I woke up from surgery cancer free. It was a long month and a half between diagnosis and removal. That time changed my life. I found out how much I could trust my friends and family to stand by me. I am very blessed with love in my life. In the inevitable process of evaluating my life, judging myself by what and who I value, I figured out quite a few things about myself. I’ll spend the next couple of posts going through the most important ones.
1. Never ever undervalue the people in your life or the love that they bring.They are not there just by mistake. Everyone in your life is there for a reason.
I have many friends, but the “inner circle” of friends in my life really came to bat for me. None of them heard the word cancer and ran away scared.
They are all my soul mates and I want to call out a few them here:
My best friend Pat dropped everything in her very busy life, and got here the night before I went into surgery. She stayed an extra day, ultimately, consciously, choosing family (me) over her job, and eventually moving her family back here from Tennessee because she didn’t want another important thing, good or bad, to go on in either of our lives where the other person couldn’t share in it. When I think about how much we’ve been to each other in our lives, it’s overwhelming. We grew up together. We’ve been friends for 28 years, through kids, marriages, divorces, and a lot of other real life events. There was a time that we spent so much time together that we could finish each other’s sentences. We’ve said many times that if one of us were a guy, we’d have been married, divorced, and married again by now. We are the definition of soul mates. There is no one in my life who knows me better, isn’t afraid to have hard conversations with me, and who shares with me as I do with her, each and every joy, frustration, and everything in between in our lives. She reads my blog too, so for the record, because you know I’m not good at saying it publically, I love you Pat. Thank you for being there for me that very surreal week. No words can express how greatful I am to have you in my life, then, and now.
Roomie is also a soul mate. It took me a long time to figure out that he cares about me because he is so very nonverbal about his feelings. When I was diagnosed, and I told him, his concern was obvious. We sat there and talked a lot. He had nursed both of his parents through particularly nasty cancers, and what I had was nowhere near that extreme. He helped me figure out the questions to ask. He fed me nutritious meals. He made sure that I had a beautiful, peaceful place to recover by redecorating my bedroom and my home office in the month betweeen the diagnosis and surgery. He cleaned house for the month that I couldn’t, did my laundry, bandaged my wound while it took it’s sweet time closing, and so many other things. I didn’t ask him to do any of this. In fact, I felt bad because in the months since he’d moved in, I’d had 2 surgeries that he helped me recover from while he was doing his best to rebuild his own life and business. He never said one word about the extra work, or care giving when I’m sure he was at the end of his own rope more than once during that time. Having been through all that, our relationship has grown closer and more comfortable. We are very different people, from very different worlds. In three years of living together as friends, we’ve made our own world together. After each of us exited brutally negative relationships, and had enough time for our hearts to heal, we found a friend in each other. Now we are more than friends. The love between us is unspoken, but shown in so many other ways every day. When we met, I never would have expected to call him a soul mate, but he is.
My cousin Rae, who went through everything that I went through 6 weeks earlier than I did kept me sane too. We had some intense, brutally honest e-mail and phone conversations about it all, and that helped me SO much. She also made a nice little recovery box for me for Christmas with some fun treats and useful stuff in it. She is the woman in my life that has a true, deep understanding of what I personally went through inside my head with the cancer, and with the body parts that went away along with the tumors, and with the after effects of losing those parts. No topic was off limit and that is awesome. With all of the taboo around female cancers, she and I could discuss things because we’d been there and faced that demon down, on our own, and later together in spirit. If there was ever a sisterhood, Rae certainly qualifies. She, by the way, is also cancer free for two + years now. GO US!
My cousin Don, who I have always adored from afar, was there for me too. We’ve always been cousins, but never really friends. He’s a little older than I am and lives 8 hours away. We love each other because we are family, but our lives were very separate. During my recovery though, we got to know each other pretty well through some e-mail conversations that had absolutely nothing to do with cancer and I loved and needed that interaction. He also stopped by while I was recovering, and we’ve gone for dinner a couple of times since then when he is in town. I treasure the time I get with him. He’s such a cool guy, and we communicate on a very human level. Honest, open, and with love. Those e-mails gave me such insight into him. After a lifetime of only having time with him when the rest of the family is around, it was wonderful to get all of the one on one time that we did.
There’s a certain cheesehead that I’m also soulmates with. He and his wife came down and made sure that I knew I was loved before I went into the hospital. He and I have a lot of history. I won’t go into too much of it here, but he is also someone that I communicate with on a very human level. We’ve dealt with some hard truths in our respective lives together. The first time I knew there was a connection between us, was when his Mother In Law, who was my cousin, died of cancer many years ago, I had opportunity to cry on a few people’s shoulders, but I chose not to. I was close to my cousin, and she died when I was in the middle of a horrible 2 week long bout of flu. I never got to say goodbye to her and that tore me up. I held all those feelings in. I was able to hold them in, that is, until I saw him at her wake and the floodgates opened. I didn’t cry on my soon to be ex-husband, or on cheesehead’s now ex wife, who’s mother was in the casket. It was him, and whatever this connection that we have, that put me in a place that was safe enough to let those tears go. He held me, and I cried hard. A few years down the road, it was him that I trusted enough to ask to be with me the day I got divorced. He came down early in the morning, and stood by me through the manic depressive rollercoaster that the morning of my divorce was. We laughed, we cried, we ate lunch, and he went back to work after he knew I was OK. That was an intense few hours. I’m not sure I would have held up as well without him there, and I’m still thankful for that time with him. It was also him that I cooked that first post divorce Thanksgiving meal for. Fortunately, there were no tears that night. There was a lot of laughter and love, and having him and my daughter there was the perfect Thanksgiving. So him coming down from Cheeseland a couple of weeks before my surgery, with his new wife, to take me to dinner and make sure that I knew they loved me, well, that’s something that a girl doesn’t forget easily. Especially not with the history that we have.
Speaking of my daughter, she and I have gotten closer too. I think the cancer and surgery had a lot to do with it. Also her growing up and getting married and realizing that I have always done my best to give her space and time to lead her own life probably did too. I survived cancer with her in mind. My mother died when I was the age that my daughter is now. I didn’t want to put her through that hell when her life is just getting into the right groove. I’m still here and kicking and I got to see her marry a pretty great guy because of that. She and I have been through a lot, but we both survived my ex, and I survived cancer, and now we both get to do more than just survive. I get to live and see my daughter grow up and turn into the woman that I raised her to be, and she gets to have a mom that she knows loves her no matter what.
So that was lesson number one from cancer. I am surrounded by so much love. Love that is stronger than any miscreant cells that were trying to kill me. When I really open myself up to the love that is there, I am humbled. I am energized too. The singular most powerful force in this universe surrounded me in the guise of my friends and family, and with that kind of positive energy, there was no way that I wasn’t going to be just fine.
If cancer had to come into my life, if there was a purpose for it, I believe that realizing how much love I have was a big part of the lesson that it was there to teach.
There was one other very large lesson that I learned. I’ll write about it tomorrow.
Namaste