Aqualand

Double locked gate.  Hand full of tokens.  A chicken stands in a glass case.  He pecks at some feed on a warped piece of wood in the corner of the cage.  The rest of the floor is checkered with chicken wire.  A bright-eyed girl drops two tokens into the slot that makes the chicken “dance.”  Old carnival music revs to life through a muffled speaker, like an old video game.  The chicken springs to life.  His legs swivel upward.  Left, right, left, right.  It’s a rudimentary dance, but dancing no less.  Parents hold their children up to the glass.  They watch with wide eyes as the chicken eyes glaze over with apparent fear.  Finally, the music stops, the lights dim, and the chickens straw-like legs once again come to rest.  How’d they do that?

Next is the bear cage.  A brown bear weighing nearly a ton sits upright and stairs into the distance, beyond the double-stacked metal caging.  The moist concrete looks cool on his butt and hind legs.  Another family walks over to an old vending machine.  They drop two tokens into the old white soda machine.  A glass bottle of Mountain Dew emerges in the bottom slot.  A half-full crate of empty glass bottles is angled against the cage next to the vending machine.      A tall man in oversized khaki shorts pokes the bottle of soda through the cage.  The brown bear snaps to attention and rolls upright.  He saunters over to the man pressed against the cage.  The bear rises in front of the soda bottle jutting through the fencing.  The man takes a cautious step backwards.  Children gasp at the size of the beast.  He sniffs the bottle and eventually locks onto it.   He sucks down the sugary cola in seconds and trudges back to his cool concrete spot.  The man in baggy khakis slips the soda into one of the empty slots of the crate.  He drank that much pop in one day?

The grand finale looks nothing of the sort to the untrained eye.  About a dozen people stand around the perimeter of a tiny pond.  It’s surface is tranquil and still.  There’s a small building that looks like a concession stand at the southern edge of the pond.  Expectant children jump up and down as their parents hand the attendant cash for a bag of something.  They walk up to the edge of the pond and talk strategy.  Most conclude that the middle is ideal.  A wiry teenage boy launches something into the air.  It makes a hollow flopping noise as it lands directly in the middle of the pond.  His father gives the boy an approving nod.  The rest of the onlookers turn all of their attention to the object now floating in the middle of the water.  It’s a frog.  Its legs are spread in the familiar right angle, arms extended.  But it hasn’t moved.  Not even a twitch.  A small breeze wisks over the pond’s surface, gently nudging the frog toward the eastern edge of the pond.  Someone else launches a frog into the middle on the western side of the water.  Then another right next to it.  Three frogs float completely still on the surface of the water.  Suddenly, the most recent of the launched frogs makes a frantic attempt to reach shore.  In seconds, he is engulfed in a frothy, churning chaotic scene.  The bodies of long, slender fish break the surface, violently thrash, and search for a piece of the shredded frog.  The water grows silent again.  Two frogs remain.  The crowd of people grows.  Anticipation swells.  The evasive silhouettes of five fish emerge under the frog near the eastern edge of the pond.  They’re muskies.  A freshwater cousin of the Baracuda.  Some are as long as three feet with brown stripes, sinewy bodies, and slender mouths like an alligator.  They’re mouths are full of teeth.  King predator of the Northwoods.   As the frog nearing the eastern edge drifts closer, the frog on the other side of the pond has miraculously drifted toward the northern edge.  The violent death of his companion has created enough ripples to push him incredibly close to safety.  He’s only five feet away from the edge.  He stares intently on the freedom that’s so close, trying to ignore the impending danger in the dark waters below him.  He decides to make a break for it.  And with the first twitch of his two back legs, he, too, is engulfed in the deadly froth of attacking muskies.  Now there’s one left.  Two more gusts of wind and he’s only three feet from the water’s edge.  A young girl even reaches down to grab him.  Her mother races over, warning her of the danger of grabbing the frog.  Two feet.  Four muskies angle closer to the frog, who’s still locked in a frozen posture.  A muskie swims closer.  Nearly clipping the frogs rear legs.  One more gust and the frog desparately grapples onto a small branch in the shallows.  It inches up the branch and shimmies onto precious land.  The frog seems to take a few breaths of precious relief.  Suddenly, two fingers clutch the frog’s abdomen and launch him back into the middle of the pond.  He frantically swims for cover.  Within moments, his fate is the same as his two companions.  The water grows tranquil again.

Enjoy and tell your friends.

and a doctor with a breakthrough cancer treatment,

and a drug company that will stop at nothing to suppress it.

This is a story about cancer and hope,

about a better way to treat the disease.

A revolution is happening,

in the way we treat and think about cancer.

It’s happening now, today, all over the world.

Powerful institutions will seek to quell this rebellion,

but they will fail,

like trying to suppress a rising tide.

