Torture

I dreamt I was in a line of people slowly walking. Somebody pulled me aside and said I was going to be tortured. "Why me?" I asked. "Just because," he answered. He told me they were going to put needles through my eyeballs and do other painful things to me.

I was terrified, but I had no choice about going. Then I figured if I took two Ativan, I could get through it.

This was obviously a cancer dream. You can't fully get over it, although with the passage of time it haunts you less.

Another train of thought got into my head that night. I had just finished reading Anita Diamont's new novel, "Day After Night." She tells the story of four young women refugees from Nazi Europe, who, in 1945, got to Palestine, then ruled by the British. Each woman has suffered terribly, in different ways. They thought they were heading towards a new life of promise, but instead they are locked up in Atlit, a British detention center for illegal immigrants. The novel is based on an actual event, the rescue of more than 200 detainees and their placement in various kibbutzim.

I often have nightmares after reading books or watching TV shows or movies about the Holocaust. Who wouldn't? But maybe the dreams are more intense for descendants of survivors and for those whose relatives died in the Holocaust. In my dreams, I am usually being chased by Nazis. In my dream the other night, I was being herded in a line.

My maternal grandfather was from Germany and had a large family there. He came to the U.S. before trouble started and urged his siblings to join him when the situation worsened for Jews in Germany. They were professors and businessmen, and they said, "Our boys will never hurt us." Of course, their "boys" did hurt them. Many perished in concentration camps, while a few fled to Israel. My grandparents stayed safe in the U.S., where they lived in the New York area and had three children, two girls and a boy. My mother, the middle child, told and retold the stories to my sister and me.

So there I was being pulled out of a line, about to be tortured by needles. It felt pretty raw. When I told Katie, she had a positive interpretation. She focused on my will to survive: In the dream, I accepted the situation and was determined to get through it with help from my good friend Ativan.

It could also be a sign that I should be doing ads for Ativan.

Things to do while on the disabled list

I've spent a lot of time in the hospital being treated for leukemia and then recuperating at home with low energy, and along the way I discovered ways to maintain some type of fitness.

If you're confined to a hospital room or if you can't move around much at home, you can always do a little gentle yoga. A hospital nurse showed me how to do some easy poses in the bed, and I also remembered some chair yoga from a Rodney Yee video on back care. You can just sit in the chair and gently twist from side to side, or do a similar twist lying down or sitting up in the bed. Also good in a chair is simply keeping one foot on the floor and then placing the opposite heel, flexed, over the knee for a good stretch, doing the same on the other side. Also in the chair, you can bend over and let your arms and head dangle.

Back in the bed, you can lie on one side, then the other, and do some leg lifts. You could also use a pair of pajama pants or whatever else is lying around to make a strap. Then lie on your back, raise one leg at a time, and place the "strap" in the arch of your foot while anchoring the strap in you hands. You can also do both legs, raised, at a time. This provides a good stretch. Ankle rotations are also helpful.

Sit-ups in the bed, as many or as few as you're comfortable with, help maintain your core strength.

You can keep some arm strength by doing wall push-ups. Shoulder rolls are a good relaxer, and stretching always helps. Some days I threw in a few wall squats, putting my back against the wall and then doing the motion of sitting down in a chair and staying there for as long as I could.

When I was in the hospital, sometimes for weeks at a time, I tried to walk every day, and sometimes I rode a stationery bike. When I couldn't leave the pod, I walked back repeating healing and calming words in my mind. The nurses usually had an idea of how many lengths constituted a mile; on one larger pod it was 44; on a smaller pod it was 54. Walking while counting helped me to take a break from worrying.

When my blood counts fell, my "yoga" nurse, a muscular, friendly man named Julio (sorry, never knew last name), suggested I send love to my white blood cells. So I did it while I walked.

Mary Jane Ott, a nurse practitioner whom I first met while she worked in the pain and palliative care division, was now working more with children. But she had become a big support and always seemed to find me in the hospital. She's so serene that just being around her, you begin to relax. She brought me a multi-colored sign reading BREATHE. We put it up on the wall as a reminder to do what we sometimes forget. Well, we don't actually forget, but when you pause to be aware of your breath, or count each inhale and exhale to 10 or more and back, you calm down. She also showed me some bed yoga, and one time while I was all clenched up and shivering from a fever, she sat by me and talked me through a relaxation technique until I unclenched.

Sometimes I practiced my tennis swing, without a racquet of course. I went through the forehand and backhand motion, visualizing the path of the ball. I knew I looked pretty silly, so I tried to do it when nobody was looking.

If you look for some of the positives in not being able to do much at home or being in the hospital, they include having the time to meditate and NOT having the distractions that make you jump up and do something else. The better I feel and the more activities I do, the least likely I am to sit quietly. I think about making dinner, walking the dog, doing the wash or whatever, and before I know it I've jumped up. (I know, gotta work on that.)

The internet and bookstores are filled with books and CDs about meditation. I found the most success with the shorter mindfulness CDs made by Jon Kabbat-Zinn, the well-known author on the topic of mindfulness. His Series 1, a set of 45-minute CDs, is good for more advanced practitioners, but if you're an antsy person like I am, you'll have better luck with Series 2, which offers a choice of shorter meditations. They are definitely helpful for calming down. I learned about another helpful site, Healthjourneys.com, that has a wide range of CDs and videos on health and healing, by practitioners including Kabbat-Zinn, Bernie Siegel, Emmett Miller and Belleruth Naparstek. Many include guided imagery and meditation. I even has one on bone marrow and stem cell transplantation! I ordered it but haven't tried it yet. The description: "This imagery uses powerful metaphors of rescue, rebirth and resurrection, cushioning the rigors of chemo with evocative images of love, protection and support, and instilling hope, energy, comfort and patience during the recovery period." Sounds good to me.