Thanksgiving 🦃

This is the sixth Thanksgiving since my metastatic breast cancer diagnosis.  The median life span of a metastatic breast cancer patient is approximately three years.  I am ever so grateful to be here still, and I am well aware of how incredibly lucky I am to have made it this long.

Since my diagnosis, not only have I gone through chemo, surgery, and IV treatment every three weeks, I have visited the local emergency room as a patient quite a few times.  I have endured pain, nausea, and a myriad of other side effects.  Our family was forced to move out of our home of twenty-four years to a much smaller house because we needed a smaller mortgage.  Money is still so tight that I visit food pantries and hot meal distributions on a regular basis to help make ends meet.  I have a wonderful friend who brings us dinner the day after treatment day, and regularly brings a bag or two of groceries along with it.  

Along with the hardships, some wonderful things have happened.

• I have reconnected with old friends -- just yesterday, for instance, I had lunch with my childhood/growing-up-with best friend.  We hadn't seen each other in about forty years.  We sat and caught up for two and a half hours.  As we talked, I had flashbacks of us playing Barbies in her living room, of dinners and sleepovers at her house, at the wonderful things her mom made for us for lunch (her mom was from England; my first taste of Yorkshire pudding, and this wonderful cracker/peach thing she made that I don't remember the name of ).  Before we left the restaurant we scheduled our next lunch date, this time including our husbands.  It was so, so nice, seeing her!

• I have traveled.  There are organizations that arrange vacations for people with breast cancer, stage 4 breast cancer, or terminal illness.  Because of these very generous volunteer organizations, we have been able to visit

• Myrtle Beach -- through Little Pink Houses of Hope
• New York -- through Inheritance of Hope
• Los Angeles --  through Ally's Wish
• Florida and Virginia to visit my sisters in conjunction with our Gatlinburg trip -- through Leslie's Week
• Nashville -- through MBC Travelers
• San Francisco and Las Vegas -- to speak to the employees of the biotech company that manufactures the medicine that is keeping me alive

• I have met a few celebrities -- .  

• Rick Springfield -- through Do It For The Love Foundation, who provide concert tickets and VIP experiences to terminally ill patients
• Lynda Carter -- actually, her husband; she was in concert nearby at the Kennedy Center
• John Berry -- when we went to Nashville

• I have made the moves to make a slight career change.  I have always been perfectly content in the "assistant" role.  I finally came to the realization that is because I am the youngest of four girls in my family.  Having three older sisters, I was never in the leadership role, always in the subservient role.  And that has always been fine with me.  I never have wanted to be the "aldultier" adult in the room.  My boss, though, suggested that I obtain my teaching degree.  After talking to him a bit and mulling it over in my mind, I decided to pursue it.  I am taking classes to earn a teaching degree.  I am now halfway through the last semester to earn my AA degree.  Halfway there!  Once I become a teacher, my Instructional Assistant salary will double, possibly triple.  We will be able to pay bills down.  I won't have to worry about my co-pays.  Best of all, in my mind, I will leave a high life insurance policy for my husband.

• I have become, I think, a happier, more serene, more patient person.   I think that because of the circumstances, because of the hardships that my diagnosis and subsequent brought, I have learned to appreciate the smaller things in life, which I have come to realize, are actually the bigger things in life. 

• 
  Our new house is growing on me.  It was built in 1955, and does have "character".  There are some wonderful features, besides having a smaller mortgage.  It's all one floor, so no stairs to navigate.  It's right in the heart of our small town; we can walk to the bakery, the ice cream shop, two different restaurants, a convenience store, the local community theater, the library, and the hospital.  There are regularly scheduled events at Town Hall, which is just over the railroad tracks that border our back yard.  Next week we'll be able to watch the tree lighting ceremony from our back yard.  How cool is that?!

There are so many other things.  Please understand that I am somewhat forgetful anymore and I may have forgotten at the moment to add something or someone.  Please know that I am ever grateful for all of your kindness; it keeps me going.

Please don't get me wrong and think this means that I believe that "cancer is a gift" because it most assuredly is not.  Cancer is a horrible, horrible disease that is incredibly difficult to live with.  Given my circumstances, though, I am so thankful and grateful for this wonderful life I've been given, and am continuing to live despite the odds against it.