We spent Halloween weekend at the beach this year. Halloween always conjures up, no pun intended, specific memories in my mind because I was diagnosed with breast cancer around this time in 2020. Also an election year. Heaven help us. This year, the feelings felt extra fresh. As I sat on the sand watching the sun go down, yes, it was idyllic, I couldn't shake the feeling of how drastically different my life was just a few short years ago. Scared and sad were the first words that come to mind.
The emotions settled quite heavily as I drifted from thinking about my own experience to thoughts of a dear friend newly embarking on this journey. A journey no one signs up for. At the time of my diagnosis, it was almost impossible to see an end in sight. The idea of 18 + weeks of treatment, procedures, and more treatment if needed, terrified me. I wanted so badly to be done before I even got started.
As a kid, my mom would read stories to me out of, what I remember to be fantastically large book, The Book of Virtues. One story I particularly liked was a story about a boy who, and I'm reaching to remember the details, found some magic ball from which he could pull a string and skip the parts of his day he wanted to avoid. He eventually skipped larger and larger parts of his life and ends up old, alone, and sad. There were probably deeper virtues to be learned, but the gist of it stuck with me. Life is full of things we don't want to do but must do. By skipping out of or over life adversities, we miss out on a lot of good things. From early on in my diagnosis, I would think about that story often, laugh to myself, and think, "I would totally pull that string so hard on this who situation and not feel bad about it." Unfortunately, I found no such magical ball and string. I, like each of us, was set to endure all aspects of my hardship. Day by day and hour by hour for two and half years.
Sitting on the beach 2+ years removed from treatment, I couldn’t believe I was on the other side. Thinking back to how I felt during treatment versus how I feel now, it almost didn’t seem real. But I know it was real. Simply picturing my friend or any person going through their first or second round of chemo serves up immediate sympathy pains. Well, more like sympathy nausea, but you get the idea. “How did I get here,” I thought to myself as the sun dipped below the horizon. The short answer would be mercy, grace, and good people. But specifically, I reflected on conversations with people in my corner where we decided early on that we were going to take everything one day at a time. Some days, we broke that down to one hour at a time. Yes. That’s how we did it. We adjusted. We set new goals, redefined what “a good day” meant, and prioritized the day at hand. When you are in the thick of it, sick, tired, weak, scared, sleep deprived, foggy, groggy, and everything else, thinking about the entire road is quite frankly, paralyzing. You can’t stay in that place. You have to find a way to take it all one day at a time knowing that one day you will be able to look back and realize you made it through the whole road.
As I sat on the beach, the tiniest wave of calm came over me. It was exciting to know that we had walked through something difficult and experienced good things through it all. A comment I can assure you would have been less than well received when we were in the thick of it. Such is experience. It gave me comfort knowing there were other people braving similar situations and finding their own way to walk the road before them.
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