Shovels, Buzzing, X’s, Bikes...

September 30, 2011

The Good: A friend of mine who had cancer shared with me how it affected her confidence... I know exactly what she means; I find it hard to be confident when someone keeps hitting me  over the head with a shovel!

You go from being the person you’ve always known to becoming scared and vulnerable overnight, not to the mention the toll it takes on how you look physically during and after the process. 

I think about what she said almost daily, about confidence, to remind myself to keep my head high and my feet light so I can  “bob and weave” whenever I see that shovel come my way.

I’m not striving to be the “New Me”; I’m striving to be “Me”.

The Bad: I’m walking down the street feeling pretty good, strolling along, la la la... and then I hit a wall, not literally but emotionally.  My body tenses and I feel my face getting those wrinkles in between the eyebrows at the top of your nose.  What the fuck is that buzzing sound coming from the building across the street and why is it making me tense and wrinkly!

During radiation treatments, there’s a constant buzzing, something like a distant lawn mower or an angry swarm of bees as some would describe... it’s a sound I grew to despise over the 25 days of being radiated, I dreaded it each time, and couldn’t wait for it to stop.

While I didn’t hit the ground and take cover hearing that noise, it did remind me that although the treatments are done, I’ll likely carry the experience with me for some time...

The What the ???: My phone rings, and then rings again, and again... one after another my appointments are cancelled... my calendar now filled with X’s, I realise this is the first week in almost a year that I haven’t gone to the hospital. 

Lessons Learned: It’s not the guy who whizzes by thinking he’s part of the Tour De France, it’s not the guy zoned out on his I-Pod while I silently scream “watch out for the squirrel”, and it’s definitely not the guy who borrowed his wife’s spandex or kept his own from the 80’s, it’s the guy wearing a dark suit with a crisp white shirt and tie that peddles by at a leisurely pace sporting a grin... that’s the guy I find sexy on a bike.  Yes, that’s right, I spend wayyyyyyyyyyy too much time walking along the bike path....