A Dreary Day

It’s a dreary day to match my dreary mood. The Christmas decorations are all stacked in the basement waiting to be put away, the tree is wrapped and ready for recycling and the lights no longer illuminate leaving the house dark and indescript in the night. I always feel a sense of let down after the holiday season, but this year it feels worse, maybe because my son wasn’t here or maybe because I wonder how many holidays I have left. I want a lifetime of holidays, but life is a crap shoot, and we never know how many rolls we get before we are forced to fold. I don’t feel as if I am dying and I don’t think I am going to leave this world any time soon, but I am also realistic enough to know that I am only one organ away from the end. This cancer of mine is a sneaky and devious disease; it could rear its ugly head anywhere, anytime. This time it is in the bones and the doctors say its good that it has stayed in one area of the bones, rather than jumping to another set of bones, say the hips or legs. So, if we can stop it in its tracks now, the hope is it never makes it to another location. Can we stop it? At times I worry about my liver, sitting right there, minding its own business, safely under the diaphragm. The liver is usually the other organ that breast cancer likes to invade. An organ that I cannot live without. Why can’t this cancer just stay where it started? Why does it have to move to other places where it is certainly not welcome? Who gave it an invitation? Why does this awful cancer think it has the right to run amok wherever it pleases, eating up perfectly good tissue and ruining a perfectly good life? Can anyone answer me that?

That was a rhetorical question, obviously, since there is no answer. Cancer, like many other diseases, have no manners, no restraint, no rules in which they are forced to live by. They simply take what they want leaving devastation behind in their wake. I look at other dreadful diseases such as Parkinsons, Lou Gehrigs or Alzheimers who invade the host like an alien on a quest to destroy. I don’t wish these diseases on anyone, yet they permeate our society. It seems like more and more people are hit with the curse of cancer or other murdering maladies, which can’t be treated by a simple pill or change of diet. There are a lot of things that I can do to fight this disease, but ultimately it has its own agenda, its own course of destruction that it is determined to follow.

So what is my defense strategy? I take it one day at a time. Fighting what is currently threatening my life and leaving the rest for another day. I can only do what I can do, and the rest is left up to chance and the destiny which is my life. Only God knows the course that this disease is determined to take, I have no control over my fate, but I do have control over the attitude by which I will face my future. I am determined to face it with optimism and courage, never losing hope for a brighter tomorrow, no matter what the roll of the dice.