For decades, Sarah Stone searched for a new way.

She grew tired of the cancer drugs of old.

A nurse herself, she became skeptical of conventional hospitals with cookie-cutter treatments

and the one-shot-fits-all solutions of drug companies.

But Sarah Stone has found something new.

Big business and conventional medicine will try to stop it.

They will fight with everything they have.

They will come after the revolutionary doctor.

At the twilight of her life,

during her third bout with cancer,

after endless sessions of chemo and radiation,

after being diagnosed with metastasized cancer in her bones, her lungs, her liver and intestines.

Sarah Stone can see a growing hint of light on the horizon.

Andy just hopes it isn’t too late.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007ZH20Q8

http://www.amazon.com/Within-Ben-Scott-Craig/dp/0615643280/ref=pd_rhf_cr_p_t_2

Sally’s second cancer experience came about 2 ½ years after she finished radiation.  Unable to banish her radiologist friend’s warning from the back of her mind, mammograms had become almost unbearably stressful.  While she could forget that she had cancer most of the time, she could hardly go into the room for her biannual mammograms.  After two mammograms came back negative, Sally had almost convinced herself that my fears were irrational.  She put off the next mammogram, deciding that she could probably go to an annual schedule.  But her family doctor kept asking about it, so she finally made the appointment.

As soon as the nurse came back in the room to tell her that they needed more views, Sally knew the cancer had come back.  She asked what it was that the doctor saw. When the nurse said, “Microcalicifications in the area of the other cancer scar,” she felt nauseous.  There had been nothing there for two years. What else could it be?  She sat in the waiting room until the radiologist could consult with her.  There was something he had to check on.  Maybe this means that he doesn’t think it’s cancer, she thought.  He’s going to tell her to just come back and recheck it in six months.  But when the radiologist talked to her, he wasn’t hesitating to recommend a biopsy as soon as possible.

The problem was the location of the cancer.  He said that this reoccurrence was even deeper in her breast, against the chest wall, and he wasn’t sure that they would be able to perform a successful biopsy in Rockford.  He recommended that Sally have the biopsy at a large teaching hospital in Chicago, where they had a new method, called sterotactic biopsy. She didn’t really understand the difference, but remembering her last needle biopsy experience, she wasn’t excited about the prospect of going through something more difficult.  The radiologist scheduled her for the biopsy in Chicago.

Sally held herself together until her husband come through the door from work.  Then she started crying.  He knew as soon as he saw the look on her face that it was bad news.  Like her, he assumed that it was cancer, even though they hadn’t had a biopsy to confirm it yet.  This time she wasn’t going to get away with minor surgery and some radiation. She knew she was in for major surgery and chemotherapy, and a long time to recuperate.  For the first time it occurred to Sally that she might die.  The prospect terrified her, not because she was afraid to die, but because she didn’t want her children to go through losing their mother.  She believed it would be a terribly painful experience for children when they were young.  Her husband was a wonderful father, and she knew he would take good care of everything, but she didn’t want that trauma for her children.  She vowed to do whatever she needed to do to be there for her family.  Her husband assured her that he was there to support her with whatever decisions she made.  He said he didn’t care about the surgery, or what she looked like afterwards.  The only mistake they made in the few weeks before the biopsy was going to see the movie “Fried Green Tomatoes” to take their minds off the cancer, not realizing that one of the main characters died young and in pain from breast cancer.

It was a few weeks before they could get an appointment in Chicago, and it was making Sally nervous.  Wasn’t she supposed to be getting started on treatment before the cancer spread?  And which doctor was making sure things got done?  The radiologist had referred her to Chicago, but he wasn’t following up.  They were keeping their family doctor informed, but he wasn’t involved in any of the specialist’s decisions.  Sally didn’t understand how her care was going to be coordinated.  Who would decide what surgery to perform? When would she begin chemo?  It seemed like it would be possible to just fall through the cracks, with no one who really was watching to make sure the right things were getting done.  She had seen it happen before.  She would make sure that that didn’t happen to her.

When they arrived at the Chicago teaching hospital, Sally realized that she didn’t need to worry.  They utilized a team approach that included all specialties in the initial evaluation.  Everyone from the plastic surgeon to the oncologist discussed options for treatment with them in an appointment.  As it turned out, even the sterotactic biopsy was not going to work in her case, but the oncologist told them honestly that she didn’t need the biopsy to assume that it was cancer.  Microcalicifications two years after radiation, could only mean one thing, and they should just go ahead with plans for surgery.  She would have a mastectomy, and they could do reconstructive surgery at the same time, if that’s what she wanted.  Since she was only forty-two, she wanted reconstructive surgery, especially if it didn’t involve an additional surgery.  Although they used to take breast tissue from the stomach, they found that they had better results if they took it from the back and under the arm.  The doctors assured them that once she had the surgery – and maybe her first few chemo treatments – she could continue with her doctors at home.  They left feeling that Sally was in good hands, and that they understood what was going to happen.

