I find it amazing how certain events that have happened
during my lifetime have been etched into my memory with such force that just
hearing the event mentioned takes me there immediately – all senses on high
alert. My heart still hurt whenever I would
hear of another team being sent into space. Immediately I return to 1986, sitting
in my car at the end of my driveway, tears rolling down my cheeks and a feeling
of sadness and disbelief spreading over me. Why? Because that’s where I was
when the news came on the radio announcing the explosion of the U.S. Challenger,
just seconds into its flight and resulting in the death of the first female
astronaut in the U.S. Space program. I will always recall the image of my
co-workers in D320 hovering around a computer monitor uttering cries of
disbelief as we all huddled together watching the events unfold during the
terrorist attack of the World Trade Center in 2001. And me, standing inside my
back door looking out in June 2002, home alone and crying my heart out, thinking
that my days were numbered because I had just received a diagnosis of Ovarian
Cancer an hour previously.
It’s more than 12 years later and I no longer see my
diagnosis as a death sentence. I go through the entire range of emotions with
each re-diagnosis, but the feelings of helplessness and fear of having cancer have faded over
the years. They have been replaced with a combination of dread and anger –
dread more for the surgical and recovery processes than the fact that the tumours
have returned. Anger because this thing just won’t go away permanently … and
probably never will. I have learned to live with my disease and I deal with
each episode as it occurs, but I find that I become more frightened of the
surgery itself rather than the disease and the fact that this process – not the
actual cancer – could hold my fate.
But, as my oncologist and surgeon have both told me, there
is absolutely every possibility that I will be around for a very long time,
passing eventually from something totally unrelated to my cancer. With a strong
faith in a higher power and trust in the expertise of my surgeons, that could
very well be true!
Until next time ......
~ B-Optimistic ~
September is Ovarian Cancer month in Canada. Know the symptoms.
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