Time to Celebrate?

Today, I finished a fourth and final brachytherapy treatment for endometrial cancer at UCI (University of California - Irvine) in Orange, California. The team of doctors and nurses who had worked on my treatment were celebratory, urging me to go out and have a great time, maybe tipping a glass to my health and future outlook. There were hugs and smiles, and plans for followup appointments. I thanked my personal nurse, a lovely woman from Romania, for taking such good care of me, and seeing to my every comfort.

I called my husband Larry, who was waiting nearby to pick me up, but he said he was on the phone with his eldest son Daniel, and that it might be a few minutes, that it was something important.

Larry has two sons from a previous marriage, and he and I have two sons. We call them collectively the Four Musketeers, as they seem to have great affinity for each other even while having wildly different lifestyles and careers. They range in age from fifty-seven to forty-one. Whenever they get together to catch up, hilarity ensues as they trade stories and good times.

Daniel, who lives in Chicago and works in the medical industry, called because his best friend’s wife had just contacted him from the Netherlands with devastating news: his friend had been killed in a bicycle accident. He had simply gone out on his bike to run an errand, was hit by another biker, and catastrophically sustained a head injury, dying instantly.

And just like that, my celebration turned into a reminder wakeup call to not take my life for granted.

Not that I had been taking my life for granted. But it’s easy to slip back into that mode when there are no obvious threats on the horizon. Ever since this cancer episode, the possibility of my life coming to an end, while remote, has followed me around. I fretted about my husband having to go on without me late in life, worried about my children having to adjust to losing their mother, and lost sleep over never seeing my grandchildren reach certain stages in their lives. Truthfully, this was probably a slight overreaction to a pretty mild case (it was stage one, and thought to be a non-aggressive tumor).

But still, it was cancer, a disease that, when I was growing up, was an almost certain death knell. I have many friends and acquaintances who have fought and/or succumbed to some form of cancer. It remains a very serious health threat, and I have friends who at this moment are going through nausea and pain provoking chemo-therapy treatments meant to save their lives.

And once cancer is in the body, even if only a few rogue cells remain, there’s a danger of its recurrence. In my case, there’s a 15-20% recurrence rate in the first 2-3 years after surgery, which is when mine showed up. Fingers crossed those pesky cells are now gone.

Mostly, I look ahead now at what I want to accomplish: finish the novel I’m working on, get the most out of my wonderful family, appreciate and give thanks for my forty-four year marriage, continue to learn and grow, stand up against injustice, return to running, enjoy good food, good wine, good health. But no regrets.

Dan’s friend’s life ended suddenly and tragically. The best revenge for that awful event is to live my best life, however long that will be. Pay it forward, and treasure the time here.