Have you ever witnessed the metamorphosis of the human spirit through the darkest of times? Brad Buchanan, a resilient cancer survivor and former English professor, joins us to share his captivating journey of battling cancer, undergoing a stem cell transplant, and living with the complex aftermath of Graft versus Host Disease (GVHD). In a narrative that weaves vulnerability with triumph, Brad opens up about the transformative role of writing in his path to healing and how he embraced a new philosophy of acceptance in the face of relentless health challenges.
As we navigate Brad's story, we uncover the paradoxical nature of GVHD – the condition that both fights cancer and poses its own life-threatening complications. His words chronicle his personal battle and serve as a beacon of hope for others facing similar adversities, illuminating the profound psychological shifts accompanying such journeys.
Our discussions transcend the individual stories, touching on the collective experience of illness, the quest for meaning amidst uncertainty, and the heartfelt solidarity we share with all our listeners. Join us for this episode that reminds us of the indomitable human spirit's capacity to confront, adapt, and ultimately thrive.
You can read more about Brad at https://www.bradthechimera.com and about CancerBridges at http://www.cancerbridges.org.
Have you ever witnessed the metamorphosis of the human spirit through the darkest of times? Brad Buchanan, a resilient cancer survivor and former English professor, joins us to share his captivating journey of battling cancer, undergoing a stem cell transplant, and living with the complex aftermath of Graft versus Host Disease (GVHD). In a narrative that weaves vulnerability with triumph, Brad opens up about the transformative role of writing in his path to healing and how he embraced a new philosophy of acceptance in the face of relentless health challenges.
As we navigate Brad's story, we uncover the paradoxical nature of GVHD – the condition that both fights cancer and poses its own life-threatening complications. His words chronicle his personal battle and serve as a beacon of hope for others facing similar adversities, illuminating the profound psychological shifts accompanying such journeys.
Our discussions transcend the individual stories, touching on the collective experience of illness, the quest for meaning amidst uncertainty, and the heartfelt solidarity we share with all our listeners. Join us for this episode that reminds us of the indomitable human spirit's capacity to confront, adapt, and ultimately thrive.
You can read more about Brad at https://www.bradthechimera.com and about CancerBridges at http://www.cancerbridges.org.
Go ahead. Okay, great, good evening everyone. I'm Wendy Myers. I'm one of the senior clinical managers at Cancer Bridges and a licensed clinical social worker, and we welcome you to our Wednesday general meeting, which has been going on for almost four years.
Wendy Myers:It's hard to believe, and we're so excited to bring you great speakers and wonderful open discussion on those opposite weeks, that we do not have speakers and know that this is a great place to be every Wednesday night at 6 pm if you have nothing to do or you're curious.
Wendy Myers:So tonight we've kind of livened up our group a bit over the last several months or so and we've been adding something Jen and I have always wanted to do and Dr Van Lunden, who's on the call this evening as well, have chatted about doing, you know, book reviews, and there's so many amazing books out there and pertaining to many issues that we're all thinking about and wondering about, and so we've been doing this and it's been very well received, and tonight we're continuing it. So tonight I'm going to pass it along to one of my colleagues to introduce Dr Van Lunden a little bit more, who's near and dear to our heart, and then Dr Van Lunden is going to introduce our guest speaker who is a wonderful author, brad Buchanan, on talking about his book Living with Graff versus Host Disease, so welcome.
Jen Kehm:Well, hello everyone. If I haven't met you, I'm Jen Kim. I also work for Cancer Bridges and I'm grateful to be here tonight. We have just such a. We adore Dr Josie and everything she brings to the table. She has been an oncologist for multiple years but is now just just keeping short.
Jen Kehm:Okay, all right, but we now we do. She adds so much to Cancer Bridges through many different programs, and the book talk is really cool. I know a lot of you really appreciate it as well as we do, because we get to meet the authors, which is kind of unusual, so it's a real joy. So, no further ado, I will hand it over to you, dr Lunden Van Lunden.
G van Londen:Thank you. Thank you both, jen and Wendy, and Brad, I'm very happy to hear you're here to talk about your books. You've written, you've written this sort of memoir, and Brad has written poetry also, because he uses healing as writing, as a healing method. And before we get started, I wanted to explain that Brad had some glitch in his schedule and, as a result, he will be commuting in the car and so he will have his camera turned off, but his sound obviously is on, and we're all very familiar with how our life can sometimes change in a heartbeat. And so I asked Brad, shall we reschedule? And he said no, because I promised I would be here and I will be here, and so that's the kind of man Brad is.
