Cancer journey co-pilot's log 6.26.23. Operation: Get Kara Home is complete after eleven brutal days at the hospital.
Status report: She is resting now. Exhaustion and psychological medical trauma have taken their toll on a body already challenged by breathing problems, trial drug side effects, steroid side effects, and various complications of colorectal cancer. Yet despite these afflictions, Kara is, by her own account, gathering her inner forces for the next mission: Transformation. Global change. Metamorphosis.
To an impartial observer, The Picante Pupation Project may present overwhelming logistical challenges. If metastatic colorectal cancer were a war inside her body, which Kara does not agree with, then she is fighting a war on multiple fronts, increasingly with an embattled supply line. Billing specialists, insurance directors, even health care professionals themselves. To put it bluntly, in my four years of co-piloting to date, there are times when other people are even worse than cancer.
But the challenges go deeper than institutional. Deeper even than the complications of cancer and its treatment. They penetrate into agreements made with oneself long ago that will not show up in the health metrics of modern conventional medicine. Accumulations of ultimately self-destructive contracts with loved ones in the stresses that contribute to disease in the body. Admittedly nonscientific speculation here...
Nevertheless, agreements Kara has made about her self-worth, by her own report, have challenged her ability to emotionally navigate the treatment of this disease since her diagnosis. "Cutting the bullshit and accepting love is key for me," she wrote in one of her earliest blog posts. To facilitate pupation, the agreements made during traumatic childhood family experiences must be released and restated for the objective of true freedom, regardless of quantifiable developments in the latest attempt to stabilize Kara's cancer.
Simply put, if cancer is a war, then the time calls for reinforcements, and these cannot arrive if one does not ask for them. Nurturance, support, assistance, to help Kara carry on through the oncology campaign. Thankfully, she is working hard at accepting the help she has needed for some time, as evidenced by yet another blog post written by me at her request. Going forward though, it is our hope that the originator will soon resume this blog and share her thoughts after going to hell and back. And that she, not I, will sign off again with...
Until next time.
--Her husband, Charles
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