They made an appointment to catch up with the family doctor.  When she told him the plan, he looked worried. “Did you check with your insurance to see if it is covered to go to Chicago?” he asked.  This possibility hadn’t even occurred to her.  She had always carried the health insurance through work, and never had any problem with coverage.  And she had been referred to Chicago by a hospital radiologist.  “I know, but he referred you for a procedure that we don’t do here,” said her doctor. “Insurance may not want to cover procedures that we can do in town.  I don’t know what the surgeons in our group can do, but you’d better check with insurance.”  She was sure that it was just a formality, but she took his advice.  Sally called the insurance carrier every day for two weeks, and couldn’t even talk to anyone who could tell her how to get the procedure approved.  Someone told her it had to be submitted to a review board, but couldn’t tell her how to do it or when they met.  Another person said she needed a letter from her doctor, but couldn’t tell her which doctor or what the letter should say.  Another woman told Sally that she knew they performed mastectomies in Rockford.   If they didn’t do the plastic surgery procedure here, she might have to have the two surgeries approved to be done separately.  It was a bureaucratic nightmare, and she started to suspect that it was designed that way, so that she would go ahead with a procedure that wasn’t approved, and then they could deny payment.  Sally knew that her last cancer cost over $100,000.  She was afraid to think of the bill for this one.

With three days before she was scheduled for surgery in Chicago, she had no answers and didn’t even know who to call.  Sally didn’t know whether to go ahead with the surgery and risk her children’s college education, or cancel it and return to someone in her town.  Even if she had everything done at home, she didn’t know if surgery such as reconstruction would be approved for payment.  She felt that the hospital in Chicago would do a better job, but with time ticking away, she was past worrying about whether she got the best treatment.  She just wanted treatment that insurance would cover.  Her husband had been asking her every night about the approval process.  When he came home that afternoon and found her rocking on a chair, teeth chattering in fear, he said, “I’ve had enough of this.”  Sally was sure he had never seen her in such a state before.  He called the insurance company and got nowhere, then called the surgeon’s office and told them that even if they had to go to the emergency room, they needed to talk to a doctor today.  Not even knowing if this was the right thing to do, they headed over to the surgeon’s office.

She didn’t know the surgeon who saw them that day, but she would always be grateful for the way he took charge and sorted things out.  He was more than a little angry at the Chicago hospital for leading them to believe that they could have everything done there without checking on insurance coverage.  He said that the local surgeon was in charge of determining which procedures should be sent to higher levels of skill, and both of her surgeries could be done in town.  He said they didn’t need to worry about coverage, because it was up to the surgeon to approve procedures.  Sally felt someone should have told her that.  He brought in a plastic surgeon to discuss the reconstruction procedure.  She got the definite impression that he didn’t have much experience with this procedure.  Later her husband learned that he had only done it five times. When he told her that he was going to take the fat and muscle from her stomach, she told him that they were going to use her back tissue in Chicago. “Well, we don’t do it that way here, and besides with this procedure you also get a tummy tuck.”  They were going to take fat from her stomach and make it into a breast? It sounded like dream surgery.

The surgery was long, but she didn’t remember that the pain was too bad.  She couldn’t tell what anything was going to look like, because she was all bandaged, with drains coming out of her right armpit.  A few hours after surgery, the anesthesiologist came to see her, which was fairly unusual.  He asked her if she remembered anything about the surgery or recovery.  When she said no, he told Sally that she had a respiratory arrest while in recovery, and they were afraid they might lose her.  He asked if she remembered being resuscitated.  At the time she didn’t, but a few hours later a memory did surface.  The only conscious moment she recalled from the surgery was looking down at the medical team working on her body.  She was above the ceiling, looking down through the ceiling tiles, which were transparent.  She remembered clearly thinking “What am I doing up here?”, then everything went black again.

She recovered from surgery without any complications.  The drains came out, and she never had problems with circulation in that arm.  They tested many lymph nodes and all were negative.  Since didn’t have a biopsy, she wanted to confirm that it was cancer that had returned, and it was, the same kind as last time.  The only difficult part of recovery was removing the elastic dressing covering her stomach and reconstructed breast.  It was the worst pain she had ever experienced.  It felt like the skin was being ripped off her body, and it took about five minutes to get it off, leaving her panting and sweating.

She didn’t look horrible, but it didn’t look natural at all, either.  She was completely numb over her entire abdomen from her hips to above her reconstructed breast, and remained that way for at least 5 years.

