When it's all over

There is something about sunshine and open spaces that lights the fuse in little children. They're off and running before you can even shout a warning. It's infectious, it's beautiful, it's a picture of that full joy many of us spend our entire adulthoods trying to rediscover.

Yet, even in the darkness of persistent depression, you get days like this every once in a while. Today is one for me. I am too exhausted and drained from a heart incident yesterday that landed me in the ER - I can't jump for joy. But my soul is!

In the ER, they ran a chest x-ray to check on my pacemaker. You know those 30+ nodules they found last time, that they thought were cancer? They are GONE. Without a trace. It's not cancer!

The theory is that these spots on the previous x-ray were pockets of infection that came along with my pneumonia.

Thank you for your support through this "waiting game". So glad the wait is over and we can get back to normal - work, school, play, mining every day for nuggets of joy.

Feeling my way through the darkness

Guided by a beating heart

I can't tell where the journey will end

But I know where to start

They tell me I'm too young to understand

They say I'm caught up in a dream

Well life will pass me by if I don't open up my eyes

Well that's fine by me

So wake me up when it's all over

When I'm wiser and I'm older

All this time I was finding myself

And I didn't know I was lost

I tried carrying the weight of the world

But I only have two hands

Hope I get the chance to travel the world

But I don't have any plans

Wish that I could stay forever this young

Not afraid to close my eyes

Life's a game made for everyone

And love is the prize

~Wake Me Up, Avicii~

Gifts unrecognized

I've said it now, to several people. Written it in e-mails to new cancer patients reached out to.

Remission. "I'm in remission."

It took months to feel at home with remission. After four years of cancer, owning cancer, being cancer, it felt strange and scary to be in remission.

Four years ago, on a hot June day in the cold air-conditioned hospital, I whispered a verse in my dying grandmother's ear as she struggled to breathe, her eyes wide and wild like those of a caged animal.

"God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of peace." (II Timothy 2:7)

When cancer first choked my throat, and my voice was raspy and tremulous, fear ebbed in. He quietly made his bed in my heart, and slowly built up walls and made a home there.

Cancer isn't like remission. When you hear you have cancer, it is an immediate change. You go from normal to cancer patient without stopping to breath in between. Remission was a slower process for me, like the first time you take a deep breath when the doctor tells you to, and use all your muscles to take in that air, and your lips quiver as you let it out slowly, trying to make the breath out last and not rush out all together. As you settle into the deep, measured breaths that calm your body and your soul, you quite thinking about it so hard. The muscles between your ribs relax. Your lips quite trembling.

That's remission. The first time I let out a remission sigh, it was hard work. Now I'm riding serene on the waves of breath in and out, no longer hurried or compressed by cancer's grip.

I realize that, although I haven't lived with a spirit of fear for these four years, fear is what motivated me. Getting to the 5 year mark would mean success, the 10 year mark a small miracle. Now I am almost to 5, and I'm in remission. I need to let go of fear as my motivator.

Fear is what drove me to gather up small joys. Fear is what propelled me to enjoy motherhood and love my children deeper. Fear is what rocketed me to a new peace with the everyday distractions and disappointments that inevitably come. Fear is what aroused the hunger to find the gift in every day alive, even if it was just the gift of being alive.

Cancer narrowed my vision for life, while at the same time expanding it. Like a zoom lens, it focused all my energies on the minutiae, pulled me toward the details of the moment, and my 10 year, 20 year, 30 year plans gathered dust because it had been so long since I picked them up and pondered them. My vision expanded to see joy in the hidden corners of life, to find beauty under cobwebs, to see His glory in a million small ways, sparkling like a fresh rain had just fallen over the entirety of my life.

I haven't decided yet if I want to zoom out. I haven't picked up my 10 year plan yet. I think I might live this way forever.

Yesterday is past, tomorrow is uncertain, but today is a gift. That's why it's called the present.

I think about the ways God used cancer to free me: free me to love, to live, to relish, to understand, to see meaning. Wisdom? Is that what cancer gave me? Perhaps it is that I finally, truly, believe and can walk in the truths of Matthew 6:25-34.

If you decide for God, living a life of God-worship, it follows that you don't fuss about what's on the table at mealtimes or whether the clothes in your closet are in fashion. There is far more to your life than the food you put in your stomach, more to your outer appearance than the clothes you hang on your body. Look at the birds, free and unfettered, not tied down to a job description, careless in the care of God. And you count far more to him than birds. Has anyone by fussing in front of the mirror ever gotten taller by so much as an inch? ...walk out into the fields and look at the wildflowers. They never primp or shop, but have you ever seen color and design quite like it? The ten best-dressed men and women in the country look shabby alongside them. If God gives such attention to the appearance of wildflowers—most of which are never even seen—don't you think he'll attend to you, take pride in you, do his best for you? What I'm trying to do here is to get you to relax, to not be so preoccupied with getting, so you can respond to God's giving. People who don't know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works. Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don't worry about missing out. You'll find all your everyday human concerns will be met. Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don't get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes. (The Message)

Linked up to Lisa-Jo's prompt, "Gift"

In the middle, a beginning...

