I am this dying mother, wife, sister, daughter, and friend. I assure you that I am no-one special. I am simply a woman facing a premature death and learning, day by day, how to balance hope and reality; how to laugh through my tears; how to find joy despite my shattered heart and my anxious mind. Why read my blogs? I am just like you. It just so happens that I am facing the grim reality of my mortality forty years ahead of schedule.
No, I am not dying tomorrow...and my doctors are diligently working on ways to improve my quality of life so that I can live longer. I have been sick for most of my life. My illness just wasn't properly diagnosed until January of this year. This past year, I have been sicker than I have been in my whole life. And then there is all the medication I take...and the side effects that come with them all. I was losing weight on the chemotherapy. I was happy about that. But, then I was also losing my hair. Now that I am on a break from chemo, I am gaining weight due to the massive amounts of Prednisone I take on a daily basis. My open lung biopsy is coming up and after that, one of the treatments I will be getting is plasma exchange...and then more chemo...and of course Prednisone. This will hopefully extend my life.
The fallout from my medical crisis has been significant. Imagine living a life where death feels just around the corner. For me, it has been a mentally and bruising battle, one that often had me wish for death because I was just so exhausted from fighting. But then, I would look at my kids and step back in the proverbial ring. Kevin has the difficult job of managing my health care, being an optimistic cheerleader (which I have to admit, can get pretty annoying at times), while still trying to work and address his own grief. And of course my sweet angelic children are worried that they are losing their mother long before they are ready to let her go.
I know this all sounds very depressing, but I can assure it is quite the contrary. Ours is an incredibly sweet and rich life. Yes, tears are shed often, but we laugh more than we ever have. We work hard every day to make new memories. We don't do it by an insurmountable amount of pictures and videos; though we should do a little more of that for posterity's sake. We do it by being truly present in the moment. We find things that we can do without putting my health in greater risk...and we do them together.
I have learned that fighting for your life is incredibly hard work, but, with an open heart, it brings a multitude of gifts. My family and I learn from this struggle every day, and it has brought us closer than I ever dreamed possible. We have learned to find humor in absolutely everything.
This blog is a collection of personal essays about my experiences as a somewhat typical parent in the face of a difficult present and uncertain future. Honestly, I don't think this blog is sad. I think it is a candid, open, and real diary of a life in the balance, peppered with humor without resisting the inherent pathos of the subject.
In this life, we only share two things in common with absolute certainty; birth and death. C.S. Lewis supposedly observed that "we read to know that we are not alone." My dream and hope is that in this blog, I will not only make the sick and dying feel less alone, but also make the living more fully aware of the precious gift they experience every day: to feel the ease of their breath moving in and out of their lungs, to notice the freckles on their children's faces, to look at their loved ones more intently. And, if reading this blog means they waffle between sobbing and laughing out loud, then I accomplished my goal. Truly living means feeling everything, all the way.
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