Chapter 1
And they lived hopefully ever after….
Tampa, Florida
Spring, 2012
A cancer diagnosis slams into you with the subtlety of a freight train. You can’t talk or breathe. You stare at familiar surroundings, but everything looks distorted. This isn’t real, you think. It’s just an out-of-body experience, and it is not happening to you.
Except it is. Breast cancer happened to me twice, but you don’t get any points for experience here. That freight train hit with the same ferocity the second time as it did the first.
After a decade of turbulence, however, I’ve now landed in a soft place. Outside the screened lanai where I’m sitting, a pair of sand hill cranes walks across the back yard, their bright red head feathers in brilliant contrast with the soft gray of their bodies. They are tall and majestic birds, deliberate in their steps, their posture exuding the confidence I’m lacking.
“So much has happened since the first diagnosis,” I say to my husband, who’s nose-deep in a crossword puzzle. “I need to come up with the perfect starting point for this story.”
Mike lowered the newspaper and looked at me over his reading glasses. “You do know you’re always cranky when you begin a new book? But in the end, you figure out a good place to start.”
I must have looked doubtful because he glanced longingly at his paper before lifting his eyes to mine. “All right, all right. Here’s an idea: try starting with our current lives. We’re doing well. You’re healthy again. We’re finally living without holdings our breaths. Begin in the here and now.” With pen back in hand, he was once more engrossed in Across and Down.
Had I asked him to solve my problem?
No. I was just kvetching out loud. But Mike was being Mike, trying to find a solution. In our early days, long before cancer crept into our lives, I’d tease him about being my Knight in Shining Tin Foil. I’d expected him to share chores and didn’t want his head to swell because he shopped for groceries, cleaned the sink, or vacuumed the carpets. Tin foil seemed an appropriate garment.
More recently when the going got rough, he was at my side–sure, steady, and strong. A full-time job. I should replace his tin foil with armor now, but I’m holding off. He knows it and laughs; we laugh together. Gentle teasing is our way. After more than four decades as husband and wife, we understand each other very well. I know why he suggested I focus this story in the present. He prefers to live in the moment, enjoying the sunshine and the sand hill cranes. He prefers to leave the dark days behind us. I can’t blame him.
Although I’m half of the Linda-and-Mike team, I am also a mother, grandmother and novelist with fourteen works of fiction in print. My stories are about ordinary people in crisis, struggling to reach their happy endings. In 2001, when breast cancer hit me for the first time, I had to fight for my own happy ending which I achieved and enjoyed for nine years.
Sitting on the screened porch today, I feel great, look pretty good, and am planning for a long future. Part of me doesn’t want to look back; I’m not that different from Mike. I should simply put the cancer experience behind me and, as we native New Yorkers say, fuhggedaboudit! The other part of me, however, wants to write about the turmoil and examine it for my own sake as well as for my children and grandchildren’s sakes, and for those families facing the same situation. There was a specific reason for my cancers; neither was a random hit, but I didn’t know that at the time.
On a sticky note taped to my computer is a quote I borrowed from Churchill: Never, never, never give up. Staring at those words got me through many a day.
Lab reports and medical records lay on the wrought iron table in front of me. Fact checking is a must for any book. I need no notes, however, to recall my feelings as a two-time rider on the breast cancer express. I need no cues to recall the complications the illness brought to my busy life and the heartache it brought to my family. And I need no reminders as to what I’d learned: in the fight to live, no decision is too extreme. They may be dramatic and scary, but if they work, so what?
Twelve years have passed since my first bout with the disease; two years since my second one. Fortunately, that tumor wasn’t a recurrence, but a brand new visitor. A good thing. Isn’t it weird that a malignant tumor can bring good news? My last appointment with my surgeon at Tampa General is long over, and I love my new oncologist at Moffitt Cancer Center who will monitor me from now on. Since our recent move to Florida, I’ve had to search for new cancer specialists, a chore I hadn’t anticipated taking on while recuperating from a second bout of the disease.
The timing of our relocation couldn’t have been worse. I adored my original oncologist who practiced in Houston, Texas where I’d lived for sixteen years. I fought most of my cancer battles there and didn’t plan on a second assault when we decided to move to Florida during the fall of 2010. I certainly wouldn’t have left at that point had I known the future, but I didn’t. Sometimes life presents choices, and we deal with the decisions we make.
Which brings me back to choosing this memoir’s starting point. I briefly considered Mike’s suggestion of Right Now. Now is important because it measures the time out from surgery: one year out, two years out, five years out. The more years, the better. Now is important because I am living in it. But…where’s the story? I’m an author in search of a story, and my daily routines don’t cut it. They’re boring. As for the future? Well, that’s the sticky one. Tomorrow doesn’t come with a hundred percent guarantee, so why think about it? Besides, tomorrow’s events haven’t happened yet, so where’s the story?
The story lies in Yesterday. Yesterday provides the yardstick to measure the journey since the original diagnosis. I must sift through Yesterday in order to pull up remembrances and mine for the truth. For that is the meaning of memoir.
Sorry, honey.
copyright 2010, Cindy (Cindy’s Love Of Books)
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If you are reading this on a blog or website other than Cindy’s Love Of Books or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.