Has it really been a year since I was here? Well no time like the present to jump back in. It was a lovely Christmas here. The children did not lack for anything except a football. I know, I asked. My sister has moved here to help us walk through this cancer life. While it has been a dreadful trial I keep hoping it will turn around and they will find a way to be happy here. It's great to have them here I only wish it weren't so hard to start over.
I'll have to figure out my voice in this space again. So much of who I am has changed this past year. I no longer have children homeschooling with me and just this week I cleared out that closet. Even if I choose to homeschool again it will be from a completely different place than before. I haven't knit or sewn anything all year. We didn't harvest a single tomato. It has been a year somehow set apart from the life we had/have?. I'm not even sure.
Cancer has redefined Us. Yes the capitol Us. It shapes how I think and plan. Looking at moments and thinking this could be the last such and such...or not. Do you amplify the important moments or make the regular moments more important. It is as though something caught us under a glass jar. Dropped it down over our regular lives, we travel in that jar, under that jar. Through the birthdays and school days, bike repairs and bills. Looking for the jar to break at any moment. We are waiting, waiting to be set free but how. Both how's will require a whole new life path. When you fight cancer for so long it becomes a part of you. A part you don't want. Dr's and MRI's and hospital's they are all the normal events of life. Go to the grocery store, pick up the kids, take lunch to dh in the hospital, fold laundry. It becomes a part of the mundane. Yet it is the paper on which you are now writing your life. Two years in and we know how lucky we are to still have the "privilege" of fighting. Trudging through all the various regimens seeing all of the glum Dr's faces, we are aware of the situation. We are the lucky ones. Lucky is a witchy lass. Trapped by treatments, planning funerals, hoping for another six months a year. But not really, just hoping not to die near a birthday or too close to the beginning of school, or Christmas. Robbed of so much boring living. waiting for freedom. Feeling that it might just be trading one glass jar for another. Finding a way to be moving forward.
And then in the blink of an eye, my dh walks in and the bottom drops out. We are far from close to done with this. The tumor markers we cling to, the barometer of our mood have more than tripled. In a week the cancer has grown to three times it's previously measurable level. What does it mean? It could mean nothing, it could be a die off, it could be massive growth in his head. Only time will tell.
Posted in: on Wednesday, January 2, 2013 at at 11:48 AM
