This is a habit I have picked up since moving back to New York City. When I am on the subway or the bus, I look around and observe the expressions on people’s faces. Some are angry. Some look stressed typing away important messages on their phones. Most look exhausted. I look at them, and then I imagine their family- specifically their parents- and I dream up how they might have behaved as a child. They are someone’s baby, right? Then I wish them whatever I wish for myself that day…. happiness, peace, energy, etc… and I transmit a message to them from my heart. For example:

May you cultivate absolute happiness.

May you find a pocket of peace today.

May you find renewed energy to get through today’s challenges.

From my research (yay for learning and grad school), I am learning that our thoughts contain energy, and we can use that to our advantage. The law of conservation of energy says that energy can neither be created nor destroyed - only converted from one form of energy to another. I find that sharing and sending out these messages helps me relax, find inner peace, and stay grounded in what really matters. Perhaps energetically it expands my life force? Who knows?! Regardless, this is my daily practice and my little way of decreasing World Suck levels. It’s so easy to jump into negative head space, so this helps me stay hopeful and present to how AMAZING this Life is.

I went to the doctor yesterday and the news is what I expected. My recent blood test and ultrasound results were uploaded to my medical chart so I took a look. I have read so many of these reports by now that I can accurately predict what the doctor will say before I meet them. Mainly because my cancer has been slowly increasing for the last 10 years, and every time my doctors say something like, “Well, it seems your cancer is slowing increasing, but nothing we can do yet, so we just have to watch and wait.”

However, meeting my doctor this time was different. My doctor mentioned possible surgery or more treatment depending on the results of a PET scan that I will soon get. My thyroglobulin levels are too high to account for just the visible nodule in my neck. In other words— my cancer is growing somewhere else and we have to find it. My last PET scan from 2021 revealed some spots in my lungs, ribcage, and spine, but it’s 2023, so we will have to see what shows up on the scan now.

As a patient, I have been pretty active in seeking healing. I tried a strict ketogenic diet, a vegan keto diet, psychedelics, mindfulness, and meditation. I am also currently pursuing my master’s degree in Mind-Body medicine with hopes to learn about other modalities and how to change this whole messy thing we call a healthcare system. It’s been a decade of me dealing with this, and so when people ask me “How are you doing?,” I don’t know what to day or how to feel about it. Suleika Jaouad spoke in her book, “Between Two Kingdoms,” about the World of the Sick, and the World of the Healthy. When you get cancer, you are brought into this alternate reality where your daily life becomes focused on your bodily numbers, measurements, appointments, and procedures. I remember all too well being able to recite my medical record number as a rap, being able to estimate after I walked up the stairs what my red blood cell count was based on my heart rate, and knowing if my nausea was being caused by chemo or if it was because I was standing in the sun for too long (and yes— one of my medications made me allergic to sunlight— how cruel, right?). Every day of my life was full of medical news and bodily symptoms.
Thyroid cancer is funky because I feel like I am living in the World of the Sick and the World of the Healthy as an illegal immigrant in both. Not sick enough to get care packages, but not healthy enough to not have a blood test every 3 months. Not sick enough for Get Well cards, but not healthy enough to forget to take my medication every morning. Sometimes I forget that I need to be diligent and on top of my health with all the normalcy my life has. As much as I am entirely healthy- able to dance, teach, do triathlons, walk my dog, and enjoy my life in NYC - I can also feel this lingering fear that it all could be taken away from me so quickly. Tragic things happen in this world. I am so exception. (Today a meteor literally almost smashed into the earth!!!) This life I have is a gift, and I want to use this time wisely, joyfully, and adventurously. So, I am doing what I can to stay present and shut down this fear as I approach this PET scan.

Cancer is tragic, weird, and unpredictable. For example, why is thyroid cancer growing in my lungs, spine, and ribcage? It makes zero sense. The duality of having metastatic cancer and feeling healthy always makes me feel unsure of how much emphasis to put on my health. On one side, I think to myself: You feel healthy. Celebrate that. These are just some little baby tumors that you have to monitor. On the other side, I think: Girl, are you crazy? You have CANCER. You have to try something. Get this taken care of now. Your health is everything. I am trying to understand it as a little thing that could lead to a lot of destruction, and I am so fortunate to have caught it early and to be receiving my care at one of the best cancer hospitals in the country. (Also… I am so thankful that I was able to squeeze in for an appointment! Her next one was in November until someone canceled and I wiggled in!)

Every time I feel like this— that is, confused, kinda emotional, and upset— I usually just go back to gratitude. So here are 10 things I am thankful for:

1. My breath.

2. Juliet cuddles and kisses.

3. An able-moving body.

4. Taste buds.

5. My Gohonzon.

6. My classes and students at Peridance, IK162, MS935.

7. My creativity.

8. Sunshine on cold days.

9. My house plants and flowers.

10. To hear and feel music.

Deep breaths. Keep on keeping on. Onward to the PET scan, and I go from there. My mom said on the phone yesterday, “Why do you have to be my problem child?” I laughed. I guess I’m just that special.

so I have bad news and good news.

