Over the summer and fall, my life was consumed by surgery, recovery, and chemo. While there is still radiation treatment to come, in January, we are turning towards a new phase: learning to live with cancer. Which means, living with lots of uncertainty.
My daughter tells me that in high school, her college counselor's mantra was "Hope for the best; prepare for the worst." It seems like good advice.
The thing of it is, getting into the "right" college only seems like a matter of life and death. In my case, those are in fact the two extremes. Best case: the cancer could be vanquished and I could live out a natural lifespan -- which, judging from the example of my mother and two grandmothers, could extend into my 90s. Worst case: the cancer could recur and kill me relatively soon, in a couple of years.
Hoping for the best is actually a challenge for me. I'm the "glass half empty" side of our marriage. Still, it's a good thing to strive for, and David, being naturally far more optimistic than I, keeps me working toward it.
And how do you prepare for the worst? I challenge you: if someone told you today you had at most a few years to live, what would you do? How would you think? What would you feel? In truth, I don't think anyone can answer these right off the bat. Like most of life's challenges, there's a learning curve. Did you really know what puberty would be like? Your first sexual experience? Pregnancy and childbirth? No. You can imagine these things, but to truly understand them you have to experience them. Which makes preparation difficult.
Besides: the gulf between the two extremes is so broad that I'm not sure it's meaningful to focus on either one to the exclusion of the spectrum in between. At this point, though, it's all so new that the extremes are what is salient. In truth, in recent days I've been ping-ponging back and forth between them: one day being consumed with sadness and fear, and the next, feeling that all must be well since I've been a good doo-bee and endured all the tough treatments. My work for the moment is to figure out how to settle somewhere in the middle, just as my eventual fate probably will lie somewhere in between.
Leslie,
ReplyDeleteWhile my situation is a world apart from yours, we are both dealing with life-long afflictions. As David might have told you, I am pregnant with my third child. A totally unexpected and not exactly happy occurrence. In my worst moments, when I'm lying awake thinking about money, our small house, minivans, and exhaustion, and I see my future spreading out before me I become overwhelmed. And then, instead of thinking about the future I ask myself, how I'm going to get through the next 20 minutes. As we say in running, you can do anything for 20 minutes. I figure out a way, and 20 minutes later, everything seems different. Not so dire.
So you can plan for the worst, but unless it's going to happen in the next 20 minutes, why worry about it?
Love the blog!
Julie