G van Londen:Brad is a medically retired English professor in Sacramento and he has survived two cancers. I put a timeline on it. Actually, he was diagnosed with T cell lymphoma in February of 2015, which is a lymph node cancer, that eventually he needed to receive a stem cell transplant for a year later, in February of 2016. Both of that was where he lives, is my understanding, but, brad, if I have something wrong, please correct me. But then, sadly, he had developed a second cancer, which is a cancer in response to we call it a post transplant lymphoma, which can sometimes happen in those who undergo a transplant, and for that he had to go to New York City to undergo treatment. And at this point we're very happy that he's in remission from both cancers.
G van Londen:But from the transplant he received his cells from his brother and as a result he had pretty severe acute and now chronic graft versus host disease, where the cells from his brother that were infused are attacking both the lymphoma cells, which is good because that keeps the cancer under control, but is also attacking his own body, which is not so good because that gives you a lot of symptoms out, immune symptoms that he describes in the book this book I'm going to read it on and I have a ton of questions for Brad and whether or not you have read the book or if questions pop up as we are talking, feel free to ask Brad any questions. But I first wanted to go to Brad and ask him Brad, did I say anything incorrectly?
Brad Buchanan:No, you got it all down, I think. Pretty well, Josie, I will say I'm safely parked waiting for my daughter to pick her up. So I'm not Okay, that's good. I guess commuting sounds a little more hazardous than what I'm up to right now. Okay, but anyway. Yeah, sorry folks, I would love to be on camera and so forth, but it's just isn't the best situation for me to be on camera right now.
G van Londen:That's okay, brad. I wanted to ask you first, before we get started with the rest, how does it feel for you to talk about what you've been through before, because I have a suspicion or feeling that it might be somewhat triggering, like some of us don't really want to relive everything we've gone through. So I wanted to ask you how does it feel as we talk about you and your book tonight?
Brad Buchanan:It feels good. Honestly, oh, yeah, I'm. This is sort of what I do. I wrote about my cancer even before I was diagnosed. I kind of knew I had cancer, I just didn't know what it was. Then I wrote about my stem cell transplant.
Brad Buchanan:During the transplant itself, the night before I got my brother's stem cells, I was writing things, and so I've always kind of wanted to communicate how it feels in the moment as I was going through the various phases. And then talking about graft versus host disease is really important to me, because it's kind of a mystery illness in some ways. When I tell people, yeah, I'm done with cancer for the time being, fortunately, but I have another disease, they say, oh really. And then when I tell them it's graft versus host disease, they just go what the heck is that? And so I have to explain it all to them and they nod and don't generally smile, but anyway.
Brad Buchanan:So, yeah, I think it's really important to raise awareness about GVHD and that's why I wrote the book that you're holding there, josie, because there was no patient narrative account of GVHD in book form that I knew of anyway prior to my writing and publishing that book. So I'm a writer by nature, by temperament and I'm very happy to speak about what I've written. I run writing workshops, as you've noted, where people are encouraged to write about difficult subjects and then talk about the writing, and so, yeah, this is sort of what I do these days. I'm not teaching any longer, so this is what I do. Instead of teaching, I suppose I raise awareness, I try to express how it felt, how it feels, and connect with other people who might be going through something similar to what I have gone through or am still going through.
G van Londen:Correct. Thank you, brett. And there's so much in this book right away that I had a really hard time prioritizing what to talk about today. So we'll see how it goes, but there's so much in here you did so well, and I think part of why you did so well is obviously you're an author, you're a writer, you're an English, you know words are your language. But secondly, you also wrote. You specifically brought a journal with you to write in the hospital room for all the treatments that you've been through, and then, obviously, when you went home until you couldn't, and that was really heartbreaking, and so that was one of the things I wanted to talk about.
G van Londen:But if you feel it's too early, it's too early. Maybe I see there's somebody else joining. We're up to 12 people now. But Brett likes to write, and all of us. We obviously use our eyes.
G van Londen:But then one of the side effects of Brett's disease, as part of the graph versus host, is that his eyes were starting to become involved to the point that he needed to have his eyes kept closed for it to heal and be less symptomatic and allow the different potions and lotions to stay in his in his eyes, and so that that whole process on its own.
G van Londen:I imagine having somebody put with your eyes and keeping them artificially closed with sutures, which is which is when I think about it, my stomach turns. Having somebody put sutures through your eyelids is like a medieval torture method, but on top of that, you couldn't write anymore and that really, I think, took away one of your coping methods and one of your sort of your. Your also a way to orient yourself to where am I right now. That really helped you stay in the moment and that, I think, illustrates the importance of the coping methods and the harm it does when a coping method is not able to be used, and we all have our own coping methods, but this is this is yours. I don't know if I'm jumping a little bit back and forth, but I thought that that might be something for you to maybe talk about a little bit more.
