I F^*king Hate Cancer ...

A very dear friend of mine who I haven't been in touch with much for the last year or two let me know her cancer was back. This was after she let me blab about my back surgery and how I was feeling. Seriously?!

OK, I know my surgery was a big deal to me (and by the way, I'm A-Okay ... no pain down my leg and very minor pain at the incision site). But cancer just trumps all.

Me: So how are you?

Her: Well, I have some bad news ... my cancer is back.

Me: Stunned silence. And then FUCK!

Honestly I listened though really I was just kind of sick to my stomach. Sick for so many reasons. Sad about the state of our friendship ... guilt that it took my blog for us to start reconnecting. Shame of my own self-obsession this past year. "Oh, poor me ... Angel is worried she's going to get fat. Angel feels old. Angel is bored and needs a job to get out of herself. blah, blah, blah."

I've been down that road and it's not helpful or useful. I know that. I know I can't compare my own inner demons to others' suffering. And I know I'm not perfect ... I'm human and I'm on this journey to live better, to be nicer to myself and my body. Even in this short time frame I've grown some. I really am looking at food more as fuel and how I can put the very best in my body to make it move and do all the things I want it to do. How I like wearing pretty clothes to my new job because I want to honor the work I've put into my body and I don't have to feel narcissistic because I want to look good ... at any age. I'm not ready to "give up" ... whatever that means ... and honestly, I hope I never will.

But when I hear that someone I love is dealing with f^#king cancer, well, it reminds me what's important, and how I want to focus on what is important. Love, friendship, being a good parent (which quite honestly hasn't been that easy this past week with a hormonal teenager who is pushing all of my buttons!), noticing nature, giggling, sharing my heart even when it's embarrassing or painful. In short, I want to live a rich, full life and the truth is I have one. Sometimes my vision is just a little murky.

But right now my heart hurts for all the friends I have who have experienced cancer, either as victim or as a family member or close friend of someone suffering from some form of cancer. I'm not kidding ... in the past year or two, I can name at least four very close friends who all have dealt with cancer. Young, vibrant beautiful women. The gratitude is in watching them go through it and get to the other side with grace, humor, tears and fortitude. I am in awe of you, and pray that my latest friend knows she is not alone, and my heart is with her.

Tomorrow is the Day ... and Happy Pre-Mom's Day!

So tomorrow at o'dark thirty (that's 5:30 a.m.) I head to the hospital for surgery. I went to Virginia Hospital this morning to get some final blood work done and an EKG; and they already checked me in for surgery tomorrow ... weird! I'm already wearing my hospital bracelet and everything. I look like one of those dorks who keeps stuff on to show where they've been or what they've done so you ask about it. You know the type ... the person who has 80 day passes on their ski jacket from all the resorts they went to over the last 20+ years. DORK! (I think that's my new favorite word ... it's so retro :-)

Anyway, I'm seriously sick of talking about myself and my FEELINGS ... so here's two funny things I wanted to share with you. The first is a hilarious post Timmy sent me because he knows I love slapstick (or essentially anything involving anyone getting hurt, including myself) so here's the link:

This Is How The Human Face Reacts To Getting Hit By A 90-MPH Fastball (PHOTOS)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/19/delino-deshields-face-hit-pitch_n_5179292.html

The second is a really cool Mother's Day post my friend Sheri sent me (see below). Even though my little man is 14 (almost 15 years old -- gasp!), I still remember every single thing this author talks about. Hope you enjoy it too. Much love to you all. Angel.

What I Would Actually Like for Mother's Day

by Raquel D'Apice

I have something I would like for Mother’s Day. Most holidays my husband doesn’t buy me gifts because there is nothing I particularly want or need, but he has always said if there’s something I really want, to let him know. He is wonderful. I would like to say up front that he is one of the best human beings I have ever met.  

And I feel bad even asking for this for Mother’s Day because it’s going to be really difficult—maybe impossible to pull off. It is not flowers and it is in no way a stuffed animal holding a mylar balloon (if someone wants to send me a quick e-mail explaining why those even exist, please go ahead) and it is not some sort of quasi-expensive chocolate. It is not a gift certificate for a spa treatment and it is not breakfast in bed. I am trying to get out of the habit of eating in bed.  

What I want for Mother’s Day is going to hurt my husband, who I love and care about a lot, so it hurts me that it will hurt him, but I want it regardless.

1. I would like for my husband to become pregnant. 

Dude. You're glowing.

