Today is a big day.  No getting around it.  I see the surgeon and find out more what is what.  The waiting, as you know, has sucked.

And today I am anxious.  Today the immediate future and my new reality is more planned out. 

Today I am hopeful and fearful.  This is a big deal.  It’s breast cancer. BUT…. millions of women deal with this every day with amazing grace and fortitude, and every day my admiration for the collective known to many a pink warriors grows. 

I also am reminded today of what others have gone through.  I think about my dear friend’s nephew who is now in college, but who has lived a good part of his young life with a really awful cancer – I can’t remember the exact name – maybe it’s in that horrible neuroblastoma category.  He’s a brave kid and I think of everything he went through along with the little girl of another friend of mine who lives out-of-state.  Both these kids dealt with this – showed amazing strength and fortitude in the face of their diseases.  If they can do it, I can do it, right?

And then I met someone new, a young woman who has a roommate still in college who is dealing with Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.  He had a surgery to remove a tumor and is about to start chemo and all that good stuff.  And he’s in college and is fighting to keep a normal life.

So right now, I have to be brutally honest with myself – it could be a LOT worse.

Today’s photo is a tiny fir-tree seedling I pass on my walks – it is fighting to grow out of a wall.  It looks so hopeful, sort of the little engine that could, so it is my post photo today.    And it represents hope.  And through faith in ourselves and in whatever higher being we believe in, comes hope.

So people, I just have to stop driving myself and all of you wonky at different times of each day, get on my stiff upper lip and believe.

Easier said then done, yes. But the alternative is simply not acceptable, is it? God hasn’t forsaken me, he’s just given me more to think about.