Sally started chemotherapy about a month after her surgery.  She chose a different oncologist.  The doctor told her that because she was young and this was her second cancer, even though it hadn’t spread, the doctor felt that it should be treated “aggressively.”  She didn’t remember there being a point where chemo was discussed as an option.  It just was assumed. She was so frightened by the prospect of dying that she would have probably taken it anyway, but it would have been nice to know later that it was something she didn’t have to continue.  She still didn’t know for sure what chemo regimen she received.  She did know that it was by far the worst experience of her life.

Sally’s husband went with her for all her chemo treatments, which was good, because it would have been hard to drive home.  Dizzy, sick, and strangely buzzed, she staggered out of her first treatment and home to bed, except she couldn’t sleep.  They gave her steroids with chemo to minimize her body’s reaction, but she didn’t think anyone told her that at the time.  She couldn’t really say for sure what she was told, because her memory of the entire six month treatment time was spotty.  She didn’t remember anything that happened at work or home, or anything she did, except her efforts to feel better, and the few things that worked.  She had been through surgeries and radiation, and never doubted her ability to overcome whatever physical challenge came her way.  But this was different.  Sally felt horrible and scared.  She didn’t know what to do.  Chemo was the only way to treat cancer, and she didn’t know if she could do it.

Sally felt that everyone who prescribed chemotherapy should experience it themselves.  Not a whole course, but at least a few treatments.  If cancer patients could do it for six months or longer, healthy people should be able to take a few treatments.  Only by actually having chemo can anyone understand what it’s like.  She thought doctors experiencing the treatment firsthand would stop unnecessary chemotherapy, which Sally believed hers was. It was hard to describe the way chemo made her feel.  She was nauseated, for sure, almost constantly, although she didn’t remember vomiting much.  She felt tired and dull, but not really sleepy.  She was dizzy, anxious, unable to concentrate, and very disconnected from the normal rhythm of life. Sally felt like she was dying, slipping away without anyone noticing, like in the Out of Africa quote.  She was still walking and talking, but she wasn’t really there.

When Sally talked to her doctor about how she felt during chemo, all they did wass prescribe medicine that made her feel even more out of it.  She felt like a weak, whiny person, because she couldn’t describe how she felt.  Was she supposed to feel this bad?  Or was something going wrong?  Her labs were fine.  And she supposedly had medications for any side effects.  Chemotherapy was supposed to make you feel bad.  She was still able to be up and work.  She didn’t have to be admitted to hospital.  So put your hand up here so we can give you another dose of poison.  She felt like no one was listening to her, or telling her what to expect.  Sally started menopause at forty-two, within weeks of her first treatment.  When she asked her oncologist if this was normal, she said, “Oh yes, it happens sometimes. Your periods may come back after chemo, or they may not”.  Should she be taking hormones? Definitely not, she was told, since she had breast cancer, she could never take hormones. When she asked if she would at least lose some weight from chemo, her oncologist explained that breast cancer chemo patients actually gained weight.  Great, this just got better and better.

Sally realized if she was going to make it through this, she was on her own.  Remembering how natural therapies had helped with radiation, she started doing some serious research.  She didn’t read anything about chemotherapy.  She didn’t want to know what it was actually doing to her body.  She just wanted to learn how to feel better.  She read about macrobiotic diets, teas and herbs, cleanses, and Chinese medicine.  She went to nutrition talks, and conferences about energy medicine.  But nothing she learned applied to chemotherapy, or explained what she could do to feel better.  In fact, most natural therapies warned against utilizing them during chemotherapy.  The massage therapists and energy workers she met told her to come back after she was done with chemo.  But she couldn’t wait five months to start to feel better.  Sally needed some answers fast.

After her fifth month of chemo, she could see the light at the end of the tunnel, and couldn’t wait to be done.  She had done a lot of reading, and was as fascinated by holistic healing as she was disillusioned by conventional medicine.  The western system of treating symptoms without ever addressing the root cause of illness seemed to her to be ineffective and purposeless, without hope of achieving any real healing.  She no longer believed in chemotherapy, and felt she was going through it for nothing.  After her fifth set of treatments, she stopped taking my supplements and following the natural diet, thinking that she only had one more month, so how much difference could these alternative therapies make?

She showed up for her last treatment cycle feeling a whole new level of bad.  In the two weeks since her last treatment she had gained another eight pounds and had even started to lose some hair again.  She decided to try to talk her oncologist out of giving the last chemo treatments.  By this time she knew that there was no real evidence to support doing six months or five or seven months.  It was just an arbitrary amount of time that had become the protocol, because it had been studied and other time periods had not. But her oncologist insisted on completing the full course, successfully scaring Sally by reminding her that she had cancer twice.  She shouldn’t even be contemplating cutting therapy short.  Then she got the results of her blood count. “What have you been doing the last month?” the oncologist demanded.  “You’ve never reacted like this before.”  Sally told the doctor that she stopped taking supplements. “Your hemoglobin is only 3.6, too low to give you chemo.” 3.6! Sally was shocked.  Normal hemoglobin levels were twelve to fifteen.  In OB, she gave women transfusions for anything lower than six.  Did she need a transfusion?  No, the oncologist told her that they didn’t transfuse chemotherapy patients. She should just go home and return next week when hopefully her levels would be up enough to complete the treatment.

