i think it is possible to remember every single detail of something so you actually can conjure it next to you – or it can feel identical, anyways, and your body believes it to be true. thoughts are connected to how our reality is created. yesterday’s dream felt entirely real until i woke up and categorized the feeling as not reality. 

not only do i wonder about this for personal reasons, i think about this in terms of medical context. so many conditions are sparked by trauma. how can we get our bodies to let it go of an incident so completely that it’s like nothing happened? can we revert to factory settings? would that heal anything or does the condition become a different mechanism once it is switched on? or is this all just escapist thinking. 

a lot goes back to how powerful the mind is. it dictates way more than we give it credit for. 

i’ve read claims of people meditating away cancer. of manifesting their dream lives. of using witchcraft to conjure boundaries that keep certain people or thoughts away. the line between happy stories and people labeled as delusional feel thin and i wonder what actually dictates success in these cases. it could all just be coincidence and luck, or another factor completely. 

weirdly, though, we have more mild forms of this that are medically accepted: placebo and nocebo. the clinical trial i am enrolling in offers two routes. you could get the actual drug being tested or you could get a placebo. while i know this is to compare the drug in a 1 to 1 scenario, what is interesting is that this is done blind. you don’t get to know which you are taking because they don’t want our brains influencing the outcome of controlled medical testing.

i have read about medical cases where people taking the placebo had symptom improvement, as if they were taking the actual drug. this is seen as an undesired outcome, but like, why aren’t we putting more research into the brain’s insane power to influence the body like that? the same with nocebo: doctors will rattle off symptoms to look for, and patients will experience them quicker than if they hadn’t been told. it’s like if you look for it, it will happen. (although then i refute myself by thinking “i bet the people in gaza try to manifest their safety or food or the bombing to stop every day but that isn’t working” and wonder, again, where the limits are)

all of this context has been important in how i’ve cared for my elderly dogs before they died. once they hit a certain point, it was all palliative – and in giving them palliative care, i made sure to nurture their brain health (and my own). i also didn’t put either of us through anything extra so we wouldn’t have to mentally climb new mountains. when lucy was diagnosed with cancer, i asked the obvious question, “is there any way to remove it or slow it down?” when the answer was not really, i no longer cared what type of cancer she had. i didn’t opt for it to be biopsied or more tests to be run. specific answers didn’t matter if they wouldn’t make her feel better or prolong a happy life for her. if anything, i worried that the invasive testing could increase her stress and expedite her death. i also didn’t want my assumptions from any more bad news to influence her. dogs are way more in tune with our bodies than we are. so we took her home. we tried not to fear the growing mass on her ribs. i eventually learned how to love it, because even though it was awful and going to take my lucy away, it was still a part of her, and every part of her deserved love. i imagined how i would feel if there was a part of my body that was killing me. hating it, hating a part of my body, seemed like it would make things worse. i pet her lump in the same way i pet the rest of her. i thought – maybe if i let this be a neutral event, maybe if i accepted this cancer and didn’t fear it, it could make her live longer and be happier through everything. 

she was given a 6 month life expectancy. she lived nearly three more years. 

i still judge myself as crazy for the approach i took, but i would probably take it again. i would accept as much information as i needed to understand the scope of what i was dealing with. then i would be okay tending their symptoms without expecting resolution. i would learn how to love the thing i feared. stress would be kept to a minimum. enjoyment of each day together would be the only thing that mattered.

i don’t know if that’s a happy story or a delusional one. i don’t know if i mind either way.