Stress

It seems that recent studies of baboons and humans have shown that the higher you are in the hierarchy, the less sick you are, the assumption being that you experience less stress. Stress hormones contribute to or produce life-threatening diseases. They even cause us to develop the dreaded metabolic syndrome with its telltale belly fat.

I'm very low on the totem pole when it comes to my occupations, music and college teaching. I have very little control over these jobs, but at least I have a good boss at the college I teach at. The occupations themselves are not high-stress, except for the self-imposed stress of performance anxiety and the stress of being the leader of your own group. Being a leader means "the buck stops here" and you are responsible for publicity/promotion, program, and behavior of group members. I have relatively few gigs as a leader anymore compared to the halcyon days of the 80s, 90s, and mid-2000s. From 1985 to 2004 I led my own group at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston. The almost 20 years of stress (combined with second-hand cigarette and cigar smoke for most of the time) is undoubtedly causing some kind of bad illness which is now dormant but will soon leap up to bite me in the ass. I can only hope that my breast cancer was the worst of it.

Problem is, stress becomes a habit. Even when nothing is expected of me and I don't have to produce on a deadline (as I have been doing for a year now in preparing my book for publication) I still feel free-floating anxiety. All summer I was sidelined by a detached retina. I had nothing to do. Nothing that had to be done. This did not prevent me from compulsively doing things as soon as I was allowed to get up from my prone position. I began a practice schedule. I walked almost every day because it was the only form of exercise allowed. As soon as I could drive, I began doing chores and errands which could have been delegated to my boyfriend. When it comes to stress, I am my own worst enemy. If it doesn't come looking for me, I create it.

I stressed for over a week over the following:
a) my brother's upcoming prostate surgery for cancer (good news: lymph nodes are clear)
b) my own post-menopausal "spotting" and bloating which the Internet sternly informs me is never normal and needs to be seen to immediately
c) the ongoing stress of living with an invalid who is your boyfriend whom you love and have to see in pain and on disability
d) my gig at the Acton Jazz Cafe last Friday (good news: was a rousing success. Would it still have been so if I had stressed less?)

Now I am low-level stressing about the spotting and bloating, because as usual I trot out my logic in an effort to show my cortisol that it can relax. The gynecologist who examined me last Thursday did not appear to be unduly alarmed and could not find anything abnormal in the pelvic exam. Since I have a history of polyps, she set me up for an ultrasound in the next few days, after which presumably we can rule out several things and have a discussion. It's not the end of the problem, because there will still be a biopsy, the results of which I must wait for. (Waiting for lab test results is quite possibly the most stress-inducing thing in existence.) I could not stop myself from trolling the Internet health sites in search of reassuring statistics. Unfortunately, all female conditions involving uterus/ovaries have the same symptoms, whether the condition is benign or malignant. It appears, however, that ovarian or endometrial cancer are the least likely culprits statistically. This only lowers my stress a little because when my breast was biopsied I was told reluctantly by both internist and radiologist that 85% of biopsies are normal. I was in the unlucky 15% who had ductal carcinoma in situ which is as close to curable as cancer gets (95%) with surgery followed by radiation followed by 5 years of tamoxifen. You could argue that because I beat the odds and won the cancer lottery 6 years ago that the odds of beating them again when they are already similarly low are not good. But better than winning the Massachusetts state lottery.

Tamoxifen is an anti-breast cancer drug which has been studied for many years--it has been around since the 80s. My oncologist correctly decided that the (albeit low) risk of my cancer returning at about 10% outweighed the risks of taking the drug itself. Blood clots are a risk but really only in sedentary women older than me. The risk of endometrial cancer is about 4%, meaning that 96% of women on the drug do not develop the disease. Dr. Tabesh, whom I love, didn't prescribe a newer and less tested drug because it was newer and less tested. She always patiently answered my anxious queries. It impresses me no end that with her busy practice (she is now chief of oncology where she practices) and as the mother of 3 she has the time to keep up with the latest research papers. She also doesn't seem to be stressed out. But then she is high-ranking in the job hierarchy.

