Rambling Thoughts

I'll never forget that moment after the first surgery, nearly seven years ago, when Daddy met my stretcher in the hospital hallway and squeezed my shaky hand with his strong one as he triumphantly announced, "The doctor says there's no cancer!"

Oh, Daddy, if only that had been the truth, and there had been no call from her a week later, asking me to come in, and did I bring someone with me? She tried to convey the rarity, the seriousness of the diagnosis of leiomyosarcoma, but I couldn't absorb it until much later, after doing my own research.

I remember Mom called me and asked how to spell it. I told her I didn't know, and she replied that my sister Amy had found it on the internet, and it sounded so horrible that they were just hoping maybe mine was a different, but similar-sounding cancer without the grim statistics.

If only I hadn't needed to take Don out to the van after work (where we could speak privately) to tell him that the biopsy had revealed a very rare, very aggressive, very deadly cancer. Our lives were changed forever, in ways we could never have imagined on that grey November day.

What would I have done with all of these years if I hadn't been doing this? Who would I be today if I wasn't this broken-down, weather-beaten shell of my former self? And yet, hope springs eternal, and I find myself optimistic about the upcoming surgery and the recovery after that. I look forward to placing this chapter of my life in the book of finished ones, and moving on to beautiful innocence of the unknown, and gloriously still unwritten, pages that are ahead of us.

To be here among the living is the greatest joy of all ...