Healing Rituals

In February my Sacramento-based acupuncturist passed away unexpectedly. I wrote about this in my blog at the time…how devastating this was to his loved ones and to his patients, including me. But at the time, I didn’t write about one of the shocking events that happened after his death. I didn’t want to focus on it. 

But today I need to.

You see, when he died, his office sent me all of his files on me. I wasn't aware that he had kept from me an "Ayurvedic chart" that he had commissioned to tell my fate. This reading, based on birth date and time, said I was going to die as early as next July. While he had given me part of the chart when he was alive, he had compassionately not shown me this. Of course I have known over the past 6 ½ years that my life expectancy isn’t great, but seeing the date of my demise written down on a piece of paper – well – it took my breath away when I read it. 

Panic stricken, I talked to our rabbi in Davis, Rabbi Wolfe, who counseled me that Judaism does not subscribe to this sort of thinking. We do not believe that your fate is predetermined based on birthdate and time. We believe that the individual has the opportunity to impact his/her fate throughout life. Rabbi Wolfe then counseled me to burn the chart.  He has kindly offered to do the burning with me and combine it with a healing ceremony.

We have decided to have the burning/healing ceremony next Sunday, June 8 at our home in Davis at around 4:30 pm. You are all more than welcome to come – although no one should feel obligated! Just let us know if you’re planning to join so that I can plan accordingly. As a Jewish mama, I want to make sure that there is plenty of food and beverages for everyone!

In other wonderful healing ritual news, my dear friend Miriam Ferris (she’s the woman who took me for my first time to the mikvah), asked her challah baking group to bake challah for me for this week’s Shabbat. Apparently, if 40 women or more bake challah and pray on behalf of someone, it is a very powerful force. Every Thursday, her group gets a text telling them who to pray for as they are baking. She asked the coordinator to put my name in for this week because she knew I was in crisis (which I’ll explain in a minute). This week was my week for women around the world baking challah and praying for my speedy recovery. In addition, my friend Alan Caplan has his synagogue in Israel praying for me during their daily prayers. They are planning to say a special prayer during a ritual that they’ll be doing for Alan's newborn daughter. I feel so blessed to have these very special prayers being said for me as I continue on this difficult journey.

So – why the increased requests for prayers this week? Over the last several weeks, I have been experiencing significant pain and symptoms that seemed to indicate that I had a renewed blockage in my colon. The pain continued to worsen and became so bad that I finally called Stanford. They scheduled me for an emergency CT scan. On my way down, I knew that there was a possibility that I would be placed in the hospital that afternoon for emergency surgery which would most likely result in a permanent ostomy bag. As you may recall, my colorectal surgeon had told me not to get any more cancer in my colon because he had no more colon to cut! He told me that the next time he had to operate that he’d have to put on a permanent bag. I was full of dread.

Fortunately, I was wrong. My colon wasn’t blocked with cancer. They don’t know what has been causing the pain – but it doesn’t seem to be cancer.  Although I haven’t received the official report, it appears that there has been very little cancer growth – a lymph node next to my aorta grew by a few millimeters and there was only a small additional tumor. Otherwise, everything else looked stable including my lungs and liver which continue to be normal. Thank goodness I’m not sporting a permanent bag right now, and we continue to seek the source of the pain.

On Monday I am scheduled for my next PDL-1 infusion. It’s doing its job keeping cancer in check. I hope to see many of you next Sunday where we will have a chance to snuff out that terrible document that speaks to my demise and reaffirm that we all have power to impact our fate!