Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (65 page)

If you have a Pap in the LGSIL or another abnormal category, add 5 mg of folic acid to your diet every day with a good B complex vitamin and multivitamin-mineral supplement. (The usual recommended intake of folic acid is 400 mcg per day, so this is a much higher dose.) Also add an tioxidants to your diet. One of the best is from a group of plant sub stances known as proanthocyanidins, found in grape pips or pine bark. Popular brand names are Pycnogenol and Proflavanol. Initially, take 1 mg per pound of body weight, in two to three divided doses, daily for one week. Then decrease your dose to 20 mg two or three times per day. Anecdotally, I have seen many cases of mild to moderate cervical dysplasia greatly improved with a multivitamin-mineral supplement plus added antioxidants.
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One more thing: If you smoke, stop!

Cervical dysplasia, if left untreated, can progress to cervical cancer, which traditionally has been treated with hysterectomy. While a full discussion of the treatment of cervical cancer is beyond the scope of this book, let me say at least this much here: I’ve seen several women who had the beginning stages of cancer on their Pap smears—microinvasive cervical cancer, confirmed by cone biopsy—who have refused hysterectomy. In those women who desire children, this choice is increasingly being supported—along with close follow-up. Depending on the situation, the prognosis can be very good.

Women’s Stories

When a woman is willing to look at the stress points in her life, then combines this inner work with standard medical techniques as well as immune support, she is almost guaranteed a successful outcome. Three women’s stories of their reactions to cervical and vulvar abnormalities and to cervical cancer, and their struggles to understand and deal with their emotional issues, follow.

Sylvia: A Wake-up Call

Sylvia was thirty-nine when she first came to see me. Two years earlier, she had been diagnosed with the beginning stages of cervical cancer and underwent a cone biopsy treatment. She had had normal Pap smears for two years, but a follow-up smear came back with the rating CIN 2. Following that diagnosis, as she was going out of the room, the nurse had remarked, “Too bad this is going to keep recurring every two years.”

Sylvia later said that that remark finally galvanized her into action. She had always intended to get around to stopping cigarettes, alcohol, and caffeine, but this time she realized that it was a matter of life or death and that she had to clean up her act. She also said, “I realized, too, that it was time to stop hating my mother. I was a typical ‘bad’ girl until about a year ago. I then began doing healing visualizations and meditating. I realized through my healing work that I came from a family in which many generations of women have hated themselves. My sister-in-law died of lung cancer from smoking four packs per day, and at her funeral my mother was more abusive to me than I can ever remember. About two days after that, I was diagnosed with cervical can cer. I’m grateful, because I feel like I’m alive now and I hardly was before.” Sylvia also told me that her sisters had all had hysterectomies and that one had had a breast removed for breast cancer. She said, “My mother has had her uterus removed, and she is a woman who is filled with self-loathing. Now suddenly I’m realizing that all of these women in my family just hate themselves and have done so for years.”

Sylvia decided to break this pattern. To do so, she improved her diet, stopped smoking, and began to keep a journal in which she recorded any insights that arose about beliefs that no longer served her. She began to treat herself with more respect on every level. Her Pap smears have all remained normal since the abnormality was excised.

Faith: Healing Cervical and Vulvar Dysplasias

Faith, a woman in her early thirties, was a nurse and was taking art classes. She had been diagnosed the year before with CIN 1 of the cervix, VIN 1 of the vulva (vulvar intraepithelial neoplasia), and VAIN 1 (vaginal intraepithelial neoplasia). All of these abnormalities were felt to be secondary to HPV infection and had been treated with laser a year before. Now the same abnormalities had returned. Faith’s doctor had recommended laser treatment again, but she was reluctant to proceed. It had been quite painful, and there were no guarantees of success.

By the time Faith came to see me, she had already made some di etary improvements. I explained to her the viral nature of the HPV infection and the subsequent cellular abnormalities, and I told her that she could improve her immune system by further im proving her diet and by using the healing practices for a while. She understood the importance of careful follow-up.

