Spring has sprung! Snow banks are melting; the robins are back; the pothole fixing crews are out (more on that later!); baseball teams are running laps around the school track and people who haven’t shown a bare ankle since November are bare to the kneecap with sparkle painted toenails.
I don’t get it.
Not at all.
The calendar says April, but my insides say, “Sleet in late December with dark clouds on the horizon, turning to snow with winds gusting to sixty miles-per-hour, temperatures plunging to record lows after that, and expect radioactive fallout as well...”The Reaper is Grim, indeed and anyone who says anything about cancer makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Used to be only the demons could do that.
Nothing in my world is the same and never will be again. Yet the world outside of me continues on as it has always gone. People drive to work, potholes get fixed, students have problems, transcripts get mailed, summer school beckons, camping trips once planned have to be reconsidered.
Nothing has changed outside of me. Everything has changed inside. My stomach hurts all the time. I don’t give 100% at work for, honestly, the first time in my life. I forget about breast cancer for a moment while I’m watching a movie, reading a book or changing the kitty litter and then suddenly I remember – Liz has breast cancer.
I feel dizzy for a second, almost like the time I first did a “real” dive off the high dive at the city pool. Olympic sized, it was long and the tank under the high dive was 18 feet deep. I’d jumped from that height when I was younger, but after spending a summer practicing jackknives off a low board and doing not-too-badly, I decided to try a real, forward dive off the board. Not a “run from the ladder to the end of the board and jump” kind of dive.
A step to the edge, bounce once, bounce twice, let the board propel you up, bend at the waist, kick and plummet. It sounds easy, but my pulse was hammering in my ears for the tenth of a second it took for gravity to pull me to the water’s surface. I cut it cleanly, faster than I’d ever passed through water before. I came up jubilant.
Then I came to my senses and ‘bout peed my pants (or in the pool, as the case may be) as the memory of standing a million miles above the water rushed back…
That’s what it’s like when I remember that Liz has breast cancer.
That’s when I briefly, for a tenth of a second, feel like I’m in free fall and a force as great as gravity is dragging me down. That’s when I’m glad I can grab hold of my Lord. That’s when I think I just might make it, cut the surface cleanly and come back up to breathe.
How the doctors see breast cancer – in simple language:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breast_cancer_classification
image: http://flagpole.com/images/jpgs/2010/09/22/RecRev-NuclearSpring.jpg
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