When Joshua Isaac first screened his documentary, My Left Hand, at the Seattle True Independent Film Festival in June of 2007, things were going well. His daughter had just been born a week earlier, he and his wife Kim were certain the cancer that had taken his left hand was in remission, and he was feeling good.
Now, little more than a year later, things are not going quite as smoothly. At the beginning of the year, the epithelioid sarcoma, a rare, not-very-well-known form of the disease, returned and Isaac began chemotherapy treatments in March. It has spread to his lungs and he has lesions on his head, though the trial therapy he travels to Oregon to receive has been keeping it at bay, Isaac believes.
But Isaac has a story to tell, a story that will be shown by Jewish Family Service, as it screens My Left Hand on Mon., Sept. 8.
The story begins over a decade ago, when doctors found a rare, cancerous tumor in Isaac’s left hand. In 2004, when he was 31 years old, the cancer returned. He went through radiation and chemotherapy treatments, and eventually surgeons amputated the hand altogether. During the process, Isaac kept the cameras rolling.
“This was the opportunity to put together a film, and put it around a subject I know pretty well,” he said. “I just kind of made my family the players in the film, and the conflict, the tension, was definitely around a medical story.”
Isaac has always had a creative streak, and making the documentary satisfied that hunger — in addition to being cathartic.
“Doing something on the experience of going through this, it gave me something I looked forward to making, even during tough times,” he said. With “the cancer experience itself, I didn’t want to gloss over the nature of it, from the slog of going through chemotherapy week to week, the ups and downs of the diagnosis, and then thinking it’s cured and getting a biopsy back of the lymph nodes telling me it’s spread…. I think that’s one thing I wanted to show in the film. I hope I was successful in that.”
Though the documentary is focused around Isaac’s cancer, the hero of the film, he says, is his wife Kim.
“I think she’s done an amazing job,” he said. In addition to raising three kids, sometimes on her own, Kim Isaac also works full-time.
“I definitely wouldn’t say it’s in any way easy. Her emotions swing,” he said. “The burden of it all can get to her — the thought I might not be here in a year or two, and she’s got three kids under 8.”
Their oldest son, Jacob, 7, is entering the 2nd grade at Seattle Jewish Community School, and has some understanding of what’s going on with his father.
“I go down to Oregon for chemotherapy,” Isaac said, “we’ve told him it’s very serious, but we do what we can to stay alive.”
Sam, who just turned 5, hasn’t quite grasped the situation.
“For Sam, he’s still a young kid who is into light sabers and superheroes,” Isaac said.
He’s made several life adjustments in the meantime. His supervisors at Microsoft have allowed him a lot of leeway to travel for his treatments and he works from home more often so he can be around his kids.
A lot has happened in the Isaacs’ life since the film debuted. My Left Hand, however, will stay the same.
“The film kind of stands on its own as a moment in time of trying to capture what it was like, what we were going through,” Isaac said.
He has thought about another project, which would focus on what he’s working on now: An ethical will, with local rabbi Elana Zaiman.
“People of all faiths write ethical wills to articulate and to convey their values, and ideals to the people they love,” Zaiman wrote in an article for JTNews in September 2006. “Writing an ethical will is about being ourselves, taking time to look deep into our souls, and into the souls of those we love.”
It’s an important process for someone who has had to face his mortality head-on — something most people Isaac’s age in his community rarely think about. And until it came back, Isaac wasn’t convinced the cancer would return.
“I can’t say I’m not scared. I’m definitely scared. I worry about the future,” he said. “I’ve met people on my own cancer journey who I’ve seen go through this. It’s not pleasant.”
Part of the film centers around Isaac’s questioning his faith in his Judaism, a topic that comes up often in similar situations, said Marjorie Schnyder, director of Family Life Education at JFS. Rabbi Dan Bridge and a local reverend who served as Isaac’s chaplain at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance will talk about faith and illness during a post-screening discussion.
Schnyder said she jumped at the chance to screen My Left Hand partly because the Isaacs are well-known in the local Jewish community, and partly because it fits in with the healing programs the agency has been running since the spring.
“Not only is the topic compelling, about a young family impacted by cancer, since they’re people known by many people in the community,” Schnyder said. “Some of the major themes were daily family life and how family is impacted, and of course that’s where we would be coming from in our programming.”