Brad Buchanan:Yeah, sure.
Brad Buchanan:So yeah, my eye troubles were definitely an unexpected and severe side effect of my acute graft versus those disease.
Brad Buchanan:This is not something that normally happens, even with people who have a stage four GVHD, as I did, and it took a long time for anyone to understand what on earth was going on with my eyes. I just started having these very sharp pains in my eyes People thought it was conjunctivitis, pink eye or what have you and it seemed like dozens of ophthalmologists came into my hospital room to poke in, prod my eyes and see what was going on there, and it took weeks actually before I was sort of packed up and sent to the head ophthalmologist at UC Davis Medical Center, who was the only person who had any experience whatsoever with ocular graft versus host disease, which is what I had. So, yeah, I was functionally blind for about a year and a half and the doctor who finally diagnosed me with ocular GVHD recommended the Tarsauri fee is what it's called where they sewed an intricate system of little loops into my eyelids. It was kind of it felt like something that would happen in a horror movie.
G van Londen:Yeah, that's what I mean.
Brad Buchanan:It's like a torture myth is it did not feel great at the time and UC Davis is also teaching hospitals. So one of the doctors who sewed by eyelid shut was expert and the other one was not expert and messed it up the first time. So they had to redo it later, which was extra excruciating. But yeah, I mean, in the final analysis my problems were kind of a sideline to my real predicament, which was that I had life threatening acute graft versus host disease of the gastrointestinal tract. I won't go into the details there because those two are pretty gross. But yeah, I got to the point where I simply couldn't and wouldn't eat. For about two months or so I had to be fed on a in a to. Basically a bag of nutrition was hung from the IV tower and trickled into my veins that way and it was hard to learn how to eat again after all that came to pass. So yeah, there was about six months where I was just too sick. I was, as you say, visually impaired. I just couldn't write anything about what was going on with me, what had gone on with me. My mother, who was among my care team, with my wife and my dad, she tried to, you know, as I was home and recuperating sort of from all this. She she was like don't you have anything to say about all that experience? Like you're a writer, come on, let's go. I mean, she was doing it with the best of intentions and I had really nothing to offer for quite a long time. But eventually, you know, part of the problem was I didn't adapt very well to my blindness. I never learned Braille, for instance. I was kind of a denial about my blindness. I thought, oh, you know, this is just a temporary thing, it'll go away. I had little slivers of vision at the very edges of my eyesight because what I what had happened was my corneas had been scratched up by the acute GVHD. So it was very actual, very superficial damage to the eyeball and eventually they could tell that underneath the corneas everything was okay. So that I did regain vision pretty fully after corneal transplants, which is where they cut out that portion of my eye and sew in another sewing activity. Fortunately for this I was unconscious, unlike with the tarsaur, anyway. So they sewed in corneas from a donor corpse into my eyes and healed up okay, and so I did have usable vision again because of that type of transplant. So yeah, it was.
Brad Buchanan:It was quite a quite an ordeal, and it was really hard to put any of that into words for a long time. Finally, I did come up with three words about my the worst of my days with acute GVHD. Those three words were crouched over darkness. That's what I finally gave my mom by way of like. That's what I was up to for those weeks. I was in the hospital for 139 days for my transplant and wasn't sure I would ever get home again. So yeah, finally I did, you know, produce three words.
Brad Buchanan:I finally did adapt to my visual impairment by devolving a writing system of sorts. I would write huge dark characters on a piece of paper, maybe 10 words to a page. I couldn't read what I'd written, but I knew something was there where I made a mark of some kind. So I would. I hired a college student actually to to type in these. Eventually I started to write poems about, and they were all about blindness. Actually, I couldn't. I couldn't write about graph versus those disease.
Brad Buchanan:Yet the disease is such a paradox to kind of thing where it's the disease you get instead of cancer that in some ways protects you from cancer too. It's encoded into your DNA. There's no way to fight it or, you know, excise it from your body. Unlike some cancers, all you can do, all they could do, is give me a bunch of prednisone, treat it with something called ECP extra corporeal photophoresis and gradually sort of manage the worst of the GVHD symptoms. So I could get well enough again that I said, okay, I'll start eating and trust that the food was not just going to rocket through my body at the other end in a matter of seconds, which it was doing for a while and slowly but surely, I had more than 100 treatments of photophoresis over the course of the next seven years or so and yeah writing was.
