Letters From Cancerland: Breathe In, Breathe Out
Back in the late fall, I started going to a yoga class one evening a week. I did it in part because I thought it might do me some good and in part because I have known the instructor since she was in high school and dated my younger son. Either reason, yoga was a whole new experience for me.
Breathe in, breathe out.
Let me clarify what kind of yoga class this is. This is not “hot yoga.” Or even “tepid yoga.” Our instructor calls it “relaxation yoga.” I call it yoga for the aged and decrepit. As the second oldest participant in the class – my lifelong friend Cindy being the oldest by a mere 13 months – I fall squarely in the “aged” category and often in the “decrepit” one as well.
Breathe in, breathe out.
I have very recently started doing a shorter yoga session, 30 minutes, at home to supplement the class, which is an hour long. I am still getting the hang of doing it on my own, especially when it comes to keeping my thoughts focused.
Breathe in, breathe out.
A recent home yoga session was complicated by the phone call I received a few hours earlier. A longtime colleague / friend had just died from esophageal cancer some four years after being first diagnosed and treated, the last two of those after it recurred. Many of us in the local community knew death was imminent, but it was still hard news to hear. The friend calling me had to stop mid-sentence and take a deep breath to steady himself.
Breathe in, breathe out.
So when I rolled my mat out on the living room carpet and started to move into a simple pose (well, they’re all simple), I realized my thoughts were not centered at all on yoga or mindfulness. They were on my dead friend and our last conversation about his hoping to live long enough to see his granddaughter’s first birthday in February.
Breathe in, breathe out.
I yanked my thoughts back. Okay, mountain pose and ... scrape the sky and ...
Breathe in, breathe out.
I thought of this friend and the conversations we’d had in the courthouse, sometimes in the halls and sometimes in the parking lot, about cancer and treatment decisions. About living life to the fullest in our own particular ways, not in ways that others expected. About the beautiful blue of the autumn sky overhead.
Breathe in, breathe out.
I moved into some of the floor poses: twists, cat / cow, modified pigeon. I tried hard to think of only my breathing, of encouraging my muscles and mind to relax. But my thoughts kept edging off. This is the second friend I – we – have lost to cancer in the last four months. Why them? Why not me?
Breathe in, breathe out.
I went into the child pose several times to regain my concentration. Come on, April. I repeated some poses, slowed down my breathing. Somehow I managed to make it through the 30 minutes. Not easy.
Breathe in, breathe out.
We always end our yoga class with the shavasana pose. To the uninitiated, shavasana is the corpse pose: supine on the yoga mat, hand at the side, relaxed. I do the same at home when I get done. Corpse pose.
Breathe in, breathe out.
Soon the timer on my phone went off and I brought the yoga session to an end. Usually I come out of shavasana slowly, “waking” myself to the world again. This time I rolled out of it and back onto my feet quickly. I was grateful to be back among the living. I was thinking of those friends who no longer are. All I could feel was my gratitude for the time we did have together in this world.
Breathe in, breathe out.
April Nelson is a multiple myeloma patient and columnist at The Myeloma Beacon. You can view a list of her previously published columns here.
If you are interested in writing a regular column for The Myeloma Beacon, please contact the Beacon team at .
Lovely essay, Ms. Nelson.
Keep on. Breathe in, breathe out.
Yes. Let’s.
Maureen
No pun intended. Your column is breathtaking. Sending you peace, and thanks.
Deb
What a great article and so timely. A very young myeloma patient I know is in hospice right now, waiting for her call to leave this earth and finally be released from the disease that has imprisoned her. Sadly, she will be leaving a young husband and daughter and many family members who will miss her terribly. I, too, wonder why some of us do well and others do not. Obviously, some have a more aggressive and harder to treat case of multiple myeloma, but I still think about it.
On a lighter note, yoga is awesome and my husband regularly does it and I have joined him sometimes. It's a great form of relaxation and exercise. I also take a class at the gym called Active Adults, but I like to call it "Zumba for Old and Injured People."
We need to laugh and breathe in, breathe out.
Take care and enjoy life, my friend. So glad you are here with us.
This is a nice column, April, but I am sorry that your good friend passed away from cancer recently. The yoga and mindfulness sound like a nice practice. I do a stretching class from TV some days of the week, and when I do, I feel more flexible during the day. And with singing and walking, comes a lot of steady breathing; vocal warmups help with breathing too! I hope to get into a more regular exercise class this year also. Thanks for the description of the yoga you are doing! I think that another term for gentler yoga may be 'restorative yoga,' which sounds interesting.
Thank you for sharing your experience in such a lovely way. Yoga and daily meditation have been key for me recently in completing my initial treatment regimen and an auto stem cell transplant. I am so thankful to have those practices. It is challenging to bring that mindfulness into daily living with myeloma, amongst all the other things that demand our attention. Breathe in, breathe out is a good mantra to keep in the present moment. Thank you!
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