Today was an adventure. Somebody met me through a mutual friend on Facebook, and began talking to me, after looking at my Mother’s Day cover photo that had five generations in it. I was holding my baby in the picture, and that baby is now 21 years old. Which tells you how old the picture is. It very clearly said Mother’s Day. I thought it was obvious.
But as we were talking, I noticed questions that I knew were headed in the direction he was not likely intending with who he thought he was. Then he said our favorite words ever, which was unexpected coming from someone who was the son of a doctor, and I met literally through one of his dad’s patients, from the office where he worked. (It’s unusual for someone in the medical field to still not know not to say something like this. But then again, I am reminded that doctors have said it to me, too.) Incidentally, the mutual friend was my daughter’s fourth grade teacher. I had already said she had turned 21. He was not doing the math.
I finally decided to let him off the hook easily and asked if by any chance he was looking at my cover photo, because that was the reason I didn’t look sick. I wasn’t. Because that was 20 years ago. Indeed, that’s what he was looking at. “Surprise! You catfished yourself!” I told him to look back a few pictures for the other half of me, and that he didn’t have to worry about trying to reel it back in, because I don’t date.
We still had a pretty interesting conversation. He’s a really nice guy. I hope he finds what he’s looking for, and maybe we will end up with a great friendship out of it. We continued chatting for a bit, and he got to hear some of my other shocking and amusing life stories. And then I reminded him to just take care of his own health, because when you lose your health, you lose everything.
He said I had a really good attitude about things. And I reminded him that I really didn’t have a choice. My life has had so many loops in this roller coaster ride, that the only way to survive it is with a sincerely huge and sometimes inappropriate sense of humor. And Xanax. And medical marijuana. OK, so maybe I’m not that great at it after all. But I know how to fake it well.
I sort of ended the conversation with a little bit of a metaphor that I didn’t realize at the time made perfect sense. I said life is full of sunshine and shit. You can’t have one without the other. I wasn’t even thinking about the connection between fertilizer and sunshine. But if that isn’t the perfect description of life, I don’t know what is.
Those of us going through the medical journey that leaves us with either a high probability of immediate/sudden death, or a promise of guaranteed imminent death (terminal), understand that if we hadn’t lost everything we’ve lost, we wouldn’t know how to appreciate what we have left. Everything we value has more value now than it ever did before. Every hug, every good day, every good morning, every lock of hair, every walk to the mailbox, and every school event with our kids… means 1000 times more than it did before this journey.
I’m sure all of us would trade it for the lives we had before, but we probably never would have appreciated a single minute of it the same way we appreciate every single minute now. And that, in itself, is something to be grateful for. Some people will never get to experience the magic of really LIVING in a moment with such fierce intensity. We are determined to suck every drop of life we can out of what we are given.
And that, my friends, is how you turn shit into sunshine.
I'm Still Breathing! 