---

the bad news is that I have two spots that lit up like a Christmas tree on my radioactive iodine scan. I have 1 spot on my sacrum, and 1 on lower spine (L5). Do I feel them? No. But it is possible that it is a new or old cancer coming back to get me.

---

the good news is that I have excellent instinct and trust in myself. While my trusted endocrinologist was on maternity leave, another one filled in for her. She looked at my scans and said, “You need more radiation.” I asked her about the harm due to my history, and she seemed to not know anything about the Ewing’s or my history. The radiology department was franticly calling me and even my mom to schedule my appointment, but I kept ignoring them because deep inside, I know that more radiation would only do more harm than good. I told that i was surprised by her update to get the biopsy, as her colleague had to heavily pushed for more treatment. She replied, “You case is very complex. It’s very possible that these new legions are not thyroid cancer. The large dose of radiation you received in 2014 has already treated a majority of your thyroid cancer. If you got more radiation, it would not do anything.”

Lesson of the day:
Keep listening to that gut, Brianna. She is speaking to you. Take time to listen.

I have never seen

someone dance so gracefully

across a minefield.

Too many tracks

across your young skin

amidst the sparkly polka dots

of your freckles.

How you ride those

searing rails of your incisions

like they were

smiles, I don’t know.

Maybe you don’t know either

and maybe you are tired

but how you burn

those curving flames

with your limbs

like you are on fire

and will burn fire with fire.

And no dose of radiation

can obliterate your radiant

unfolding body in space

your determined

breath that lifts your

arms to the heavens to say

not yet

because you are here on a mission

and have more than a million

dances left

to dance out the devils

and burn out the toxins

with your light.

Tonight, I hold your

light in my mind

your smile in my mind

your dance in my heart.

Your dance will outsmart

even the most stubborn

cancers.

(2016; Berkeley, CA)

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver

found this piece by Heidi Priebe online and had to share...

---

By Heidi Priebe

I hope that we come back as birds. I hope the next life we live doesn’t tie us down to one place or one taste or one understanding of the world as it appears on solid ground. I hope that in our next plane of living we are freer than we were ever in this one — that we follow any wind where it blows and we don’t worry about where we call home and that we never have to feel lost or found because wherever we rest our weary wings together, we know we already belong. I hope that in the next life we get, we’re untethered. That we belong to the sun and the skies and to each other and that nothing has to tear us from the wild.

I hope that we come back as trees. I hope our roots nestle into the earth, our souls learn to scream out in mirth and that each winter drives us deeper and closer into the dirt we’ll return to in the end. I hope our branches reach up to the skies and your roots start to intertwine with mine and that we never hear stories of the pastures, the fields and the open roads that could have beckoned us away, toward some Neverland with always-greener grass. I hope that in another lifetime, exactly what we have is enough.

I hope that we come back as spiders. I hope that in our next life, we are creatures so dreadful and loathsome that our sins no longer feel caked on our skin — that our repulsion and disfavour is a God-given part of our nature that we can no longer deny. I hope we have no qualms about the badness of our being in the next life we get to live out. I hope we relish in the chance to be dreadful — all our actions so evilly pure and intentions insincere. I hope in our next lives, we come to make peace with our atrociousness.

I hope that we come back as pilots. I hope we spend years scanning the skies, passing each other by — just a few miles or a few airports or a few patches of turbulent weather apart. I hope you tip your hat to me late one summer afternoon in a dingy airport lounge. I hope I daydream about you that night — eyes growing hazy and hands growing lazy with the thought of your lips upon mine. I hope we die in a fiery crash, thousands of miles above the earth, never knowing quite how explosive we could have been down on the ground.

I hope that we come back as strangers. I hope I’m raised in a cramped Brooklyn loft with a burnt-out pair of parents who name me something asinine and you’re a rich kid from the upper East side and our eyes lock one day on the 6 train when my tethered, choppy style entices your lopsided smile. I hope we share a wine-drunk kiss in the back of a Soho bar and that you make me forget where we are and that for one night our star-crossed love affair can light all of Manhattan on fire.

I hope that you come back courageous — as someone stronger and taller and braver than you ever knew how to be in this lifetime. I hope that you don’t second-guess who you are, that your capability stretches far, that the distance between your heart and mine becomes small enough to bridge in the world that we have to look forward to.

I hope I come back as someone who can love you. As the kind of girl whose mind doesn’t race and whose knees never quake and who knows how to offer my heart in a way that won’t waiver or wane. I hope that I am big enough, brave enough, whole enough to realize that a lifetime beside you could be greater and wilder and freer than any I could entertain on my own.

I hope we learn to call each other home.

I hope we come back as people we’re not. As ones who aren’t afraid to make a move or take a chance or base their lives on happenstance. Ones who don’t need a rhythm or rhyme. Ones who don’t worry if the stars are ever going to align.

And ones who don’t have to pin their hopes on the existence of some other lifetime.

Heidi Priebe is the author of The First New Universe, The Comprehensive ENFP Survival Guide, and The Comprehensive INFP Survival Guide.