Brad Buchanan:Writing was tough in those times, but I finally did devise a way to write, at least about my blindness, which in some ways was an easier topic to tackle than GVHD.
G van Londen:I think, brad, you were doing a stem cell transplant in general is not a joke. It's a pretty serious intervention. But what Brad experienced is rather unique. He had a very severe case of graft versus host disease. So I don't want anybody here who is about to undergo transplant to just for it, this book, this story for them, to scare them off. I don't want that. It's supposed to be enlightening and powering, because there's different learning pearls in Brad's book.
Brad Buchanan:Yeah, and I feel the same way. I 100% feel the same way, dr Josie, and honestly though, as you say, my transplant entailed some unexpectedly severe side effects, I would do it again, 100% at the same institution, even that I had it. And yeah, I wrote the book. My oncologist said at the time you might scare people away actually from getting the transplants that they need, and so I've tried to say in the book and say every time I talk about the book.
G van Londen:Oh, that's why you did that. Yeah, you do stress that in several parts of the book that you will do it again.
Brad Buchanan:Yeah, of course, yeah, because I know, I 100% know that I needed that transplant and I believe it's kind of a medical miracle that stem cell transplants are even possible. I'm starting to learn more about the history of the research that led up to this amazing idea that you could transplant someone's immune system into someone else. Anyway, just a marvel of human ingenuity. I just got unlucky. Honestly, I had the gold standard donor, a younger male sibling, my brother James but for some reason or other maybe it was because he got some weird tropical disease that didn't show up on the DNA test or what have you His immune system just kind of lashed out. Maybe he was.
Brad Buchanan:I sometimes joke that he's getting his revenge for all the times I mocked him or bullied him or whatever when we were kids and I was the older sibling. But yeah, a transplant is the gold standard for treatment of the type of cancer that I had and I would 100% do the same again. And I just felt like GVHD needs to be talked about more openly and not kept as a kind of little secret or minimized to people who have it Okay, and I think we need to treat people going into transplant as adults and say here are the possible consequences. It can be fatal, it can be very severe, but you stand, 100% stand, a better chance of surviving with a transplant than you would without it.
G van Londen:Yeah, yeah, I like that weighing the benefits with the risks. There's a few things she just touched on and one I really thought was funny, almost, but probably not for you in the moment. You were hospitalized a day before I guess, your brother was going to donate the cells and your brother was flying in and you had all these thoughts what if his flight won't arrive? What?
G van Londen:if because that's very real. You underwent all your preparation. You underwent the treatment to eradicate your bone marrow, so it's ready to receive your brother's bone marrow. And what if your brother doesn't come? I mean, that is, your road is very selfish. I guess it is selfish, but it's also sort of like a matter of life and death. The others go ahead.
Brad Buchanan:Yeah, yeah, and that, like I was actually admitted to the hospital on January 3rd and I only got his stem cells on the January 11th.
Brad Buchanan:There were eight days of intensive total body irradiation that I received and then a huge blast of chemotherapy again as well, just to wipe out my immune system completely. I chose that slightly more violent form of the stem cell transplant process because I felt that anything short of that would not get rid of my cancer. That was my oncologist opinion anyway. So we had to do that and the nurse coordinator who orchestrated the transplant gave my brother a pretty stern speech ahead of time. She said you know, eventually Brad's going to get to the point of no return where if he doesn't get your stem cells, he will die. And my brother relayed that to me, you know, a few months or whatever it was not months, but maybe a couple of weeks before I went in. And that just kind of preyed on my mind is yeah, like they're going to take me past the point of being able to survive without a new immune system in my body and he's going to have to come and rescue me. Basically is how it felt.
G van Londen:And he did. Well, that's how it is. Yeah, yeah, some aggressive forms of blood cancer. You need to be blasting somebody with treatments to really kill all the tumor cells. The hope is that it does that and rescue with someone else's immune paracels to give them the ability to live in the world and fight infections. And also sometimes we want that graft versus lymphoma effect where these stem cells from a donor fighter cancer, and so that's all very delicately balanced. And if it's, you know, experts need to do this, and so there's only transplants being done in certain centers, and I guess Brett was lucky that is in his backyard. Some people need to travel very far to have this done.
G van Londen:But as we were talking about this, I think there's a lot of things that Brett has been through and all of us cancer survivors have been through that can be very traumatizing, like having this cancer takeover, going through certain procedures that are super scary and uncertain what the outcome is, being in the dark literally if your eyeballs are closed.
