This is a rambling post. I’ve worked on it off and on for a few days, when I wasn’t too busy making pickles or watching soccer. It makes little sense to me, but maybe it will to someone else or someone someday or me someday.
Sometimes I feel as though I’ve had two separate lives – the one that lasted 58 years and two months, and the one that I’ve lived since our house fire. I use that date of the house fire instead of my diagnosis date when I think about this because that’s when I began to feel ill. Had the cancer not been creeping in, and then racing through my body, I’m quite sure we would have recovered from the house fire just fine. But it did, and we didn’t, not fully.
Here’s what got me thinking about this today. Another lung cancer survivor posted this question: “Have you ever thought about taking your next breath?” My response: “Top of Mt Kilimanjaro 2012, and lying in a bed in Boston before my targeted therapy drug 2016. Two very different experiences. ” That response kind of shook me up. Huh.. Wow. That’s so much more than the highs and lows of one’s life. It is two different lives.
But not really two lives, it can’t be, because all the conditions around us are the same as they’ve always been, and most of the time everyone around us does what they’ve always done or even moves on. So, what then? One life interrupted? No, it’s not like my life is on hold and will return to what it was. It’s a really weird phenomenon perhaps. You’re going along with all of life’s ups and downs that are expected as one moves through “middle age”, your house fills with smoke, you get diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer, you’re really, really sick, and you live. And you keep on living. But not the same life and now you have to figure out what to do in this life.
In that other life, if we’d had a house fire we would have replaced all the backpacking and camping gear because we would have used it. In that life we had plans, and the fire would have been an interruption. Plans that won’t be realized in this life, because it’s not the same life. In this life we’re making the plans we should have made in the other life, and “getting our affairs in order”. Important stuff, but not the same as the plans we were making in the other life, plans that were months in the making, that took us to new places, climbing to new heights or depths in the case of Grand Canyon.
I’m not complaining. I’m REALLY glad to keep living in this life. It’s just weird. No time ago, in that life, a few of us were going to the Y doing a daily workout that I intensely disliked, but that I could do, and it included hundreds of things like burpees, squats, lunges, sit-ups. In this life I had radiation to my lung, and it caused fibrosis in that lung (along with other nasty things ). In this life, I’m doing squats from a chair and push-ups against the counter, and I’m huffing and puffing. I walk 20 minutes and get to a hill, and… huff and puff. But, I’m doing it – I couldn’t when I was really sick – and I know it will make me stronger.
In this life our plans revolve around trips to Dana Farber, and the news we hear there. Planning for months for something exciting in the future just doesn’t make sense, but maybe it will. Maybe. Hasn’t yet. In this life we’re not yet comfortable with knowing what next week may bring, let alone make plans for months from now. But that’s not to say that I don’t have goals and milestones to reach. Sure I do! Grandchildren provide so many opportunities. Our future is filled with such events that I expect to attend. Complicated and weird, plan, but don’t make plans, or make plans, but don’t plan on it.
This afternoon I felt that I was in my old life, cheering away at a soccer game. And then, at game’s end, I pushed myself up from the chair that I should have just hopped up from. Oh yeah, right. New life, new rules. Huff and puff back to the car. Not complaining. I’m alive and very active, all things considered. And my plan? Keep on getting stronger and polepole breathe, wherever I may be.
In this new life I’ve recently gone to my first horse show and I met a very sweet praying mantis in the garden, and last year I became mom to two Nigerian goats Matilda and Dottie. Things that didn’t happen in my old life. I am happy and have purpose in this new life. Weird. polepole breathe!
polepole ~ breathe 