Thriving Past Cancer: Marine's Journey

My nine year old has an old soul. He hides it though and uses jokes to protect himself. We read together, watch old movies, and talk about topics that a nine-year-old should not be thinking about. Our recent adventures are found in "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," by Frank Baum. He stopped me last week when we discovered that Oz was a fake and asked, "Why don't they see it mom? Why don't they see that they already possess everything they are looking for?" "What do you mean, my love?" I asked "Well, the lion keeps looking for courage, but he's had it all along." He paused, then continued, "It's like you, when you were in the hospital, you forgot that you had courage. You were the lion!" I gasped. "Talking about my stay in the hospital, what happened to you? You'd come and cower in the corner behind your I-Pad, you wouldn't look at me or talk to me." "I looked," he said. "But w

December 2016, two days after my surgery, my surgeon, whom I have come to call the Thinker, removed a mass and reconnected me in the oddest of ways. He walked into my room, tall, lanky, confident. "How's my favorite patient today?" he asked. "Upset.  Doc, you forgot to sew me up!" I muttered. "We don't sew people up anymore.  We leave them open so that they can close from the inside out.  It's supposed to decrease the chance of infections." "And how am I supposed to go on with my life while I have this enormous gash in me?" "One day at a time," he said.  Then as an afterthought, he asked, "Why are you still in bed?" "You just operated on me?" I quipped back. "You've been lying here for almost a week.  You need to get up and moving." "What do I do if this hole you've left ajar splits open and my insides all fall out? My stomach?  Intestines?" "Lucky for yo

Choosing to Live  I wanted to die in December. I felt the strings that bound me to this world thin. Pain wracked my body. Sorrow shook me to the core.  The silent killer, colon cancer, had wreaked havoc on my innards.  My colon was perforated and there was a hot mess inside. It pulsed in agony by the time I was diagnosed and admitted to the hospital. For fourteen days I lay in a hospital bed looking out at the world through hollow eyes. I saw, but I truly couldn't fathom. Time slipped by. Three hundred and thirty six hours seemed to slip away with little to no effort. My brother and sister-in-law tried to pull me back. They were verbal and angry, refusing to leave my side. They tried so hard.  Each visit was an attempt to bring me back to the world of the living.  They walked in with flowers one day, a Christmas tree the next, jokes, lottery tickets, a book, and movies. Nothing worked. Then one day they showed up with a journal and a pen. They put it under my right hand an