Tag Archives: cancer survivors

The Ides of August

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Ugh!  Thank goodness August is nearly over.  What an awful month.  What an awful summer.  Summers are usually unpleasant for my family (none of us enjoy the Texas heat) but for some reason, August has become an annual trip through bad times for us, especially my sister and I, who live together.

We don’t know what’s going on.  It’s very puzzling, but reliable as triple digit temperatures and as unpleasant as being trapped at a political rally.  What usually happens is a nosedive in our finances, no matter how much we’ve prepared for the month during the year.  We know August is coming.  Unlike Congress, which likes to pretend there is no such thing as an annual budget to pass, we acknowledge that August will show up with some emergency financial drain, and we save up as much as we can.  But it’s never enough.  Ever.  No matter what amount we save, the expense is usually double.

Family health always takes a nosedive too.  If it’s not me or my sister, it’s a family member who depends on us for transportation and help.  This year, it’s apparently all of the above.  I won’t bore you with details, and my family would kill me anyway for talking about their business.  But wow, what a summer.  I provide most of the transportation to medical appointments, and I have been very busy.  Since my car’s air conditioning is broken right now in a very expensive manner, travel adds to the unpleasantness.

My sister and I often shake our heads in amazement at everything that happens during the summer and mostly in August every year.  Don’t dwell on the bad stuff, some people tell me.  You’ll draw it to yourself.  Hah!  If thinking about something drew it to me, I’d be living the life of a huge lottery winner…

My fellow Christians remind me we are not to be afraid or anxious, to rely on God’s grace and help to get us through.  Thanks, but that’s not the problem.  We’re not anxious or afraid.  We’re exasperated!

But we endure.  It happens every year, and we’re used to it.  We know it ends.  Health improves, finances recover, and the heat breaks.  The seasons in nature change, and so do the seasons in human lives.  Sometimes the season seems to linger too long, but relief finally comes.  I’ve had times when August lasted for years, but I held on, and the calendar of my life finally changed.

Bad times come to everybody’s lives, and some will last a very long time.  Don’t give up.  I’ve spoken to many teens who felt they couldn’t last another day, and reminded them that school does not last forever.  Often the only thing you can do is keep your head down and endure in silence, but it will end, and you won’t have to go back any more.

Some jobs are miserable and make you hate to get dressed and go in, but despite what many believe, they don’t last forever.  I’ve had them.  I used to moan about them, too, until one day I met a young man with very old eyes, and complained to him how I was stuck in a dead end situation.  He told me to think of one good thing about my job.  Just one, not a list, just one, and concentrate on it.  Remind myself of it over and over and over whenever I felt overwhelmed.  Just one month after taking his advice, I was promoted into a job I’d forgotten I’d applied for and enjoyed myself thoroughly at it.

When doctors told me I had some health problem, I didn’t waste time crying or moaning or complaining about it.  I just asked what I could do about it and got it done.  It usually amounted to removing some part of my body or taking medicine that did unpleasant things to me.  But I survived by reminding myself it could be worse, and endured.

I developed the habit of looking for some lesson I could learn from the situation, no matter how dire it was.  Every August of my life is exhausting, expensive, and very exasperating.  But I have found there is always something I can learn, too, and I love to learn.  Life lessons are rarely cheap, and never easy, but once they are learned, the rest of the classes are often simpler and the tests easy to take.  May the seasons of your life pass not quickly, but as pleasantly as possible, and may you not have a difficult time learning whatever lesson is there for you.

Cleaning the Windows

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I’ve been reading a lot this week about various people and how they cope with their lives.  I live with a younger sister.  We’re both in our fifties now, and our health isn’t too good, so we’re trying to work on it.  She has  a particularly nasty condition that leaves her looking normal on the outside, so people don’t really understand when she says she feels awful.  Having lived with her for over thirty years, I know just how bad it can get.  This week the oak pollen around south Texas has reached near historic levels, according to the weatherman.  Her condition makes her immune system hyper vigilant, so her allergies can wreck her.  Literally.