During my bout with breast cancer I also took the genetic test for BRCA1 and 2, which are sneaky cancer genes that show up in a small percentage of women who are mostly of Ashkenazic Jewish descent, as I am. Thank an inbred gene pool for that! These genes make women prone to ovarian cancer AND breast cancer. Well, I don't have the genes. But I do have 2 risk factors for the reproductive organ cancers: I am getting older and I took tamoxifen.

I have succeeded in convincing myself that my spotting/bloating (which has mysteriously disappeared over the past week) is either a) more polyps, which are usually benign but need to be removed or b) nothing (technically, the aging uterus sheds cells from its lining which is thinning out, which is a normal process.)
If it is more polyps, another surgical procedure is in order--thankfully, an in-office one--the last thing I want to see is the inside of another hospital. As I recall, it was not a pleasant procedure: the gyn refers to it as "crampy," but I would characterize the pain to be well over 5 on a scale of 1-10, 10 being labor pain.

To quote from Fight Club: Even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.

Though not the Mona Lisa by a long shot, the mirror and my boyfriend both tell me that I am a youthful, more attractive than average 58 year old. BF uses words like "beautiful," of course. I strive stressfully to exercise a lot even though I hate it (except for biking, hiking, and horseback riding) to stay on the Weight Watchers plan which enabled me to lose 30 lbs. I am not one of the 95% of Americans who do not eat enough fruits and vegetables; I easily get more than 5 a day. But cancer treacherously
laughs at fitness and healthy diet and gives Lance Armstrong a run for his money. Being at the top of his game and the sports hierarchy, he beats it, at least for now.
Cancer took the life of my clean-living, outdoors-loving mother at age 59. It cost my 48 year old boyfriend his stomach and his health. And it cost me about 1/3 of my right breast after 4 surgeries. It is a malevolent, sneaky, treacherous disease. Each time BF gets a CT scan--every few months--it has thus far shown no return of the cancer. But it has been known to return years later. So I share in his stress every time the test comes around. And using logic or reading about odds does very little to alleviate the stress.

Stress has been shown to actually kill brain cells, the only cells in the body which do not regenerate. This results in memory loss of the following type: I go into a room and forget what I went in there for. Or, as happened just now, I ask BF: What was the name of the bicyclist who won the Tour de France and got cancer? This after fruitlessly searching the recesses of my brain for a name that was just out of reach. My generation dreads Alzheimer's as people once dreaded the plague, and my friends are all convinced that they have the early-onset form of the disease. But maybe it's just stress. No--"just" is not a word that can be used with "stress" anymore. It's a killer.

I could write a lot more on this subject, but I am too stressed.

In search of lost time

My oldest friend's father (a close friend of my father's) died last week after being ill for some time and suffering from dementia. Over the past several years, most of my father's close friends have died. It has been an achingly sad experience for my father, of course, but also for me, because with each death, a childhood experience of mine seemed to die. Sometimes I wonder if my memories are even real. Unless the memory is a shared one (as with my brother) I have no way of knowing if things actually happened as I recall them, or if indeed they happened at all. With each death, I also cling hopelessly to those who are still living, like my aunt Joan and Uncle Buddy who are my role models for how a life ought to be lived. Or Irv and Phyllis, my father's oldest surviving friends, who at 90 and 91 are still hanging on to life, and not tenuously: they are active in a senior citizens" choir, and most importantly, they still have each other. I know that the day will come, sooner rather than later, when I will have to bid goodbye to my father and my relatives in their 80's and beyond. Nothing prepares us for death, it sneaks up on us unawares, leaving us full of regrets for not having seen the person just once more to say goodbye, because last time you saw them, you didn't know it WAS goodbye.

