Wild Emotions: Constant Grace

I think, one of the hardest aspects of having cancer is your inability to take a vacation from it. And I don’t mean just the treatments and stuff; those will eventually go away. I am talking about taking a vacation from the idea of having cancer! Taking a vacation from having cancer. Dr. Anthony said it when he said it; “My full time job was now to be a cancer patient”. There is no break from it. Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, I must live with this condition.

Before they found the mass, I had no idea that I had cancer. I figured something was a little wrong with my stomach, but never in my wildest dreams… So it came to a moment in time – a flash really when I went from living a normal life, carrying on as I always had to suddenly having cancer – and not knowing, at the time, how bad it was. Over the next twenty days, after surgery and scans, it became apparent that this cancer is probably not medically curable. One hundred and fifty one days now of ups and downs, sadness and fear, hope and faith – one life, one in which I fully expected to live another thirty years, and raise and grandchild has become very much in doubt.

Having gone from a mild angst about having only thirty years left, to the completely unknown, and possibly ten times less than that, my emotions have run a complex and difficult course.

I spent the day yesterday, thinking a great deal. There are times when I am stopped in my tracks, and the malignant realizations hit me all over again as if for the first time. At times, I literally ache for other, simplier times, from before I had cancer or even knew about it.

For the most part, I have kept a positive outlook, believing that if anybody could beat this, then I surely am a good candidate. I am relatively young and I was in very good health when this thing came along. I was just about as strong as a forty-nine year old could be, so I figure my chances are on the high end of the scale. Still, it is a difficult and very saddening thing, when you have to pair down what you actually wanted to do with the rest of your life, decide what to discard and hope you have time to finish what is left; only those things most important.

The emotions are wild. Some days I am okay – full of hope and faith… and even on the days that is thin, I have accepted, for the most part, the unthinkable. Which isn’t to say I am not frightened. Indeed I am, not only from one day to the next but also from moment to moment; those crazy feelings where one moment your fine, then suddenly, as if struck by lightening, the significants and magnitude of what you’re going through crashes down upon you with the force of a planet killing celestial object.

The thoughts mostly on my mind these days are upon how much time I have wasted in my life. My Gosh, the time I have wasted in the past, as a healthy, able human being is remarkable. How much quality of life I let evaporate because of a million separate worries; and those added together equal nothing at all to worry about in comparison. If I am restored to a normal live expectancy, I hope and I pray that I will not also return to those periods of complete apathy within which I actually allowed parts of my good life to literally rot away.

I never imagined something like this would come along. In that regard, I am just like many of you now reading these words. When it first came to my attention, I spent a lot of time asking how and why; waking up in the middle of the night in cold sweats and troughs of disbelief. But as time passed and these ideas matured, as God Promised, along with the trails of a human life, comes the grace upon which we may life through, not only accepting our fate with “the peace of God that passes all understanding”, but to thrive in ways that we never could have before.

Even though I am frightened a lot, and even though I want to live on normally… even though I do not want this cancer, there is nothing, absolutely nothing that can keep me from living vibrantly and thriving for as long as I can, so long as I have God’s Grace with me.

Many say that God does not put more on us than we can handle. I say, so long as we live with God, there actually is nothing we can’t handle.