Elena: Healing through Art My name is Elena I live here in New York City, and I was diagnosed with breast cancer in January of 1998. I found a lump a couple of days prior to New Year's and in two weeks, I had surgery for lumpectomy, but further biopsies confirmed that the cancer had metastasized and I went in later for a mastectomy a couple of weeks later. Subsequently I went through eight treatments of chemotherapy, at which point I lost all my hair and experienced the usual nausea, but found the whole experience tolerable. Throughout that time, I maintained my job teaching at the Alvin Ailey School, working with children ages nine to eighteen. I found a lot of support from my students, fellow workers, and close friends and family, particularly my sister, who had been through breast cancer eight years ago. We found that my sister and I, who actually lives in Seattle right now, found a particular bond in the experience of taking care of me, and she helped me through the first couple of weeks after my mastectomy in just allowing me to rest and to make me feel comfortable and let me feel her warmth. The whole experience was enlightening as well as difficult and terrible and frightening, but out of that experience, I finally was able to get closer to my real self, my essence I found that I had a lot more strength than I had imagined, both mentally, emotionally, and physically. Learning to love my self At that time, besides my full-time job at the Ailey school, I was going to Columbia University, majoring in women and gender studies. At that point, In my academic experience, I was exploring the body and the way society deals with women's bodies, and as my body changed through chemotherapy, I was also able to explore the way our society looks at someone who is diseased, and a woman whose body has completely changed to the chemotherapy and the surgery through breast cancer. And that experience prompted me to explore my body further, and its different changes, through a collaboration with a photographer named Marbeth, and this time, the photographs that we took were very therapeutic for me in the sense that I was able to look at my body without feeling ashamed of it. It was I would say a form of psychotherapy, in that I was able to look at it and really touch it and really you know have a private experience with it as well as a visual experience with it. The photographs were based on movement, since I'm a dancer, a former dancer, and well versed in both techniques of ballet and modern. At that time I was already decided to stop dancing and focus only on my teaching, but I found that I needed the dancing part of me to center me throughout the whole experience, so I needed to go back to that, and feel my body moving. and At that point I found that even though I only had one breast and I was bald, I realized that I could still move and be free and to use my body and feel my body in a powerful sense, even though I was being knocked down with all kinds of drugs during my chemo therapy treatments. This way I was able to fight getting myself down and feeling bogged down emotionally. I knew that there was some sort of freedom at the end of this, and through my dancing I was able to feel that. Inspiration during hard times During this time my chemotherapy had been from February until July, at which point I started to feel even more nauseous and weaker and much more fatigued at the end of each day. I figured there was an end point to this, and I knew that if I was determined and just understood that I was just going through my treatments to get better, I would get through it to the end. One of my friends kept telling me, kept reminding me that the cancer is in my body, but it's not in my spirit. So, that sort of helped me get through the experience, and still gets me through to this day, two, two-and-a-half years later. Going back to the photographs that I had taken with my friend Marbeth who is a photographer, and who takes dance photographs for the Ailey company and the Dance Theater of Harlem, we went into the studio and just kind of explored all kinds of movements, showing my body in its changed form. And we found that these photographs had to be shared with the public in the sense that it gave a different image of a woman who has had breast cancer. I found that these photographs not only helped me in my self-acceptance, but it also gave me a peaceful feeling about my whole situation. I had to find several ways to deal with my anger, and finding peaceful images helped me to do that. During my surgery, or prior to my surgery, I was trying to research as much as I could and find images of what happens to a body after surgery and after a mastectomy. The only images I could find were medical images from medical books, and they were not, they did not give me a feeling of peace. In fact, they gave me a feeling of fear and panic, and I realized that there were women out there going into surgery who need something more peaceful and more reassuring, that tells them it's okay that this is happening, there is more of you than just the surgery. And in a way, I found that by accepting my body and its different changes I was able to get to the essence of my self, without the trappings of the hair and the clothes and all the other stuff that goes with it, that I could accept myself fully for myself and you know, it was okay to be bald and it was okay to have a different kind of body - I was still the same inside. I think for women who are just newly diagnosed, I think it's very important to find those images and to find certain ways to come above the fear and come above the reality. I'm not saying that one should negate the reality and what is happening, but to find that support from images, beautiful images, or poetry, and something that's comforting while you're going through such a terrible time. I was reading a lot about Audrey Lord, she has a wonderful book called, "Cancer Journals" and a lot of the things that she'd talked about in it was the spirituality the spirit of the person, and not losing that, that anchor. Creating comfort through beauty Right now, two-and-a-half years later. I've decided to get back to dancing and to performances, as well as trying to keep my fulltime job as a teacher and co-director of the junior division program of the Ailey School. What I've found and what I've discovered after the experience with cancer is that I am certainly a lot freer and happier in the sense that I was able to get through it and that my goals have changed. My goals are no longer about the superficiality of life, but a clear sense that the only goal that I have is to keep myself alive. The few things that I am that keep myself going is back to my dancing again, and that sense of freedom in the way my body is moving, which is symbolic of life, in my head. I've found that the choreographers that I've worked for before have decided to do some new pieces for me, and this collaboration is not only to put on a performance but to celebrate life. I hope that I can share those performances with other women and to use those performances as a tool to just give them a sense that there is life after cancer, and that one has to keep going. |
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