A year ago last winter, my beloved piano teacher, Charlie Banacos, became ill with a fast-moving and deadly cancer; he was dead in a matter of weeks. Even now after the passing of time, I am still inconsolable. He was the first musician/teacher to take me seriously, without sexism, and lead me down the path of playing jazz. Without him, I might not have become a musician at all. I was young when I studied with him, and like all of his young students at the time, I regarded him as a spiritual as well as a musical leader, even though he did not espouse any religion (at least not in lessons.)
He was a remarkable man by any standard, a prodigy who gave up performing to teach, who slept only 4 hours a night and practiced 14 hours a day. He made you work harder than you thought possible. He dispensed wisdom modestly. He always greeted you with a smile and a joke, and would end the lesson by shaking his fist and saying "Burn!" I can still see him in my mind's eye. I feel that his presence is still with me, inspiring me, to this day. Of course it's completely unscientific, and I could not explain how I know this, but I often speak to him, and I believe that he hears. I recently downloaded two photos of him from the internet, printed them and put them up in my piano room to inspire me to get back to practicing and to take advantage of the extra time I have now not teaching.

The times and places I remember have changed, just as in the Beatles song "In My Life."
The landscape of the college town I grew up near, where my father taught, is unrecognizable when I refer to the mental picture of what it looked like in say, 1969.
The Pizza House and Campus Restaurant are long gone, as are Waring's, the Hoot, the Disc, Phil's Record and Radio, Singer's bookstore, and the College Theater where I saw The Sound of Music, The Graduate, Dirty Harry, and Easy Rider. My high school had a facelift many years ago, and is now larger and more expansive than it was when I attended it. More often than not, when I am driving through Storrs on the main drag, it seems like a dreamscape to me. Did I really grow up here? Is there an accurate picture in my mind of what it used to be? Did I really cut class to read tarot cards in the basement Campus Restaurant, where the pizza was terrible and the air redolent of marijuana? Did I really write bad poetry for the high school literary mag pretentiously entitled VIRTU (with an accent over the "u")? I submitted some nice drawings, I think. Did I really roam the halls of school in a black hat and cape from the Portobello Road flea market in London? I seem to recall a crew-cutted gym teacher
snarling at me that this wasn't Halloween. Did we girls really have sadistic female gym teachers? And what is it about gym teachers anyway? I have nightmares to this day that I was not allowed to graduate from high school because I had not satisfied the gym requirement. In the dream, I failed to show up for gym all year long even though I knew what would happen to me. In reality, I dragged myself to the hated gymnasium, put on the awful bright red one-piece uniform with the bloomers that didn't look good on anyone, even the thin girls, and made a pretense of playing whatever game we had to play that week. I sprained my precious piano-playing fingers playing volleyball and basketball. I was always in the outfield in softball, so clumsy was I with my lack of eye-hand coordination. No one wanted me on their team. I came in almost last in the cross-country (1/4 mile run which seemed endless) Ah, the humiliation! That memory must be accurate. We never forget our humiliations--they appear to be larger than our triumphs.

I also suffered humiliation in math class and in Modern European History (which I alone of all my friends had to drop) but let us not dwell on this pain. I did not have anywhere near perfect grades, so it's a mystery that I got into Wellesley and Vassar and was waitlisted at Brown (the women's college was then called "Pembroke")
It wasn't good enough for me because Yale and Wesleyan turned me down but accepted two of my female classmates. Disappointment. And the resultant self-flagellation because of course it was ALL MY FAULT for not working harder, cutting class, doing drugs, etc.
I fancied myself a rebel but in reality my attempts at rebellion were feeble. My brother, two years younger, was much more daring, and rebelled to the extent that he almost flunked out of high school, something I would never have dared to attempt.
I was just a little too young to be part of the hippie and yippie movements, and I missed out on Woodstock because--are you ready for this? I was too cowardly to run away with my friends who were going, because my parents forbade me. A good little girl to the last. If I had known that Woodstock was going to be the biggest pop culture phenomenon in history, I might have gone at 15. When my friends all came home with bronchitis and pneumonia, my mother said triumphantly: "You see?" But I would have risked sickness if I had known. I had to be satisfied with the movie.

Lost time, lost time--one day, today will have spun as far into the past as 1969.
In 40 years, I will be 98 if I am still living. Then I will be trying to remember what is happening now, and wondering if it really happened. And there may be no one else left to ask.