Did You Ever Think Life Was Gonna Be This Way?

Yesterday morning, I awoke and considered the day ahead: an Oxaliplatin infusion this afternoon, the first one in almost five years. I wondered briefly if I would see my friend Madeline at the cancer center - a mental image of her, smiling her little Mona Lisa smile at me (she had a whole wardrobe full of smiles, just as she had a closet chock full of fun clothes) from her infusion chair as we sat together, wafted up and forced me to do a mental double take, because I won't see Mad at infusion. Or anywhere else. She died on August 22 from complications of colon cancer. She was 41.  I tucked Madeline into my heart and head as I prepared for my day, knowing that her many years (she lived with CRC for over five years) of pushing back against this horrific disease with every medical option available to her would help me keep my perspective when I felt like whining. This woman exhausted all of the FDA approved treatments and then moved on to clinical trials, which are no small unde...

I've been neglecting you, my dedicated blog readers. I'm so sorry. Don't worry, I haven't been languishing in the hospital or crawling from bed to rocking chair and back. I haven't even been in hiding. Nope! I've been out and about, and I've been busy! I've been...SPRING CLEANING.  This is a momentous event. Long, long ago, in a world before I was diagnosed with cancer, I was a tidy person. An organized person. A person who would work all day, come home, parent and perform various household tasks, and then end the day with some reading or hanging out with my husband. And then I would get up and do it all again the next day. I had energy! I'm sort of amazed, looking back now, on all that I was able to get done. Spring cleaning was one of those things. On a somewhat regular basis, I would tear apart the closets, purge the dresser drawers, weed out the bookshelves, and all the rest. But that was a long time ago. In my post-diagnosis life, some days...