And let me clarify: not for a long period of time. Absolutely not for nine months because that is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard—nobody should have to be pregnant for nine months. That should be written into the Geneva Convention. But for a week or so I would love for him to have an abbreviated, montage-version of a pregnancy—a mash-up of the first and third trimesters in which he is constantly nauseous and exhausted and WHAT IS GOING ON WITH THESE MOOD SWINGS, no, never mind, everything’s fine, false alarm, NO SERIOUSLY, THERE THEY ARE AGAIN, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?? I would like his back to hurt to the point where there is not a single position in which he is comfortable and for him to get to the point where the idea of walking two blocks is more exhausting than, under normal circumstances, the reality of running ten miles.  

 

2. I would like him to experience labor.

The agony.

FOR ABSOLUTELY NO LONGER THAN TEN MINUTES. I’m not a mustachioed totalitarian dictator, I just want him to understand it. Within a ten minute period I’d like him to experience three or four one-minute-long contractions, but I want them to be the ones at the end of the labor—the ones that are two minutes apart, where you are either sobbing or screaming because there is nothing that could have prepared you for that amount of pain. The ones that are so horrible and all-encompassing that when people ask later, “What was it like?” you stand there with your jaw hanging open because unless the person has been systematically tortured while also undergoing an un-anesthetized root canal, they are not going to have a workable frame of reference.  

 

3. I would like him to experience 10 seconds of physically pushing a child out of your body when you have not had an epidural.  

PUSH.

Honestly, maybe not even ten seconds. I just want him to get the gist of it.

 

4. I would like him to experience a very brief time period sampling the first few weeks (months?) of what your body feels like right after you have given birth.  

“Here you go. Good luck figuring this out.”

I want him to understand how it feels when you are emerging from the hospital after what feels like a horrible, debilitating train accident. And you are in both pain and a mild state of shock and also the doctors are going, “Hey, hope you’re feeling better after that horrific train accident and also here’s an extremely delicate yet demanding human being for whom you are now responsible, regardless of the fact that you’re in so much pain that looking at a bicycle seat gives you a panic attack.”  

I want him to breastfeed the baby and deal with the ridiculous insanity of pumping and leaking and horrific soreness or I want him to be not that great at it and wonder what’s wrong with him that he’s not enjoying it the way all the books told him he would. OR I want him to choose to not breastfeed the baby and have total strangers come up to him, telling him that he is a terrible father for not breastfeeding the baby.  

I want him to have at least one instance where he urinates on himself while sneezing.

 

5. I want him to stay at home with the baby full-time for one full month.  

Like a version of solitary confinement where the prison guards force you
to continually read “The Cat in the Hat” at gunpoint.

This is a polite way of saying I want him to be COMPLETELY OVERCOME BY UNIMAGINABLE BOREDOM AND LONELINESS. I want him to be overwhelmed by a loneliness so intense that he regularly wishes he were an Iroquois indian because after four weeks alone in an apartment with an eight month-old, living in a communal longhouse with a bunch of other adults sounds more appealing than an invite to the Vanity Fair party.  

*          *          *

And what will I be doing during as he endures the pain of this incredibly elaborate mother’s day gift? Will I be sitting in a leather recliner eating beef jerky and corn chips, going, “Ok, so now do you get it?? Do you finally understand?”

No, of course I will not be doing that.  

I will be beside him the whole time.  

If during his pregnancy he wakes up at 3AM and says that he is so so sorry to ask but he really wants Taco Bell, I will go out and get him Taco bell. I will hold his hand during labor, grimacing, because it will be hard to see someone I love in that much pain. I will try, when I can, to get the baby when he cries at night so that my husband can get a few extra hours of sleep. When I get home from work and see that he is frustrated and exhausted and has had a really rough day, I will take the baby off his hands. I will do whatever I can to make it a little easier for him.  

Hang in there.

I will do for him all the things that he has done for me.  

Which is why, for the record, I conjured up this extremely complicated, probably-impossible-to-implement mother’s day request in the first place.  

Partially because there is a part of me that wishes that he could fully, completely understand what I went through. It is hard (maybe impossible?) to fully understand something you have not experienced.  

But partially because being married to someone who, despite his lack of understanding, did everything he could to make my life a little bit easier, I can’t come up with anything else I could possibly want. 

Day 16 - 20ish ... I'm Getting Lazy But I'm Not Quitting!

Well, I don't want to post if I have nothing to say, and I'm not really sure I have something to say today, except I went to get my chest x-ray this morning (another pre-op test I've had to get for my upcoming surgery) and so the fear is getting a little bigger as Friday nears.

I saw a friend of mine this morning who just happens to be a nurse at Virginia Hospital Center, and who has worked with the doctor who is doing my surgery. It's been two years since she worked with my doctor but I got the impression he wouldn't necessarily be her first choice. She said his specialty is actually some sort of brain surgery, and the other two doctors who he works with in his practice are pros at the particular surgery I'm having (and in fact, one of them was recommended to me but I would have had to wait 3-4 months for an appointment to see him so I went with my doctor instead).

