Last night, I hosted a mini-art night. I'm trying to keep busy with things that I truly enjoy.
During art night, the girls were talking about a colleague who recently passed away. He had been battling cancer for a few years, and then recently got diagnosed with a second ailment. He passed shortly after the second diagnosis.
Later, after the girls had gone, Danny and I sat on the patio to visit. I told him that I feel weird, that somehow I'm caught between life and death. I know it's only been four months since I was diagnosed, so I'm trying to keep things in perspective, but I feel like I'm in limbo. I've heard a few people say things like, "Well, we're ALL going to die at some point," or "You could get hit by a bus tomorrow." I think those are pretty simplistic views, and probably from people that have never had to honestly face their own mortality.
I imagine, in time, I'll be able to put things in perspective but at this point I'm still pretty scared. The truth is that I'm closer to death than most people my age. I'm literally battling for my life, both physically and emotionally. Each day I feel the pain in my skull, the tenderness of my left temple, the tightness around my scar, and I remember my reality. I look at everything around me with skepticism, as if the products in my life are trying to kill me. I'm starting to analyze the labels of my foods, my beauty products, reading up on radiation, ph levels of water, basically anything I can get my hands on.
I just want to fight this. Hopefully, at my next MRI, the doctors will be blown away by my health and the lack of growth of my tumor. Of course, in my mind I have to be aware of the reality that no matter what I do, I might still be destined to live a much shorter life than I had hoped or even expected. I have to be able to accept that possibility. It's a fact of life, an incredibly disappointing one, that at some point we all leave this Earth.
