Sceptic on the cancer table

I am lying on the table – like a massage table. Sue Fick presents me with certain words to think about. “Loneliness.” I make some incoherent response. “Yes, that’s a big one, isn’t it”, she says with energy – as if she’s learned something about me.

“I have had lots of friends…but in one sense one’s always alone.”

“I’m not talking about the philosophical fact of being alone, I’m talking about the feeling of being alone.” She says she thinks it goes way back, to my family, when I split from them.

“Well it wasn’t just them, it was the whole community, everyone I really knew and cared about.”

“No, I think it’s the family itself.” She says the loss of the rest was quite secondary.

Sue gets information when she holds my arm. She is down to earth. If she gets information she lets you know. If she doesn’t, she lets you know that too.

Is she just recycling what I have told her, or is she tapping straight in, as she thinks? I don’t care. As my wife Debi says, Sue Fick could cure you of anything just by being herself. Let her believe what she needs to believe to be a healer. I’m the one with the cancer. Just diagnosed and already cut out, gone without a trace, the CAT scan says. But Sue believes there’s no smoke without fire, and she’s working on putting out the embers. Transforming them, maybe.

A cheap gypsy, or the real thing?

“Sacrifice.”

Silence. I try to think if the word has any relevance to my life. I haven’t sacrificed myself for anything, other than my own dreams. I think of Jesus on the Cross, and how much the idea repulsed me that his death was a sacrifice that would appease God on behalf of man, a final sacrifice which made the endless sacrifices of domestic animals unnecessary: what kind of bloodthirsty God would that appease? The Blood of the Lamb was part of my parents’ religion. It revolted me as soon as I tried to really understand it.

“I don’t get any connection to that.”

She takes my arm again, as if sending and receiving an email direct to and from my…what? My soul, my energy centre? “No, I’m getting that that is the accurate word. Sacrifice. Didn’t your parents sacrifice you? They gave you up.”

“Well, they couldn’t hear me. To have really heard me would have been to ask too many questions about everything. They couldn’t follow where I went, but I didn’t resent that, I didn’t expect them to become something else.”

“So they dropped you, to keep their world intact.” I forget her words actually, but I think that’s what she meant. Sue is a Christian of some kind, as well as a practitioner of an ancient Peruvian healing method; she’s no iconoclast, she’s not trying to make trouble. She just tells it bluntly as she sees it. “You may not have resented it, but you have never reconciled to it.”

“I guess not.” Does this woman know more about me than I know? As I said to Debi three weeks ago after I lay on this table the first time, “Either Sue’s a cheap gypsy or she’s the real thing.” “A cheap gypsy could have told me that,” Deb says when someone has told her something obvious about herself. I know what I think about Sue. I think she’s half-nuts, entirely trustworthy, perhaps the only person in the world I could tell the whole truth to about anything without thinking twice.

Sceptical…of scepticism

I am a complete sceptic about whacko notions like astrology, crystals or homeopathy – not the practice, the theory. But I’m enough of a sceptic to be sceptical of my own scepticism. I long ago formulated a theory that an alternative healer needs to believe wholeheartedly in a system, a set of ideas and a practice; and when they find the right set for them, they can heal, sometimes. The same set may not work for someone else. It’s not exactly the system that works, but what it liberates in the healer.

In the same way, religions have built vast edifices of words, thought and practice on the foundation of certain deep experiences that are beyond words. These experiences don’t prove the theories. The theories are partly attempts to understand, a variant of science and philosophy, and partly they are ways to serve, control, deceive, help, gain status, get rich, get laid: normal species stuff.

It amuses me that Sue has a printed manual that she follows as she delves into the pure energy fields of my body and soul. It’s the system she needs, along with her stones from Andean mountains. I have no need to understand it. As long as it works for her; as long as it liberates her amazing power. One day, a millennium from now, we may have a scientific language for describing what she does. That we don’t have it now is not a good reason for me to reject something that may save my life. She thinks the things that caused my cancer may cause another one. I can believe it.

She also came to the conclusion last time that my cancer and my father’s death were intimately connected.

Unblocking the memoir

“Success.”

“Well. I have been successful in some things, but not in the world’s terms, not in my work, certainly. My novels weren’t successful. That’s been part of the trouble with this book I’ve been trying to write. This memoir, about my upbringing and my Dad. I have been working at it or wanting to do it for so long, like it’s the one thing I have been put on earth to accomplish, that by now I feel it has to be totally successful.”

“Well, that’s enough to kill it right there.”

“I’ve been struggling with that for a while, trying to switch from being successful with it, to wanting it just to be as true as it can be.”

She takes me through words about the self: accepting myself, celebrating my strengths, loving myself. Somewhere here I tell her that I have got very depressed this week by working on the memoir. My first week off work after the operation that whipped out my testicle, I was too whacked to do anything much. The pain in my groin (they take it out through the abdomen, not through the scrotal sac) made it hard to walk or drive.

The second week, though, I wanted to use to some good purpose. So I got out the box of papers I brought home from clearing out my father’s house. He died in November 2002. Now it’s May 2003. In March I put stacks of boxes in my sister’s attic in London, but brought this one back on the plane to New York: these are the papers that looked most interesting.

I started this week with reading every letter I ever wrote my parents up to the age of about 23. It depressed me hellishly. Pity for the person, I was, and for the ways I haven’t improved one bit: still as lazy and procrastinating as ever. Even then, I contrasted my own sloth with my parents’ ceaseless and effective labor.

