It is late August 2005. I was enrolled in my second year of a Masters in Creative Arts Therapies program at Concordia University in Montreal. I went to my family doctor for some odd symptoms and was sent for an MRI. My doctor’s hunch was correct - I was diagnosed with a pituitary brain tumour – hopefully benign. This one was shockingly large. The two brain surgeons I consulted recommended surgery. I was terrified. I booked it. Then cancelled. I consulted a woman who claimed to be a shaman. “Get the surgery,” she insisted. I rebooked the surgery.
But then I took a deep breath and decided to ask the universe for guidance. “Should I get the surgery?” I whispered into the vastness. And then I unplugged from everything and everyone in order to listen for the answer. It was hard to hear above the clamouring and panicked voices of family and friends urging me to get the tumour removed. But then the answer came. Loud and clear.
DO NOT GET THE SURGERY!
I cancelled the surgery one last time and never looked back.
At this point, I must digress to explain that being diagnosed with a brain tumour and dying during surgery was my absolute biggest fear. My husband lost his mother that way. She died shortly after surgery for brain cancer, leaving his dad alone with three kids. It made me stop and think, why have I taken on my husband's story? It was yet another reminder of the work I still needed to do on creating healthy boundaries. My husband was only nine when his mother died. Our son was ten. What healing needs to happen, I wondered? And if I could change the storyline, would it be healing for my husband too?
I took a medical leave from graduate school. I went on a spiritual retreat and studied Five-Element Medical Qi Gong and energy healing. I then worked with a teacher to unblock the chakras. I developed a personalized creative arts intervention that blended guided meditation, visualization, an artistic physical representation of the tumour that got smaller each day, followed by drawing the images and messages received from each meditation. Some days, I would meditate on and off for four hours working to better understand how I needed to change my life and what the tumour had to teach me.
This was the year I had chosen “Keeping Still” as my theme. Every year on my birthday, I choose a theme – something I need to work on or wish to master. Be careful what you wish for! Keeping still became a way of life during my healing work.
I taught our son how to heal himself by dialoguing with his frequent stomach aches and pains – to picture the pain as an object or a creature with as much detail as possible (colour, texture, shape). Ask it if it has a message for you, I told him, and shrink it with a ball of white light. He has always been a wonderful artist and would often draw what he imagined was causing the pain as the final step in the healing process. It worked. It was empowering…for both of us. When it felt like the right time to tell our son about the brain tumour, I did it in a way that felt like no big deal. “Can I go watch TV now?” he asked after I told him.
My husband was incredulous. How different it had been when his dad told them. They had taken what would be their final family vacation without telling the kids that as soon as they got back their mom would be admitted to the hospital. The last time my husband saw his mom was right before her surgery lying on a guerney with a shaved head and blue markings drawn like a map to indicate where the surgeon would cut (my husband wrote an award-winning children’s book about it). I was determined to change the story. Luckily, my surgeon did not believe the tumour was malignant.
It was also during that time that I began to study sound healing and did what came naturally as a singer – vocalizing various tones aimed at the tumour (usually immersed in a tub with bubble bath surrounded by candles).
The following year, I went back for a second MRI. It was only then that the surgeon realized he had made a misdiagnosis. Had he conducted the surgery, it would have failed. I did not have a pituitary tumour; I had a meningioma. I cannot tell you how relieved and validated I felt that I decided NOT to get the surgery. Thank-you, Universe. Part of my difficult decision was based on the fact that once the pituitary gland is removed, so is the ability to empathize! Among its many functions, the pituitary is what sends signals to the brain for a mother’s milk to let down when she hears her baby cry. I am a therapist and a healer (as well as a mother). I wouldn’t have been able to do my job. Can you imagine a therapist without empathy? Or a mother, for that matter? (Oh, wait, that was MY mother! ha ha.)
And so, every year then two, now three, I get an MRI, just to make sure the tumour hasn’t grown. And it hasn’t. I had really hoped it would shrink, but I am not complaining. It’s been 20 years. I still don’t know how my brain has adapted to this major invader, but I am living proof of the brain’s plasticity. The medical profession isn’t interested in the spiritual healing work I did. But they are impressed that the tumour hasn’t grown. And I continue to sustain the changes in my life that the tumour guided me to make. But most of all, I am grateful to have been led to the art of sound healing.