Tag: taking back my life

A Break From Positive Thoughts

by Tammy Myers

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My sweet baby girl woke up from her nap today with a fever. She came running into my office carrying her soft blankie (as she calls it) and Boss, her favorite stuffed doggy from Aunt Misty. She slowly opened the door and peeked her little round face in while giving me her best… “can I get up now” look. She slept for a good 2 hours and 45 minutes today, so I said, “you can come in sweetie”. Her eyes lit up and her cautious little face turned into a big smile as she ran over to me. She quickly climbed up onto my lap and then turned on the her innocent inquisitive charm, as she does every single day. She has a way of being playfully manipulative with her innocent curiosity, in an attempt to shift my “work focus” over to her, by making very funny and overly expressive faces and asking very detailed questions about every photo or graphic she sees on my monitors. She is always very strategic with her questions because she wants to buy as much time as she can, but the secret is on her. This one-on-one snuggle time at my desk with my sweet girl, is one of my favorite parts of the day, and I want to drag it out as much as she does on most days. After a year of living with the fear that cancer could take me away from my little girl and that she could actually be forced to grow up without a mommy, I have learned to appreciate and love even the littlest of moments…. and this daily moment is one of them.

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taking my life back

by admin

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What does the phase “taking my life back” really mean to someone who has or is facing Cancer

This is actually a post that I wrote most of, this past summer and couldn’t bring myself to post until I found it again overtaking my thought process.

So here’s some truth. The phrase “I cannot wait to take my life back, doesn’t mean exactly what you think it does, or there is at least a whole lot more to it then you think. As a breast cancer patient, we don’t really have to tell you about the obvious things that we are longing to put behind us, like wanting to have hair again, wanting to spend less time at the hospital or at doctors visits, being able to raise our arms above our head again, being able to plan for things without taking future surgeries and hospital stays into account, having two breasts, being able to buy an age-appropriate bra outside of a mastectomy fitting room at the cancer center, and most of all being able to play with your child without feeling winded, overcome with exhaustion, pain, shortness of breath, or fatigue. The truth is some of this will get better in time, and some of it won’t, but when I say that I cannot wait to take my life back, I mean so much more then all this.

The honest and real truth is that the hardest parts to “take back” so to speak, are most often the parts that we choose not to tell anyone about. Like the fact that you completely lose the ability to relate to “normal people” including your family and your closest friends, that you really no longer know how to have fun because you find it really hard to separate yourself from the new fear-based cancer version of yourself, and most importantly that you feel extremely isolated and alone at times even when you have the biggest support system and you are surrounded by family and friends that love you, because it’s not possible for others to understand where you are at mentally and emotionally unless they have been there themselves.

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