What About That Gray Area?

The gray areas of life have never appealed to me. My daughter, Anna, is the same way. When learning to tell time there were constant questions about the clock, and hearing, “What time is it?” was incessant. One day I said it was about 2:45. “What does ‘about’ mean?” It didn’t take long for me to get into teaching her that it meant to round off time and numbers before I heard, “I don’t like rounding off.” Now there’s a girl after my own heart! In fact, on the day she was born, the doctor was explaining different scenarios to the birth which involved things from waiting until my labor might decided to kick in, or whether to induce, etc. Nervous, anxious, and ready to get going, I asked her exactly what time the baby would be born. No rounding off. No gray area. How silly is a question like that, but in that very raw moment my mind hit “Default” and I was my real self.

The real me, the one who wants to treat the wonders of life as if they were a pie baking in the oven, was fully exposed in the first two years of my cancer. Little did I know in the beginning months that I had always been living in a gray area, as we all are everyday. But it wasn’t until after I had my “first and final” treatment when more metastasis showed up in my neck that this cancer thing might never be over. Yikes, I had never thought that would happen. Then the tumor marker in my blood said there was more cancer in my body, yet no cancer could be seen. What?! More unknowns? More shades of gray? Trying my patience and fortitude like nothing I’ve ever known, I had to sit down with the gray and have a look-see.

I had been living my life thinking that I was in control and that by sheer force alone I could make all things white or black – clear as day. No unknowns, no gray areas, no things that would be out of my willful, intent and mind. What folly! What ego! Truth be told there’s precious little that I have ever been in control of, most of all, the things that really matter. It has been true to this day that there are gray areas in my “cancer life” that have yet to be made clear. The gray area describes more and more of life than I realized, and to admit that, to succumb to that reality is humbling, and ultimately freeing. And so the space that I now have that was previously taken up with this internal struggle, gives me room to sit in the gray area and see that God is there, too.
The gray area has taught me so many things: humility, patience, faith, wisdom, perseverance, and trust.

But Wait, There's More

August of 2008 brought the first of what would be 3 surgeries related to this “thyroid thing.”
Surgery #1 brought about surgery #2 when, what appeared to “nothing” became not only something, but something with the word “malignant” attached to it along with the phrase, “vascular invasion.” I didn’t know then that it would be such a big deal, but my hospital consulted with Stanford just to confirm what they thought they saw signaled what I now see as the foreshadowing of how this disease would play out. More gray area. More confusion. More inconclusive information.
The morning after surgery #2 when my thyroid was completely removed the nurse gave me a pill. It would be the pill I would take everyday from that moment forward: synthetic thyroid. I looked at the nurse, gave a toast to this new pill that would allow my body to function and swallowed it. I would be forever dependent upon this pill and suddenly it took on a meaning greater than any nourishment I had ingested to date. Without this pill I will die. The same can be said for water, food, love, yet somehow it took this pill for me to see that one little itty bitty item would help keep me alive. What other “little itty bitty things” had I not noticed in my life that made the difference between me living and not living?

It's Probably Nothing

This is the phrase I heard for five months while the medical field tried to find out what this "lump" was at the base of my neck. Time and experience told these professionals that it probably was, indeed, nothing. But not in my case, and my body proved this phrase wrong time and again throughout the years. In these months of not knowing, for a woman just 40 years old with a 10 and a 9 year old daughter and son, I was sadistically introduced to the gray area of life that I would forever have to acknowledge. Imagination gone wild - "What if I have cancer? What if I die? What if? What if?" The "What ifs" of my mind took over reason and spun into fear, a place I did not like.
To offer reason and comfort as she always does, Eleanor asked me one day, "What if you have cancer? What will you do?" This was a defining moment in my life, for at that very moment a clarity came to me carried by grace and the answer was as true as anything I have every really known: nothing. Nothing different. I would live my life as I'm living it today. I would drive the kids to school, go to my job, drive the carpools, do the laundry, cook the meals, live and laugh and love with my family. At that moment, I decided to live my life as if it was a choice. Because it is.
"It's probably nothing." That phrase has ceased to have meaning for me. It doesn't matter if IT is something or not; it's what we do with our lives everyday that matters in the end anyway.