G van Londen:I guess all of you get the picture that there is a lot of psychological torture here too, and at some point Brett became a little confused from all the medications he was on. He became a little what we call delirious, and so it's not surprising that, besides the physical after effects, there's also significant emotional after effects that interfered with his ability to do anything, even writing, and most of us here know it takes a while for you to recover some of the things that you've lost, and it took a while for Brett and Brett, I wanted to go to your subtitle. The subtitle of your book says how I stopped fighting cancer and I started healing. I don't know if you wanted to comment a little bit on that, because I thought it's very interesting when you pick that subtitle.
Brad Buchanan:Yeah, well, there's a chapter in the book that's really all about the kind of cancer warrior mentality that I had to adopt, because I was terrified, of course, as anyone would be, but I was also unusually squeamish, I think you could say, and tended to pass out when I was about to get a blood test and just had a very Did we lose you?
Brad Buchanan:No, I'm still here. Okay, I had a very frightening session of sort of informational and orientation session before I began chemo, where I got like clammy palms, I broke out in sweat, I felt like I was going to faint. I had to go sit in the hallway, in fact, while my wife listened to the rest of the briefing. So I kind of needed that cancer warrior mentality to go in and say I'm going to fight this cancer, it's going to kill me, or I'm going to kill it, and so on and so forth, like military language. Oh yeah, 100%. And that is a pretty conventional feature of cancer discourse in this country, as it is in probably lots of other countries too. But dealing with an illness like graft versus host disease, that approach, that language, the violent language of needing to fight and kill cancer and so forth, that just didn't apply to GVHD, because it's the result of a change in your genetic identity. Your DNA is altered as a result of the kind of stem cell transplant that I had. So there's no way to fight that alteration. All you can do is to manage it, to manage the symptoms, to cope as best you can With a disorder. Disorder, that's really kind of what it's who you are in some respects because it's part of your now altered DNA. So I kind of take the reader through the necessary psyching up of going into battle with cancer. I wrote lots of poems that were like bombing. At one point my colleagues said we need to take an aggressive approach with your cancer and I liked it to throwing a Molotov cocktail. I had to change that mentality.
Brad Buchanan:When it came to healing for the consequences of my transplant, the warrior mindset taps into your fight or flight reflexes or freeze reflexes, and that's not where healing happens. Healing happens in your paris, as I've been learning through my subsequent readings. I've had to do a lot of reading in books like the Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Vander Coke, just a fantastic book that kind of explains a lot of my shutting down after my transplant.
Brad Buchanan:I was sort of in what he calls the reptile brain, which after prolonged trauma or after prolonged you know, severe illness, you just kind of shut down. You say please make it go away. You don't have the energy to fight, you don't have the energy to do anything anymore. You just kind of sit there like a deer in the headlights and so anyway, that's yeah, I had to stop fighting because there was nothing to fight against with Grav versus Oast disease. And it was only when I stopped being in that mentality that I could start tapping into the healing emotions that writing helped to bring out. And I really do believe that engaging with the emotions surrounding your medical traumas, or any kind of traumas, is necessary to heal properly from them and to heal fully from them. They're what make us resilient in the long run.
G van Londen:Yeah, I might know you can hear me. Yeah, I like how you explained that, Brad, and I saw a lot of people in the audience shaking their heads that they recognized what you've gone through and I liked thank you for explaining that. I have a few more things that I could go into, but I also wanted to see maybe let's pause here in terms of me firing to stay in the same language firing questions at you and like a military firing squad, let's see what other people here, if they have any questions. If not, don't worry, no pressure here, and then I will just keep asking my questions. Do it? Does anybody in the audience have any questions for Brett?
Speaker 5:Hi, this is Robona and I. Just one question being a writer requires a lot of caught what I'd call cognitive load. Yeah, you really use that brain, and having came out and just being as sick as you were really challenges the ability to use that brain and yet you're writing is excellent. So what did you get there?
Brad Buchanan:Thank you. Thank you, ramona. Well, yeah, I definitely had cognitive challenges after chemotherapy and my my transplant. So it took me a while to feel like I trusted myself in some ways to write. I mean, fortunately, I think for most people and I'm not an expert but fortunately the effects of quote unquote chemo brain are reversible, and at least in my case they were. They were temporary. You know the things I started to write after my transplant.
Brad Buchanan:I don't think we're my finest literary efforts, but the message I want to convey about writing is healing is it doesn't have to have literary merit to be therapeutic to you. You know, and this is why I facilitate writing workshops where you only offer positive feedback on each other's writing, because we know that even if something is written in a style that maybe we don't happen to admire or whatever, that writing, that thing, was important for the writer in that moment. And in writing one's truth, however basic, the language or however you know, impaired the cognition that produces it and indeed my cognition wasn't there, who knows, maybe it's still being impaired Hard to say that. That's the writing that needs to happen for that person at that time. And and so I've kind of thrown out my old conceptions of literary value which I, as a an English professor, you know, grading students Creative writing.
