2 Year anniversary

Here is Mark on Monday night, preparing for the magazine photo shoot. He took over 100 photos that night which I will post once we know whether the magazine story will run or not. The writer asked that we not use any of the images until publication date. But here he is in all his cleverness, doing the set-up.

Yesterday was my 2 year anniversary for the first breast cancer surgery. It is funny to look back at my innocence. I had no idea what was coming. No one does. It was a lumpectomy. The surgeon took out a 3 cm tumor. She cut right around the nipple line, the top half. Once the incision healed, the breast looked almost completely normal. However, she warned us that the sentinel (lymph) node was positive for cancer, and that from her naked eye, she thought the breast was full of cancer. She was right. 17 days later I had a full mastectomy when she found 5 of 22 lymph nodes positive for cancer. November 17 I was in the ER when the cancer was suspected in the right hip which was later confirmed by bone biopsy.

I have always been very conscious of dates -- I sometimes get the year confused, but am right on with dates. I continue to feel very, very lucky. Statistically I know I'm living on borrowed time. How can I feel so good with cancer lurking around? It is puzzling. Sometimes I wake up at night with pain in my right knee and upper ankle and I am sure that the cancer is active, eating away at my bones. Yet the scans remain clear to date. It is definitely a strange way to live -- I don't "worry" about it, exactly, yet when I have pain or discomfort, it gets my attention. Every day I pray that I may live today as fully as possible. Most days I do a pretty good job. This week in meditation class Narayan suggested that we walk as if it would be our last walking meditation. That was interesting. I felt my mind move into stillness as I continued to walk, and I knew that it would be OK to die. That I could let go of all of this -- and be in peace.