How do you measure a year in a life?”
- RENT
I made it another year with metastatic lung cancer.
The past 365 days have encompassed....
A Phase II clinical trial
Brain surgery
Brain radiation
Brain swelling
Months of steroids
An Expanded Access clinical trial
A Phase I/II clinical trial
Bone radiation
Countless MRIs, bones scans, PET scans, EKGs, echocardiograms, and blood tests.
It was a tough year.
The past 365 days have also encompassed...
A road trip to Minnesota
Celebrating my parent’s 50th wedding anniversary
Seeing my eldest enter his final year of elementary school
A family visit to the Holiday House
A dreamy family vacation to California
My 13th wedding anniversary
Girl Scout camp with my daughters
A fancy trip to New York
Countless family dinners, holidays, scraped knees, homework sheets, movies, and school pick ups.
Strolling through my notes from the past year left me marveling at the juxtaposition of the monumental with the mundane. Surgery appointments and swimming lessons, PET scans and play dates, bone rads and birthday parties.
Raising young kiddos while living with metastatic cancer - while incredibly difficult - is also what keeps me grounded in regular life when it feels like everything is spiraling out of control. Regardless of how I’m feeling physically or my fear-addled mental state, they still need dinner, and rides to activities, and baths, and snuggles, and help sounding out words, and have questions about how everything works, and need help finding their lost shoe, and and and.
So kiddos, when you are reading this one day, know how much your regular day-to-day stuff meant to me, and how it kept me sane (while sometimes driving me crazy). You made the ordinary extraordinary, and kept me going when it all felt like too much.
“The longer I can put up with this, the longer I get to stay with Jason and the kids.”
“This is the life I’m trying so hard to stick around for.”