Brad Buchanan:I cringe now to think about it, but I used to do that I would try to evaluate, you know, what they had written against the standard of literary excellence that I thought I kind of was the guardian or gatekeeper of that and I think about it now.
Brad Buchanan:I'm just like, oh, I probably discouraged them from ever attempting writing against some of them. So yeah, I guess I'm here to bear the message that chemo brain is, I think, generally temporary. It was for me as far as I know. Again, some people of my acquaintance might differ, but in any event, writing can, I think, help at whatever stage of recovery. What happens to be from from that, from that cognitive impairment that chemo can can sometimes produce? Yeah, that's a great question and thank you.
G van Londen:That's what I was thinking, but I wondered if your insistence on writing somehow helped, made a difference for your cognitive recovery. I don't know. I don't think we will ever figure out in our lifetime. Yeah, it is answer. Help your Ramona.
Speaker 5:Okay.
G van Londen:I think she's saying yes.
Speaker 5:I think it does, and it also suggests that the fact that he was willing to the Brad was willing to push himself. The comment you made about doing your recovery, it may actually played a. Rolling exercises like any exercise, cognitive exercise, correct, you were good.
Speaker 5:Yeah, the key to how you were able to get yourself back to that, that ability to write like that, or maybe create a new ability to write at a level that you didn't write before- oh, I don't know, brad, I don't know, I don't know that having lived through that experience may have created an empathy or a level of empathy that to get a level that you could tell things or say things you couldn't have said well, I've certainly lost any and all inhibitions about writing, that's for sure.
Brad Buchanan:Yeah, there's stuff in the book my relatives might cringe at, you know. But honestly, yeah, you know I write about erectile dysfunction in the book, very common side effect of, you know, severe chemotherapy and radiation. That's just how it is. And you know I take comfort from a wonderful poet, john Keats, who wrote beauty is truth, truth, beauty. That is all you know on earth and all you need to know. In other words, if you say what is true for you, that is beautiful, if it's, if it's, if it seems so to you and to other people, if it resonates with them, then it will have meaning. And honestly, I there's a lot of anxiety these days in the writing world about, you know, ai taking over our task as writers. But my view and my response to that is to say well, writing is important to be to us, not because it's an ideal combination of words, but because we are embodied creatures who are expressing how it feels to be embody, and no robot can ever do that for us.
G van Londen:I like this. You should write a piece to the New York Times something like this Well, it'll be in my next book.
Brad Buchanan:I'm researching and writing another book about writing as healing and all the kinds of things we're talking about today. So that'll be a chapter in that book.
G van Londen:So we're good in time. I apologize, I'm a little scared or even it's really hard to nail this book in an hour. In the chat I put a link to Brett's writing as healing descriptions. That is in the on the West Coast. But I also put a link to a session he will do with us on Saturday mornings on the East Coast, which is March 23rd, I believe, at our time 11.15 am. It's all for free, and then Brett will lead that session An hour long. Writing is healing. I also put in the link in the chat a link to the book that Brett referred to, the body keeps the score, by Bessel Fender Kalk, which is a rather dense book but it's very easy to read and you could just there's some repetition there.
G van Londen:You could just focus on the chapters that are relevant to you. But the gist of his book is that sometimes when we've had psychological trauma, we may not remember per se and one of the ways that we might remember is by working with our body physically. Because our body physically holds the score, it may trigger memories. So sometimes when you, for example, go to my official therapy I don't know if many of you know what it is sort of a medical massage where they ease your tightness that you all may have when you've been traumatized. If they work on you to ease those tight spots in your body that are ready to fight, it may trigger memories that then you take to your therapist to continue to talk about it and try to rewrite your story, the pieces that you may have lost, and give them a place and heal from them as far as you can heal from trauma.
G van Londen:I don't know if I make sense, but the book is all about the fact that your body physical body can help you heal. It holds memories. Anyway, that's a lot of detail that may not be relevant to today. Thank you, Ramona. You trigger a large discussion here. Well, yeah, what did you want to say, Brent?
