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"Dominique Browning writes an online column for the Environmental Defense Fund and is the author of Slow Love, from which this essay was adapted. She also writes a blog at slowlovelife.com. My 80-year-old French cousin, Colette, and I are strolling slowly down a Paris street, her arm in the crook of mine. She is an elegant person, perfectly groomed. She has always been a gracious hostess, a busy mother, and an ardent shopper. Today she is, as always, immaculately turned out; her bag matches her shoes, her coat is a pearly white wool. She wants to talk about drugs.  &amp;quot;Le Prozac!&amp;quot; she begins shouting, to my disbelief. &amp;quot;Le Prozac! C&amp;#039;est un miracle!&amp;quot; I turn and stare at her, and she sweeps her hands dramatically down her coat. &amp;quot;Le Prozac! C&amp;#039;est un imperm\u00E9able \u2014 a raincoat! Everything just washes off. Nothing bothers me anymore. Why didn&amp;#039;t I find this miracle 30 years ago?&amp;quot; She fixes me with a penetrating look. I am her age, 30 years ago. &amp;quot;Finally, I can slow down. J&amp;#039;adore le Prozac!&amp;quot;  So there you have it, I&amp;#039;m thinking, 80 years and finally she&amp;#039;s found a way to quiet what must have been a constant anxiety in her head \u2014 an incessant voice urging perfection, order, restraint, and speed in all things: Do more, do it better, do it faster, faster, faster. She&amp;#039;s almost weeping with relief and joy at letting go of that clamor. But do I listen to her? Of course not. I return to New York and leap right back into my frenetic life. Nothing moves fast enough. Work is driving me crazy? I love my job! My relationships with men go nowhere? So what! I don&amp;#039;t see enough of my friends? Later! That&amp;#039;s life, isn&amp;#039;t it? Until suddenly one day it isn&amp;#039;t. Suddenly, I am unemployed. Mine is not a story of financial ruin, though like hundreds of thousands of others in the past year or two, I&amp;#039;ve had to radically alter the contours of my life without a regular salary. It is a story of psychological collapse, of struggling to start over again \u2014 and not make all the same mistakes.  One day, months into unemployment with no glimmer of a job in sight, I crawl out of bed to take myself into New York City for my annual health exam. I&amp;#039;m dreading the visit. My gynecologist, Patricia Allen, is glamorous and brilliant. She&amp;#039;s also five feet two and cannot weigh more than a hundred pounds. Or, to put it another way, she wears size 0 clothing, made in a parallel universe as a disguise for alien visitors to what is shaping up to be my new elasticized-waist planet. One thing about being unemployed: I&amp;#039;m hungry all the time. And I haven&amp;#039;t been resisting the urge to feed my fear. There&amp;#039;s nothing like being depressed for putting on the pounds. My doctor maintains strict standards for herself, and for her patients. The first thing she checks is your underwear: Many an unsuspecting patient has been chewed out for substandard issue. &amp;quot;What on earth do you call those things you are wearing? Don&amp;#039;t give me &amp;#039;comfortable.&amp;#039; You expect your husband/boyfriend/emergency room doctor to respect you in those? Have you given up on life?&amp;quot; Dr. Pat is an unregenerate flirt. She gives advice to her patients on how to talk to their partners about difficult issues \u2014 only once during the weekend, and only after that special Saturday-morning sex. (&amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t talk to me about errand day! Make time!&amp;quot;) I have purchased lacy bikini underwear just for my visits to Dr. Pat, so that she will not give up on me.  After she checks your underwear, she checks your weight. All doctors check your weight and record it on charts, which, if you ever peek at them, are completely illegible \u2014 except for your weight! Dr. Pat is the kind who&amp;#039;ll actually make rude remarks about your weight. &amp;quot;Two pounds? You think that&amp;#039;s nothing? Two pounds every year for 10 years is 20 pounds, dear. After you&amp;#039;re 50, 20 pounds is like 200 pounds. Out of control.&amp;quot; And so on.  The first time I met Dr. Pat, 18 months earlier, and was put through the underwear drill, I was a bit put off. But then she saved my life.  Dr. Pat grew up in a tiny town in Kentucky, and her practice reflects the caring and nosiness of a community where everything is everyone&amp;#039;s business; nothing is off-limits. She expects her patients to tell her everything about themselves and their bodies, what has happened to them, and what they&amp;#039;ve done with them. That&amp;#039;s why our first visit took many hours. The life of my body had been, to that point, remarkably unremarkable. I&amp;#039;d never been in the hospital for an illness. I rarely took aspirin. I didn&amp;#039;t drink to excess or smoke. I had given birth to two babies without any pain control, mainly because I waited too long before I began to beg for it. While I was telling Dr. Pat my medical history, I could see by the tiny frown between her eyes that it was not good enough, or bad enough. Surely there was something I was forgetting? Yes! Suddenly I remembered a &amp;quot;significant medical event&amp;quot; from my 20s. How could I have forgotten it? I had awoken one morning with a mild backache. I attributed the discomfort to overdoing it in the swimming pool the day before. By noon, I was in enough pain that I became convinced the mattress in my rental was no good, so I talked my boyfriend into driving to the mall for firmer bedding. Before the new mattress was delivered to our house, I was stricken with seizures so severe that I could no longer stand up. I was crouched on the floor, howling dementedly with the worst pain I had ever felt in my life.  