All in a year's time

You may recall that last summer, Jo and I were pregnant at the same time. Oh, wait. She was pregnant. I just looked like I was. (Darn tumor!)



This year? Not so pregnant. (Either of us.) Jo has a stinkin' cute little baby named Sally and I ... well ... I am still wearing this same orange/pink/white tie-dyed style shirt. (Well, I've taken it in about 8 inches and now almost always wear it belted. But still, I am still wearing the same shirt. New clothes cost money. Altering clothes does not.)



You also may recall that, at the time, all of my doctors were under strict instruction not to share pictures, samples or even have conversations with me or my family members regarding said tumor. I knew, going in, that they were figuring it was about 10 lbs, and about the size of a volleyball in diameter. (They, of course, were dead wrong about the size/diameter, but that was the assumption.) Just this week, I sucked it up and asked for a copy of the dvd from the medical imaging company who performed the CT in June 2010. Mom and I looked though all 244 pictures of said tumor. Some of them made sense, some of them made us gag, some of them made us giggle. Almost all of them made us "see" things that weren't there. Here, I will show you.

Check this out. My guess is that this is a pelvic view (they did a chest/abdomen/pelvic CT) and those white arm-looking guys at the bottom are actually my femurs extended for that view.

But the thing is, even KNOWING that this is a pelvic view and the arms/legs are easily explainable, I can't help but think that it looks a little like a weight-lifting championship being held by maniacs. ... Seriously, check out the maniacal grin on Atlas there as he holds up the world. (The world = my 22.5 lb tumor.)



And then there's the balloon tumor, AKA: Pinky and The Brain. (It's wanting to take over the world.)



This was the first picture I saw, and it made my stomach fall right out of me. They'd shaded out all organs, so all you can see is the tumor, free-floating. It looks a little Hiroshima to me.



And, in the spirit of saving the best (or, at least, my favorite) for last. Check out the kitty cat tumor. The split spinal cord at the bottom of the shot looks like a cat, and the tumor looks like balls and balls of gray yarn stacked up in a bowl. Hilarious, no?!



Who knew that CT shots of tumors would be such a fun run down Rorschach Lane? I tell you what, if I am ever in my life given another Rorschach test, I will be thinking that every single ink shot looks like a tumor. Every single one. Hilarious!

It's been a nutty, nutty year. I've had three surgeries in twelve months, lost somewhere between 80 and 90 pounds (I don't believe in owning a scale, for reasons I will not go into here and now), mostly due to having spent months of my life last summer subsisting on crackers and air. (Not a diet I'd recommend.) I've gotten pretty good at altering dresses, skirts and tops to fit the new me. My mom has gotten even better at custom-fitting dresses that I'd shrunk right out of. (What do you think she does when she comes to "take care of me" after all these surgeries? I run quite the little dress-altering-sweat-shop here, folks.) I've modified my diet and my lifestyle. Not grossly (and any of you people who are cracked enough to think a triathlon is on the horizon for me are simply that - cracked - it took me getting cancer (twice) to start walking on a daily basis, I don't even want to consider what might happen in my life to make me start running, swimming and/or biking for miles on end).

I've said it before, and I'm sure that I'll say it again. And again. And again.

This year has been hard. In some ways, unspeakably hard. There are moments, days and nights that I won't ever talk about, because simply remembering those dark hours reduces me to a puddle of tears. But there are other parts, even other hard parts, that have made it all worthwhile. This year isn't something I'd have chosen out of a basket full of fun things to do (we all know I'd rather have a summer fling than a summer cancer treatment program), but I would never - never, not ever - consider giving it back. I have learned things that I don't think I could have learned any other way.

Relationships have been redefined. Friendships and family are the most precious things in my life. Time has new meaning. Risk isn't really risk anymore, it's more like just taking a chance or trying something that I've always wanted to do.

I have been redefined. (Not just my waist and my hips and my sad, old lady bosom and my bum full o' stitches.) I am different. Different in a way that I like to think is better, and stronger. (It's probably all those push-ups I have to do just to get down into and then up out of bed.)

May this year never feel the need to repeat itself so long as we all shall live.

Amen.