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Cancer Patient
The Medicine Tree

(From Bedscapes Community Forum newsletter, January/February 2000)

"I had a lumpectomy (stage one breast cancer) under general anesthesia in 1998 in Portland, Oregon. I awoke in the recovery room in a flood of tears in the darkest place I can ever recall. I mean that. A nightmare of being far far from home, lost, as if I were on a different planet. I could not stop weeping. I told the male nurse who was becoming very alarmed that I had to get to "my people" back in my room right away.

I was so distraught and insistent, I know he thought I was nuts. Nonetheless, he rolled me to my room where two friends were waiting. As soon as he left, I told my friends Tori and Jane that I had to get outside. I was so desperate and vehement, they didn't hesitate. With one of them holding my gown together in back and the other the i.v. thing, I walked down the hall, unsteady and swaying, to a door that led to a grassy area outside. It had rained. I can still feel how sweet the wet grass felt on my bare feet. We headed for an evergreen tree a little ways away. The moment I touched its trunk, everything cleared up and I landed firmly, solidly, back in this reality. Suddenly I was clear-headed, calm, in my body, at home. Even as much as we three know and appreciate the power of nature, we were still stunned at how quickly and completely that touch brought me back.

The rest of the story: The nurse who was assigned to me ran out shrieking, scared that she had lost track of me. She demanded that I come back right then. I was able, easily, to tell her to stop shouting and that I would be back in a few minutes. She turned and left. In a little while, we went back in. I left the hospital the next morning on the arm of that same nurse who had calmed down and apologized. And in-between, I did not take a single thing for pain."

Dee Packard