A Lot Of Time The Corn Grows Anyway

Here is another excerpt from Kitchen Table Wisdom that I wanted to share because it really touched me when I read it and I have gone back to read it again and again in the past few days. Dr Rachel Naomi Remen writes:

Some years ago I served on the dissertation committee of a woman in the Midwest who was studying spontaneous remission of cancer. Among the people who answered her ad in the paper asking for people who thought they may be had an unusual experience of healing was a farmer who had done exceptionally well despite a dire prognosis. On the phone one evening, she told me about him. She felt his outcome was related to his attitude. "He didn't take it on," she said.

Confused, I asked her if he had denied that he had cancer. No, she said, he had not. He had just taken the same attitude toward his physician's prognosis that he took toward the words of the government soil experts who analyzed his fields. As they were educated men, he respected them and listened carefully as they showed him the findings of their tests and told him that the corn would not grown in this field. He valued their opinions. But, as he told my student, "A lot of time the corn grows anyway."

In my experience, a diagnosis is an opinion and not a prediction. What would it be like if more people allowed for the presence of the unknown, and accepted the words of their medical experts in this same way? The diagnosis is cancer. What that will mean remains to be seen.

Like a diagnosis, a label is an attempt to assert control and manage uncertainty. It may allow us the security and comfort of mental closure and encourage us not to think about things again. But life never comes to a closure, life is a process, even mystery. Life is known only by those who have found a way to be comfortable with change and the unknown. Given the nature of life,, there may be no security, but only adventure.

I really love this story!! I whole-heartedly agree with the farmer...My cancer diagnosis is an opinion, not a prediction. There was nothing black and white about my test results: both biopsies came back benign, my lymph nodes were not as enlarged as is typical with metastatic cancer, the spot on my liver did not "light up", but yet the tumor appeared in the ultrasound to have invaded my colon wall and the fact that they could see the lymph nodes at all during the ultrasound was not a good sign. I think that I am blessed to have some of the best colorectal oncology doctors in the country. Their top-notch educations and vast experience enabled them to quickly assimilate the large amount of nebulous data that my case entailed, and for that I am eternally grateful. But at the end of they day, they are doctors, not magical fortune-tellers. They cannot predict my outcome any better than I can; they can only share their opinion.

In fact, in the first meeting that we ever had with Dr Poen (my radiation oncologist) he admitted this. He said, "Julie, I can tell you exactly what 2007 will look like for you...by the end of this year, you will be cancer-free. What I cannot tell you is what 2008, 2009, or 2010 hold in store. I cannot tell you whether the treatments this year will cure you or whether the cancer will come back. Only time will tell us that."

I have never been very good at dealing with uncertainty. I like to have a sense of control and to know my options in black and white. Lately, though, I have found myself growing slowly more comfortable with the uncertainty of my situation and growing more comfortable with just living each day as it comes. I think this is because -- like the farmer in the story -- I refuse to "take on" my diagnosis as a prediction. While I greatly appreciate all of my doctors' opinions (and I am obviously acting on what they all agree is the appropriate course of action given the diagnosis), I feel in my heart that what eventually happens to me will be because of a multitude of factors that neither my doctors nor I can even see or understand. As I wrote earlier, I think that the things that we know are only a small part of the things that we cannot know.