My fear is that my impatience (which I have in abundance) may have caused me to not pick the best doctor, or that as a punishment for being impatient; I will have some kind of accident happen during surgery to "teach me a lesson." This is OLD stuff that comes up for me. It's that "punishing God" I was brought up with ... the one where, you make a mistake, break one of the 10 commandments, and of course God will seek justice/punish you.

 I DO NOT believe in a God like that today. (And I swear this is not a religious thing ... I mean God in terms of a higher power or whatever you choose to believe in, or even nothing at all – everyone has their own path.) When I got into recovery, one of the greatest gifts was learning to rely on and to believe in a higher power of my choosing. I chose a higher power that loved me unconditionally, that wanted what was best for me, that didn't judge, but also didn't interfere (good or bad) in my life or others. I felt like I could accept life, and all the awful things that sometimes occur – cancer, senseless acts of violence, children being hurt, etc. – if I no longer believed in a God that was a puppet master "healing this one because he/she was good, but letting this one suffer because he/she needed to learn a lesson." I also struggled with the Jesus concept I had been brought up with ... the one that says you won't go to heaven if you don't accept Jesus as your eternal savior, etc. I kept thinking to myself, what about those individuals on some remote island who have never heard of Jesus? Are they not going to be allowed into heaven, despite living a good life, simply because they were never taught about Jesus? That just seemed wrong to me.

Again, I'm not getting into a religious debate here. I'm simply sharing my journey in finding a God I personally could believe in.

I realized, for me, my own humanness was my undoing. I was determining what actions were good and which were "sinful", when in reality, I have NO CLUE what God thinks or doesn't think (or even if God thinks at all). So I mostly stopped judging my actions and just tried to live as best as I could. I tried (and continue to try) to follow that book, “All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” If you haven’t read it, it’s wonderful, if you don’t feel like it, no big deal. In short, it really boils down to treating others how you would like to be treated.

So I’m not sure why this fear is coming up today.

Or, maybe I do … I probably answered my own question in this post. I’M HUMAN.

Won't you join me in being a human being today too? :-)

Day 14, 15, 16 -- Crazy Town Meets Perspective

I've been in a little bit of a funk. Nothing even nearing depression or anything like that. Just kind of blah.

And, I think I know what it is ...

It's called LIFE.

Imagine that, not every day is perfect, not every day is GRAND CANYON worthy. Some days are just ho-hum.

Well, there's a bit more to it than that for me (because I like to complicate things), but I must say writing this blog is giving me an unexpected gift ... time to to reflect and gain perspective. I realized as I was writing this that I'm having that let-down period from coming back from an amazing vacation and from being out of my routine (I am a serious creature of habit and even good things that mess up my routine, like vacations, can make me feel uncomfortable for a bit). Plus as soon as I did get home from the Grand Canyon, Tim left for a business trip to California so I've been doing the working/single mom thing. Again, nothing a million other women haven't dealt with, but it's just good to remind myself that oh yea, there is a reason why I'm feeling a bit tired, a bit blah, a bit, less than. This is all normal!

There is also a bit of fear lurking in the background too. I had a pre-surgery call with the hospital yesterday telling me I will be staying the night next Friday. What? My doctor told me this was an in-and-out surgery. Oh, and I have to get all these pre-tests, blood work, EKG, chest x-ray, etc., done THIS WEEK or my surgery will be cancelled so I've been scrambling to get these appointments in while working, while taking care of Ben, while trying to exercise ...

I called my surgeon's office and the woman told me that I should be prepared to spend the night but I may not have to -- it depends on how the surgery goes. She said it's a two-three hour surgery and that I will not be able to do ANYTHING for four to six weeks. Yikes! This leads to my fear of getting FAT. Fear of the surgery? Fear of being paralyzed if the doctor makes a mistake? Nope. I'm worried about getting fat and being miserable because I can't exercise.

My mind is CRAZY.

But at least I'm getting it out by writing about it, and by talking about it. Right? The important thing, as my sponsor pointed out to me today, is that I don't have to act on these feelings. I can feel them, acknowledge them, and then let them go, and do the next right thing. I might want to indulge in the feelings a little longer than necessary (by former sponsor called that mental masturbation ... I like that term), but really that's what this whole "I love me" experiment is all about. I get to CHOOSE the messages I tell myself, and when crazy town hits my head, and let's face it, I live in crazy town, I can choose to go a different route and cut that path right off.

It's slow going. I want instant progress and results.

What I am getting is perspective.

Thank you, thank you for taking this journey with me. Your emails and thoughts are helping and teaching me much. I love myself, and I love you!