I am not going to die from breast cancer. At least, that is
what my world famous doctor has told me. I am grateful for
the information and want to bend my head in awe of him,
take his hands in mine and kiss them tenderly. I am
humbled by the declaration in a way that has a power to stir
the emotions I have needed most lately: relief, freedom
from worry, peace.

I have been told by others that I most likely will "survive" this experience. They have all been very cautious, handing out my survivability statistics and telling me how lucky I am. It has taken me a while to absorb the "lucky" phrase since when you are told you have cancer luck doesn’t feel like
something that is on your side that day. Given the statistics
around this disease you can quickly feel as if just getting it
to begin with puts you at odds to living a normal life ever
again. The worst thing I did was read anything about it. I
believe in the written word but what was written about this
disease hardly comforted me. The testimonials and the
journal articles and books did nothing but create an
impending sense of doom. All those charts and graphs
that now pertained to me sobered my normally indomitable
spirit. When you are staring down something as big as
this, you don’t want someone just telling you the "great"
news about your survivability. You want to hear loud and
clear that will not only survive, but that you will live.

I am a young 42 year old woman. At least that is what I like
to believe. I don’t believe I need to go into my personal
diagnostic lingo, about the size of my tumor and whether
my nodes were clear or not, about how invasive the cancer
was, or if my estrogen is positive or negative for someone
to understand that once you have cancer you have signed
on for club membership and entered a place "over there"
where you truly never believed you would have to walk. Of
course, there were points in my life when I believed I would
never have children, or be divorced, or fall in love again,
and as I observed these phenomenon as an outsider drew
opinions that on the inside of each of them is nothing like
my former concept. I never understood the real freedom or
peace, nor the heartbreaking agony of each, and as in this
case, struggled to maintain a sense of balance and
perspective as I worked through the power and humility
each of these experiences would bring. Even though I am
new to the cancer camp I have already experienced agony
and joy, struggled to maintain my composure and sense
of self, while my personal belief system once again is
thrown into the fire for further glazing.

It isn’t that living a good, decent life and being true to
yourself helps you to avoid problems. I naively believed at
one point that if I lived the "right" life and did the "right"
things that the miracle known as an "easy" life would be
mine. I would have earned it, you see; shown myself and
others that standing up and doing the right thing meant that
trouble laid its head elsewhere. A good life, I have come to
understand, is that you do the right thing and when trouble
comes (and it will) you can ask yourself, now what am I
going to do about it? All my preaching to my children about
accountability and respect; everything I have said about
being the master of your own destiny, has been put to test
in many trials by fire and the truth on the other side still
rings true: your life is what you make it. You can choose to
live a life of abject sadness and believe that bad things
have happened to you, and oh-woe-is-me. Or you can
gather the very substance that has become the essence of
you and make your life a joyful experience regardless of the
bad test results. I heard in a song, no one owns what you
hold inside. How one leads a truthful, meaningful, and
loving life despite and because of the test results is what I
have come to believe ultimately crafts the human spirit.

I never really sought wisdom before nor wondered as to my
true purpose on earth. Then I had children, then I fell in
love with a beautiful man, then I saw the other side of
heartache and I became wise, gradually. I look up charts
and graphs from the New England Journal of Medicine and
I see how the bar chart morphs and shape shifts as the
years move farther away from diagnosis and treatment. I
understand clearly the "seriousness" of my disease and
how I need to be diligent and "pay attention." And I
understand deeply that no matter what those graphs and
charts want to point out, they don’t map my human heart,
nor live my chaotic and lovely life, they don’t prove
statistically the determination I have to stand at my
daughters’ wedding, or kiss my first grandchild, or make
innumerable, and perhaps regrettable mistakes in the
coming years.