It came to me in the sweaty heaps of down purging out fever in the long deep hours of a sick mama night. The introduction to my book. Or, at least, what was supposed to be my book. And ended up being my blog. Back before I knew about blogs. (of my, this is simply not coming off with the polish it had in my green...er, I mean *dream*)

Someone who had a lot of grit and knew the toll her words would take said it first, "Write a little bit. Every single day." She meant about cancer, for me. For her, it was a little bit of every one of the last days she had with her son here on earth. She wrote letters to the sky, the thousands who prayed, before the word "blog" really existed. I came later, and so, I wrote a blog.

It started with the very beginning. A very good place to start. Oh, wait, that's "Do, Re, Mi". I mean the blog. It started with the very first day. Before surgeries and radiation, before separations from my kids and before I ever thought about dying before my 30th birthday. It started, to be exact, on June 6, 2008, 10 days before the surgery that confirmed what a biopsy had hinted at: aggressive, invasive thyroid cancer, snaking it's tentacles out out through that thinnest of all body parts, my neck...even on those of us who are not so thin elsewhere.

I remember the thud. It felt physical, like something heavy had actually dropped beside me. Turns out, I was all by myself, in post-surgical recovery, hearing myself and the word "carcinoma" (medical fancy-pants for cancer) in the same sentence. It made everything I had written for every one of the last 10 days painfully, awfully true. I really had it. That funny premonition - it was really there, and for a reason. The prayers I'd begged for - yep, I needed them. I was going to be a mom with cancer.


And a blog.


A mom with cancer and a blog. Talk about someone your parent's generation isn't going to know how to categorize. On each and every day, I wrote. And it wasn't always pretty. Okay, it was seldom pretty. Or holy. Or much to read, for that matter. But it was a mom with cancer and a blog. The daily. The dirty. The hush-now-we-don't-talk-about-that-in-public.

Somewhere along the line, I quit writing a book. And really invested in writing a blog. The daily. The dirty. The hush-now...wait. In my generation, we do talk about it, in the most public of ways. Thousands of moms, who write for thousands of reasons, do it every day all over the globe, from every computer in every land. Every entry, for us, no longer a chapter, or a part of one. It was just a day. One shared. Somewhere along the line, something started to gather around my mom-with-cancer-and-a-blog life. It was friends. The realest I've ever had. And some of whom I've never met IRL. (yeah, I had to look it up, too, once upon a time with a teenage texting babysitter. In Real Life.)

And so, I guess I'm going to keep on going. Blogging, that is. I hit remission February 2, 2012, just a month ago. And I guess I've kind of been spinning my wheels, mentally, emotionally. Something along the lines of, "What exactly do I do with a cancer blog now that I finally don't have cancer?" If you get a chance, stop by my friend Joy's blog and get her thoughts on the transition from mommy blogger to faith blogger. I think I might need to take her advice and write my one sentence disclaimer now. It's just a day: one shared.

That magical little word!

I heard the magic words today! I'm in remission! My cancer scan came back completely clean (it always has) but the really awesome news is that my tumor markers have gone from 4.5 in 2010 to 3.5 in 2011 and now 1.1 in 1012!! This is virtually unheard of, as this number is supposed to go up, not down. However, with the advice of my doctor, I started an immune boosting, cancer deadly diet in 2010, and my tumor markers have consistently gone down since then. While I am not "cancer free" because my tumor markers are still positive, I am in remission and have received my green light to start work as a professor and even to adopt (although that is not in our immediate future, as far as we know).

My doctor has never seen someone go all the way back to zero once tumor markers are positive. I will continue to pray and be vigilant about my blood sugar control and healthy food intake, with the hopes that I will be one of the lucky few for whom this miracle occurs.

I will no longer need to take radioactive iodine for the foreseeable future, unless my tumor markers go over 5 at some point. This means no separations from family, none of the nasty side effects, and an end to the rising risk of secondary cancer due to the radiation damage. It means hair on my head, my immune system will be able to finally direct it's healing energy to my other health problems, and an incredible sense of joy as I finally become as SURVIVOR instead of a thriver! I will still have annual cancer check-ups to test my tumor marker level, and will still require the expensive injections to reverse the cancer suppression meds once a year in prep for those labs. Unfortunately, this is the one cloud in the sky: no getting ahead of our health care bills, as we will continue to max out our high deductible insurance every year in January when I get the injections ($25,000 a pop).

Thank you, everyone, for your vigilant prayers and sweet empathy. It has been almost 4 years now...4 years of fighting, feeling miserable, and constantly facing separation from my family. I am out of the woods now, running out into the field of sunshine!

How wonderful, how beautiful, when brothers and sisters get along! It's like costly anointing oil flowing down... It's like the dew on Mount Hermon flowing down the slopes of Zion. Yes, that's where God commands the blessing, ordains eternal life. (Psalm 133: 1-3)