Sally went home and started all her alternative treatments again.  By the next week her hemoglobin was up to 7.8, well within the range to safely give her last two treatments.  On the last treatment, the nurse had difficulty starting the IV for the chemo, although they had never had trouble before.  She tried to start it three times, unsuccessfully.  Sally had really good veins, and knowing she was a nurse, the oncology nurse was getting upset.  Sally felt she knew what was happening.  She felt her body was rejecting the chemo drugs.  She watched as the IV needle got a blood return, but failed to flow, or mysteriously slid past the vein that was so prominent.  It occurred to her to mentally communicate with my body, reassuring it that this was the last treatment, thanking it for what it had gone through, and promising that she would never let this happen again.  On the next attempt, the IV went in easily, and chemotherapy was over.

The oncologist wanted her to take Dimoxosen, which was out of trials and was recommended for all estrogen-receptor positive breast cancers.  But for some reason, Sally just couldn’t do it.  After all, chemotherapy had put her into menopause, so weren’t her estrogen levels probably already greatly diminished?  The doctor had no tests to determine what level her estrogen was, either before or after chemo.  Also, she read that taking Dimoxosen increased her chance of getting uterine cancer.  The oncologist confirmed this, but said it wasn’t a problem, because she could have an endometrial biopsy each year, and if she did develop uterine cancer, a hysterectomy would take care of it.

This was not the way Sally intended to live the rest of her life, being afraid of cancer all the time and getting more body parts removed.  She felt there was a better way and she was going to find it.   She kept two oncology follow-up appointments, but both times left her shaken and scared.  She knew she couldn’t do what the doctors wanted her to do.  It no longer made any sense.  She had read enough to know that conventional cancer treatment wasn’t proven to be any more effective than unconventional therapies, and caused a lot more harm.

Sally was done with conventional cancer treatment.  Even if the cancer came back, she knew she could never go through chemotherapy again, and that was the only answer western medicine had for her.  She was convinced that her second cancer was result of the radiation she had after the first cancer.  Although she continued to work in the hospital, she became subversive.   She passionately pursued all alternative aspects of healing.  For years, she thought that it would be possible to integrate alternative and conventional medicine, but none of her efforts were successful.  The two systems were based on very different principles.  Forced to choose, Sally had no doubt which direction to go.  She headed into the vast, fascinating unknown of holistic care.  She wondered if she would ever find what she had ultimately been searching for – the union of conventional and alternative medicine in treating cancer.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007ZH20Q8

http://www.amazon.com/Within-Ben-Scott-Craig/dp/0615643280/ref=pd_rhf_cr_p_t_2

His mother, however, was dangling over a great abyss as well and he was worried that she was about to let go.  She didn’t even need to jump, just stop fighting the force pulling her down.  This battle wasn’t clear to the average person looking at her, but Ben could see it.  She was clawing onto the ledge, her fingers slipping lower and lower.  Her friends, her family, and her doctors could only do so much.  Ultimately, she was alone in this battle, and no one else knew her body or how much it could take.  For twenty years she had been fighting the gravity of cancer.  Some years it didn’t pull as hard.  Other years it felt like one of the boulders at the edge of the frigid creek was tied to her ankles.  Ben knew that she was tired.  He knew that she was beginning to let go.

“Yeah!”  His friend exclaimed as a skier cruised under the lift, turned sharply to the right, and launched off the cornice known as Lover’s Leap.  He landed in a cloud of white  powder as if an old battleship cannon had been fired out of the side of the slope.

The mountain was almost silent.  Only the sporadic ski edge grinding against the groomed run, the occasional elated skier shouting random exclamations from the thick evergreens, or the steady hum from the twisted metal lift line broke up the stillness.

As the lift sped up Blue Sky Basin in the back bowls of Vail, Ben turned around and looked back at empty chairs.  Snow-capped peaks crowded the horizon.  Out there, somewhere in those hills, was his religion.  If there was such a thing as God, he felt closest to it held up to the heavens by the jagged Rocky Mountains under his feet.

Sitting next to him, his friend Dan negotiated a granola bar into his mouth while wearing mittens.  He always grabbed a handful of the free bars next to the ticket office.  The two didn’t speak.  They soaked in the last run.  They didn’t need to say anything. This wasn’t a time for words.  Words could only cloud up such a crystal clear moment.  Endings were always like that – clear, easy, and emotional.

