Cancer

I could have titled this entry a number of things because this particular subject on this particular day came to me in a dream.  Since there was a "joke" placed in a public place last night that referenced something funny and cancer in the same sentence, I decided that would be my topic of this post.

Cancer was one of my defining moments.  It wasn't the first nor it was the last - but it was a big one.  I was diagnosed with a very rare and life threatening type of breast cancer on my birthday in March 2002.  In my case I woke up one morning in late January feeling something was not right.  After spending a week or two deciding if I should even go to a doctor (there was no lump or anything I had ever read about as a warning sign) I went and was placed on an antibiotic for a month which, for obvious reasons, did not work.  That doctor sent me to a surgeon.  It was a Friday afternoon.  By Tuesday I was told I had cancer.  Talk about a change in direction!  It is a feeling a little like playing the child's game blind man's bluff.  Someone puts a blindfold on you, spins you around several times, and then wants you to go in a particular direction and find something or someone.  The needle in the haystack.

After major chemotherapy, a stem cell transplant, a major surgery, twice a day radiation, another major surgery, and two recurrences of this disease I am still here to write about it.  My life is not the same as it would be if I didn't have this disease.  In almost 9 years I have had a space of 15 months where I have not swallowed handfuls of pills to keep me going. But since I will never know what life would have been like without this happening to me, I don't know what I'm missing.  I could waste a lot of time feeling bad about what I'm imagining I'm missing but what's the point?  It won't change the facts.  I have enough other things I worry about.

Along the same theme are those people that have loved ones who have cancer.  The care-takers, the daughters, the sons, the husbands or wives.  They have experienced a defining moment as well.  Their lives will never be the same.  I think of a friend of mine, Michele, who had just moved to a new state with her husband and three children when her mother was diagnosed with lung cancer.  Michele's mother was not as lucky as I have been but neither have the loved ones that suffered when her life was taken.  For the rest of my life I will always look at cancer as not only affecting the person that has the disease but of the other people that have suffered because of it.  Their lives have changed directions and how they manage the rest of their lives has somehow been altered.

If you don't know someone that has cancer or that has lost their life to this insidious disease, you will.  It is then no longer funny.  In the meantime, if you are the one with cancer, just keep moving one foot in front of the next, you never know what is coming down the pipeline in terms of drugs or other types of care.  I'm lucky.  My daughter was in the 7th grade when I first learned of my disease.  They couldn't promise me I would see her graduate from the 8th grade.  She graduated from high school in 2007, spent two years in New York City, is back in Montana and onto other things.  I have the ability to watch her mature and grow into a woman who may someday write her own blog.  I have watched my son go from boy to man.  He has married, is a father of one and about to be two, coaches baseball, helps neighbors and friends, and is a heck of a business partner. 

Life might not always be what you think it's going to be, but it can be something good if you just let it be.  Peace out.