURPOSEFUL THINGS TO DO THAT CONTRIBUTE VALUE TO YOURSELF AND OTHERS.

This also means, don’t waste much of your day on being entertained. Watching DVD’s may be good therapy for you, maybe that is all you feel you need to keep a strong interest in life, but if you need more, then probably what you need is work projects that give purpose to your life.

The tennis friend who tried the cherry pie socializing with me did say he has his grandson over for four days at a time every couple of weeks. Now that is purposeful activity, is it not? This is what you want to build into your life if you can. Study something. Make something, work part time at something. Volunteer. I develop my inner life. Of course I do … I am a dreamwork psychologist.

Another tennis friend who died a few years ago told me about his study project of taking three years to go around to the old city halls and the old church archives to research his family members of the past. They were mostly all dead now. They had lived once upon a time a rich and vital life, just as you and I have done. He felt that before he went, before he left this earth, he also must learn about his ancestors, and so he filled many days traveling and reading and taking notes in the dusty archives of old buildings belonging to the past.

And then like right on schedule he died and we never enjoyed his beautiful tennis playing and humorous mannerisms again.

Dusty tennis shoes pounding the clay surfaces of tennis fate no more.

Well, it happens to all of us. I am rendered into an old body now, making my adjustments. I can no longer play a good level of tennis. It happens to all of us.

It happens to all of us …

But the point is: don’t give up unless your life feels purposeless and you simply don’t feel like you have the energy and motivation to keep doing new and creative things.

I am doing new and creative things still.

At first with the cancer diagnosis I thought that now I had to give up all life motivation and gracefully die, but I had some dreams and psychological breakthroughs that said to me, no, Strephon, it’s not time to die yet! The cancer may take you over and defeat you, but why not stand up to it and say to the cancer, yourself and others that you are going to keep living your vital and purposeful personality you have built up over the years.

Yes, this is the point, is it not?

PRINCIPLE: DESPITE NEGATIVE CIRCUMSTANCES SUCH A LONELINESS AND CANCER, THEY SEEM TO GO TOGETHER, ASSERT YOUR RIGHT TO LIVE ON STILL AND BE AS VITAL AND PURPOSEFUL AS POSSIBLE.

If for instance, you want to ‘cure’ your cancer, do the research and find the real possible ways to cure your cancer. This is why I am active now with alternative treatment. I have done enough research to see that regular doctors can only give me palliative treatment, which is medications that keep me from suffering too much, like using the pain pills and their sleeping pills until, miracle of miracles, the alternative herbal treatments kick in and stop the cancer and vitalize me.

And if these alternative treatments don’t work?

The thing about something not working is to try something else until maybe you solve the problem.

If you never solve the problem then the problem overwhelms you and with cancer you die. If you do solve the problem then it was because you put whatever available energy you could into solving the problem, and it worked!

Sometimes these things work, you know!

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