REALLY sorry I’ve let it go so long! Any of you on Facebook with me know that I’m fine, but for my non-Facebook friends, I’m sorry I left you hanging. I am indeed fine. Actually better than fine, but you’d never know that from my silence! Sorry ’bout that. I know I said in my last post that I had scans at Mayo coming up in December, and I fully intended to remind everyone as the day drew nearer, so that my prayer army could saddle up, but I kind of forgot about one thing: finals. Yep, as the parent of a college freshman I can totally say this is my first rodeo, and I’m still learning. And what I learned this time is that you simply do NOT schedule scans when your kid is in the middle of final exams. First of all, it’s just not nice to add worrying about Mom’s health to a list of stressors that includes things like calculus and chemistry. And second, what if the news was bad? We certainly couldn’t tell him in the middle of finals. But if he knew I had the appointments he would ask about the results. And I suck at lying. So we had no choice but to keep the Mayo trip on the down low. Lesson learned.

The day went great, by the way. My liver, lungs and blood all checked out splendidly, so the cancer is staying put in the eye for now (and hopefully forever). My oncologist was positively giddy at how well the Avastin injections are working, and for good reason – I was supposed to be pretty close to blind in that eye by now, and I am definitely NOT blind. It’s sketchy, and I would be in trouble if that was the only vision I had, but sketchy vision is way better than no vision. Plus, as luck (and symmetry) would have it, I have another eye. And that one works just peachy, so it’s all good. Barring any weird hemorrhages in the radiated eye, everything should stay like that from here on out, which is pretty sweet. And my oncologist didn’t give me any crap about my RA meds! Woo hoo! So he and my rheumatologist can go on disliking each other, but I don’t have to get in the middle of it. I like that. A lot. I don’t have to go back to Mayo for 9 months now (and before you say it, I already checked – no final exams then).

In December and January I saw my rheumatologist and orthopedist, and everything is going well there too. The one disappointing thing from my one year post-op appointment (hip replacement for anyone who forgot. That includes me, because I mostly forget about my bionic-ness), is that my orthopedist’s idea of “light running” is even lighter than I imagined. Like taking 9 months to work up to 3 miles, and it all has to be on a treadmill – that kind of “light.” I have to see him again in a year and at that point he will decide if I get to ever run outside. So I haven’t even started the treadmill running, because what’s the point? If I’m going to be inside on a machine going nowhere, I can ride a bike to nowhere or climb stairs to nowhere and still get…nowhere. The point of running (to me, anyway) is enjoying fresh air, scenery, the company of others, and maybe racing (especially if there’s a fun t-shirt and/or cold beer at the end). So that didn’t work out like I had hoped. I knew it was a strong possibility though, so while I’m bummed, I’m not surprised. The hardware is looking good on the x-rays, and things are working so well that I mostly forget I have it. I do have a leg length discrepancy from the new parts, and it’s made my pelvis a little wonky, but the doctor didn’t seem concerned about it. So I’m not concerned either.

I’m still working with a nutritionist, trying to find out which foods make me feel the best, which ones tick off my RA and how to best fight cancer through what I eat. The key is to boot the things that harm, without going overboard. As I explained to my internist, I’d hate to give up dairy, then later find out I’m dying and have my first thought be, “I could have had cheese!!”

So that’s the scoop on my health – pretty doggone stable, and I like it that way. It’s boring, but it’s the good kind of boring. And speaking of boring, allow me to explain the picture at the top of this post (no, it’s not the photographic equivalent of a butt dial, I actually meant to take the picture): it’s the waiting room floor at my oncologist’s office at Mayo. I hate it, I really do. And it’s all I get to look at when I’m there, because the very first thing they do when I get there is turbo dilate both of my eyes. So no texting, checking emails, reading magazines or books. Just staring at the floor for hours (and I’m not kidding about the hours thing – this last time I waited for 2 hours to see my doctor. Super fun.). I think what bugs me the most about the floor, aside from the incredibly drab colors, is the fact that there is no discernible pattern. I’m a Type A, organized, child-of-an-engineer kind of person. I like patterns. I like knowing what’s coming. And this room, this cramped space with the ode to brown decor and stale air, is where I would most like to know what’s coming. I arrive at the Mayo Clinic hours ahead, sometimes even the day before, and I go through test after test, until I finally arrive at this place, where we wait to hear news that will be either exhilarating or devastating. And while we wait, I stare at this stupid, senseless floor with no pattern. It occurred to me this last visit that having cancer is a lot like looking at this floor, like trying to find a predictable sequence where none exists. I can read up on my cancer, and I can research treatments and survival percentages. I can eat perfectly, sleep enough, exercise regularly, and do everything in my power to increase my odds of beating it, but I can never predict what it will do. I can’t tell you why I even got it in the first place, either. I think that’s why I don’t like the floor. It has no pattern.

And I think that’s true of a lot in life, not just cancer. For those of us who yearn for the stability of predictability, when life throws us a curve we’re shaken. Sometimes we’re shaken in a good way, nudged out of our comfortable, protected space and into a place of growth and possibility. And we are ultimately glad to be in this new place, even if it was rough getting there. Sometimes though, we flail and gasp for air, desperately grasping for anything that feels solid and safe. And predictable.

In December, on my two-year “cancerversary,” two teenage boys in our town were killed in a car accident. On a day when my family and I were celebrating that I was alive, two families and an entire community were trying desperately to wrap their heads around the unthinkable. Days later, I went to Mayo for my scans, terrified as always, but also bearing the sobering thought that I had already lived longer than those boys. It made no sense. It was out of sequence.

When the unknown is merely theoretical, we can give it poetic names, like “embracing the mystery.” And that’s great when the mystery involves only lovely things. Like, will we have cake or cupcakes? Wine or cocktails? But when the unknown could involve heartbreak, loss and grief? That’s harder. Faced with that, who wouldn’t want to turn to the last page of the book to see how it ends? Ok, ok, I know people who wouldn’t. But I’m not one of them. I like knowing things ahead, so I can prepare myself. In her book, Daring Greatly, Brené Brown calls it “foreboding joy.” And it’s not a good thing. If we live our lives preparing for the worst, we prevent ourselves from enjoying the best.

Of course, if we always knew what would happen, we wouldn’t need faith. We wouldn’t need one another. We wouldn’t need a lot of the things that ultimately make our lives meaningful. So we “embrace the mystery,” we “wrestle with the unknown,” we reach for one another, dare to try new things, take chances…and we don’t wait to find out that we’re dying to live.

So I’m trying to change how I view that awful, beige floor. Sure it’s ugly, but it presents a challenge, a helpful exercise if I’m willing to look at it that way. As with life, when I survey its patternless expanse, I can allow myself to get frustrated at my inability to make sense of it. Or, I can choose to stop trying to figure out the puzzle and instead make the most of my time in it.

I had a friend who passed away from colorectal cancer years ago, and I remember how she and her husband loved the song “The Riddle” by Five for Fighting. At the time I really didn’t understand the appeal of the song, but it makes better sense now. I read an article about the songwriter, and it told of how he took 18 months and over 100 drafts to write the song – a song that started out as a meditation on the meaning of life, but ended up being about his relationship with his young son. And that is about as close to an answer as I think we’re going to get for now. Relationships. With our Creator, and with each other. Spending our time well while we’re here.

“There are secrets that we still have left to find,
There have been mysteries from the beginning of time,
There are answers we’re not wise enough to see,
He said, ‘You’re looking for a clue? I love you free’…

Here’s a riddle for you, find the answer:
There’s a reason for the world,
You and I”

So I’m trying to make my peace with the patternless floor.

It’s still ugly though.