August 2020 – Frantic Shanti

What I Learned By Feeding Virtual Fish

I wrote my previous post about Zen Koi 2 so that I could write you this one.

You’d think that with a lovely mindful smartphone game where there’s limited stress and little competition, I’d be able to sink into peaceful bliss every time I played. Oh, but no. After I fell in love with Zen Koi 2, I found myself engaging in rather unmindful behaviors.

No stress? I’ll create it! All I needed to do was swim my delightfully colorful koi around and nab a little morsel here and there. It wasn’t long before that turned into frantic darting around the pond, frustrated by the prey I wasn’t fast enough to easily catch, annoyed by lack of maneuverability (these abilities improve as you level up), incensed when a spiny pufferfish blocked my path or spikey plants slowed me down. Instead of creating space between myself and the game, I was sucked into it and treading virtual water frantically.

Mind you, there’s no time limit on playing this game, no detriment to your koi if you spend a lot of time in one area. The prey items never run out. All you need is patience…and a little perspective.

I had trouble releasing newly hatched koi, wanting to keep them in my separate, personal pond (which has very limited space), so that I could play with them again. All this, even though once a koi is hatched is it in your collection permanently, and if you release it, you can easily clone it and swim with it once more. So there’s absolutely no need to hold on. But I was grasping, unable to let go. My behavior didn’t make sense.

It really wasn’t until I found myself clenching my jaws and gripping my phone that I dawned on me that I wasn’t enjoying this. I was striving for the next level. What I had at the moment wasn’t good enough, I was always trying to increase my koi’s abilities or get to the next sigil. I wasn’t enjoying the beauty of the little fish I had now. As soon as a mating fish appeared, I started drawing Punnett squares in my head, calculating what color combinations would result, and whether I potentially needed the hatchling to complete a collection.

Clearly, this sort of behavior is *not* what I’m going for when practicing mindfulness. In fact, it is completely antithetical to it. The striving, grasping, inability to focus on “now” was very telling. These are, of course, digital creatures, color pixels on the screen. It was my mind that made them real, my mind that created the anxiety around the game. It was my mind that gave the game so much emotional power over me.

So much grasping. I can’t get back what I lost by holding on to things that can’t be.

So I was thinking. Isn’t that kind of like my relationship with my fears? They too are not real, and it’s likely that a majority of them will never be real. And yet I attach to them and let them drag me around, frustrating me, agitating me, and in general, making me miserable.

For me, my cancer “story” was about loss. Loss of hair, loss of energy, loss of hope, loss of time to do more in my life. And the more I had felt I lost, the more I clung to how I wanted things to be. But they couldn’t be like that. I had already realized that, but it wasn’t until I played that innocent little smartphone game that I saw how powerful my attachment was to the things I really needed to release.

So, the next time I played with my fish, I gave myself distance. When I found myself clinging, I took a deep breath and let go. I let go of the newly hatched koi, I let go of the need to be more than I already am, I let go of the fears about tomorrow. And nothing bad happened. My koi was still peacefully traversing its little pond. I was still sitting on the couch, phone in hand, just like before. It was a pleasantly grounding realization.

Spiny pufferfish be damned. I think I can do this.

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My need to hold on is like my cancer journey: still a work in progress. I don’t know what the future holds. But if I can make this moment a little more pleasant instead of mourning all my losses, then I will consider that a victory.

Mindfulness Apps I Love: “Zen Koi 2”

Note: I do not receive compensation for writing about apps. I highlight these products because I personally use them and have found them to be helpful. Hope you do too!

Zen Koi 2 works for me like a mindfulness/meditation app.

I admit that I would have never though of calling a smartphone game a “mindfulness app”, but as far as I’m concerned, Zen Koi 2 qualifies.

The concept is simple: lead your koi through a pond as it catches prey that it uses to magically craft into gems, which in turn are used to expand the size of the pond. The koi increases in abilities (speed, agility and rarity) and has the opportunity to mate with other koi (in a stylized, family-friendly kind of way).

The egg that’s produced has the possibility of hatching into one of several different koi, which you can gather into collections. The pond increases eight times, each one marked by a certain sigil (symbol), and at the last one, your koi ascends to a beautiful dragon by jumping over the dragon gate and establishing its place in the heavens, harkening back to the Chinese legend of the hero Dayu.

The koi is supercute, swimming around the pond and gulping the prey you select for it.

That’s the gist of the game. But what makes it a mindfulness app? The way it allows you to stay in the moment. There is no competition, and while, if you prefer, you can focus on completing the collections of different koi “sub-species”, or collecting dragons, the game is not lessened if you chose not to do so.

Both koi and prey are colorful and pleasingly cute. The pond looks peaceful and inviting. Catching the prey is easy, even though they get more evasive as the pond expands. Select a prey item and the koi swims up to it and gulps it.

