Hitting the Restart Button

This is the beginning of a journal that will be all over the place when it comes to organization of material.

This year I had the best Thanksgiving I've ever had. Next week I get to begin chemo.

This may seem a very strange reason to have a wonderful Thanksgiving, but since the Tuesday before Thanksgiving week I'd been looking at the very real possibility that this might be my last Thanksgiving. Now there is a possibility of more.

My new life stage and journey began on Monday when I went to see my family doctor about some problems that had suddenly gotten worse. He ran a basic test that was negative and immediately set me up for a CAT scan. I was at the radiology lab an hour later.

He called me at nine o'clock Tuesday morning, "I've got the results of your CT and they aren't good. There are four masses, two in your lungs. I've talked to an oncologist and here is his phone number. I want you to make an appointment today." I numbly said, "I will." And hung up. (I think. Things got awfully fuzzy from here on out.) I called the number right away and left a message that I wanted to set up an appointment.

I felt the way I feel when I am really hurt. When I've come off a horse and broken something. Or been body slammed by a horse into a wall. At times like this you know you are hurt. You know you are going start feeling a lot of pain; soon. For the moment though, there is a place where you are just there, waiting for time to begin again. A frozen bit of time free of the agony to come.

Then the hurt begins and it is hard deal with it all. Breathing is a good place to start, but it takes incredible effort to suck in that first lung full of air. Now you hurt.

There are stages of shock, disbelief, grief, anger, more grief and finally a stage of trying to figure out how to handle this ultimate new stage of life. These are not nice tidy stages one after another. They shifted and scurried through my mind in seconds or took hours to process.

Then I began to grieve about all the things I might be seeing and doing for the last time; all the people I would be leaving. And then facing the intense, very real fear of an unknown future. Because for all the millions of words written about it no one really knows what happens next. This truly is unchartered territory for each of us.

One reason I was so afraid is that because of many years of being exposed to second hand smoke the possibility of lung cancer was very real. This panicked me because I have been through this process with family and friends. I knew just how bad the odds were for any kind of long term survival with such a diagnosis. The idea this might be my last Thanksgiving was a real possibility in this case.

I've a long history of being sick during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. For many years I was told this was psychological. Then a few years ago it was determined that I had allergic reactions to cedar pollens which in turn triggered my asthma, which I didn't know I had. So the problem of annual holiday sickness became treatable and bearable. Only now there was this new totally frightening illness for the holiday season.

I did a lot of crying the next few days. Once I had pretty well cried myself out I made up my mind I was going to go into this with the idea of buying as much time as possible regardless of what was going on. I was going to develop my own bucket list. First item on the list; take the next step.