As they rode off the lift, Dan slapped his goggles over his eyes, looked at Ben, and with a subtle lean to the right, Ben knew exactly what he meant and nodded.  He followed as Dan shuffled along the packed snow on his telemark skis.  Ben skated behind on his snowboard.  They rode along the ropes marked ski boundary and slipped through a gate that read “Warning-Experts Only.”

The black Never Summer board under his feet negotiated the tight, snaking path through the alpine forest along the gradual ridge of the mountain.  His body was relaxed, flowing with the turns and undulations.  He popped off a bump and whipped his board around 180 degrees riding out smooth on his backside. His sharp metal edges cut into the packed snow with the sound of a shovel scoopping up snow and scraping against pavement.  He flipped the board back to his frontside and accelerated down the trail. The turns came quicker, the bumps rougher as his heart thumped from the slight loss of control.  The space narrowed as he ducked in an attempt to avoid a few low lying branches. They smacked his helmet.

The trail leveled off as he saw his friend leaning over his ski poles just in front of him.  Dan’s scruff glowed a reddish brown in the sunlight from the clearing trail.  The narrow path under the thick canopy of evergreens opened up to a wide field of open space, like a football field carved out of the top of a hill.  Except for the narrow trail dissecting it, the field was covered with pristine snow.  The woods surrounded this brief opening.  Dan motioned forward.  He was going to give Ben a few minutes alone.

During his high school years in Rockford, Illinois, Ben used to dream about a Coors Light commercial. In the ad, a few guys standing next to a pickup truck after a long day of work gazed out over vast, and very flat, plains similar to the fields that spanned the surface of Illinois. Once they popped open their cans of beer, a massive mountain fell from the sky down to the fields adjacent to them. The idea was that the fermented grains and hops in the silver can could bring the refreshing feel of the Rockies to anyone.  The purpose of the ad was to convey the refreshing taste of the beer, but Ben just saw the mountain.

Ben fell to the ground.  He never intended for this to be the end.  But a phone call changed everything.

“Hey, Ben.”  He knew right away that something was wrong.  Just by the tone.  His father liked to joke, enjoyed some freedom in his dialogue, but there was no hint of humor, no desire for multiple meaning.  He could sense this in just two words.  He knew something was wrong.

“Well, mom went in for her checkup yesterday and they found something.”  Immediately the word “something” conjured up a giant ball of cancer in his mothers body, reaching its pale white tentacles into her vulnerable organs.

“Yeah?”  Ben’s voice softened.  He was a kid again, thirteen at basketball practice.  All of the years of cancer, all of the calls, it all came back to him.  He thought of his mother.  How scared she must have been.  He wanted to talk to her, more than anything.

“Where is it?”

“It’s in her lymph nodes.  We have to go in for some more tests, to see if it spread.”  His father spoke with a sigh.  It was a tired sigh.  That of a man who was the head of the household, the man who took care of things.  The father who always made Ben feel safe as a child.  It was a voice that had often faced his wife’s death, but this time it seemed different.

“What does that mean?”

“It’s not good, Bub.”  His voice was tinny, it had little force behind it.  As if he gently released the sound of the words into the receiver and wanted them to hit his son’s ears with minimal pain.

“I think you should come home.  We don’t know how much time she has.”  Those words had never left his father’s mouth before.

“Okay.”

His dad told him everything.  Stage four cancer.   It was her third bout and this time it had spread from her lymph nodes, bones and, possibly, lungs.  His mother had been given a death sentence.  It was the diagnosis that the family had always dreaded.

That was two days ago.  He always said that the only reason he would go home was if one of his parents got sick.  He just didn’t think it was going to happen so soon.

He gazed out at the brilliant snow.  It displayed thousands, even millions of points where the sun reflected as if a diamond dust were scattered on top.  His fear about his mother receded.  He didn’t want to jump to any conclusions.  He had to be strong for her.  He rocked his head back and forth as countless little miraculous coordinates of light illuminated.

In this brief clearing from the trees was a small window.  His blue eyes glowed a brilliant crystal as they melted into the clear sky above.  His tall, lean body sank into the snow.  The cool mountain breeze flowed through the sandy brown curls of his hair.  The sun warmed the exposed skin on his face.  His nose filled with the aroma of pine needles from the evergreens.  He was not attached to this place, but flowing through it.  His body expanded in all ways, out to the trees, up to the sun and sky, and deep into the jagged mountain beneath him.  His body was gone, if only for a moment.  But in this place, he knew he was much more than the relaxed muscles encased in Gore-Tex.  He dared not take the thought any further for it all would only be speculation.

