For two weeks in August twenty–some years ago I thought I was dying. Here’s how that mistake happened.

I went to my doctor to show him a scattering of salmon–colored patches on my back thinking it was some dumb rash. He grabbed his biopsy kit, took two bites, gave me the number of a specialist and had nothing else to say, so good–bye.

Five days later, I went to see Dr. Z. at the university center up on the hill. He told me I had a rare skin cancer, snipped three more samples, and scheduled me to return in two weeks. I was too shaken to ask questions.

Back out on the street in the sunshine, I told myself, “A good patient reads up on his illness.” Just up the block was a world–class medical bookstore, and next to it a world–class medical library, so off I went. In the store, I cracked open a hefty clinical book. A new–car smell came out at me. I checked the index and started reading about my cancer. Messed–up CD8 cells infuse into the epidermis, thus the patches. Not too scary.

But if those cells go back inside and get into your bloodstream they turn into lymphoma. Okay, so this stuff’s dangerous. Then when I got down to the end, the last sentence said, “invariably fatal.” I rushed to the library hoping for rescue, telling myself to only look at current books from the last two years. I grabbed them off the shelf one after the other and sped–read down to where each of them concluded with a grim prognosis.

It was a slow death, five to fifteen years, so that was something, but what a death. Ugly red lesions would break out on my face. There were pictures, lots of pictures. That’s when I felt sick. I was such a private person, if I was going to have to die, why couldn’t I do it modestly with an invisible inside cancer instead of this brazen thing that would make a scene?

I drove home crying, called my friend Kate crying, called my sister and my parents crying. I was scared, but maybe angry even more than scared. I had stopped doing my maniacal activism. I had decided I was going to have a personal life and be happy. I had decided it was my turn. But the cancer said…

“You don’t get a turn.”

It was a hard two weeks. Everything was so intense. The blue of the sky had never been so blue. The days passed in slow motion. I got lost inside each moment, yet each one flashed by at lightning speed.

When I went back to Dr. Z. and told him how scared I was, he said, “No, no, no. I’ve never lost a patient I caught in the first stage and you’re right at the beginning of the first stage. I promise you, you will die of something else.”

I still don’t understand how those books could have been so wrong, but I was going to be okay and that’s what mattered. I had to do chemo, but not the classic kind. They gave me an ointment to take home with me. Twice a day I had to rub it into the patches. First, though, I had to put on latex gloves. Don’t touch it, but rub it on your body. Weird. But blessedly there wasn’t a single side effect. No nausea. No throwing up.

Still, it took three years to get to remission, so…

I had plenty of time to meditate on mortality.

I asked a sweet couple I knew, one an oncology nurse and the other a hospice counselor, “Is it mostly like in the movies where people get a diagnosis and rise to the occasion?”

“Oh, no,” they said in chorus…

“Most people regress.”

Well, that was me. I had tumbled down into despair and despite my good news, I hadn’t climbed back out. I knew I was handling my illness wrong. I was calling my medicine poison, which it was, but that was not a good attitude to have about something I was counting on to heal me.

Then I read Love, Medicine and Miracles, by Bernie Siegel. He tells stories of exceptional patients, not that they all beat their cancer in the end, but they refused to surrender. They took charge of everything it was in their power to take charge of. And…

I caught their fighting spirit.

I called a number in the back of the book and tracked down Susan, an oncology nurse who did imagery work to promote healing. As soon as I sat down in her office, I told her, “I’m here to get my image and then I’ll go.”

She had the kindness not to laugh at my naïveté. She smiled gently and said, “It doesn’t quite work like that. You’re the one who will find your imagery. It will work for you because it comes from inside. It might take more than one visit.”

Twenty minutes into the first session images came…

Tears behind my eyes, me throwing cancer out the upstairs window of my childhood home, my hands knowing how to rip open cancer cells, spilling their evil harmlessly on the earth which matter–of–factly recycled it into loam. That kind of thing.

And they came to me. I didn’t have to struggle for them. It was like being on vacation. So different from the last couple decades of exhausting myself scrambling hard in the service of good causes.

By the end of the fourth session, I saw what I was really working on. Not cancer, but my life. I needed to do something with my underlying despair about myself.

Susan said I might want to paint pictures of my healing images, to help me experience them more deeply and to hold on to them. And so I did, starting with the image of my hands from the first session…