Brad Buchanan:No, it's a great question and I well, I wanted to piggyback a little bit on what you've just said, Josie, Like, yeah, I've. Since I've been through all this, I decided to overcome my inhibitions about getting a massage and, believe me, I desperately needed many massages to kind of reconnect with my body. One of the things that GVHD patients often say is I feel like my body is no longer mine, that it's like a collection of badly assembled body parts, like Frankenstein's monster. And that was absolutely how I felt. I felt like it was just a disconnected series of you know, organs and limbs that just didn't make sense any longer because there was no feeling, that sort of ran, there was no good feeling uniting them, and massage was an important way for me to kind of re-inhabit my body to accept its limitations.
Brad Buchanan:I have basically, you know, embraced the truth that I am disabled as a result of my illnesses and as a result of what GVHD and the treatments for cancer have done to it. I also have done a lot of therapy, including therapy with EMDR treatments, which is a stimulation of the brain on both sides through eye movement and sometimes involving for me it involved also music that would sort of engage both sides of the brain while we talked about trauma and so forth. So yeah, and I've written about those things too, because you can recreate the moments of insight that you get from therapy, you get from you know massages, or that you get from music. You can retell those stories in writing too and kind of shape those back into the narrative that you're talking about.
Brad Buchanan:Josie, One of the things I'm learning in my research for this upcoming book is that telling a narrative where you accept your own transformation of your illness and kind of give it a positive construction, if you possibly can. Some of us can't, because it was just too painful and left us damaged, but I'm doing my best to shape narratives of my life that don't deny what's happened to me and my body, but to cast it in a light where the transformation has some positive aspects to it, which it certainly has. I mean, for one thing, I get to claim status as a genetic chimera, a mythical monster that you know. The people who came up with the stem cell transplant decided that they would use that word as a medical term to describe people who've had their DNA altered in the fashion that I've had by this type of transplant.
G van Londen:That means in the most acute sense. I guess all these Ancestri tests that you see everywhere, where you just spit in a tube and you send it to see if you have family members on the planet. That won't work for Brad anymore, because his DNA is altered, although in his case he was donated by his brother but if you're donated by a random stranger, yeah that's a good point.
Brad Buchanan:Yeah, it also raises interesting criminal questions for evidentiary purposes if you leave DNA at the scene, if it's like someone else's DNA partly. Anyway, there's mystery novels to be written about that.
G van Londen:Yeah, I think so, brad. I wanted to say something else, and then I'll ask if anybody has another question. By the way, are we triggering? Anybody here Did anything of what we're talking about here today? Is that triggering you, making you get to Hebrew Creepers? Okay, you will tell us if it is right, because we can pause it, and so I think what Brad is going through will resonate with a lot of you to some degree.
G van Londen:I think what Brad went through is maybe a very extreme case, but I think most of you resonate with that, and we discussed the last topic he brought up is how he doesn't recognize what he is. But he also struggled, brad. You also struggled with who am I and what makes me me, which I liked, you picked those words what makes me me? Sort of an existential question, which brings you to what you started to talk about grief, and the final stage of grieving is finding meaning and purpose in whatever bad you went through, which some of us can and some of us cannot. But I guess those are all struggles and questions that you ask yourself as you're trying to heal and maybe transcend to a higher level of your being. I guess Would you like to expand a little bit on that, or is that too much to do? No, I'm happy to.
Brad Buchanan:Yeah, I'm happy to talk about that. At various points in my medical odyssey I was told you're probably going to die within X number of weeks, months, days, whatever. When I was diagnosed with my second type of blood cancer, my oncologist said, yeah, you have about a year to live. Fortunately he revised that opinion after going to a conference where he heard about a clinical trial for people in my exact situation and here I am today. So he was wrong, but the clinical trial proved as effective as advertised.
Brad Buchanan:But anyway, to get back to your question, I did a lot of grieving during my illness because I felt like, yeah, part of me is going to be forever gone as a result of this medical ordeal. There were times where I thought I'm simply going to cease to exist. So I spent a lot of time walking around Sacramento coming to terms with that, walking to the local cemetery. I picked out a spot, in fact paid for it, made arrangements, wrote the will, the advance directive, all that stuff. I mourned for myself and my life as I was going through all these things, because it would have been irresponsible to ignore the strong likelihood anyway that I was going to die and, in a way, that radical acceptance of the immediate, clear and present danger of death freed me up to live in the moment fully after I had done that work of mourning in real time. So I don't.
Brad Buchanan:I do grieve certain things these days, like I grieve the end of my marriage, which I think can be. The marriage was really badly affected by all my medical ups and downs. Yeah, I grieve the end of my career. I could have reasonably expected to teach at Sacramento State for another 20 years or so but that was all curtailed due to illness. But I don't grieve for who I am today because I am different and I have a future that is different from the person who you know was thinking about his life 15 years ago.
