The moment before

Right after I was diagnosed with cancer last June, I heard all kinds of things. One of most memorable was during a visit with a friend of a friend who just happened to have done the Ironman in Hawaii the year after a very similar diagnosis. As in, she was training, for the Ironman, through her chemo and radiation treatments. Amazing. Anyway, we agreed to meet for the first time on a sunny July Sunday morning, one of us in a walking daze and the other still sweating from a morning bike ride. And go figure, the pastry place was closed. Nobody around here likes pastries on Sundays? So we just plopped ourselves down in their outside seating and started talking, like we'd known each other our whole lives. I shared things with her that I hadn't been able to share with anybody else yet. She said to me, "you can never go back to that moment right before you knew." It seemed all at once to be a simple statement of fact and very powerful. That moment right before I found out that I had stage IV colon cancer at 38 was the loss of my freedom from worry. Sure I had "problems" that I was worried about, I was getting married in two months, what color were the table cloths going to be? But now I had THE problem, the life-altering, future-changing problem of advanced cancer. And it sucked. Even in my most care free moments now, it's there. Just hanging out.

The crazy thing is that if I could go back to that time, just before, what would I even tell myself? Would I have done something differently? Gone to Paris the weekend before? Filled myself with Hacienda margaritas? Played soccer at the park with friends every day from dawn until dusk? Nothing can prepare you for that kind of moment or make you feel like you're ready. Nobody says to cancer, "bring it on!"

When I met with my psychologist last week, I was telling her that I was thinking about making a list of all of the not exactly appropriate questions that people have asked me recently and she was all for it. That is one of the reasons that there are SO many books out there written by cancer patients. You find yourself in all kinds of awkward situations and you can't help but want to share your stories. It also got me thinking about the meaningful messages, and about that moment before. For me, I'm trying my best to keep my brain focused on each moment going forward. (But it still sucks.)