The Unwinding of the Miracle

by Julie Yip-Williams

  “Truly” was my mother’s response, the only word she uttered during that brief conversation as she sat, bolt upright, her face set in an unreadable mask.

  10

  Moments of Happiness

  When I was first diagnosed, I thought that I would never feel happiness in its truest, unadulterated form again. I was certain that every second in which I felt even a modicum of happiness, at seeing Mia grasp concepts like the solar system or watching Belle walk fearlessly into her first day of school, would be tarnished by cancer and that cancer’s ominous presence would invariably invade every moment of my life going forward. In many ways, what I suspected would happen has happened. The joy I felt in watching my little girls dance with abandon under the flashing lights of another child’s birthday party was marred by the thoughts in my head about how many future moments like this I will not be able to witness. In the midst of all that music and raucous screaming, I cried for all the things that I might never see.

  Even without the cloud of cancer hanging overhead, happiness can come on unexpectedly, an elusive feeling that flits across the consciousness and is gone. Anyone who raises young children understands the oftentimes soul-crushing monotony of life’s routines, of battling through fatigue to get up every morning, of rushing the kids off to school, of withstanding the stresses of the oh-so-necessary paying job, of cooking healthy dinners that will likely go uneaten by picky children, of relentlessly negotiating with the kids over when to brush teeth and what clothes to wear the next day and what treats they can have if they eat tomorrow’s lunch. Before cancer, occasionally I would find flickers of the pure joy that everyone says children bring. Happiness came when Mia said something clever and funny or when Belle wrapped her little arms around me and held me like I was the most important person in the world. Joy came, too, when I spent a long weekend away with Josh or hung out with friends during a rare evening out without children. But for the most part, life before cancer, which consisted primarily of working and parenting, was plain old hard and thankless.

  Don’t get me wrong—I always appreciated what I had, my children’s health and our comfort and well-being. I didn’t need cancer to make me grateful for everything in my life. Growing up a poor immigrant and legally blind had already taught me all I ever needed to know about gratitude and appreciating life, truly. Rather, my life before cancer had settled into a routinized contentment and acceptance of the status quo, as opposed to an existence dominated by moments of happiness, defined as elevated feelings of pleasure, delight, and euphoria. After the cancer diagnosis, I simply assumed that whatever few moments of pure joy I would have would be tainted and that unadulterated happiness going forward was a total and complete impossibility.

  But my assumption was wrong.

  On a Thursday in the first blush of fall, I was sitting across a table from my former obstetrician, Dr. C., at a nondescript eatery buried in the dinginess of lower Manhattan. We were sharing a late lunch of spinach, brown rice, and roasted vegetables, which was incidentally entirely anticancer and antidiabetes compliant. We were in the midst of a conversation that had been going on for two hours, one that had begun in the lobby of my gym, where Dr. C. had met me, one that would go on for another two hours as we walked through the streets of Chinatown. Our conversation was about everything. We first talked about my cancer diagnosis, how it had come to be, potential medical causes, my CEA level, possible future surgeries, the merits of going outside New York City for additional treatment, her belief in my ability to beat this cancer because, in her words, there is nothing typical about me. We talked about Dr. C.’s recent trip to Uganda, the reverse culture shock she was experiencing, and her plans for the future.

  It was in the middle of this conversation that I blurted out, completely unbidden, “You know what? I’m really, really happy right now.”

  Even I was a little surprised at this declaration. How is it possible to have Stage IV colon cancer and feel for even a second, much less the many moments of that afternoon, the kind of carefree joy that would prompt me to make such a statement?

  Much of it had to do with Dr. C. herself. Indeed, there is nothing about Dr. C. that is remotely typical, either. She had returned only two days earlier from six months in Uganda, volunteering at a hospital with 550 beds to which people would travel for days and at which patients would sell a cow to pay for surgery. She showed me pictures of the hospital nursery, which was nothing more than a table where babies lay, with their mothers’ blankets wrapped around them as the only proof of maternity (for there were no ID bracelets). She told me crazy stories about how she had sawed off the gangrened arm of a pregnant woman who had been gored by a bull and how she had to remove a mother’s dead fetus as well as the remnants of her ruptured uterus after a failed home delivery, all under harrowing conditions where anesthesia, electricity, resources, and expertise were in short supply. Dr. C. had shut down her practice of twenty-five years, during which it felt like she had delivered nearly every child in Tribeca, in order to go to Uganda as part of a commitment to serve underserved areas at home and abroad, a commitment she had made when graduating from medical school.

  When she closed her practice and left for Uganda, I doubted that I would ever see her again, because it was clear that she had no intention of returning to New York. I had written her an email a couple weeks earlier to let her know about my diagnosis, not entirely expecting her to respond. It was only upon her return to the United States that she read my news and contacted me immediately to convey her shock. I asked to see her then, told her in fact that I absolutely needed to see her.

