Creating reality on your own terms - yet again

I had a breakdown last night. Ending up with about an hour on the phone with my dear boyfriend's compassionate heart and words through his sleepy, blurred mind. I feel like I am just all about cancer. Everyone cares so very much, and I get such wonderful thoughts, prayers, visits, everything unimaginable. My boyfriend's sister (she told me yesterday she just tells the nurses that she is my sister in law - she's great) and her family all came in to the chemo treatment room yesterday and decorated me and my hundreds of drip bags with feathers, faces, sticky foam creatures. People stared at them as they huddled on the floor making all of these things, but started coming over looking at how to get in on the action. It was a hoot!! Bottom line in my hours of need I am getting such loving care at home, on the emails, on the phone - pick a medium and it is being used to get to me.

So what's to break down about? Well, I fancy myself to be one of the most independent people around. I want a wall painted at 2 am, I just get up and do it. I want to move a piece of furniture, I just do it. I am hungry I eat. Wanna see a movie, just go. Suddenly I have cancer. Suddenly I have a PICC line in my arm that used to curl 30 lbs, now able to take a max of 5 lbs. on a good day when I have energy. I want to eat, I ring a bell or holler from the next room. I have to pottie, I roll out of bed onto a pottie made by a company called "invacare". Someone else cleans it for me. I want a shower, it takes 50 minutes to get my bandages saran wrapped water tight, and I am still petrified. Shaving legs is definitely a sit in the bathtub with 6 inches of water thing. My biliary drain springs a leak, and I have to have help to change the bandage. You are no longer a person, you are a clinical specimen - and you just don't care any more. nakedness at 45 in front of your dad is, well, embarassing the first time, and merely clinical from there on. Pooping becomes a hot topic. Weighing in 3 times a day is a highlight. Taking pills 4 times a day, that someone else has organized, is an event. You may be getting the idea, or maybe not. I am not sure I would if I were not the one doing it. I am sure everyone's experience is different.

Dear boyfriend says to me with simple clarity, You have cancer, You are not cancer, Meaning will come from all of this that is happening. I feel like I am sitting on buddah's knee - getting the first 2 clearly, yet struggling with the meaning part. That's the very thing I am struggling with. I have a job, from which I am on medical leave indefinitely (yes, that time frame is hard for a goal oriented gal), I can't work, I can't define myself as my work. I can't go work at an animal shelter for this external plumbing that I have that some darling homeless pup could destroy with the bat of one gentle paw. One drug makes my vision blurred, so reading is a challenge, and when I lie down to take in the news, I drift off from exhaustion. A dear friend of mine's words echo to me (she never said this to me, but to others who felt sorry for themselves)..."well, cry then!"

So, cry is what I did. And sought a way to find meaning and definition. Meaning became a little clearer when I realized that all these loving, caring friends and family were rushing to be by my side in such giving and supporting ways. They do this out of love for me, not because I was some corporate hoo-ha, drive a jag, travel wherever, etc. They don't care, and never cared about any of that. They are the ones that matter, not the "stuff". All of that frees me to reframe a definition of what I want to do and be on the other side of this fight. And what I want to become during the fight.

I want to reclaim myself - parts of me I let fall away over the past few years. Things about me that got soft, that I just let roll over me. Shit that I took that I don't normally even consider taking. Stuff I got upset about that in reality are dumb. If the other person doesn't care enough to change it or do something about it, why am I beating my head against it??? I now just have to take whatever time I have left - 2 months or 10 years - and be who I am. My physical body is just a shell of what I used to be. So is my passion, my esteem. I cut all my hair off, of course. Isn't that what we women do that shows a big change has started? (haha)

Now I get to make the time to see what else I want to change. Life changing things. Sure, painting a room is gratifying, but it masks the fact that you really want to knock out that wall and put on a deck with french doors that allows the air and sun to come in. You can clean carpets, but replacing them with something bold that you love is different. I need to find the walls I want knocked down, the carpets that need replacing - and get in there and DO those changes. Some people won't like it, but I will. Those people who matter will love me more. I know now how short life can be. And that I should really be bold enough to live it the way I want. Watch out!