At the last expansion of the pond, the koi jumps over the dragon gate and transforms into a colorful dragon.

Once you hatch an egg into a koi, you can release the fish if you don’t want to keep it. The koi remains in your collection, able to be cloned and played with again, “paid for” with easily-obtainable pearls that appear in pond flowers, as rewards, or, if you prefer, by watching ads. There is no time limit and your koi is never in danger. You don’t suffer any penalties by taking it slow. This is all about living in the moment, playfully chasing the prey needed for that given sigil level and enjoying the surroundings.

You also get a personal pond outside of gameplay to showcase several koi and decorate with plants and rocks as you wish.

What was my most definitive test of whether this worked as a mindfulness app for me? I woke in the wee hours of the morning with too many worries on my mind. Usually I meditate when this happens and I can fall back asleep, but last night my thoughts raced too much to allow that sort of calm. I popped open this app and after about 15 minutes of helping my koi meander through the pond, I found distance from my worries and was able to sleep a few more hours.

Zen Koi 2 is worth looking into if you’re interested in soothing, mindful distraction.

Breast Changes, Revisted

One of the most popular posts on this site has been, “I Didn’t Expect THAT: Breast Changes“, so I thought it might be useful to revisit the subject now after a few years have passed since my initial lumpectomy for breast cancer.

Before my surgery, I had been frustrated by the lack of information about how much tissue would be removed along with my tumor. Or maybe I was just too afraid to search. In either case, I had prepared myself to lose a good chunk of my left breast. All the “after” photos of lumpectomies that I found on the internet were not pretty.

However, my tumor was only 1.6cm at its longest, and was on the outer upper quadrant of breast, and this turned out to offer me the best of all possibilities. There was amazingly little breast size lost. I was impressed. So was my surgeon.

So, fast forward to now, three and a half years down the road. The scars, one for the lumpectomy and the other for lymph node excision, remain very uninteresting in a good way. Only three sentinel lymph nodes were removed, and the scar for that sits up in my armpit. The lumpectomy scar is situated a bit further down and into the side of my breast. But it’s not obvious.

This is the original photo from my post on Nov 1, 2018, already over a year and a half since my surgery.

Three and a half years after surgery, today: the top scar is the lymph node excision, the bottom one is the lumpectomy.

The biggest issue I have had with the lumpectomy scar is that the scar tissue there feels like a biggish lump itself. Not frightening for me anymore, but when I went to a new gynecologist who, I suspect, forgot that I had had breast cancer (HOW? That’s the main thing I talked about!), she felt that area and said, “Oh, there’s something here” in that ‘I’m-going-to-say-something-scary-in-a-calm-voice’ kind of way.

Yes, it was just my scar tissue, but for a split-second I wanted to let myself freak out. Didn’t, but wanted to.

Sorry about the headlights…I just wanted to show how “normal” the shape of my breasts is. The weird thing is that it’s actually my left breast that is a bit BIGGER now. Who would have expected that? (NOTE: my left breast is also turned towards the camera slightly, accentuating its size.)

But the bottom line is, as time has gone by, the scars remain inconspicuous, and if not for the fact that my affected breast is actually a touch firmer and larger than the healthy one, something attributable to radiation treatment, there’s no obvious sign that I had breast cancer.

Not a bad deal considering what could have happened.

Pre- and Postmenopausal Breast Cancer — Hey, Talk About the Difference, Would’ya?

This follows on the heels of my last post, which discussed a couple of things that doctors say to cancer patients that I wish could be handled differently. Today’s post is specific to breast cancer and deals with menopausal status.

Okay, okay, the last time I wrote about this I concluded that healthful living was important regardless of whether you were staring down breast cancer before or after menopause. But I need to back up a bit, because there’s more that needs to be said.

It is a fact that the risk factors we hear about the ones associated with postmenopausal breast cancer, as are the recommendations for decreasing your risks. It took literally months for me to fully comprehend this.

Wish I’d known that earlier! Following my diagnosis, I beat myself up trying to understand what I did “wrong”, when in fact, I was doing everything “right”. I hadn’t worried about breast cancer because according to the informational breast self-exam card hanging in my shower, my risk was super-low.

Well, yeah, it was. For postmenopausal breast cancer.

It was only later, talking to my clinical counselor, that she described younger women at informational sessions for new breast cancer patients, looking dazed and not understanding why they were there. Vegetarians, non-drinkers, non-smokers, active exercisers, lean and fit. Isn’t that the lifestyle that we’re supposed to live in order to reduce our cancer risk? You mean it might not work?