Accepting myself? “I don’t know if I want to do this book, or if I wanted to do it for so long, that now I think I ought to. Thursday, I meant to start writing, but I watched a TV movie instead – Spider man – and then had a long walk, and turned the TV on when I got back. Then I started playing a game on my computer, and didn’t stop until I heard the dawn chorus start, at 4.30am. I felt sickened by myself. But then I said, oh well, that’s what I’m like. I have always had to work through periods of procrastination before I find the energy to do something big. It’s my rhythm. It’s hard to explain to others, especially to Debi.”

“Yes, that’s not her style.” Sue works with Debi at the Mohonk Preserve, a non-profit project dedicated to one of the United States’s oldest wildlife sanctuaries. Debi is one of the world’s more organised and focused people. Except that now she is helplessly watching her mother die in Florida, while I am here with our 14-year old son, and my – now thankfully ejected – cancer. If I had had bad news, Deb would be back here already. She already spent a week with me travelling many miles for second opinions, hassling our insurance company to pay up, and being with me for the operation and after.

When I have met friends in the last few days at the supermarket, and I tell them we are in the thick of cancer and the death of Deb’s mother, slowly, of a rare neurological disease, it’s like I have just laid a royal flush down on the table. People feel sorry they even mentioned their troubles, which now appear like a pair of twos, at best. They don’t know what to say to me. I am embarrassed to mention it, but friends want to know, and what is friendship worth, if we can’t share stuff like this. One of the best responses was from a guy at work. Suspected testicular cancer, I wrote. “Nuts!” he replied.

People have been great, real. I don’t know how many people have now told me how someone they were close to died. What I have learned is that there are any number of ways of dying: with acceptance, fear, visions, anger. My Dad was amazing in keeping his optimism to the last, and yet even he wondered if the next life was really going to be like he imagined it would.

After my talking about my miserable week wrestling with my book, Sue holds my arm and exchanges a few emails with the inner me. “We’re going where you are taking us,” she says, presumably because this focus on my book has taken us away from the original plan for the session.

She has a strange way of breathing deeply and huffing her breath out, when she is concentrating in the realms of energy. Now she surfaces, and says, “I asked, will it be helpful and positive for you to write this book? On a scale of one to ten, where one is not helpful, and ten is totally helpful, the response I got was ten. I asked, is there a block to you doing it, and the answer was yes. I asked can I help remove this block, and the answer was yes.”

I reach out and cup Sue’s face with one hand. Tears fill my eyes. She has given me an immeasurable gift. For the moment I know with all my soul, that this book is the thing I most want to do, and at this moment I believe she can help me do it. Even if this is all she has given me – this momentary joy at the thought that it is worth doing, and the pathway can be made clear to do it, that is enough.

Either she’s a cheap gypsy or she’s real. On her table, I have no doubt she is real. This is pure intuition. Later, on the phone to Florida, I can’t find the words to explain to Debi why. Sue is thin in the face like a bird, with the largest mouth and smile imaginable. She focuses her whole being in such a way that, slight as she is, she feels oceanic, Himalayan. I suppose that would be Andean.

Sue’s story

Here’s a story Sue told us when she and her husband came to dinner a while back. The weekend after the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center, she had been due to go with her teacher of ancient Andean healing wisdom and a group of fellow students to Peru. Although most of America stopped flying, and few planes took off that weekend, Sue and her group went.

Standing in a circle at Macchu Pichu, the students said to the teacher, we can’t concentrate. We have to talk about what happened on Tuesday. The teacher, who (of course?) had spent time in Afghanistan as well as in Peru, said yes, indeed. She said that she felt there was great wisdom in the Himalayas and the Afghan mountains, and the energy balance of the world needed those mountains to interact usefully with the Andean mountains, and when that happened the terrorists would be ejected from the Afghan mountains.

So they did whatever they had to do to be a connected group, and the teacher concentrated hard on the problem for maybe twenty minutes. Then she cheerfully announced that she had got the mountain ranges in creative communication with each other, and they would take care of it, and having done all she could usefully do, it was time to get on with the main tasks at hand.

And, said Sue, all those months later in our drawing room, the terrorists were successfully ejected from the mountains, so it worked! We murmur something about the American military, and she says that was all part of it, mountains work in mysterious ways. But she says it laughing, as sceptical of herself as we are, except that she really isn’t. She just laughs because the world is so much more amazing than one might think.

Sue Fick, you’re an amazing woman

It’s not as if I put myself and my suspected cancer entirely in the hands of this woman. I got a surgeon with a knife to get it out of me, and she fully endorsed that tactic. But it doesn’t mean she doesn’t still have a lot of work to do. She cheerfully gets on with it, an artisan in the business of righting energy flows. “I have to go to someone else to do this kind of work for me,” she says. “You can’t change just by wanting to. You have to get someone else to do the work.”

About the last thing she tells me this session is that I have to write from my intuition, not from my mind. My mind, my thoughts, can feed into it. But it has to come from lower down in my body, I think is what her hands are saying as she talks about ‘intuition’. You have to work on that, she says.

“How?” I ask. “How do I work on it?”

“You don’t have to. I just did. That’s my job. That’s it. You can get up now.” I get up.

“Sue Fick: You’re an amazing woman,” I say.

Am I crazy, deluded, or in the hands of a healer? I don’t care. I’m coming back soon.

Want to share your thoughts? Email: dave.opendemocracy@earthlink.net