Cancer and Quilting: journeys towards wholeness

I am restoring a quilt. I feel a pure pleasure in laying down a line of perfect stitches. Hand sewing freezes time.

There’s also a satisfaction in taking pieces of fabrics and creating a beautiful new whole. And that’s life’s journey is it not? New pieces/events fly at us. We catch them in unsteady hands and wonder what to do with them.

I spoke to a New Hampshire artist who battled cancer. She wove bracelets while receiving chemotherapy. She told me that the act of winnowing out the bad/deformed beads from the good ones was for her an allegory of separating the bad/cancerous cells from healthy cells. Art as sympathetic magic. She later sent me two of these bracelets. (Picture posted) I wore these bracelets to my interview for nursing school.

Nursing school is big on pharmacological and technological “interventions” (therapies to help the patient). This year I have learned that the most simple, basic, and humble actions are underestimated. As one professor said, “You are the intervention.”

I was assigned a terminally ill patient whose moans could be heard down the hallway. She had regularly refused treatments and medications. This is the patient’s right. Nevertheless, it’s a difficult moral dilemma when the refusals lead to care that falls below the standards-of-care. I dreaded the assignment.

I managed to clean her wounds and body and medicate her pain. I held her hand. I felt a sense of grace when I fed her vanilla ice cream. Peggy, the hospital chaplain, held her hand and sang her to sleep.

The force of entropy is at work on our bodies and spirits: inevitable as the oceans’ tides. So too is the force of knitting tissues, calm washing in our minds: the union of wholeness. My oncology patients see entropy in errant tissues out of rhythm with their bodies. I have observed their cycles as a nurse. It is never a linear journey like many of them wish. It is never: surgery, chemo, then immediate cure. It’s always a roller coaster, many cycles, good days, and sometimes truly terrible days. It’s like quilting: a process that unfolds at its own pace.

Wholeness does not mean that we will be free from cancer or disease. We are all living and we are all dying. Wholeness is being alive. I am alive today. Today I will live.