Tag Archives: Thanksgiving

Breast Cancer - A Loving Fight, San Francisco - Leaving your heart

Thanksgiving – Remembering to be Thankful

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“When you’re down on your luck, you gotta do it,” –
Andrew W.K.’s feel-good song Got to Do It
 
After my wife found she had cancer a couple years ago, Thanksgiving took a different meaning for me.  I felt guilty that it took her illness for me to appreciate the holiday for what it is, but I do now take the time to remind myself and my kids about how thankful we should be at this time of year for what we have rather than next month when people start wishing for what they don’t have.  Tonight I sat on my brother’s couch after dinner, half napping as the tryptophan kicked in.  Fighting the lure of a nap, I picked up the recent Sports Illustrated and started to read an article about Jill Costello, a local girl from San Francisco with a big heart who graduated from the University of California at Berkeley this past Spring and as the coxswain for the women’s rowing team, led them to second place in the National Championships.
Jill Costello - former Cal rowing star

I had read briefly about Jill back in May in the local newspaper after I heard about her through the UCSF Medical Cancer newsletter that my wife gets. Jill had been diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer although she did not smoke.

Although I hadn’t kept up with her story, as I read through the article I felt myself tearing up.  I knew what was coming.  I looked over at my wife smiling and laughing with my family and felt truly blessed.

Thanksgiving is truly THE family holiday of the year.  It isn’t long enough for most people to travel far  away.  It isn’t about presents or religion.  It is about celebrating your place and those around you and being thankful  for what you have.  Sometimes hearing stories about the loss of others who really are special people reminds me of this.

I want to give a special thanks to my friend Donald Wilhelm who we lost this year.  A good guy who inspired many and left us too soon.  In the article in Sports Illustrated: The Courage of Jill Costello, we read a great story about another inspiring person who can teach us to appreciate what we have today.  Although the article did not mention it, Jill lost her battle after graduation, but her strength inspired many to give more than you receive.

As her coach so succinctly put it at Jill’s funeral, “There are givers and there are takers, and you want to be more giver than taker. She never complained. She gave far more than she ever took. She was an inspiration to all of us. I hope when we face something as daunting as this, we can show some of the courage that she showed.”

Breast Cancer - A Loving Fight, Route 53 - Life is A Highway

What’s Up? How’s Your Wife?

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This is my most special place in all the world. Once a place touches you like this, the wind nevers blows so cold again. You feel for it, like it was your child.

– Moonlight Graham, Field of Dreams

Ah..what to write.  When I run each night, the mind swirls with this thick soup of thoughts.  Some people have writer’s block.  I have writer’s neurosis.  I wish you could see the list of half written blog entries that I have yet to complete.  You will, but hopefully they will still be relevant.  I guess tonight I will have to address some recent inquiries to my email……

Funny how I still occasionally get an email (this week I got two) which asked how my wife is and why I don’t write about cancer anymore in my blog.  The short answer is that this blog was never intended to be about my wife’s cancer.  It was just a continuation of my personal thoughts on life.  My public memoirs if you will.

The long answer is that I can say that I feel so lucky that my wife is doing great, gets monthly shots and takes daily pills to make sure the cancer does not come back.  We are just about at the one year mark of five years of Tamoxifin treatments (20% done is quite an achievement).  The monthly shots leave a nice black and blue mark on my wife’s abdomen, my wife’s surgical scars are starting to fade, and occasionally we talk about her side effects, but I take my cues from my wife for the most part.  She’s ready to move on.  That said, we don’t forget.  We don’t forget the fears, we don’t forget the worries, we don’t forget those nights without sleep, and we don’t forget the months of surgeries.  Reading some of the blogs and talking to those who have just been diagnosed or who have wives reminds us of where we were and how much our lives have changed.  

Breast cancer is now a large part of our lives so much so that we have to escape.  No breast cancer walks or runs for me.  My runs are my way of running in honor of my wife, mom, mom-in-law, cousins, aunts, and friends who have all been struck by breast cancer.  Every night when I run I am reminded of our fortunate results, my wife’s strength, and those others who we have met through our ordeal.  By the way, of all the above mentioned, only my mother was over 50 when first diagnosed.  Yes, this is in light of the new panel study which says that women should now wait til 50 before having mammograms.   It is really a shame that we are now trying to cut back on preventive medicine during a big time for research and discovery.  Now is not the time to cut back when we are making so much progress.

Yes, breast cancer as a topic is all around us now and we just can’t escape it so we relish those moments when it doesn’t remotely come close to infiltrating our conversations or thoughts.   It is like my friend who works with juvenile delinquents on a daily basis.  He has told me that because of his job he doesn’t want to have children of his own.  This week I met with a gentleman who has been waiting a month and his wife’s surgery is right after Thanksgiving.  I had met him a couple times, but this week he just broke down.  His fears and concerns finally overwhelmed his facade.  His worries about his wife, his kids, the mounting medical bills, and all the uncertainty surrounding the outcomes finally came to a head.  It just took me back a year and I relived it all in one hour.  That feeling of hopelessness hit me like a ton of bricks.  I broke down with this man I barely knew.  I couldn’t tell him things would be alright as I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to hear either.  I wanted a path.  I wanted a path out of the mess.  All I could tell him was to bury himself into caring for his wife.  Focus on the task at hand.

