I have been unable to sit and stare down a blank blog page for quite a while. The healing process wore me out, I suppose. There is usually an idea that hits me, calls to me, but for weeks, nothing. Then Facebook popped up a “memory” and I decided to use it as my sign from the Universe that it would be appropriate to re-visit. The “memory” was from two summers ago, during a heatwave. July, 2021. It was several seasons after a very difficult time of loss: first my mother, then my husband, who remains in a nursing home, during November 2020.  These events were shocking and traumatic at the peaking of the “Covid Days,” when everything flipped upside down.

Soon after, my own health issues crept in, and over the next two years required test after test and three subsequent surgeries. After that last surgery in 12/22, a recurrence of breast cancer was found during a “prophylactic procedure,” after about nineteen years of the original cancer. Hence, last March, another, major, and complicated surgery. A second mastectomy and reconstruction.

So before I let you read that original Facebook post which, by the way, makes me wonder how far I’ve come, if at all, in tackling these events, let me just say that I am grateful to still be here.

So what’s the problem? Another upcoming surgery days away to revise the recent mastectomy reconstruction, which, trust me, cannot be left as it. I think I just freak out at the thought of another journey under anesthesia. It’s that getting up before dawn, getting to and signing into a hospital on the grog of an empty stomach, the march down a hallway in a hospital gown, the climbing up on an operating table and being strapped in for lift-off.

It’s the loss of control.

It’s being told to bring your healthcare proxy with you.

This is what I wrote two years ago on Facebook along with a famous quote by Nelson Mandela:

But, just wanted to let those of you who call or text me, almost daily, to see if I am OK, to remind me to eat and try to sleep, to ask if I need anything; who mean well and send love and strength, that I am truly grateful to you.“

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