The Double Life

It's been a while.

I still have cancer.

I am still navigating what I can only describe as parallel lives.

There is me, mother, wife, full-time working woman, who is trying to find missing library books and make dentist appointments. Someone who is making plans for summer camp and beach weekends, making mental grocery lists and trying to pair missing socks. Someone who had a hard enough time trying to balance work and home before fitting in devastation.

Then there is me, breast cancer patient on week 20 of sitting in a chair, waiting, wondering, hoping. Someone who has given up on headcoverings and who barely wears a wig outside of work. Someone who makes green smoothies and keeps her talismans close at hand.

It is amazing how normal this has all become. How the weeks have moved forward and how much I have changed and how much I am very much the same.

You would think I would be sleeping less. That the worry would be so constant, so chronic that I could do nothing but sit wide-eyed in my bed at night and fret over all the what ifs and the things that I may miss. And while there are times that I am blindsided, hit so fiercely and furiously by the enormity of my diagnosis, I am also so exhausted by chemo and kids and correcting commas that there is no time left to pay it any mind.

So I live in both spaces, balancing precariously on the tightrope of each, trying to move on.

Friends and Benefits

If you stumbled upon this page because you mistyped as you were Googling "friends with benefits," I am sorry to inform you that you have made your way to a cancer blog.

Having said that I will say that the JT/Mila Kunis movie by the same name was surprisingly much better than I thought, although I do prefer the Ryan Reynolds/Anna Faris classic "Just Friends" when it comes to movies about trying to navigate the tricky and often hilarious missteps of trying to date your best friend.

However, what this blog post is really about is saying thank you.

Thank you to every single one of you who showed up on Saturday and supported me and my family. I know that the draw of a day drink with an open bar might have been a bit of incentive, but please know that to walk into a room and see so many people that have played a role in my life and who were willing to show up and lend their support was unbelievably amazing.

Thank you.

Thank you to Marianne and Colette and Bourbon Street.

Thank you to college roommates and their moms and work friends and to those of you I had sixth period French with and those of you that at one point I might have french kissed. Thank you to my cousins and aunts and uncles, friends of friends who showed up and lent a hand. Thank you to old friends I haven't seen in too long and to those who have been by my side through it all.

In all honesty I wasn't even sure I was going to show up. The thought of walking into a room, what I dubbed the "Worst High School Reunion Ever," at 36, bald, with breast cancer was a little daunting.

But the one thing I am realizing through this entire, terrible, overwhelming, unbelievably life-altering process is that there are people who care and who just want to help. By showing up on Saturday, you lessened the burden a bit for me and for that I am incredibly grateful.