“Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, she became a butterfly”

Over six months without a post but here it is.

Looking back at when I started this blog– 26, cancer-free (or so I thought), thinking about “rings” with my then boyfriend of three years and running marathons– I feel like a completely different person from the one writing this today.

I think that since my initial diagnosis (“I’m 27! WTF!?”) and my rediagnosis (with more denial and less panache was dubbed “Cancer 2.0”), I fell into fear.  Deep dark fear.  I was given a 36% survival rate if I had complete radical treatment and at six months from that point, I am still rattled but making steps forward to live.  Fully live.  Because after all, don’t we all have a 100% guarantee of death??

I recently realized that I had stopped really living my life.  Day to day, running errands life.  Sure, I was crossing off my bucket list and doing what all of those “things to do before you die” books tell you to do– but I had stopped the normal.  The mundane.  Stopped trying to move forward in my career.  I stopped running, which is me.  I can see where I gave up in places…started living as though I was dying.  But this past Saturday I met an amazing kick ass cancer vixen (the founder of Cycle for Survival) who was just rediagnosed for the FIFTH time.  She was there with her husband, cycling for an hour, raising funds for rare cancers…only four days after chemo.  I looked at her, her husband and saw life.  True beautiful life and love.

This past week “fully living again” included –shallow or not– going to a real salon to have highlights and a hair cut (thank you Sommer Muasher).  I was in tears having this simple, normal-for-most-women-my-age act done because I have been too terrified to cut my hair since its regrowth– June 2008 (like 80 years in girl hair time!).  Terrified to spend any money on something that I could quickly lose through two weeks of chemo. Scared to invest any money in my body that still feels like it is falling apart from cancer and the drugs.  But it felt good and afterwards… I felt pretty!  Ohhhhh so pretty!!

Funny how these little cancer habits were unknowingly created.  Take tonight, I went grocery shopping and actually purchased enough groceries to last longer then two weeks.  Since my first diagnosis I truly thought that I would die and was worried my Mom would have too much to deal with that I didn’t even want to fill my pantry.  Yes, there is peanut butter but no jelly.  Pepper but no salt.  I was so scared to move froward and fully live my life that even in the smallest of ways I chose not to.

I know that these are teeny, tiny small bits of life. But they were things that I had surrendered until now.  Even through injections, pills*pills*pills and yesterday’s draining of fluid from my abdomen (I swear they are trying to clone my MoJo!!), I am determined to live (boring “recycling kind of living!”).

Last week I had brunch with a dear friend who truly set me free.  He had once created the “Happy Game” for me where we go back and forth naming things that make us smile until we both find the sunshine in life again.  I usually list off John Elway, Tabasco, pandas, running– the Joan Greene obvious.  But this week he called the game off.  He asked me to stop playing the “Happy Game” and to start living it.

So here it goes…

Living is a funny thing that we truly take for granted until we get a good look at what death is.