The reality is that all bets are off for premenopausal breast cancer. The average age at diagnosis is 63, which means that there are a lot more postmenopausal women with cancer who have been studied, and so there’s more that we know about them. And that’s why everyone talks about them. For them, higher bodyweight is positively correlated with development of cancer, but higher weight in premenopausal women has a mildly protective effect. What’s up with that?!

I was already a full year into this blog, which I started a year after finishing my chemo, and I was STILL ranting about those stupid risk factors that mean nothing. But the truth was that I hadn’t yet connected the dots about menopausal status and cancer risk. My medical team kept saying things like “you’re still young”, and I didn’t understand what they meant by that, until my clinical counselor mentioned that things didn’t go as anticipated for younger (read: premenopausal) women.

So my anxiety about what I did to bring cancer upon myself could have been brought down a few notches (and my early posts on this blog would have been less acrimonious) had I known that the preventative information is aimed at women in a different stage of life.

Instead, I was frantically asking, “What should I do now? What should I change?” and was perplexed by the response: “Just keep doing everything that you’re doing!” “But that’s what gave me cancer!” (Obviously, it wasn’t, but in my mind, there was some preventative measure I hadn’t taken that left a crack open for cancer to squirm through.)

So, okay, no one knows exactly what causes breast cancer in an individual, and this is not the post to attempt tackling that question. But truly, it would help if doctors would admit that the view is *even* fuzzier if you haven’t yet gone through menopause. Psychologically, I would have been able to cut myself some slack, and perhaps it would have, just a teensy bit, eased that frustrating sense of helplessness.

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This is probably a good place to remind everyone that, even with everything we know about cancer and how it develops, there’s still so much we don’t know. Genes, environment, the alignment of the planets…who knows where the blame really lies?

Hey Doctors! Before You Give a Cancer Diagnosis…

From time to time, I think back on my cancer experience (who am I kidding, I think about it every single day!) and wonder how things might have gone differently. Generally, I write for the cancer patient, but this post is directed at the doctor who delivers the diagnosis.

So…dear doctors:

Think very carefully about what else you want to tell a new cancer patient right after you tell them that they have cancer. It better not be important, because they’re not going to hear it. Once you deliver the diagnosis, a cancer patient’s executive level cognitive processes freeze, making comprehension difficult. Any further speech sounds like the “wah-wah-wah” talk of the adults in Charlie Brown cartoons.

For example, I was told two things by my radiologist, when he came into the room after he looked at my diagnostic ultrasound: (1) you have cancer, and (2) you’re going to be alright. Guess which one of those points I didn’t remember. I’m sure my doctor was trying to be cheery and supportive, but I can guarantee you it didn’t work.

Let’s face it, no matter how gently a doctor tries to break it to you, being told that you have cancer is devastating. It’s perfectly normal to be blown back by the news because your life is going to change drastically for at least a while, and maybe permanently. But, geez, doc, you should be prepared to repeat the same info at least several times and cut out the unnecessary bits. Your newly-designated cancer patient is going to have to need time to process the news!

Tip to the patient: bring someone with you to your subsequent visits who’s good at taking notes and is on an even keel. I brought my husband but he barely wrote anything down. Turns out, he was just as shocked as I was and wasn’t taking the news any better.

Hey, doc, I get that this is hard on you too. So please don’t think I don’t appreciate what you do (especially these days!). But please consider some of these things before you deliver your next cancer diagnosis. Thanks. 🙂

Following up on that, doc, the next thing that I would suggest is that you not give overly specific responses to questions based on assumptions you’re making. I asked about the recovery time from surgery, since I was terrified by the thought of going under the knife. Mine was early stage breast cancer, and ultimately I had a lumpectomy, but that same radiologist had warned me that recovery would take 4-6 weeks. Up to a month and a half?!? I whimpered something along the lines of, “But I have to work,” at which point he reminded me that my health was more important than my job.

I don’t know where he pulled out such a long recovery time, but being given that sort of time frame compounded my anxiety. Maybe he also said that some people have a shorter recovery time, but of course, I wasn’t processing info well and all I could remember was “4-6 weeks”.

So I would recommend to doctors, (1) if you really don’t know specifics, don’t offer estimates–I was back to work the week after my surgery, btw–and (2) please don’t blow off a patient’s concern about the importance of other aspects of their lives, like going to work. Yes, ultimately, as the saying goes, “if you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything.” But for many of us, if you don’t have a job, you don’t have health insurance! Everything in our lives is interconnected. It’s all important. Please keep that in mind.

Hey, nobody likes to deliver bad news and I know you’re trying your best. But the only thing worse than telling someone they have cancer is being the one it’s being told to. So please, be gentle. You will go home that evening possibly bummed that another one of your patients has cancer.

The patient is going home that evening embarking on one of the most frightening journeys of their life.