New wrinkle in the plan....

My surgery has been postponed. I need to recover first from lung inflammation that 5% (lucky me!) get from Taxol, my last chemo drug. I had started to feel better from chemo but my lungs weren't feeling great. I had gotten another cold virus and figured it was that but it was getting worse and worse. I had a cough and my lungs hurt and felt tight. They took a cat scan and saw the same inflammation that had shown up on my pet-scan. Not cancer, but they are unwilling to operate until it clears up. So, we are treating this with two antibiotics to forestall pneumonia, prednisone and lots of vitamin c, niacin, and vitamin D through light exposure (the latter 3 coming from us, not the medical folks.). I now sem to be getting better fast. But I couldn't understand why I was suddenly weepy, until I found out mood swings are a common side effect of prednisone. I am also jittery, having trouble sleeping and blowing up like a balloon from water retention. Amazing stuff, prednisone, but BAAAD for you! The toughest news to take, however, is that, as I inferred from their not angling my treatment course, the clean pet-scan is seen as encouraging but not definitive. The doctor, to whom I hadn't spoken since the scan, said that it's the pathology Fro. Surgery that "really counts.". They'll biopsy all the breast tissue and the lymph nodes they remove and see whether they still find live cancer cells. If so, I guess we feel grateful they've been removed surgically, hope the radiation kills anything still around the chest wall, and that any cancer that got into my system through the lymph nodes succumbed to the chemo or my immune system. And we wait and see. We wait and see in any case. That's the real deal with cancer. You get your regular scans, you get on with your life, take care of yourself and hope for the best. As we all do, once something happens to jolt us out of our immortality dream-state. If we're smart, we appreciate the time we have and don't ruin it with fear about the end. Easier said than done, of course. So here's how I'm doing it. I write every morning 5 things for which I'm grateful. I work actively on forgiveness, of myself and others, letting go of past wrongs so I can chose to live as I want to and not in reaction to them. I work on appreciating the present moment, stopping long enough to actually look at, taste, smell, hear and feel what's going on right now. I am TERRIBLE at this. I mean, really lousy. The impatient, analytical and judgmental parts of my brain just won't shut up. What a racket they make. But I am learning. I know that clinical voice in my head is not all of me, just one sometimes useful piece of the whole. I'm learning to hear it without immediately identifying with it, thinking "that's me thinking, that's why I think, believe, know about life." When I remember to, I acknowledge the input ("thanks for the opinion, worry, or memory") and return my attention to my senses. I feel my breath going in and out (nothing like a bout of lung inflammation to make you appreciate a good, clear breath!) I look at the sunlight on the floor, listen to the traffic, feel Butters curled up against me. And it's then, not when I'm worried about losing it all, but when I'm actually allowing myself to have it, that it's all worthwhile. Have a great day, and try to be there for some of it! Colleen