Gentle Reader-
This past Friday I celebrated another cancer milestone: the third anniversary of my diagnosis. It passed like any other day. I got up, got dressed, brushed my teeth, dropped the kids at school, and participated in all the regular boring day stuff most adults in our nation experience. In short- it was nothing special or remarkable. I may have mentioned it to a casual passerby, what this day was for me. But to any other outsider it was plain old me, doing plain old stuff, taking life and all that comes with it for granted.
And that is a cause for celebration.
While Hodgkin's Lymphoma is referred to as "the good kind of cancer" that diagnosis and treatment turned my life upside down. And I must be completely honest when I say, that at that point in my life there was plenty turned that direction already: a divorce, two school age kids, and a pending short sale of our home. In other words, I really didn't need another thing stacked onto my already overburdened plate. Yet, life, God, the Force or whatever you want to call it somehow thought it was a great idea to add one more thing.
During that time, I really was astounded by just how shitty things had turned. And maybe the life lesson was that of humility. One of my painfully honest colleagues told me, in the middle of treatment, that I was the person she compared her life to. In that: "Well, it could always be worse.." kind of way. Yep, I was THAT lady.
As you, gentle reader, already know things worked out. And here I stand three years later, my lungs a little smaller (thank YOU bleomycin toxicity!) my stomach a little less toned (thank YOU prednisone!) yet my heart is ever larger.
Today, I am engaged to a wonderful, lunatic who swears on his very existence that nothing bad ever happens to anyone who is close to him. SWEARS, I tell you. And I lovingly reply back: Man, I hope I'm not the one who blows the curve.
I still live on borrowed time- in six month stretches. I head back to my white coated MD's at SCCA in September to make sure those pesky lymph nodes remain unburdened. And of course, I will freak out and drive everyone around me crazy with my anxiety. But, that day will come. I will take my Ativan. I will surrender my body, my blood to the search. And I will tell myself that I can handle the outcome- regardless of what it is.
And that, my friends, is my life today. Boring, normal, unremarkable.
Ta-da!
