Cancer patients pick up the pen

YAKIMA – Meet Jenna Tahkeal.

She’s 32 and every day she thinks about how the cancer that took her hair and her health and her breasts might also take her life.

It’s a fear she can’t escape – but it’s great writing material.

So hours after the rest of Goldendale has gone to sleep, she’s quietly sitting in bed, solving the Earth’s crises and pondering her existence with multicolored pens and half a dozen spiral-bound notebooks.

Her thoughts often go something like this:

“We hardly ever seek the absolute truth

Like caving ourselves in a tiny phone booth

We seek much more than we have found

Giving into ‘what’s working’ just for right now

I say to you now do you enjoy your present

What can you do to change the unpleasant”

She’s not a poet, she says. Just someone who has embraced the freedom of a blank page and the humanity she shares with e.e. cummings, Anne Bradstreet, Heberto Padilla and her other favorites.

“When I read their poetry, I notice that it’s not just me that thinks about these worldly issues,” Jenna says. “They also worry about our future and our belief in God and about relationships.”

They’re the same mysteries that have defined Jenna’s writing since she was diagnosed a year and a half ago with inflammatory breast cancer, a disease in which cancer cells grow in sheets rather than tumors, making it one of the most difficult cancers to detect – and one of the deadliest.

“You hear horror story after another, women with your type of breast cancer live 2-4 years. I feel fortunate to even be here really,” she wrote recently.

“I was told to read everything about my cancer and be aware. I never did. I honestly never did. I didn’t want to drown myself with the horror of knowing that statistically I have only a year left.”

Instead, she turned to her poetry, a hobby she’d been practicing about 10 years.

She’s not alone. Wendy Warren, a writing instructor at Yakima Valley Community College, offers journaling workshops throughout the community, including several free courses for cancer patients at North Star Lodge, the cancer care center operated by Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital.

People in the class spend little time talking about cancer directly, but are asked to focus on mundane daily tasks and see where their emotions lead their writing.

“What I’m asking people to do is just drop their preconceived notion about writing and what journaling ought to be,” she says. “First of all, there is permission to rage on the page.”

She has seen writing help many people come to terms with the terrifying thoughts that trouble many cancer patients.

“You can muse about possibilities, about your own finite existence – because we’re all gonna die,” Warren says. “Coming to terms with that is a very powerful thing; and understanding it’s part of a natural process of life.”

Warren points to the Pennebaker studies, a series of experiments in 1988 in which Dr. James Pennebaker, then a psychology professor at Southern Methodist University, determined that regular journaling strengthened the immune systems and helped manage certain diseases in people who had experienced traumatic events.

“There’s some actual quantifiable, physical health benefits to doing this,” Warren says.

Not to mention the more obvious emotional healing that can take place on paper.

Warren has read most of Jenna’s poems and is impressed by her willingness to let go of rules and write frankly about her life.

“People carry within them such amazing stories, such amazing insight,” she says.

Jenna is no exception – she is a survivor.

Her story is one of thousands that begins with breast cancer and will end someday far better than it might have otherwise been.

“Essentially, before I even got my cancer I thought I was just a dead woman walking, really,” she wrote recently. “I really wasn’t living to my full capacity. Now I am.”

She was living in Everett, Wash., well on her way to a master’s degree in public administration that she didn’t know how she’d use, when she woke up one day in April 2004 with sharp, stabbing pains in her right breast.

She immediately saw her doctor, but due to the difficult-to-detect nature of the disease, it was December before she was ordered to have a biopsy. It revealed she had Stage 4 inflammatory breast cancer that had spread to her liver and pelvic bone.

By the time she was diagnosed, she and her boyfriend, David Latshaw, had moved to Goldendale. She remembers she and David held each other every night, thinking she might be gone the next day.

“We really didn’t know how long I had,” she says. “We were thinking, at any minute.”

And the natural questions crept into her notebooks:

“What’s going to entail your last day alive

Wondering continues on this final arrive

Will you have brushed your teeth or even showered

Will you be courageous or a scaredy cat coward”

When Jenna started chemotherapy at North Star, she stayed with her mother at her home in West Valley, where Jenna and her eight brothers and sisters were raised.

With the support of her family, she also made the tough decision to have both of her breasts removed between rounds of chemo and radiation.

And one day, about six months ago, Jenna was told she had defeated the cancer, defying the odds, at least for now.

Today she is cancer-free, and thinking of what her next step in life will be.

“I’m always afraid it’s going to come back,” she says.

But that fear is what fills her notebooks – where she retreats almost every night to chronicle the journeys of ladybugs, celebrate not having to wear uncomfortable bras anymore, and record all the other details she never noticed two years ago.

In March, she typed up a collection of her poems that she titled “Poetic breast cancer: of love, life and spirit.” She created it to try to help another North Star Lodge cancer patient feel a little less lonely and a little more hopeful.

“I think about it now and everything was hard, but I managed OK,” she says.

But few of the poems actually mention cancer.

They’re a little bit about dying, but mostly about living, dreaming, potential and wondering where exactly cancer and smiling, fuzzy-haired survivors fit into the universe.

“These poems are what some women with cancer probably think about,” she says.

“They are dedicated to every person who has gone through any type of cancer, and I pray and hope for a cure.”