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THIS PAGE HAS BEEN VISITED
TIMES SINCE IT WAS UPLOADED.
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Contents: (click at blue dot to read chosen section)
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Encouraging Prologue: On Fighting Cancer “SO YOU THINK you’ve been given a death sentence when the doctor told you that you have a malignant tumor? Well, not necessarily so. Cancer need not be that deadly. “In every battle or every game, there is always a chance to win victory – call it a winning streak, call it luck, whatever! You can take that chance. “Taking that chance is no guarantee you would really win over cancer. But refusing to even try to fight will most likely guarantee defeat. “Taking that elusive chance to win over cancer is actually a decision only a person afflicted with cancer can make. Dying of cancer does not make the decision wrong or useless. It may mean that the odds were not overturned. Often the odds are beyond the patient’s control. “So how does one take the chance to win over cancer? Take control. Strengthen your body. Your best ally is your immune system. Never compromise this. Make intelligent decisions. Have courage. “Courage does not mean putting on a cheerful face all the time, having no tantrums, not being afraid. It’s being strong enough to face difficulties, dangers and disappointments. Courage is not caring if you lose but caring enough to try to win. “Here are some action points to consider: “Know yourself, know the enemy, and you can win a thousand battles. “Study, understand, know well your vulnerability and shield it from cancer. Beef it up with wellness through a good diet, enough sleep and rest, exercise, and keeping a healthy mind. “A lot of cancers are caused by toxic chemical and physical agents in the environment. Stay away from them. “Cancer is caused often by certain lifestyles that include smoking and too much coffee. A healthy lifestyle is certainly a ticket to remission. “Watch out for the danger signals of cancer. “Embark on a wellness program or regimen (physical and mental). “Undertake a lot of introspection for self-discovery that can harness your inner strength. “Harmonize your body, mind and heart/spirit to trigger your natural healing process. “It is difficult and rough and tough. Remember that ‘when the going gets tough, the tough get going.’ Victory over cancer is tough; it requires a lot of hard work. It also requires patience. “As you patiently wait for the ‘mystical five years’ to be over, embark on a cause larger than yourself. This will put a lot of your problems in perspective, especially if you connect it to a social context. “Most of all, trust and believe in yourself, in the power of Life and the forces that govern it. “Then, live with abandon, adding a little frivolity once in a while. “Be challenged, not discouraged by life’s difficulties. Live your life one day at a time. Any misfortune, no matter how large, can be overcome one day at a time. Before one knows it, the storm has passed over and one has weathered it through. “Go with life’s bliss and splendor. Don’t joy, happiness and love seem boundless as one savors every minute of it? “So, life goes on even with cancer. Whether or not you lick cancer would not really matter, once you’ve discovered a quality of life that cannot be constrained in space and time.” The foregoing Prologue came from the prolific pen of a lady writer who was afflicted with malignant melanoma, a type of skin cancer that has been described as “among the fastest-growing and most-resistant to treatment.” But she outlasted all those grim prognoses. She even outlasted one of her doctors, and completed about a decade and a half of active and fulfilled life from the time the first malignant melanoma cancer cells were suspected to have emerged within her right foot. She fought cancer and won many more additional years of active life, enriching it by her profound discernments about the value of life and its very purpose. That lady writer who wrote this challenging Prologue took the same challenge and, by her own reckoning as expressed above, gloriously triumphed. Her name was Carmencita S. Soriente-Reyes. Most of the material in this book came from pages of her diary, handwritten as a living journal of her struggle. Other parts came from her letters. |
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Dedication: A Letter to Cita
August 10, 2003 My Dearly Beloved LifePartner Cita, In a foggy garden in Baguio this morning, after some moments of deep breathing and fondling some baby leaves, I started on a stream of thoughts centered on you. When the sharp rays of sunshine started to break through the thick clouds and fog, I felt the urge to write you a letter that would greet you on your special day, and which might also help me do what I have long been putting off since the year after you returned home to the Source. From where you’ve been since you moved on beyond the life we shared for nearly two decades, you would surely have known all this time that I still haven’t started on that book project we had planned together and which I had promised myself and our loved ones to do even after you had gone ahead – the book about your feelings, your views, your life, as a passionate advocate of many beneficent causes. Of course, in the first year or so, it was also fully accurate to say that it was too painful for me to even just start sifting through your notebooks and all those letters in your files, including those lovingly sweet