Free It's Always Something by Gilda Radner Page B

easily as I’d laugh.
    Sometimes I would even lie in my bed and think up things to make people laugh on purpose. Like, I’d wait till the nurse left the room—maybe she had just gone into the hall to get a coffee or get her lunch—and then I’d buzz for her and say into the intercom, “Nurse,” in the most pathetic way possible. “Nurrrsseee.” I always got them laughing that way. It was some strange form of “The Judy Miller Show”—the hyperkinetic child’s fantasy I did on “Saturday Night Live.” In this protected environment, I was still the clown, still wanting to be liked . . . to be loved . . . to be funny . . . to perform.
    Late one afternoon, not quite two weeks after my surgery, I had my first appointment with Joanna Bull. Joanna was in her late forties. Her face was round and open and her blond hair was cut in a Buster Brown style. It was as though an angel had walked into my hospital room, an angel filled with life. I never saw anybody like her; I never saw anybody with so much spirit. She flew into the room, plopped herself fearlessly at the foot of my bed and put her arms on my legs so there was a physical contact between us. She talked to me about cancer. She was a psychotherapist who worked at a place called The Wellness Community, where she was assistant director. She counseled cancer patients all the time, and she was just sparkly. I remember her sparkling eyes. We talked about cancer, specifically about my feelings about it. I told her that I thought this ordeal was a school I was going through, that I was meant to teach and help others. She said that now it was more important to see this as an “exquisite” time to take care of myself and heal my own body. We talked about the upcoming chemotherapy. She knew I was seeing a psychiatrist at the time and she said she was assigned not to deal with my psychological problems but to help me learn to relax and to handle having cancer.
    I protested that I had had cancer. But Joanna confronted me with the fact that you never know. She herself has a form of leukemia. She has no symptoms and it may stay in remission all of her life, or it may show up at any moment. She lives with cancer all the time. That made me trust her. I had a lot of months of treatment ahead of me. The important thing was that I learn to make that treatment work for me in the best way physically and in the best way psychologically, and to use techniques of visualization and relaxation to imagine I was helping the chemicals fight the cancer cells. She put me through a relaxation exercise so I could learn to kind of transcend my body and the feelings in it to a mental state of well-being. Then she had me do visualization throughout my body, concentrating on health and getting well. It was hard to do at first, but she came back three times a week in the hospital, then she came to my house after I was home.
    Joanna would speak in a slow, even, delicious voice. I would lie there in bed and she would talk me through a series of motions, telling me to tense my body in all different areas so that I could get a sense of the difference between being tense and being relaxed. “Tighten up your toes and curl them up as hard as you can, then release them and let them go.” Then she would go through my whole body one part at a time until my entire body was relaxed. She would lead my conscious mind through other exercises—relaxation and healing, putting light in certain areas, healing light; seeing the word relax, seeing it far away and closer. These were drills for my conscious mind to help my body to relax. I was going down a stairway into deeper and deeper relaxation. After doing this four or five times, I began to realize this was meditation. I also found that even though I fought it, I would go into this relaxation feeling that Joanna was talking about. The sound of her voice was very soothing, and during our sessions, even if only for twenty-five minutes or half an hour,