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.
Saturday Evening Blog Hop
I'm linking up over at Elizabeth Esther's tonight. Join me over there? I promise you'll find some fodder for discussion!
Sunset Looks at Sunrise
He grabs the hammer from his brother's truck, peels away a green shingle from the house where he grew up. It's land our ancestors farmed for four generations, land we all know deep in our souls, land about to be sold. They left it to us, their legacy. A legacy worth enough to change the way we live. I wonder, did they know we would sell it? That their seed, their children, would scatter far and wide, would become accountants and professors and salesmen and scientists?
The buildings still stand, testaments to time passing, 100 years of wind peeling paint. Someone wielded hammer to wood, dovetailed joints and engineered roof lines. Someone painted it red. I wonder if it will be razed for tillable farmland. It aches, this wonderment.
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| Linked to Lisa-Jo's prompt on "Ache" |
It's My Birthday, and I'll Cry If I Want To
We traveled down to Rochester, entering those carefully planned buildings, beauty even from 12 stories up, the geometric curves of the architecture breathing life into a scary place. No one ever goes to Mayo to get good news. It is two days before my 33rd birthday, and I am nervous, palpably anxious, as they screw my head into a vise (they have named it a "coil" which sounds slightly less terrifying).
My eyes dart furtively from inside the cage that is clamped down less than an inch from my nose, and I ask, "How do I get out of this thing?" "You don't", they reply, and decide to strap my arms and legs down down, too, to prevent me from going all kinds of crazy and prying myself free from the giant tube into which they are planning on loading my body. I push against the restraints, just to see if I'll be able to get out, and it's worthless. And so I start practicing my breathing techniques instead. You know, the ones you use to get through childbirth.
The next day, leap day. My one extra day every four years to be the age I am. I got to be 32 for one extra day this year. I had an appointment with my regular physician to talk pain control, figure out how we're going to navigate these next few weeks of nerve pain brought on by the injection I received into my ear drum on the 13th. I wasn't expecting to get the results of the MRI until March 1, my birthday. It did seem like some cruel joke, to find out whether or not you had a tumor on your birthday.
Well, apparently God thought that was cruel, too. Because, after a few phone calls to the right people, my regular doctor was able to procure the results of the MRI. And they were {drum roll please!!} NORMAL! I do not have cancer in my brain!
Nevertheless, the pain continues, and this morning was bad enough I went back to the emergency room for more tests and drugs. The tests revealed nothing (I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing at this point) and the drugs helped. I had the joy of spending an hour with a very dear friend in the ER while my mom graciously tended the children (again).
And so I start my 33rd year taking narcotics around the clock and somewhat resembling a pincushion.
The diagnosis, for now, is trigeminal and facial nerve neuropathy. I am praying that I just wake up one morning and it has just disappeared.