Then I didn’t hear from her again until three years later, when she came in for a consultation. She told me that within six months of her dietary changes and meditation practice, all her HPV abnormalities had gone away. Her doctor couldn’t believe it. Her Pap smears had remained normal. But now she was contemplating entering a sexual relationship once again, and she was worried about the HPV. Would it flare up again? She had already done a great deal of inner work around her sexuality through reading and going to twelve-step groups, particularly Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. She realized that in the past she had had sex when she didn’t want it and had participated in it almost au tomatically, as a way to stave off her fears of abandonment. She had been brought up in a religion that made her feel guilty about her sexu ality. Her brothers had been taught by her parents not to get anyone pregnant, while she had been taught that she wasn’t supposed to be sexual at all—or at least not until marriage. Having gone through a period of celibacy, she felt that she was once again ready to explore her sexuality with another person. At the time I saw her, she had developed a supportive and loving relationship with a man that did not yet include sex.

Faith and her potential lover had both had HIV tests that were negative. I suggested that he be checked for HPV and herpes, though both of us agreed that the results wouldn’t affect the course of their relationship. I asked her to consider whether the relationship would be a source of nourishment and joy for her. When I last saw her, she was in the midst of deciding and didn’t plan to proceed until she and her inner guidance were in complete agreement about her next steps.

Barbara: When Surgery Failed

Barbara was thirty-nine when I first saw her. Her story illustrates beautifully the connection between a woman’s past, her social situation, her body’s “entry points,” and her ability to heal.

The first time I saw Barbara, she was blond, petite, perfectly dressed, and had a smile on her face that looked permanently glued in place—a mask to cover what was going on underneath. Though she loved her work as a teacher, her body was giving her a lot of warning signals. Her mother had died at sixty-three of ovarian cancer. Her ma ternal grandmother had had the same disease. Over the previous nine years, she herself had had over fifteen different surgeries for early-stage cancer, first of the cervix and later of the vagina.

She said of her earlier history, “As time passed, subsequent doctors’ reports continued to show precancerous cells. Biopsy after biopsy led to one surgery and then another. Laser treatments proved ineffective. Finally a total hysterectomy, with removal of the ovaries, was done nine years after the first signs of abnormal cells appeared. I was advised not to worry. There was still some normal tissue. I was grateful.”

Barbara’s hysterectomy was done when she was thirty-six, three years before she came to see me. At her first visit, we took a Pap smear of her vagina, which once again came back abnormal.
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It was read a “mild dysplasia with koilocytotic changes” (this refers to specific changes in the nucleus of the cell, usually associated with an active HPV infection). She underwent a colposcopy and biopsies, which con firmed that she still had the abnormal cells in her vagina. Treatment consisted of removing the abnormal cells.

Because of the recurrent nature of Barbara’s problem, we knew that there was nowhere for her to go but inward—to explore, if possible, why her body kept giving her the same message. We wanted to work with her to bolster her immune system and stop the process of disease that was resulting in more and more pieces of her vagina being surgi cally removed, frozen, or cauterized. All the treatments that she’d had so far—surgery, laser, cautery, and various medications—had failed to “cure” her problem.

As we took a deeper history, Barbara told me that her husband had been an alcoholic for the first fifteen years of their marriage. Much later, she found out that he had been having a series of affairs for years. As she put it, “He’d be holding my hand in the morning, and that of another woman in the afternoon. All the lies he told me were finally confirmed a few nights prior to when I asked him to leave, truths I had known in my heart. One affair after another, moments with prostitutes, encounters in large cities. He had previously denied this and more. The truth left me empty and alone.” When she originally came to the cen ter, Barbara had started to see a therapist and was in the process of piecing together her family history.

