Tag: cancer

Does adoption cause chronic illness? No. But do lack of health insights worsen conditions? Yes.

Published on by Sunny J. ReedLeave a comment

Another chemo-brain blog post. Apologize for the style here.

Getting cancer made me angry, not because it’s an annoying interruption to my life but because it adds another layer to the “Was there a way to prevent this?” adoption complexity.

How many of you are attending annual check-ups or such, armed with a list of your great-uncle’s colon cancer and your second-cousin-twice removed bout with kidney stones? You probably think nothing of it, as it’s become such a routine expectation in our medical visits. Let me tell you: Health histories are a privilege. To an adoptee, not knowing the full story of our parentage or family trees is just one loss we experience. But the one that tells the fullest picture of our lives, the one that tells us just what our very own bodies encompass, will almost never be available to us. To me, that’s adoption’s most profound and inhumane loss.

Without a health history, we are simply flesh and bone and fluids from….where? We ask ourselves where we came from, and perhaps obtaining a family tree can help, but adoptees lose the most tangible explanations of what makes us humans. I’d personally would have been happier knowing my medical history rather than knowing why I was given away. Extreme? Maybe. But knowing my genetic health history would have given me control over a life owned by the adoption system.

What can be done to prevent or treat these medical variables? Where can blame be placed–and should we be looking for scapegoats at all? How many parents experience the secondary shame of telling a doctor, “No, I’m sorry–my son’s adopted so we don’t know,” and then didn’t think–or know–to press for additional testing? It’s not necessarily the adoptive parents’ fault; genetic testing is costly and often not covered by insurance unless medically necessary. So who then considers a lack of medical history an acceptable patient status? Well then, are adoption agencies culpable, what with their desire to protect the privacy of the birth parents (if possible) over the child’s future health? Are they clinging to the hope that their outdated yet selectively applied “blank slate” theories will help adoptees get by on a shrug and some hope?

Knowing my genetic health history would have given me control over a life owned by the adoption system.

As you can see, there are some clear ethical and human rights questions at play, which I hope to cover in another post on ICAV’s website soon. For now, I’ll hazard to guess that adoption agencies–and overzealous adoptive parents–go in two directions with regards to their wards’ health: They can either blame “drug-addicted, impoverished mothers and fathers” for their children’s issues and end it there, or passively say “this is all we have, so let’s hope for the best.” Neither mindset considers a child’s right to grow into a healthy adult (because adoptees DO grow up). Both mindsets also set a child up for medical alienation by both parents and community; say, for instance, a child develops a mental disorder or disability, despite being placed with a “loving” adoptive family. All the love in the world won’t prevent genetic expressions or rewrite faulty DNA. Does the child become an ungrateful pariah or just another problem and disappointment? Do the parents speak negatively of the biological parents, while blithely blaming their own grandmothers for their propensity toward diabetes? Some adoptive parents are more proactive:

 

Assuming the worst is probably the best case of a life of unknowns, regardless of how uncomfortable or negative that may seem. However, in my case, I’d never assume I’d get breast cancer but I did assume I’m a ticking time bomb waiting to see what new ailments my body chucks at me.

Unfortunately, insurance companies and paychecks don’t feel comfortable investing in worst-case scenarios, given how expensive genetic testing is and how uneducated physicians are on proactively managing adoptees’ cases. While preventative medicine is expensive, it seems less costly than having a giant tumor pop up in the middle of your life. With all the funds and fees associated with adoption (that’s all I say about that), swinging a few extra thou toward comprehensive medical testing doesn’t seem like such a stretch after all.

This won’t be the last I discuss this topic, as it simply fuels my work on adoption and children’s rights. I hope to have my ICAV post ready soon, where I’ll look more closely at children’s rights and ethics with regards to intercountry adoption and lack of medical histories.

In the meantime…get yourself tested. Speak to your doctors if you need to, explain your situation, show them this post. Whatever. Message me on Twitter and I’ll be your ally. You deserve to know something and never knowing was not your fault. I’m here with you because no medical records is inhumane, archaic CRAP and we should never accept it.

Would you feel sorry for me? I hope not.

Published on by Sunny J. Reed2 Comments

Apologies for the rambling here; chemo-brain is a real thing.

I waited for 18 years, an arbitrary length of time set by people who–from the outset–spoke for me, to find out my birth mother died several years after I was sent away.

img_5431I spent those years emotionally and verbally abused by both family and community, my racialized existence provoking shame into anger. I lost many family members and friends to death, either by natural circumstances or violent ends.

At 25, I lost my adoptive mother, though imperfect she was, to a three-year battle with ovarian cancer.

At age 34, I enrolled myself in an intensive outpatient program to deal with complex PTSD as a result of lifelong abuse.

At 35, I myself was diagnosed with cancer, but not without finally getting that key to sentient industrialized humanity, my medical history. In it, I found that not one of my maternal relatives lived (so far) past age 77. My birth mother died of a cerebral hemorrhage, her younger brother died of a bone marrow cancer, a surviving brother survived his own brain bleed, and another uncle survived thyroid cancer.