  Dr. C. has, since the day I met her, always made me feel safe. She diagnosed me with gestational diabetes during both pregnancies and forced me to keep (and email to her) a daily food journal that recorded everything I consumed as well as my blood sugar levels at specific times each day. Just as she did for all her other patients, she showed up at the hospital the moment I arrived (as opposed to the end of labor, as so many other obstetricians do). She, not a nurse, held me when the anesthesiologists administered the epidurals. She coached me through the pain of labor and delivery, and was essential to the healthy arrivals of Mia and Belle into this world. As a solo practitioner, she did not take a single vacation in the twenty-five years prior to closing her practice, and in return for her devotion to her patients, her patients have an unwavering loyalty to her.

  I know my friends who are also former patients would have loved the opportunity to spend an afternoon with Dr. C. The truth is that the only reason Dr. C. took an afternoon out of her limited time in New York to talk to me was that, as unlikely as it is, I have cancer. If she were still practicing and I didn’t have cancer, we would never have talked about our lives in such an honest and open manner, entering the realm of a friendship that I hope will endure for years to come. It is a privilege to have been cared for by Dr. C. It is even more of a privilege to know and be inspired by such a good and courageous human being, who wants to, and indeed does, make a true difference in the lives of everyone she touches. In spending time with Dr. C., I was happy because I didn’t expect to be. I was happy because out of cancer had come this new relationship and a new understanding about another human being who had already been so important to me and my family. I was happy because through knowing and talking to her I felt in those moments an enrichment of my life and soul.

  The sudden prospect of a shortened life and imminent death seems to have the power to do that. Relationships are accelerated—acquaintances can become intimates in an afternoon. Because there is no time to waste, and what is more important than intimacy?

  I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the moments when I’ve been the happiest in my life. You might expect me to say it was the moment I married Josh, or the moment I held each of my squirming daughters for the first time. Alas, no—sorry, Josh and Mia and Belle. As honest as I am, I have to admit that marriage and bringing forth life, while filled wi
th joy, were too fraught with anxiety to be truly and purely happy moments. I wondered, subconsciously anyway, as I stood by Josh’s side in my pretty white dress, whether our relationship would endure. As I learned to hold my firstborn against my body, I wondered if I were going to break her fragile body or otherwise fail her as a mother. It would have been naïve and arrogant of me not to have those thoughts then.

  No, when I think of the happiest moments of my life, free from anxiety and worry, I think of the time I sat atop a hillside with three Tibetan monks in the distant province of Gansu, China, at age nineteen, listening to the haunting chants from the monastery below. I think of sitting in a Zodiac on Thanksgiving Day 2005, making my way through white, green, and blue water toward the Antarctic coast under the brightest sky and sun I’d ever seen, to meet hundreds of wild penguins. I think of riding on a bicycle rickshaw along the country roads of Bangladesh too narrow for a car, under a star-filled sky with hundreds of fireflies lighting our path. These were the most euphoric moments of my life, moments when I was at peace, however briefly, when I had no worries about my past or my future, when I had traveled alone long and often difficult distances to reach my destination, when I felt gratitude in the breathtaking beauty I was so privileged to behold, when I felt like my soul was expanding to encompass a rare and even divine part of the human experience, to see and feel places of such extraordinary natural wonder that they must surely have been touched by the hand of God.

  As shocking as it may seem, cancer has brought me moments of happiness. My moment of happiness with Dr. C. wasn’t so different from the moments of happiness I’d experienced during my travels before cancer. While cancer has the capacity to tarnish my happy moments with my children, to taint them with doubts about the future, cancer also has an incredible ability to strip away the ugliness and the things that don’t matter and to put everything in a perspective as bracingly clear as that Antarctic sky. With Dr. C., I forgot about the dreariness of that restaurant. I forgot about the uncertainty of my future. Instead, cancer gave me an ability to focus on the present, to really listen to everything Dr. C. told me, to enjoy and marvel at her stories and her as a human being and our human connection. And because cancer forces me and others to refocus on what matters, what I have found, as with Dr. C., are people coming forward to strengthen and reestablish old relationships or establish new ones—former doctors, high school classmates, fellow parents, distant friends, people I’ve never even met. It is these relationships in my life, a life that for better or for worse is so defined by cancer now, that matter to me most these days, that make me truly happy. It is in these relationships that I am finding the breathtaking beauty, peace, and divinity I once ascribed only to my solitary wanderings.

  11

  An Adventure with the Chinese Medicine Man

  In early October, a friend whose mother is facing a rare, lethal form of breast cancer strongly recommended that I go see Dr. G.W., an expert in dispensing herbs to treat cancer and other ailments as part of traditional Chinese medicine practices. Initially I was skeptical, in part because my beloved internist is dead-set against herbal supplements—he wrote an entire chapter in a medical textbook about the untold risks associated with taking them. I had also assumed that my oncologist was opposed to traditional Chinese medicine as a form of either alternative or complementary treatment (as most oncologists seem to be), although we’d never discussed the topic specifically. The fear is of course that, in the absence of clinical studies to show otherwise, the herbs might interfere with chemo treatments and have other negative ramifications, resulting in the promotion of cancer growth and additional unpleasant consequences.