Her condition manifests with an inflammation of her inner ears.  Her ENT specialist who diagnosed it said everytime it did, more brain cells were cooked in the heat and more of her memory and comprehension would be lost.  She’s more concerned by extreme pain and the dizziness that leaves her staggering around and unable to drive.  She is given a steroid to deal with it, in the hopes that her immune system can be suppressed and the inflammation decreased.  The side effects of that are sleep, swelling, and bad temper.  Since she is trying to lose weight, it is not a good season for her.

I have insulin resistant diabetes and a slowly degenerating back.  This makes it interesting when it becomes dangerous for her to walk and I have to cook and take her meals.  She also is sensitive to light due to migraines during these episodes so she tries to sit in the dark and quiet.  I can’t stand the dark and like music playing most of the time.  It’s a challenge to make her as comfortable as possible while not giving up my life.  Luckily I enjoy challenges.  I consider them brain exercises.  It’s how I got through breast cancer.

Some people, when faced with an obstacle, sit and stare at it and complain to everybody around them about how it is blocking them.  I always wonder what it’s blocking, and become so curious I try to find a way around it to find out.  Zoos frequently try to “enrich” the animals lives by giving them problems they have to work at.  I figure maybe that’s what I’m getting.

This week a Facebook friend of mine remarked on how she was feeling overwhelmed by all the bad things she was seeing and experiencing.  Like many do, she wondered why God was allowing it to happen.  I gave her an excerpt from one of the stories in my next book, just as God gave it to me.

“Why does God allow such evil to exist? How can He allow them to suffer like this?” “Because if you were never allowed to try to stop it, if you were never given the chance to care about others, you would not be His children. You would be potted plants. Maybe, at the most, domesticated pets. Would you prefer that?”

I also cope by reminding myself how much worse it could be.  I am so much better off than many people I know personally.  I thank God every day I don’t have my sister’s problems.  I thank Him for letting me have a pension sufficient to live on, a nice home to live in, insurance to pay for most of my medical bills, and transportation not only for myself but for family that need to go somewhere.  I have lived in much worse circumstances.

I can dream of winning the lottery, writing a best-seller, inheriting a fortune, or even marrying somebody rich.  But they are just dreams.  My day to day life is interesting, rewarding, and creative, which is pretty darned good.  This Easter weekend when the world celebrates the coming of spring, or the renewal of the Hope of the world thanks to an empty cave, or just enjoys a nice festive weekend holiday, try to look at your life in a better light.  Don’t sit around in the gloom, grab some cleaner and polish the windows!  It may at least distract you!

It’s Not Twitter, But…

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I never could figure out how people could use just 140 characters to express themselves.  I tend to run on and on and on…well, if you ever read stuff I write you know that.  But one thing I found I really enjoyed was captions.  I love doing photograph albums and writing the captions.  Preparing family photo calendars for Christmas is one long giggle fest for me.  Then a few years ago I got cancer, a type with a very low survival rate.  Being the optimist I am, I decided the day of my diagnosis that the day they declared me cancer free I would get myself a teeshirt that declared “Grim Reaper Reject”.  I did, too.  Then one day I was driving with my sister past our favorite meat palace and got a face full of fragrant hickory smoke.  My sister sighed happily and remarked, “Man, if there’s no barbeque in Heaven, I’m coming back!”

Yesterday I was on the Teespring website reopening the teeshirt sales for those two sayings and my brain started cranking.  We have a Christmas sign on our front door we haven’t changed out yet that has annoyed me from day one.  “Jesus is the Reason for the Season” it says.  It annoyed me because it seemed to say that was the ONLY season He was there for.  Jesus is the reason for EVERY season! Huh, I thought.  That sounds like a teeshirt.  So now it is.

While I was doing that, my mind wandered back to a conversation I had about friendliness.  I have a running joke that I use to describe myself.  I call myself a social slut because I’ll talk to almost anybody.  Hey, I wonder…  Yup.  Another teeshirt.

Unfortunately, these are not open for long.  If you’d like one, check them out quick.  I may, if things work out, wind up getting an inventory of several sizes and sell them myself.  But you don’t have to wait if you don’t want to.  These shirts go up to 5X.

The place to look for them is http://teespring.com/stores/words-are-my-life.  I’ll probably be putting more up there as they come to me.  Sometimes they smack me in the face and sometimes they slip in when I’m not looking.  I hope they amuse, inspire, and just sometimes make you think.