He came here to remember a state of being.  But he knew that it couldn’t last, maybe for some, but not for him.  His life was not a state of constant bliss.  He was granted windows, yes, but those who peddled a constant state of enlightenment never delivered in his experience.  It was an act.  Bliss was fleeting.  Connection was temporary.

Two skiers shuffled by Ben.  They didn’t ask if he was okay.  They just nodded through their orange goggles.  Ben smiled and thought about his friend waiting for him while gorging on granola bars.  With that simple thought, the window of clarity faded away.   He skated back into the shadows of the glades and the trail ahead.

“You ready?” Dan asked, sitting at the top of the run.

“Let’s do it.”

If silence could be deafening, it certainly was in the back runs of Vail. Specks of skiers angled down the adjacent slopes of the sprawling resort. He heard his friend clip into his bindings.  The sound was muted, absorbed by two feet of fresh powder as if they were in a sound-proof room.  The sounds dropped to the snow and fell flat.  Ben loved the silence.  He adored this natural setting.  It was nothing like his life in the city.

“I’m gonna miss this, man.”  Ben spoke as he bounced up and down to uncover his board in the deep powder.  He stood up tall, reaching his arms to the sky and soaking in the final breaths of fresh mountain air before he plunged back down.

“You’ll be back.”  Dan said with a slight waver in his voice. He wasn’t sure.

Memories with his friend flashed in front of him.  His arrival to Denver when Ben didn’t have a place for him to stay.  The month of crashing on couches.  The guy that tried to slap Dan in Arizona.   Hundreds of journeys into the Rockies.  The period when they didn’t talk much, countless late nights in the backyard, grilling, smoking, drinking, and laughing.  As the crowd around them grew, Ben and Dan remained at the core.  They came to a new city with little going for them, and they had carved out a life.

Ben never could have done it without Dan.  He never could have made it without his friends.

Ben knew he wasn’t always easiest roommate, or friend for that matter.  He knew that he could be single minded in his ways.  He had a powerful personality, intimidating to those who didn’t know him.  He had a way of cutting through the small talk, away from the bullshit that made others feel as though their lives were trivial. If you didn’t know Ben, if you didn’t understand where the source of his fire resided, he could be difficult to understand, closed, even abrasive.  But those few people that he let in understood him very well.  And when they were let into the heart of his existence, they found a structural integrity throughout his being. In everything he does, in everyone he speaks to, there is great integrity.

Ben gazed out with a slight grin, quiet and confident, “I shall return.”

“Do what you got to do, man.”  he said.  He understood.  His friend had no choice.  He just wanted everything to work out.  Dan thought of Ben’s mother.  Sweet and loving.  Strong and caring.  Dan dared not think it, but she was the kind of good-hearted person that never lasted on Earth.  As if she were being summoned somewhere else. He tried to fight the thought growing in his mind, but it was there.

“Tell your mom…Well, you know.” he hastily spoke as if hoping the noise of the words would cover up the terrible thoughts in his head.

“I will.”  This wasn’t an exchange of words, but a layered exchange of tones that meant more.

Ben stared into the blue horizon.  He fought back a well of emotion, the sting of tears that wanted to release from his eyes.  He didn’t know what to think.  He just wanted to see her.  His friend’s words reminding Ben that his mother had lymphoma.  Although he didn’t exactly know what that meant, he hadn’t heard of many lymphoma survivors.

“After you.”  Ben motioned.

“No way.  I’m not taking your tracks.  Not today.”

“It’s okay.  I just want to sit up here for a few moments.  I’ll meet you at the end of the traverse.”             “All right, man.”  Dan said as a broad smile shown through his rough beard.  He gracefully dropped into the run dancing through the trees.  Ben marveled at how graceful his friend had gotten on what were, essentially, fancy cross-country skis.  He charged through the snow, paused for a moment, then flew off a fifteen foot cliff landing in a cloud of smoke below.

“Yeah!” was the universal bro sign for I’m fine.  He cruised down the hill and onto the single trail.  He waved a pole back up at Ben before he vanished into the woods.

Ben dropped to the left of Dan’s marks.  His board reacted slowly, smoothly to the deep snow.  After about a dozen turns, he stopped, shook off the snow on his goggles and looked down at the jagged cliff that his friend had just launched.  He knew it wasn’t a good idea to do it alone, but he was going anyway.  He took a deep breath and looked around.  His chest began to flutter.  He could see a small portion of rock that had become exposed from Dan’s leap.  For a moment, he thought about riding around it, but he couldn’t.  A force beyond his mind turned the board straight toward the rock.  The slick board gained momentum as he closed in.   Holy shit, holy shit.  The board clipped the rock, but it didn’t matter, his momentum shot him into the air.  He gazed down at the distance to the ground.  He hit the powder with a loud poof as if he jumped into a field of fluffy pillows.  The board shot out from underneath him.  He checked his body into the snow and popped back up and rode away.  The electric rush pulsed through his nervous system as he looked back.  Ben crossed between thick evergreens and carved thick, powerful arcs into the pristine powder.