  But my friend was insistent, and her recommendation was impassioned; so I looked into Dr. G.W. His credentials were impressive—PhD from Harvard some thirty-five years ago, professorships at various prestigious institutions, years of cancer research at Sloan Kettering, and numerous legitimate-sounding papers and presentations on herbal research. Plus, the breast cancer community online raves about Dr. G.W. Breast cancer is his specialty, but according to his website, he does have experience in other cancers, including colon cancer. The clincher, though, was that my friend’s mother’s doctors spoke glowingly of him, and that my own oncologist, while he doesn’t know Dr. G.W., was comfortable with me taking herbal supplements, so long as he approved in advance the herbs being used. The fact that my blood is being tested all the time also provides him (and me) comfort; if the herbs caused negative effects, they would show up in my blood.

  More irrationally, I’ve been emboldened by Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies, a beautiful and brilliant work that chronicles the history of cancer and the work of daring doctors and researchers and their patients who heroically—many said stupidly at the time—risked their professional careers and lives to develop revolutionary drugs to fight off this scourge that has plagued the human race since our beginning. If those brave souls could take such risks with potent, untested chemicals, I could roll the dice with traditional Chinese medicine, which after all has been around for thousands of years and is a part of my noble Chinese heritage.

  So I sent Dr. G.W. an email, and he called me. He told me to meet him on the corner of Forty-seventh and Broadway in Astoria, Queens, in front of the Rite Aid. Odd, but okay. For those not from New York, Queens is a borough that no one ventures into unless one lives there. Think of Vince, Eric, Drama, and Turtle of Entourage fame, who escaped the obscurity of Queens for the glamour and glitz of Los Angeles. Think of Carrie, Samantha, and Charlotte of Sex and the City, who cringed in horror at the idea of visiting Miranda in Brooklyn (gasp!); Brooklyn was bad enough for those sophisticated Manhattanites; forget about Queens; Carrie Bradshaw’s treasured Manolo Blahniks would never have touched a sidewalk in Queens. While Brooklyn offers the charm of elegant nineteenth-century brownstones and gorgeous Prospect Park (the outer boroughs’ response to Manhattan’s Central Park), Queens has little to offer in terms of aesthetics, with its streets characterized by squat and square redbrick buildings. I’ve been to Queens only a few times, because my sister lives in Astoria, and I’ve tasted on even fewer occasions the amazing ethnic food that only Queens offers.

  The point is that making my way to Queens to meet the Chinese medicine man on some strange street corner was an adventure. My parents (who were visiting from L.A.) insisted on going with me, and they dragged my sister along, too. The four of us stood on the corner of Forty-seventh and Broadway in front of the one-story building that houses a Rite Aid—my brother was the only one missing out on all the fun. I called Dr. G.W. and told him I had arrived at our designated meeting spot; he said he would be there in five minutes. My parents kept asking me, “Aren’t we going to his office? Why are we standing here?” I couldn’t answer their questions, as I was starting to wonder myself whether this guy was legit. I stood waiting with my little entourage and giggled with my sister over the ludicrousness of the situation—here I am standing on a street corner with cancer cells floating around in my body, waiting for an alleged doctor to give me mysterious herbs. I felt like I should be wearing dark glasses and a trench coat. My parents didn’t seem to find the situation very amusing. I told them to lighten up.

  As I waited, I remembered some of the bizarre adventures I’d had in China. The Chinese (as do people in most other parts of the world) have an unorthodox and frequently sketchy way of doing things, especially when viewed from the perspective of Westerners, for whom order and the rule of law are dominant forces. On multiple occasions, I nodded to a man muttering “CD? DVD?” on the streets near the famed Silk Alley in Beijing, where fake and nonfake American- and European-branded clothes, shoes, and accessories could be had for serious bargain prices. I’d then followed the man to an abandoned building where I handed over very little money in exchange for a lot of pirated CDs and DVDs. Back in the mid-1990s, it seemed like any transaction that promised little money for great reward involved some man or woman lea
ding you from a public place to an abandoned back office or stairwell where hotel rooms could be booked, tickets purchased, and currencies exchanged; it always reeked of illicitness. And I loved it all! The risk taking, the unknown, and the strangeness got my heart pumping and my blood flowing with excitement, amusement, and a real joy for life.

  I suppose waiting for Dr. G.W. wasn’t all that different. Why couldn’t a miracle cure be found on the street in front of the Rite Aid? I was curious, entertained, and excited—and somewhat wary. When my father saw a lone diminutive man in a floral shirt carrying a black satchel ambling down Forty-seventh Street, he said in a tone dripping with sarcasm, “That must be him. Really looks like a Harvard-trained doctor.” Indeed, it was Dr. G.W. “Who are all these people?” Dr. G.W. asked me suspiciously after we confirmed one another’s identity. He accepted without comment my response and allowed my entourage to trail behind us as we walked.

  We walked back down Broadway to a little café. I ordered sandwiches for myself and my parents, thereby giving us the right to use the café for a medical consultation. We climbed up to the second floor, which was empty of people. I sat with Dr. G.W. at one table, and my parents and sister sat one table over, openly eavesdropping on our conversation, which lasted well over an hour.