“There’s nothing else to try? Nothing even experimental?”
“There was some experiment I could have joined, but I declined. It sounded awful.”
I sat up. “What? Really? What was it?”
“Some new drug. Some clinical trial. I said no.”
“What? Why would you say no?”
“I don’t want to take any more drugs. I’ve had enough medical intervention for a lifetime.”
“But it’s just medicine.”
“With gruesome side effects. The least gory of which is ‘fatal skin infection.’”
“I’m just saying, what if it worked?”
“What if it didn’t? And then I’m killed by my own skin?”
“At least that way, there’s a chance.”
“Not one worth taking.”
In that moment, it seemed like she wasn’t trying. “You have to try it! Call them back! Tell them you’ve changed your mind! You can’t be a quitter. You have to keep fighting!”
She shook her head, infuriatingly calm. “I am fighting. In my own way.”
“How?” I said. “How are you fighting?”
She looked me straight on. “I’ve been meditating three times a day since my last checkup.”
“Meditating? You’re fighting recurrent melanoma withmeditation?”
“I think it’s working,” she said.
“What’s working?”
“I should have had many more seizures by now, in fact. That’s a very promising sign.”
“What are you talking about?”
My mom gave me a smile. “When I first got the prognosis, I read everything I possibly could about it—like you do.”
I nodded.
“And one of the articles I read was about a French woman with basically my same situation who had managed to halt the growth of her tumor through creative visualization.”
I shook my head. “What did she visualize?”
“She mediated three times a day, and she very specifically imagined a hard shell growing around her tumor—so hard that it was compressed inside and couldn’t get any bigger.”
I made a conscious effort not to roll my eyes.
“Itworked,” Diana said.“She’d been going downhill rapidly—but then her decline slowed, then stopped entirely. She didn’t die for another seven years, and that was in a car crash. Totally unrelated! When they autopsied her tumor, guess what they found?”
“What?”
“A shell. A hard shell around it. And it hadn’t grown at all.”
