Seven daze

What a difference a week makes.  Babies are born and life irrevocably changes; school starts and summer quickly fades to a bittersweet memory; biopsies come back and suddenly you (or at least certain body parts) are part of a new, unsolicited category of the population.

That's what happened to me and my family.  An annoying (yes, that's how I viewed it), costly medical  procedure that I thought was a formality revealed cancer.


I don't write nearly enough--hence the title of this blog.  I too often get trapped in my own brain and the rattling and bumping of thoughts produces more anxiety then is necessary.   So as I logged on to the blog today I was surprised to see an entry I'd started last fall.  Even then I had cancer on the brain--maybe only as a point of illustration, but it was part of my schema nonetheless.

I wrote those three paragraphs less than a month ago.  Wow, if I thought I'd lost a layer of naiveté in a a week, a month of being a student of this crazy disease makes me feel simultaneously like an energized rhetorical sage--I can now proficiently spout all the necessary terms and phrases needed to appear that I know what's gong on and it's kinda of fun to play that role, if I'm being honest--and a tired pup since playing the part of the medical intern gets really tiring really quickly and at the end of it all the blasted cancer is still there.

So what's changed?  Well, my hopes of having a simple little lumpectomy and radiation have morphed into a bilateral mastectomy.  I was and still am completely uninterested in taking such drastic measures, but it seems to be the wise choice.  Pardon the metaphor, but in a base sense my diagnosis has become like my fourth child.  We are in the newborn phase where the youngster drains me of all my energy, keeps me up at night and shows no awareness for how it's existence is changing everyone else's.  But the thing about the newborn phase, especially for first time parents, is that while we think it's the hardest part of parenting, as soon as our kids get beyond it and approach adolescence, we quickly realize that all the sleep in the world does not compare to the energy needed to parent an older child.  I am that first time parent with this new addition--I think I'm tired now an that my body has been compromised but I haven't got a clue as to what's in store for me.  Maybe I'll spring back quickly and make it look "easy" like I did with my own newborns, refusing to wear maternity clothes home from the hospital.  But maybe I won't.  Maybe I'll be the woman who never looks like she did pre-pregnancy.  Either way, fitting into my jeans-or my tops-is so trivial compared to the real transformation that's about to talk place, the internal one.  There were many moments in each of my children' newborn lives that I did not handle well.  Instead of grace and dignity, frustration and fzrazzledness prevailed.  I'd like the chance to have a redo.  That's my prayer (in addition to complete healing, of course!: that I could handle this newborn phase with a maturity and calmness that is not based on the ease of my circumstances.  Lets face it: compared to so many on this journey, my circumstance are a cake walk. As my husband reminded me, as difficult as my choice to have the double mastectomy was, I at least had a choice. May I walk with purpose, that which is not my own, but which has been a merciful gift to me.

That Which Points Me Heavenward

This year hasn't really turned out to be as fabulous or inspiring in the way that we all hope for every New Year's Eve.  I mean, it's not like I typically those midnight toasts to materialize into the health and prosperity  that we cheers to.  But if I'd most certainly gotten to the point that I felt pretty good about maintaining the status quo.  It was reasonable, I thought, to assume family members' health wouldn't deteriorate too quickly.  Business most likely wouldn't get too slow.  We'd manage to continue to lead our comfortable lives, my family and I.  We'd continue to live reasonably modestly (only an American would state such a fallacy!) and splurge from time to time.  There was nothing on the horizon that seemed that it would rock our world beyond the normal ebb and flow of the life we'd become accustomed to.  I was wrong.

I've been on the sidelines plenty of times to witness pain and grief.  My husband and I are privileged to have two dear friends who literally stared cancer in the face and told it to go to hell.  They fought hard and they are winning the daily battle against this bastard curse that we have come to call reality for too many.  We see daily that hate that infuses so many minds and drives them to acts of terror in our global community.   Shoot, we hurt when our kids experience the reality of feeling left out.

But as much as we all hate to admit it, without the struggle the victories wouldn't be so sweet.  Tragedy unites us--ALL politics aside--to me there is no more emblematic image of American pride as when George W. Bush reminded all of us from the rubble of the World Trade Center that our country would not be destroyed.  Every time I hear Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down" I'm taken back to the whirlpool of emotions I had in the days following 9/11...shock, grief, patriotism.  It was a raw, horrific, beautiful time when people set aside their own agendas and looked outward to see who needed help next.  Its times like these that remind us that we are not alone.  That the artificial constraints that we allow to so frequently divide us don't stand up to Our collective hearts were broken and it was in the wounding that we vowed to press on, to not merely survive, but to go on living.  That's true redemptive beauty emerging from the ashes: to live when enduring seems like a long shot.  Our cancer ass-kicking friends typify this spirit.

So do the thousands of Paralympians who just wrapped up their games in Rio.   I spent a significant time watching events this past week and a half.  I'll just put it out there and say that I was completely ignorant about what all these games entailed.  All I knew was that they coincided with the Olympic games and that the participants had some sort of physical challenge.  Well, let me tell you that I feel like my eyes have been opened to a whole new realm of humanity.   These are incredible human beings.    I was completely enthralled at their level of athletic prowess and  I found myself fascinated by the individual stories of triumph and perseverance.  I've always been someone who wants to know "the story."  It's the journalist in me.


So it's September and in a few short months we'll be ringing in 2017.


soul searching-what makes me tick is " the story"

asking why-let go, look up.  the point is to let go

grown up struggling w/sadness

"I know we were meant for something better"