letters written to me and those lovingly hurt letters written also to me. But as years gradually rolled on I realized with chagrin and a bit of panic that I actually didn’t know what to write! The panic grew as more time passed and the wealth of information – the research work you did so rigorously on cancer in general, and on melanoma in particular — was fast getting dated. I’ve never had this kind of problem with any of my works before; the problem of not knowing what to write, not knowing what central message my piece of writing or book project would be saying. My usual problem has been in efforts to compress my manuscripts for economical and reader-friendly brevity. Where was my dilemma coming from? For most of your life you carried on with a strong fighting stance against injustices in society, including those that contribute to causing cancer and those that disempower the afflicted from having any control over their actual options. But toward the last few months and especially the last few weeks of your earth life, your behavior swung to that of equanimity, peaceful acceptance (not defeatist resignation), and forgiveness. From which of these two viewpoints, then, was I to write this book? That dilemma was highlighted when the title we had originally planned for the book, Fighting Cancer Together (which was faithful to the name “Laban sa Kanser” of the cancer-fighters association you founded in 1991) was very politely but also very effectively challenged by a suggestion that the book be titled, instead, Facing Cancer Together. When I heard that idea from the Maryknoll nun who had been our close friend, I recognized its intimate fidelity to your outlook and attitudes shortly before you graduated in peace to an unhindered view of our Source. But the material I had at that time was a big bundle of anger, of just indignation, over the status of our Philippine health care system where the people’s right to health – to appropriate, affordable, and available health care and medical supplies and services – has been honored more in the breach due to all sorts of reasons. The reflection session this morning in the beautiful Maryknoll garden, and the six-hour bus ride from Baguio to Manila, afforded me some quiet meditation time “away from it all.” As I write this letter to you in the last few minutes of what should have been your 48th birthday – and after Mommy, with tubes and all, had managed to fall asleep in the dimmed isolation room of the Lung Center’s Intensive Care Unit – I feel I have finally found some insightful clarity on how to do this book: I am going to combine the seemingly-conflicting aspects into an integrated whole, with separate chapters for the different facets. I’m going to present to all who would have access to this book a very dynamic, a very exciting, picture of you! In the nine years that have passed since your departure from earth life, I have been given a rich series of enlightening experiences to help me reconcile just anger with spiritual bliss, experiences that include being embraced by a very pleasantly spiritual (not really religious in the usual sense) learning institution, and having been able to complete a “pilot edition” manuscript of a book that discusses and relates together both the mundane and the more profound realms of our human existence and actualization. I write this letter and the entire “book of excerpts from diary entries” for the perpetuation of your memory and as a tribute to your continuing inspiration, although it is unlikely that any such perpetuation or tribute would still have some real value to you “where” you are now. I write this book – and this letter – for all our loved ones, including those who love us back, and I write it for all others who may gain from it something that, in their own judgment, they can make use of. I write this mainly for myself, to help me feel better attuned to the reality which I comprehend intellectually but which has not sunk completely into my heart – that you have left me behind but we have remained one, and that you are still with me as I continue longing for LifePartnership such as we both once enjoyed.
I love you!
August 10, 2003 / 11:56 pm Lung Center of the Philippines Quezon City |
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Acknowledgments
To our Great Almighty Parent and Loving Source, and to Mr. & Mrs. Dominador P. Soriente and Fresca Santos-Soriente, who gave our country and me, and my family a most wonderful gift, in the person of our beloved Cita;
To Dr. Myrna S. Soriente-Estrada M.D., Cita’s one sister “equivalent to five,” who, along with Ian and Nonong Soriente-Reyes and the Corpus-Reyes clan, really helped me bear the last weeks of Cita’s earth life and my past ten years without her;
To Ms. Joydee C. Robledo, who gave me a crucial encouragement right on the eve of my marathon-writing of this book, and made possible it’s “photo-finish” completion, as a mock-up of the pilot edition, by the 10th anniversary of Cita’s passing last June 11; and
To Ms. Marie Reyes-Marciano, who did a crash-editing of the whole text for this First Edition, as still another special gift to Cita...
I offer my deep and heartfelt thanks!
Note: The chapters of this book are not arranged in any chronological sequence. Cita was co-authoring and unfolding various aspects of her life simultaneously. When she decided to dedicate her life to loving service of the “least of her brethren,” she had already started her homecoming to Our Almighty Source.
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