That night I ran a long run.  Couple that encounter with an incident earlier in the morning where I had a woman faint in the elevator bank in my office bulding.  It turns out she was having a heart attack.  All she kept saying was “my babies, my babies” . Her predicament had me distracted the rest of the day until I had my conversation with that breast cancer husband.  Both incidences had me reeling.  They reminded me of how fragile life is.  All I wanted that night was to be alone with my thoughts so I could just make sense of it all.

Well I hope that explains it all.  Thankful this Thanksgiving? Yep I sure will be.  Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Breast Cancer - A Loving Fight, Route 53 - Life is A Highway

Being Thankful – Life is a Highway

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You share a bond and friendship that can’t be broken – Fortune Cookie

Given what we have been through this year, some might wonder how Thanksgiving might be different or how we can be thankful.  In fact, on my run tonight I spent a half an hour just thinking of all the people and things I am thankful for.  Well this Thanksgiving was different for me.  For one, I never before had a Thanksgiving where I didn’t sit down for a big Turkey meal with either side of our huge family.

In fact, today marks the 4 month marker since the day she was diagnosed with cancer and our world was set spinning.

The thought of almost losing the love of my life and the mother of my children at an early age to breast cancer has been a bit of a wake up call to me / her / us.  I am so thankful that she has been able to endure her skin sparing mastectomy to remove the cancer and has been given a new lease on life.  Today was spent “being thanksful” and thanking all those who have helped us to get through this year.  We also spent the morning helping out those less fortunate than ourselves.  Is not all about health and wealth.

To hear and see the stories of others we were able to see other people out there who are just as thankful as we are for what we have today.  In fact some definitely have more to be thankful for than us and I was happy to show our children how lucky we are.  This year though we have many friends, family, doctors, etc who are all part of the reason why we are thankful for their love and caring, for the health of my wife, and for the lessons we have learned from them to know what true compassion means 

In recent days we were happy to hear that my wife’s parents finally have decided to come out and see my wife.  I know it means so much to her that they will be coming to visit.  I guess we have one more thing to be thankful for this year.

Route 53 - Life is A Highway

Confidence is a Drug – Life is a Highway

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“I am Superwoman, Put an S on my chest” – Alicia Keys

Continuing my theme of letting go, my wife is starting to do a lot of little things which are showing her confidence and need for independence from going grocery shopping alone to resuming her exercise.  It is a simple thing sometimes but I can trace this renewed energy just from a simple invite from some of the “popular moms” in our kids school who asked her to join them for an evening out.  It really made my wife feel good to still fit in.  I know her confidence wiill ebb over the next few months as she goes through her recontstruction and deal with both the emotional and physical scars.

Interestingly enough we had the same conversation about confidence with our own children.  We want to teach them humbleness.  While both are well liked by their classmates we want to teach them to be humble individuals and help them for the inevitable day when they receive rejection and teach them how to handle it.

Part of gaining confidence is providing exposure to as much as possible.  As a parent it is our job to show our children as much as we can while providing guidance.  As we go through our lives our parenting takes on many forms that are influenced by our own experiences.  We sometimes learn by giving our children things that our parents couldn’t give us or providing many of those same experiences.  For me, I miss those moments with my dad and this weekend I was able to take my son to his 1st  Big Game (Cal vs. Stanford football), but it is was more than just a game.  As I say, it is always the experience of getting there, and taking a 9 year old to Berkeley is always an eye-opening experience.  Blondies Pizza, Top Dog, the homeless, Rasputin’s Records, etc are all part of the mystique after taking Bart to Berkeley.  For our son (and some day our daughter) the experience started with listening to the Cal Band. 

After listening to the Cal Band we marched up to the stadium with them.  The smile and laughter that he had watching the band made me tear up.  30 years ago that was me with my dad.  I only hope my dad felt as satisfied with giving me that same experience and I showed him the same amount of gratitude.  The casual conversation about the history of the schools and the area were part of a great day of bonding that hopefully will create many pleasant memories for my son because they sure did for me.

My wife and I are still being cautious about the post-surgery experience and what it will mean to us.  I think we know how it will be physically but psychologically we’ve been talking about some of our concerns and issues each night.  We will have to work through it, but at the moment we aren’t sure what those exact issues will be.  What we do know is that we have to be observant of each other’s behavior and let each other know when we observe anything.

One thing we did agree upon though is that leading into this Thanksgiving, we will not be at a loss for things we will be thankful for.