Within an hour, I developed a raging fever and became delirious. I&amp;#039;m sure my neighbors could hear me ranting about the demons crawling through my body. My husband-to-be looked on with pity and terror in his eyes, wondering, no doubt, if this was a foretaste of life with me.  It was at this point that he thought it might be time to get help. Of course, by the time we got to the hospital, the kidney stone, which was what had possessed me, had done its damage and left behind a ragged trail.  I closed my recitation of this event with the prideful comment that the pain of delivering hefty baby boys did not come close to the pain I felt while passing kidney stones.  Dr. Pat was sitting up straighter, scribbling furiously. Finally, I was giving her some good material. &amp;quot;Have you passed any more kidney stones?&amp;quot; I thought perhaps I might have, but nothing as severe, probably more like rocks instead of boulders. &amp;quot;Is someone monitoring your kidneys?&amp;quot;  By this time in my life I couldn&amp;#039;t even remember where my kidneys were. So many other organs, like my expanding stomach and, post-divorce, my broken heart, had hove into view. I assured her I had been free of kidney awareness for decades. I left her office with a note to see a radiologist for a typical baseline vaginal ultrasound. &amp;quot;And, while you&amp;#039;re at it, get an abdominal ultrasound. You might as well.&amp;quot; I put that appointment off for months: I had too much to do, too tight a schedule to satisfy someone&amp;#039;s baseline curiosity. But Dr. Pat hounded me, and finally I lay down on the table and had my belly slathered with warm gel. I hadn&amp;#039;t had an ultrasound since I had last been pregnant 16 years earlier \u2014 how dear is the memory of the first sight of my tadpole of a son, his brain split in two, his heart thumping outside his body. Things had improved, technologically speaking. I lay on my back and asked the technician to swivel the screen so I could see it as he examined my insides.  &amp;quot;Tell me about all the organs, while you&amp;#039;re going around,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t remember a thing about my anatomy once you get past the uterus.&amp;quot;  That organ was fine. So were those eccentric-looking antlers of ovaries. He began ticking things off clockwise. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s your bladder, looks perfect. There&amp;#039;s your kidney, excellent.&amp;quot;  I was shocked at how big the kidney was; somehow, I&amp;#039;d confused kidneys with kidney beans. One was the size of a nickel, the other the size of a fist. Well, that revelation alone was worth the price of admission. &amp;quot;Your gallbladder is good \u2014 &amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Are you sure? I&amp;#039;m not so sure. Will you take another look? I seem to be unable to drink gin any longer. Or vodka. One of those clear ones. Of course, you can&amp;#039;t tell with martinis anymore, they make them out of anything. But after martinis I get terrible cramps. Awful. The kind that ruin the evening. I was thinking it might be a bad gallbladder.&amp;quot; Naturally, I had not mentioned this to Dr. Pat. &amp;quot;Nope, gallbladder is fine. No sign of inflammation.&amp;quot; This guy could have told me the eye color of my unborn children. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re a perfectly boring patient.&amp;quot; He pressed round further down the other side, ticking off a couple more organs. I remembered what I had learned in high school biology about symmetry. The technician grew quiet. I figured he was bored; the left side just mirrored the right side, as I recalled. Soon, though, pictures were being frozen on the screen, which was now swiveled away from me; measurements were being taken, and other people called in to look. They were calm, scrutinizing the gray images on the screen, so I was only mildly curious, until a beautiful white-coated doctor looked me in the eye and said, gently, &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t worry. I&amp;#039;m sure we&amp;#039;re going to be treating you for a very long time. Dr. Pat would like you to call her. Immediately.&amp;quot; That clued me in. In short, Dr. Pat told me I was to cancel lunch and get to the hospital.  &amp;quot;But it&amp;#039;s with my agent. Are you sure? That took forever to schedule.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Honey, if it were my mass, I&amp;#039;d want to get it checked as soon as possible.