He didn’t understand snowboarding as a sport. It was a spontaneous act of creation.  He danced with the mountain, constantly shifting and adjusting his line in unison with the slope in front of him.  His turns weren’t a mechanical process, but an expression of art, as if he were carving out his name in a form of snowboard calligraphy.  He could look back up at fresh turns on the mountain and know that they could only be his.  No one else could replicate them.  Every semi-arc gave him power, a power that could only come from within, a power born through him.  Ben was that source.  He had never found anything stronger outside of him.

This was the key with anything true in his life.  He wasn’t just a person experiencing.  But rather a point of awareness intertwined with the surroundings.  Flowing with the trees, dancing in the powder, and breathing with the mountain.  The boundary where Ben existed independently of his environment vanished.  There was no line.  Never with a job, never with a woman.  And now he had to leave it and he was terrified that he was going to forget how this place felt.  This crisp memory was going to blur.

Ben could only maintain this connection, this blending of self and environment for short sessions.  His mind chattered again.  He worried, felt insecure, or uncertain.  Life grabbed him again.

This was the only difference between his life and the prophets.  They could maintain this state of existence that Ben only knew in windows.  We talked enlightenment, debated it and strived for it. To this day he still doesn’t know what the fuck enlightenment means.  But he knew that something to strive for would be to extend these grand moments, but it was difficult.  He didn’t know why, but it was much harder than the peddlers of nirvana claimed. To just be aware, to just quiet the mind.  They just are.  It seemed so easy, but it wasn’t.  Why not?  That’s what the gurus have never exacted.  Why was it so hard to just be in the moment?  Why was it so easy to forget?  Why did Ben have to escape his life to the mountains to remember how to connect with his surroundings?  Why did it happen most when he was alone?

He wanted to hold onto this act.  He wanted to remember.  But, as with all things, he knew this memory was temporary.   As the run shallowed out, he reluctantly filtered into the single trail that led back to the groomed runs and, somewhere further down, to Illinois and his mom.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007ZH20Q8

http://www.amazon.com/Within-Ben-Scott-Craig/dp/0615643280/ref=pd_rhf_cr_p_t_2

It’s a vacancy inside.  There’s really no other way to put it.  That’s what it feels like to lose the one you love.  An no matter how hard you push, how much you to either positive or destructive, that hole in your heart remains.  An you learn to live with it, to move on, to accept that you are broken at times.  You are fractured.  And what you discover is that you aren’t alone.  Most people in the world, along a broad enough timeline are broken in some way.  It’s the loss that often brings us together.  Some are defined by it.  Forever victims of it.  But others choose a different path.  They choose to live in the light, despite the pain in their heart.

We are meant to move with the trade winds, and flow with the currents.  Attachment is the enemy here.  Fear of loss.

An for a while I found myself driving away the ones that I loved most.  I didn’t know I was doing it consciously.  It took over a year to become aware.

But I was doing it.  Somewhere in my lower consciousness.  Below the surface.  I was driving my family away.  It’s a survival mechanism.  One that’s no stranger to any psychologist.  The pain of losing someone so close, so dear to your heart elicited an automatic response.

Drive everyone that you love away.

Of course, this is a bit extreme.

It seems offensive to me that my actions can be so predictable and transparent in a time of recent loss.  But they are.  And we humans often have the same predictable responses to the same sort of events.

__

Tomatoes bud from sturdy green limbs.  Delicate green bean plants waver in the soothing evening breeze.  Rows of lettuce and spinach plants splay their lush leaves over the wet brown soil.  A blackish purple eggplant dangles near the soil.

Uncut grass wisks in the cool morning breeze.  The bright green blades sweat with morning dew.

__

Had a dream last night.

What was it about?

I was shooting baskets in an empty gym.  I think it was the old church gym that I used to play at.  The place where I faked going to church so I could play there.

How old were you?

It was now, present day.

So you were old.

Haha.

I was shooting three-pointers out by the top of the key.

What’s that?

It’s taking shots facing the hoop directly.  I was shooting and making a lot of shots.  I kept looking over at this guy who was ignoring me.

Kept making shots.

He finally came over and I realized it was Coach K.

Who’s that?

Legendary coach from Duke.

He put his arm across my shoulders and said I was a good shooter.  And that feeling, that hard-fought acceptance was the feeling that came back with me when I woke.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007ZH20Q8

http://www.amazon.com/Within-Ben-Scott-Craig/dp/0615643280/ref=pd_rhf_cr_p_t_2

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7403942n