Together In Friendship
“I like geography best, he said, because your mountains & rivers know the secret. Pay no attention to boundaries.”
In May, 2005, “Bald Parties” had been occurring over a month’s time. I think this was my fourth one, but after a while I simply lost track of time. In the end, time was the least of my worries. I just knew I needed the present time.
My friends and family were hosting bald parties to honor people going through chemo treatments. Specifically me. Freshly shaved heads of loved ones offered me significant comfort so I wouldn’t feel like the only cue ball in the billiard room. It worked! I felt supported and loved. “Now, who wants to take my next treatment?” I offered it to the group. No one took me up on it.
My friend, Kristen, approached me to ask, “Do you think, when you’re ready, you would like to teach yoga at Burn Camp?” Kristen Quinn is the Psychosocial Program Coordinator with University of Utah’s Burn Camps and Burn Camp Programs. I was sitting on the steps of her back yard having a discussion with another friend, a nurse. . “Why can’t they just place the I.V.s in my leg?” I extended my leg like an exclamation mark as I lamented my ‘resistant’ veins in my left arm.
I was so caught up in the moment, the swirling chaos of the present, the frenetic thoughts of what seemed, at the time, an abundance of medical intervention placed upon my body (and spirit), feeling the invasion and insistence to ‘perform’ accordingly. Already parts of my body, my veins, were resistant to their intervention.
Kristen was asking me to take my mind to the next step. She alluded to an ending of the chaos when she offered my interest a new home to live in.
“Sure” I nodded.
“Yes, I would like that,” I affirmed more convincingly.
I had been so caught up in the immediacy of MY treatment and MY scheduling, so enveloped in the world of MY young children, so engrossed in the academics of MY students. I hadn’t thought about anything that might bring me joy. I had forgotten that this was even an option for me.
“Umm, when?” I asked.
“Let’s get you through this and then we can talk about dates at a later time,” she said.
Like the secrets held in the mountains and rivers, the boundary I was being asked to dismiss was not that they lay before me or even one that existed behind me; the self imposed boundary that denied me even the possibility of joy resided within.
Science tells us that the parts of the human brain that are critical to handling emotions aren’t fully developed until we're in our twenties, but we can take little steps when children are young to help them manage their feelings. I knew that before I could do this for anyone else, I had to regulate my own emotions in a way that didn’t overwhelm me.
Then, I could teach others.
When I practiced yoga with a bandana on my head, I longed to be the person I once was. I loathed the apathy associated with me accompanied by the description of ‘the bandana lady in the back of the yoga room who had (whisper voice) CANCER’. At the time of treatment, I found little difference between my own personal struggles with emotions and the struggles of the campers I had recently met at Burn Camp, except for one detail: their coping strategies appeared more advanced than my own! Once again, I was reminded that kids just want to be kids.
“I just need to be around people who don’t have to ask me all the time about my scars.”
“I’m excited to be with people who are my friends and don’t feel sorry for me.”
“I’m excited to challenge myself on the rock wall. Usually, people baby me, and I want to try hard things.”
“No one tells me I’m lucky to be alive here.”
“My favorite part of camp was the yogurt (yoga). But the funny thing is that it’s not the kind of yogurt you eat.”
-Quotes from Burn Camp campers
For me, the practice of yoga helped organize my thoughts and feelings in a way that kept them from destructively taking over my body and mind. I didn’t want to be the only cue ball in the billiard room anymore. But, for a while, I was required to. It helped to have friends and family join me in my ‘bald headedness’ playing in the grand distraction game of “Who is really sick?” But once their hair grew back and mine did not, it became evident again. As I learned to feel the ‘Big Feels’ and not freak out, my confidence grew that I could teach this same coping strategy.
Camp Nah Nah Mah (Ute for “together in friendship”) is just one of five Burn Camps offered through the University of Utah Hospital’s regional burn unit. All of those who attended the camp were one-time patients at the hospital which is responsible for the biggest geographic region of any such unit in the United States. Brad Wiggins, Nurse and former Burn Camp Director and Kristen Quinn founded and developed the U of U Burn Camp programs in 1993. Brad explains, “Firstly, we want to teach our campers that they have raised themselves up and out of a situation that’s very difficult, very challenging and to become a survivor means a lot of things.” Brad continues, “It means acceptance of your injury, secondly it means that you’re not going to let your burn injury hold you back from attempting to move on with your life, and finally that you have “truly moved on to a place of peace with what’s happened to you”.
“Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you —all of the expectations, all of the beliefs —and become who you are.”
Perhaps I became a teacher to become a student? Perhaps my students have been my teachers all along? As I continue to move forward with my teaching (and my life), I am reminded of something one of my campers told me, “When I get anxious about surgeries, I’ve learned to calm my body using breathing and I've even learned ways to help my friends feel calm too.”