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Mass? What&amp;#039;s that?&amp;quot; I asked. Dr. Pat sent me for a CAT scan and an MRI and anything else they could think of. I finally began to understand that I was in trouble when the doctors kept shoveling me, on my hard slab, into that tunnel over and over again for more pictures. It was freezing; I was trembling; my hand with a big needle in it was throbbing, as it had taken several stabs to find an actual blood supply. Tears began to leak out of my eyes and slide sideways down my face, pooling in my ears. All I could think of was, Alex will be OK. He is grown up. But Theo is still in high school. He is way too young for me to leave him. Please. Make this go away. The radiologists refused to tell me what was going on. I went to the surgeon&amp;#039;s office alone the next day. He was brisk and direct. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve done this operation thousands of times.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What operation? Everyone keeps using these terms \u2014 mass, growth. What are you talking about?&amp;quot; The doctor shrugged his shoulders. &amp;quot;Mass. Growth. Tumor. It&amp;#039;s all the same. You have kidney cancer.&amp;quot; I decided that as he was supposed to be a great surgeon, the only bedside manner I cared about would be on display when I was unconscious. Within a couple of weeks I was on my back on what looked like a giant tea trolley. I put on a brave smile as my family receded from view and I entered a busy, bright place. Dr. Pat stood at the end of the table, just behind my surgeon, and as the team of doctors introduced themselves, she squeezed my foot. &amp;quot;See? I&amp;#039;m not going anywhere until you are out of here. And I&amp;#039;m wearing my good-luck angel earrings. The gold ones.&amp;quot; Even in the OR, she was impossibly chic. I smiled wanly. Dr. Pat gave me a kiss. The anesthesiologist went to work and I was drugged into the fastest, deepest sleep I had ever experienced, a sleep so effortless that to this day I wish I could do it again. And, come to think of it, one day I suppose I will. I lay in bed after the surgery feeling as though I had been battered. My belly was swollen with air; within a week I looked like I was six or seven months pregnant, and in fact, that was how I felt. I had been told to get out of bed frequently, and to walk around, but it was difficult to move. I had never felt so tired. And of course, all I could think about was the invisible cell, the one I was sure had escaped, the cell that was going to burrow into my guts and slowly but surely strangle the life out of me.  A few days later the biopsy returned: Not one, but two different kinds of tumors were smack in the middle of the kidney, one tucked slyly behind the other so that it hadn&amp;#039;t even shown up on any of the screens. Both malignant. Kidney cancer is referred to as a &amp;quot;silent killer.&amp;quot; It is extremely slow-growing, but deadly. It is one of the few cancers for which there is still no known chemotherapy. It is so dangerous that tumors deep in the kidney suspected of being cancerous are not even biopsied presurgery. The risk of a cell escaping during the extraction is too high. Most people \u2014 and they are generally older than I was, and generally male \u2014 do not know they have kidney cancer until they are peeing blood. By that time, it is often too late. In my case, the margins around the cancerous tissue in my kidney were clean, as the surgeon explained it. The cancer hadn&amp;#039;t broken out of its host, and it likely had not spread. There was no statistical likelihood of the same thing occurring in the other kidney. Kidney cancer has nothing whatsoever to do with kidney stones. Dr. Pat was just intuitive. And careful. She&amp;#039;d heard that I&amp;#039;d had kidney trouble at a young age and thought, Let&amp;#039;s just take a look. And I was lucky. In fact, over the next year, I would lapse into dazes, wondering, What if I hadn&amp;#039;t kept the appointment for the ultrasound?  I had cheated death. For a week or two, I was full of gratitude and awe at the beauty of life&amp;#039;s simplest pleasures. And then I started fleeing as fast as I could from the stark evidence of mortality. Against doctors&amp;#039; orders, I quickly returned to work. Never mind that I couldn&amp;#039;t even get through the day without lying down every couple of hours. I probably added months to my recovery by running myself ragged. Not long afterward I was out of work anyway.  In the months of recovery \u2014 from losing my job, not my kidney! \u2014 I began finally to think about having had a life-threatening illness. It had begun, slowly and quietly, to realign my tolerances for who and what was toxic to my sense of well-being.  It took nearly a year of falling apart, and of steady self-examination, to finally claim cancer&amp;#039;s gift: clarity. As I mentioned, all that thinking was making me hungry. I was a regular at the local bakery, and then I became obsessed with baking muffins. Everything, it seems, can be turned into a muffin. You find yourself wondering why there can&amp;#039;t be chicken muffins, or salmon muffins, or beef muffins \u2014 forgetting, for a moment, that they do exist, and they are called hamburgers. In the year and a half following the operation, it has become clear that losing a kidney has done nothing to dampen my appetite.  