PEACE for iflitifloat - Rest in Peace, dear friend — Page 6

I'm voting PEACE!

Just sending a little Friday love and Peace to iflit - who is such a generous and unselfish friend. You make the world a happier place, and I just want to publicly (well message board publicly) say how much I appreciate you and your friendship.

Anything you need: you got it!

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Holy Bali Hai, the sky's a bright canary yellow!

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Updated On: 10/30/10 at 09:08 PM

Monday peace and sunshine!

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Mamie- so nice to see you post again! Love the photo!

You are still in my thoughts, iflit!

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Healing thoughts, peace, and wishes for a comfortable road to recovery for Iflit and everyone facing a similar adversity.

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Updated On: 11/2/10 at 02:22 AM

Etoile has an avatar?!?

It's like hell has frozen without a fat lady singing anywhere.

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I just got back from the doctor... had my first of three injections (four weeks apart) which will, hopefully, inhibit the tumor from growing. (I have hormone receptor positive breast cancer cells in my liver...which increases the treatment options). There seems to be little in the way of side effects (at least compared to chemo) and it won't make my hair fall out again (happy dance!!!!).

There won't be any new news, one way or another, until mid-January at which point we'll know if this treatment is working or not. I'm going to be optimistic and assume it WILL work. Therefore, I think it's time to turn the spotlight off of me (with sincere thanks for all the good thoughts and wishes) and let things get back to as normal as possible. And perhaps, throw our support to others who need it as much, or more.

That being sending good thoughts, wishes, and prayers out into the universe on my behalf is still appreciated.

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Being in my situation and feeling a bit sorry for myself at times, I've given a lot of thought lately to the idea of "fairness" when it comes to cancer. (Or anything else, but cancer is on MY mind lately, so that's the context I've been thinking about it in.)

Maybe it's part of having worked in health care for so long, but in the end, I don't believe illnesses or accidents as something any one of us deserves more or less than any other one of us...even creepy or bad people (a non-clinical and purely subjective assessment on my part)...nor am I implying that that is what you said either. Believing that doesn't change the fact that I feel angry and cheated in general, or that I'm really pissed that I might have to lose my hair again now that it's finally grown in (and looks damn good). It really SUCKS, all right...and it *does* feel, on an emotional level, "unfair". I've always tended to think of things like diabetes, HIV, kidney failure, birth defects, and cancer (and cancer recurrence) as being largely random. Granted there are behaviors that we may or may not have participated in that may contribute sometimes, but there's still a bit of a lightning strike quality to who gets sick and who doesn't. I fear I am making no sense, but I feel like waxing philosophic, so what the hell...

I also don't allow myself to second guess the treatment options I chose or to beat myself up for the "should haves" (ie not have canceled three years worth of mammograms because I was "too busy") that are so tempting to indulge in. That alone has saved my sanity (relatively speaking) more than once.

Good luck to your friend. I hope she is lucky in her treatments. It appears that there are lots of new things out there which may buy many of us some quality time. Sometimes even a lot of it...or so I've been told. And please post follow-up reports.

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Thanks NYadgal and iflitifloat!

I know what you mean about the word "fair", and it was definitely from an emotional level that I used it. You were making sense (at least to me) and for what it's worth, I enjoyed your perspective on it, philosophical rant and all.

I saw my friend last night (leave it to her to throw herself a 60th birthday party the day after receiving the news!) and she was in pretty good spirits. It was nice to see her surround herself with friends, laughing and having a great time. It's her husband that I think is taking it the hardest at the moment, or so it seems.

She definitely has a long battle ahead. I'll make sure to update from time to time. I think her next step is surgery, but not sure when it's scheduled for since she obviously didn't want it discussed at her party.

Updated On: 11/15/10 at 12:56 AM

In 1980, a Massachusetts rabbi was still dealing with the death of his 14-year-old son 3 years earlier, from a rare genetic disease.

He sat down to write a small book, using the simple, comforting voice he used each week in his sermons. He wrote the book for his parishioners, but really he wrote it for himself.

I read the book, called "When Bad Things Happen to Good People," because I had had two teenage cousins die of genetic diseases: one was born with a combination of brain cancer and Down's syndrome (then still called mental retardation), and the other was born with a horrific skin disease that left his growth stunted and his skin webbed and scabbed all over. Both were born in the late 1950s and died before they reached 20.

The questions Rabbi Kushner explores in the book are "How can there be a god when such things happen?" "Why do the righteous suffer?" and "What good is religion?"

I read the book somewhat dispassionately in 1981, because even though I had lost all 4 grandparents, they were elderly and had been ill. I hadn't yet experienced the shock of hearing a cancer diagnosis in several of my aunts and uncles who were otherwise healthy. My parents were still healthy, None of my female friends were worried about breast cancer. And HIV/AIDS was months or a year from decimating the ranks of my friends and theatrical colleagues. So, for me, it was published in a brief Age of Innocence that was soon about to end.

But as the 1980s, progressed, a lot of bad things happened to a lot of wonderful people in my life. As Shakespeare has Claudius say in Hamlet: "When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions."

I kept reading Rabbi Kushner's book--and giving it to people selectively--not because it's the most profound book ever
written, but because it is one of the simplest.

In the end, I think, Rabbi Kushner says that despite everything that has happened, he can worship a god who hates suffering but cannot prevent it. That kind of theology was shocking to some other rabbis and Christian priests and ministers, but on the whole, I can accept a god who means well and wants good for us but cannot make it all come out all right. I guess that god is good enough for me.

Rabbi Kushner wrote a new introduction for the book's 20th anniversary in April 2001. That was another golden age that was about to end. By the time, the anniversary edition was out, a very bad thing was about to happen.

The book won't cure cancer--and there are deeper and maybe more profound books out there--but it's an old friend and I come back to it.

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