Surviving
This morning as I drove my daughter downtown to Nutcracker practice, enthusiastically singing along to 70s dance hits, feeling carefree and happy, tears sprang to my eyes. This is what surviving looks like right now – deliciously, blissfully mundane and normal. Not a week goes by that I’m not hit with this same feeling of thankfulness – just insert a different scenario.
The practice of referring to cancer patients as “survivors” has generally unsettled me, but I’ve never been able to put words to what bothered me about it. Lately, my thoughts have come together. I have realized that the label of “survivor” (noun) implies something that has already happened. A static event. In reality, situations are much more fluid. Surviving (verb) is a much more accurate description. I live under the assumption that most people I see in my day to day life are surviving something – there are few life-changing situations to which we can put a big ole check mark beside the box labeled “Survived”.
In my case, surviving means living each day as normally as I can between appointments with this or that doctor. It means hopefully being gifted with enough normal that I often forget that it happened at all. I’ve been so fortunate to not experience any setbacks, and to know that statistically I have very little risk for recurrence. I also live daily with the understanding (or guilt, actually) that so many others aren’t having my same experience. I am fully aware of how much “easier” my story has been than others, and for that my gratefulness will not cease.
By means of an update, I’m doing very well. There is no sign of cancer in my body. I have appointments with my oncologist every 4 months and with my surgeons yearly. I have lost most of my chemo weight (finally), feel physically strong and can do most anything I want to do (unless it involves isolating my pecs – that is not pleasant :/ ). Hormones seem to be balancing out, and I’m tolerating Tamoxifen well. My hair is growing – more slowly than I want, but then again, I expected it to be chin-length by last Christmas, so I obviously had lofty expectations. I still have occasional chemo-brain moments, but those seem to be less and less frequent (but none less irritating).
I do not feel the need for urgently checking off grand adventures. I do feel the desire to love my people more deeply and pour into them as much as possible, to stop and notice moments before they scatter away, and to act and make decisions that affect legacy. If people look at me and my family, I don’t want them to feel sorry for what we’ve been through, but rather to see the reason were able to live abundantly through a season that none of us would have chosen. And, though we wouldn’t have chosen it, I believe that any of us would tell you that our understanding of Jesus’s love, mercy, and grace is more full today than this time two years ago.
After this post, I’m going to try to become a better blogger. I don’t want to always write about cancer, so there will be stories about biscuits and projects and who knows what else in the future. That is what I set out to do years ago when I started this little blog, and I intend to use it as a creative outlet. To remind myself that I am actively, fully, wholeheartedly SURVIVING.