BRAIN CANDY

We are no longer calling the presence of Mini-Me as Brain Cancer. We are now calling her Brain Candy, because it’s much more fun. Brain Cancer just has a nasty ring to it, but when you tell someone at a party that you have Brain Candy, they immediately want a piece too. Well, till they find out what it is.

Anyway, in fighting Brain Candy, we have begun Operation Woo-Woo (keep track, there will be a test), which is the other much more magical and fun side to killing Mini-Me.

“What is Operation Woo-Woo?” you ask? Well, Operation Woo-Woo incorporates all that hippy stuff that many Western doctors consider completely illegit and schtupid, like energy work (reiki, acupuncture), visualization (imagine the tumor going away, ask it to leave), diet (tumors love sugar, so no more cake for me), and spirituality.

And let me jump off the boat here for a sec and talk about spirituality. Kathy was raised a Mormon, Fred a methodist. They both became atheists and raised us as such. As a result, I have never had an ounce of interest in religion. In fact, just the opposite, I’ve had a revulsion to it. Religion was scoffed at as opiate for the masses in our household and I was right on board with that attitude. But when I was told I had Brain Candy, I immediately wanted to explore Buddhism. I don’t know why. It just landed in my thoughts.

So our dear friends Darryl and Andrea humored us and took me and Jack and Rose and Saul to a chant and a service with their church (temple? I don’t even know what you call it), Soka Gakkai. The chanting was deep, primal, swirling and … safe. It immediately brought tears to my eyes and I could have listened to it for hours and hours and hours. The service was, meh, like a service, all kinds of “my life has been horrible but thank god for Soka Gakkai, because the horrible was made tolerable” (to which I always think, well, along those lines, Soka Gakkai or fill-in-the-blank religion also allowed things to get horrible, so wha?). Anyway, they do support lovely notions that right now mean a lot to me, like faith for a harmonious family, faith for each person to become happy, faith for surmounting obstacles, faith for health and long life, faith for absolute victory. That’s a hell of a lot more helpful thinking than Dragon Lady’s “You’re so effed” attitude. 

OK. That’s all I wanted to say about that for now. Stay tuned. Maybe I’ll become some sort of uber-spiritual lady chick through all this. Er not. 

Nam myoho renge kyo dude!

Oh, and my fave branch of Operation Woo-Woo so far? The acupuncture. I’m a believer. I’m going to a lovely angel of a man, David Goodell, who burns mugwort (calling all Harry Potter fans) on various points and then drills needles into me flesh. I don’t know exactly what he’s doing even though he tells me (thanks to my diminished attention span and cognitive acuity because of the Candy or thanks to the fact that anytime I’ve ever heard about anything vaguely informational, it all turns into Charlie Brown “Wah wah, wah wah wah wah wah wah” mumbo jumbo), but I feel great all day.

The above picture is of the acupuncture needles.