Holiday Greetings

There is always a lot of stress at the holidays. The cooking, the baking, the decorating, not me, just watching other people. As for me, I am just grateful to be alive and on my way to a healthy new year, but I had my own stress. How can you buy gifts for everyone that expresses gratitude for support above and beyond, all on a shoestring budget? I had one day to shop and this is what I discovered, you can't. So I got what I could and just left it at that.

The support I have gotten this year has been unbelievable. There are those who express little faith in the goodness of mankind, but I have found otherwise. More people than not have offered or given me kindness, assistance, friendship, and more. I thought I was a fairly good person, but these people have shown me what goodness really is. Just reading this blog gives me a boost.

So as the next year approaches I offer to you all my love, my gratitude and my hope for your happiness. And to all, great eyebrows.

Radiation

I am on the last phase of my treatment for breast cancer ... radiation. Unlike chemo, it doesn't leave me nauseous or hairless, but it is every day. My normal time is 9:30 a.m. and the procedure involves lying on a platform that moves me up and about to get into the right position. It is very high tech and yet to further adjust me they pull the plain white sheet underneath to get my body in the perfect trajectory. Then they place a piece of rolled up bubble wrap under my breast. It is my own special piece that even has my name on it.

This week the system has been down on three different occasions and there were multiple phone calls as the team tried to reshuffle everyone. My mother expressed concern that if the machine was so inefficient how could I be sure it was working correctly on me. In other words was there a chance I was getting so much radiation that they could use me to light up the neighborhood for Christmas? So today, when I saw the radiologist I asked her, and she assured me that if anything was wrong, it just shut down. Besides, she further explained, it wasn't the radiation machine that kept breaking down, it was the computer. Isn't it always.

What Would Francis Do?

As a part of my spiritual growth, some years ago I became a Third Order Franciscan. One of the tenets of the group is to espouse Simplicity of Living. For me this means no lusting over Coach handbags. However, one way to measure your success at keeping it simple is to move from a two bedroom-two bath condo to a single bedroom. A very large bedroom, and I do have space in other rooms, but not enough to transfer all my goods intact from one place to another.

I decided to be ruthless and get rid of everything that was of no use or value and would cost lots of money to store. So I parted with my sofa, discarded souvenirs, and emptied shelves of medieval history books (it was a phase I went through in the 90's). But then there were other objects that I found impossible to part with. A potholder my niece made me as a wedding gift. A mug my nephew assembled that said Aunts are Great. And how could I part with music from bands that no longer exist like Rusted Root? How could I throw away my Muddy Waters cassette tapes? I couldn't. So they came along with the important stuff like my Jane Austen action figure, my shrimp deveiner, and my Dead Sea Salt foot scrub.

If I didn't know before having cancer, I know for sure now what matters. My friends, my family, my eyebrows, and I can take those things with me wherever I go. I don't even have to pay for storage.