Thus, we can get back to the story of my morning visit to Dr. Pat for my annual exam. She puts me on the scales. Her eyes widen. When she asks how I am doing, I burst into tears.  My new weight isn&amp;#039;t only about the joy of cooking muffins. I begin babbling my way through the litany. I&amp;#039;ve lost my job; I have finally given up on a boyfriend wedded to ambivalence; my younger son has left home to go to college, so I&amp;#039;m truly living alone; I have been forced to put my house on the market, and the stock market has taken a nosedive, dragging along with it much of my life savings .... Then, of course, there&amp;#039;s also the fact that every cancer survivor worries about the cell. What if one minuscule cancer cell is going haywire in my body? What if that twinge I felt when I reached into the back of the pantry for the peanut butter wasn&amp;#039;t a pulled muscle, but lung cancer? What if that headache...  It is all too much. I just feel I can&amp;#039;t make anything right. And global warming! &amp;quot;Have we discussed global warming yet? I&amp;#039;ve contributed to it. A lot! Everything has gone wrong and it is just too much.&amp;quot; By then I am sobbing. I am expecting to hear about a psychiatrist she wants me to see, or medication I could take to make it all better. I am prepared to tell her not to bother with that, I took medicine for years \u2014 it is no longer enough.  But Dr. Pat has a better idea. She sits quietly, looking at me for a few moments. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ve gained 15 pounds,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Time for you to go on Dr. Pat&amp;#039;s Diet.&amp;quot; She reaches into a bag behind her desk, pulls out an impossibly cute, tiny can of V8 juice, wipes off the top, pops the tab, and hands it to me. &amp;quot;Drink this.&amp;quot; She begins scribbling furiously on her notepad. &amp;quot;The key is protein. And the trick is the V8 juice. You will eat very small portions. But you will eat throughout the day. No more dinner parties. I don&amp;#039;t care who&amp;#039;s inviting you. Stay home. Stay on the diet. E-mail me every night. Tell me what you ate.  &amp;quot;And this is important: Tell me about the saboteurs. What makes you break the regimen? Every night, I want an e-mail. And every morning, weigh yourself. And then send me the number. Accurately.&amp;quot;  I raise my hand to ask a question.  &amp;quot;Yes, the V8 is salty. You need the salt. You need it for energy. You&amp;#039;ll need to be able to keep going.&amp;quot;  This is sounding ominous. I raise my hand again, but she cuts me off.  &amp;quot;The thing about this diet is that it will make you aware of what you are eating. It will make you aware of when you are eating. Instead of all that mindless shoving of stuff into your mouth, you will learn to pay attention when you are full. And you&amp;#039;ll think about how alcohol and sugar become a way of life. You don&amp;#039;t want that way of life, I can assure you.&amp;quot; I am, quite frankly, appalled. I cannot begin to tell you the ways in which this entire enterprise is doomed. The first problem that occurs to me is that I do not own a scale. A quick scan through several stores convinces me I would never own a scale. They are hideous. Why has no one designed a decent-looking modern scale? What has happened to scales that let you jiggle the calibrations to help things along?  Days later, when I finally do buy the sort of old-fashioned doctor&amp;#039;s-office scale I want, I can&amp;#039;t read the numbers from as far away as my head. Well, all I need is a rough guess.  After I settle the scale in my closet, I take the diet to the supermarket and stock up on the permissible food items \u2014 all four of them. It is then that I begin to feel the effects of the diet. Massive relief. No more gnawing insecurity about my food choices. This is by far the healthiest regimen I have ever maintained.  And those dumbbells Dr. Pat insisted on! Yoga! I am unfurling limbs that have not been stretched in years. I am even learning to stand on my head, appropriately enough. I smile at myself in the mirror, and decide that a smile is the best sort of face-lift. I start smiling at everyone.  Life has never been more peaceful. Within weeks, I am no longer obsessed with my problems. I am happily handing things over to other powers faster than the powers can present themselves. My mind is so warped that I understand with the force of revelation that I cannot control anything at all except what I am eating, my next supply of protein.  Within a month, I feel relieved of the burdens of the world. And 15 pounds as well.  Perhaps Dr. Pat is right. All I know is that, once again, I have the illusion that my life is in order. And sometimes that&amp;#039;s as good as it gets. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/entertainment/a18886/dominique-browning/>