More yoga teachers smoke than you
know. My addictive personality couldn't
survive soft tissue cancer. My sister,
the matriarch and my pseudo mother through my 20’s and 30’s ended up in a coma
after her first chemo treatment. She found
out while I was on a beach in Rhode Island getting engaged. I came back with my news first, so being who
she was, she waited another month before she told me. “I have Leiomyosarcoma, I have a chance for a
clinical trial” and she assured us the doctor told her she wasn't in the “last
2 outs of the final inning” (she loved baseball and he used these baseball
analogies the only 2 times I met with him, which made me want to scratch his
fucking eyes out).
She didn't make it into the trial;
she downplayed this as no big deal and decided to try a very progressive chemo
treatment. It was a beautiful Indian
summer day in October, I was in my second weekend of advanced yoga teacher
training, exhausted happy and soaking in an ancient wisdom I thought was sure
to save my soul. She was in a coma was all I heard, the rest of the message was white noise, except that she was rushed to the hospital.
This is when I learned the difference between
doctors and surgeons, doctors are like Mother Goose telling fairy tales and
assuring us there is still hope and surgeons are autistic idiot savant
detectives, just laying out the facts.
It was decided in the infinite wisdom of the doctor while my sister was
in what he called a semi-coma to biopsy her cancer once again to see if there
was a different treatment approach. My
brother-in-law didn't want to go down for the surgery so I volunteered. I waited in the pre-op area and held her hand while they prepared her for surgery.
I went to the waiting room and
about an hour later the surgeon came to talk to me, he said they were able to
obtain a viable sample easily and he must have seen the look of relief on my
face, as he looked perplexed, so I pressed him further. He said that he could have taken the sample
from almost anywhere inside of her body, that the cancer had made its way to
all of her organs and the soft tissue of the stomach. He told me in just a few sentences of facts
that my sister was riddled with this cancer and would most likely not
survive. I tried to press him further
but he could tell I hadn't been told the true nature of her illness, he excused himself rather abruptly.
I held it together and made my way
back up to her room on the 5th floor. I was reeling, what I sub-consciously
knew was now confirmed.
I waited until she was brought back
up and my brother-in-law arrived back to her room before I made my way calmly down
the elevator and outside to the smoking area where another sister was and said “give
me a cigarette”, she refused and pleaded not to start, she knew how many times
I had started and stopped. I had begun
to live a much healthier lifestyle in these past years and finally had gone a few
years without them. I didn't care; I
needed something, anything to take me away from the reality of where I had been
the last 3 hours. I smoked on and off
since I was ten years old and they were like a faithful old companion to
me. The ritual, the smell (however
terrible after they were put out) became a place of comfort. I didn't want to deal with how I was feeling and
this was my familiar route. I needed
something and I was not ashamed. I used
to be ashamed of my smoking habit when I first started practicing yoga and had
come back to it on and off, but this time it was just my old friend to
accompany me through the pain, take the edge off and give me something, anything to
do.
I was still teaching yoga and seeing
clients privately and hiding the fact that I was
smoking, trying to cover it up with showers, hairspray and essential oil, but I
know it lingered more than on my clothes, it lingered in my heart and
soul.
My sister died 6 weeks later, she decided to let go shortly after her first bedsore appeared, it was
the one thing I knew would be the marker for death to come, I've seen this
firsthand before. I kept smoking, I kept
teaching and I kept grieving. I lost
hold of my meditation practice and asana was just something I had to do to
keep things moving. All the things that had
saved me had not mattered for a time.
One morning 4 months after my
sister died I awoke coughing and crying and I knew I could handle the rush of
grief that was about to take hold. I
threw out my cigarettes that day and cried for what seemed like an eternity.
We don’t know what goes on inside
other people or what their experiences have been. Even I tend to offer judgment before
understanding. I offer this story as
invitation to offer compassion before judgment because I think most of us are
doing the very best we can.