But I don’t feel sorry for myself. Instead, I laugh.

I laugh at life’s ruthless targeting of one person, of some people, of groups of people, to be the ones who absorbing every single blow. Yet there exist individuals like my husband, a white male stamped with middle America’s indelible trackmarks and unhindered by any tragedy greater than a few standard life discomforts.

It’s an angsty existential riddle, quite a cliche in its frustration: Why me? Why not others? What lesson haven’t I yet learned? but even GOING THERE strikes me humorous, bizarre. Because logical and reasoned women like me, women dedicated to answering WHY and WHAT with quantifiable, explainable THINGS, simply should know better than to ponder the universe’s absurd definition of reason.

But I can’t help it. As long as people like my husband and I exist, opposites in backgrounds but similar in all the ways that count, the preposterous workings of LUCK will nag me behind my theories and statistics.

I definitely don’t have room for self-pity. I fear only a few things in life now, a happy byproduct of such unfortunate luck: chemotherapy permanently altering my cognitive function and stamina; not finishing my PhD program; and not making it to Disney World come hell or another cancer diagnosis. Redundant tragedies inure you to anxiety, I promise.

Instead, I laugh.

I laugh hard, harder than I should because there’s something so poetically tragic about suffering and then more suffering. Forgive me if I sound self-absorbed, and I humbly nod at those who continue to suffer greater than I–you do exist.

And that’s the key right there. No matter what, it could still be worse. If cancer still isn’t the worst thing that could happen to me or my family, then yes, there’s still room for confidently facing more feckless mistakes or uncontrollable health issues. Above all else, therefore, I want to have the space to handle whatever’s worse, because no matter what, there’s always room for hope.

when i lost my mother, i found myself

Published on by Sunny J. Reed7 Comments

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When I was just about to turn 26, the ovarian cancer savaging my mother’s tired internal organs finally completed its violent mission. My mother died on Thursday, July 15, 2010, after a three-year fight she knew she’d lose.

It was a humid summer day and my room was a mess.  My brother–or was it my aunt?–knocked on my door that morning, to tell me my mom was gone. Several hours later, I was told there was something left for me on her nightstand. It was a card, addressed to me, while her body still lay in her bed and the hand that penned the message still and limp.

It took me several moments to open the card, but when I did, the message was clear. Full of love and persistent motherly concern. In a shaky hand, she gently urged me to

Find out why you’re so angry all the time.

Before she died, my mother would hug me gently, a body wrapping me in the medicinal scent of chemotherapy drugs and holistic remedies. She’d whisper

I’m sorry I couldn’t help you.

It’s been many years since I received that card, a memento framed and hanging in my hallway outside of my son’s bedroom. It’s displayed in its angel-fronted glory, in a custom frame underneath my son’s first foot and handprints and a portrait of my mother as a preschooler.

Back then, I took her message as a sign that yes, I was angry and her efforts to help had failed. I still attributed my anger to overall jealousy and discontent with the world–I hadn’t yet discovered my rage related to a lifelong history of abuse, racism, and adoption.

The most difficult thing in re-reading her inscription–so lovingly writ!–is acknowledging that she, as well as my father, was a source of that anger. That her choices in adopting me, her inability to progress and open her mind to color, and her inadvertant support of my father’s racist-abusive behavior caused my problems. That my mother, to whom I experienced an unhealthy over-attachment as compensation for adoption-related attachment issues, wasn’t the innocent, well-meaning idol I knew.

A disheartening reality, one most people who lose their parents young must face: Confronting the possibility that your parents weren’t perfect, but unknowingly failed you in many ways.

It’s a complicated love. I love my mother and wish she were still here, playing with her grandson and existing not as a playground ghost  but my friend and mom. But realizing her errors and her misconception that my anger was due to anything but her actions cements the wound adoption wove into our relationship.

She died believing she did right, which I suppose is the best way to go. But with her absence, I’ve slowly unfurled her imperfections, not out of disrespect to her but in an effort to free myself from a life chained to grief.

Her memory influences my adoption reflections. I’ve written of our racial differences in Through Her Mirror: What my white mother’s view on makeup taught me as a Korean adoptee and her fundamental misunderstanding of adoption and race in A journey through space, a journey divided. I shared her racial ignorance in Shut Up and Smile. None of this was done maliciously. It’s all part of our story together. The journey she took me on is ultimately one we’d never conclude together, and while honoring her through unflattering memories might not seem loving, it’s a testament to the complex nature of transracial adoption and a mother-daughter relationship.

Perhaps this article’s title is misleading. I have yet to “find myself.” Actually, I dislike generic terminology. Maybe a better way frame this, for myself and other adoptees suffering through loss without their mothers, is

When I Lost My Mother, I Found Freedom