Barbara gradually began to put her life back together. She said, “I embarked on a journey that would eventually lead me to believe that I could make it on my own. Asking my husband to leave was the first well-thought-out decision I had made on my own. I was fully cognizant of the impact it would have on my life, and I had the courage to initi ate and pursue a life outside of marriage. I missed the closeness and the union one feels in marriage. I missed the special person next to me and the knowledge that he would come home. He was my rock. He defined me. He owned me. He abused me. He left me. It hurt, and the pain has lightened, yet it will never fully go away.” (This series of revelations on Barbara’s part nicely illustrates the lifting of denial. As Anne Wilson Schaef once remarked, “It’s hard to lose what you never had.”)

Barbara kept a journal and told me that its pages revealed a fright ened woman—a child, in many ways. She said that she feared tomor row and that staying positive felt unnatural and uncomfortable to her. Aloneness and learning to live alone seemed insurmountable to her. Her one real joy was caring for her daughter, then eleven, and watching her grow.

Barbara started to do creative visualizations of her tissues as strong and healthy while also undergoing therapeutic touch treatments to help her move the “stuck” energy in her pelvis.
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This modality helped her learn how to relax and become less stressed. She told me that up until that time, she had never thought about her sexuality, her breasts, or her vagina as free of disease, clear, healthy, and pink. “My body parts had always been dirty and not a part of me. They did not exist,” she said.

She described her therapeutic touch sessions as follows: “Therapeutic touch began as I sat in the chair. I was asked to put my hands on my knees and to think about warm water and a clean, healthy body. Trust this woman, I kept saying. Trust! For the first time—ever—my body felt free of anxiety. A true sense of peace prevailed, a high that was truly unexplainable. Empowered. They want me to become empowered. I should change my diet and continue to vision my life as it could be. Trust, I kept saying. This may work. This
will
work.”

Barbara attended a conference with Bernie Siegel, M.D., and Louise Hay and went through a guided imagery experience that focused on the highlights of her life. She said that during this experience, pictures and pain surfaced that caused a knot in her stomach that she thought would never go away. She also did some releasing rituals to try to let go of her past. One of these was to bury her wedding ring in a creek that flowed away from her home. She said the affirmation “I’m open to receive myself.” She continued working with this theme repeatedly, returning to it over and over.

Despite all of this work, another Pap smear returned as abnormal six months after her first treatment. This time Barbara was treated with a chemotherapy cream called 5-FU for ten weeks. (This treatment is reserved for very resistant cases.) She decided at this point to work with her dreams and try to listen more deeply to her cells.

Around this time Barbara’s father died, and another part of her past began to surface. A mentally ill woman had lived with Barbara’s family from the time Barbara was born. Barbara noted that this woman, Kerry, had great power and controlled the entire family through manipula tion. Barbara wondered if Kerry had been having a lesbian relationship with her mother all these years. Was that why Kerry had always come first in the eyes of Barbara’s mother—first over her husband and chil dren?

Barbara writes, “My dreams eventually revealed the horror that I had denied. Kerry had sexually abused me as a child. My anger at this was profound. She had violated me, and how I hated her for what she had done! She often told me that I was dirty. I can still feel her hands on my body. And then she would place me in the tub and tell me to wash all the dirt away. She made me scrub my vagina until it was raw. I felt ashamed and feared the loss of those who loved me.

“I’ll never know where my parents were and why they did not pro tect me from the witch that had bound me for so many years. She can no longer hurt me. She is old now and suffering from the pain of her own cancer, a cancer that has bound her for many years now in a home. The family’s codependency has been altered. My work with the twelve-step programs has confirmed my thoughts that we all must separate and become individuals and learn to live alone.

“I struggle to forgive her for taking my mother and father from me. She also took my freedom, my dignity, my sexuality. These attributes are returning, and I’ve begun to love myself. The shame has lessened and the guilt is dwindling. I have begun to recognize other Kerry fig ures in my life. I am drawn to them; I fear them; I now avoid them.

“In my search for peace and contentment, I continue to take three steps forward and two steps back in all phases of my being. I refuse to give up the fight. I have fulfilled my promise to see my daughter through college and to present her with a model that strives to validate her while validating others and their efforts.”