Brad Buchanan:But I kind of mourned that person some time ago. I didn't know what I would become next, but I'm glad I became someone, even if that someone's rather different than who I expected to be at this point. But and honestly that's my. You know, people have a tendency to come to me and talk when they've received a very bad bit of medical news, you know, and the first thing I tell them, if they want any advice, is I say you need to radically accept that you're going to die. You just have to come to terms with that straight up right now, and I mean we all will die sooner or later, but putting that on the front burner and not denying it is very important, because then it brings you up later on to come to terms with whatever may be happening. To sort of make your peace with the idea of death is job one for people in truly dire medical predicaments, as I was.
G van Londen:Thank you. Thank you, brad. I wanted to ask the group if this do they have any questions about this or, in general, any questions? We covered a lot today.
Wendy Myers:I just have to thank you, brad.
Wendy Myers:I am the therapist actually at Cancer Bridges we didn't get a chance for me to introduce myself before we hopped on here and my licensed clinical social worker that have been doing this about 33 years and what you've said is just absolutely correct on multiple levels, obviously from your own standpoint of view, but in general and I always say, we have to address the elephant in the room first and that is the ability to talk about the hard stuff, but that hope and reality can, they can live together and that once you be able to do all the logistical things and talk about all those emotional things of loss because it is all loss, you're right, totally grief work Then you can move on with hope and a sense of purpose. And what do I do now? How do I set intentions going forward to be able to find my way because I'm alive and have a life worth living? So thank you so much for your courage and your wisdom and your knowledge to be able to help others and to live a life with purpose. It's awesome.
Brad Buchanan:Yeah, thank you. Yeah, purpose is really important for anyone, and especially for people who've had, you know, medical catastrophes before them. They have to. I have to a reconceive of my life as having a different purpose than I might have chosen, you know, if I had had my brothers. But here I am and I absolutely embrace the purpose that I've been given.
G van Londen:Brad, before we split, there's a question. If you can explain what the writing is healing workshop entails, would you be able to explain that in one or two minutes?
Brad Buchanan:Sure, yeah. So the way it works is the facilitator gives a prompt. In my case, I usually present a poem with a theme. The prompt is always optional, though, and if someone wants to write about something different, you know, whatever just happened to them, that is 100 percent OK. And then we write to that for a certain amount of time. We get positive feedback, and then, if there's time, we write again. So that's sort of what we're up to, that, and I do these with blind writers, with cancer, cancer center writers, you know any, but anyone is welcome. We don't check people's credentials at the door.
G van Londen:And you? You don't have to share. There's some participants who write don't share.
Brad Buchanan:Yeah, it's always optional. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
G van Londen:Only positive feedback, so you don't have to be afraid that you're going to be burned down to the ground.
Brad Buchanan:No, exactly. Yeah, we try to be very we try to be very supportive of everybody.
G van Londen:Yes, and surprisingly, we've had several times and you know Brett has done this many more times than I have but that's some people really feel what they write and have an emotional reaction and so I put the link in the thing. I think it's also on Kansas Bridges calendar, but sometimes it falls off. That's why I'm giving you the direct link to that's my website, the link for March's session with with Brett on the East Coast. On the West Coast, it's like our midnight, which is for me a little too too late to still write something, but this is our Easter Coast morning time. Um, brett, I really enjoyed having you here. We miss seeing your face, but I let me see if your face is in the book here. This is, this is Brad. We can show your face this way and it was. Oh, there he is. Well, you look the same. Ok, fine, that's Brad, and I'm really happy that we got to do it today and to be continued, hopefully I'll see you all next month with the next author, chat, which is Liz O'Reardon, who is a British breast cancer surgeon who writes about her own breast cancer experience, which is breast cancer specific, but, just like with Brad, there's a lot of things that are applicable across the board to other tumor types. You don't have to have the book read.
G van Londen:And it looks like in April, brad, you don't know this yet because it just developed today, but your, your wife, may come on in April, I think. Ok, right, april 17th, I think it is. April 17th is a Wednesday in April at 6 pm hour time, where she will talk about her book already toast, which describes her burnout related to caregiving for Brad, and I will talk with you, brad. Brad and his wife are still amicable. They're separated on friendly terms, so I can say that here. But not every marriage survives a big ordeal like this, which is sad. But to be continued, brad, I will stay in touch with you and hopefully I see all of you next, plus the cats, ramona and the cat too, next next month. Thank you everybody for coming.
Brad Buchanan:Thank you, dursy, and thanks everyone.
G van Londen:Big hugs, thank you.