Living With Cancer....

I think it was the fact that Leo brought up Ernie's cancer surgery the other day that has me thinking about it.  When he said, so matter of factly, that it was only two years after Owen was born that Ernie went into the hospital I was startled----startled by the fact that he brought it up right then....and startled by the passage of time.  I'm somewhat shocked to realize that it has been six years.  For most of us, at least most of us of my generation----we hear cancer and we see death.  The Big C and the Big D----irretrievably  linked. 

So it's been six years.  Six long years. Six short years.  Of course for a couple of years we hoped it was gone for good....but it's not so we live with it.  Living with cancer....it's just not what you think about when you hear a diagnosis.  And maybe generations younger than I will think that when they hear that big letter C.  I don't know.  It's hard to believe....six years counting and many more to go.  Living WITH cancer....not dying FROM it.  The boys most likely won't really remember a time when Ernie didn't have cancer.

Six years ago my parents were healthy.  My father was starting to show signs of Alzheimer's and age but when I called my mother that afternoon to tell her what the doctor had said he immediately got in the car and drove over.  We were sitting on the patio when he pulled up and he just came and held us and told us it would be o.k.  And I remember sitting in the waiting room of the old cancer center with a two year old Owen dressed as a firefighter....and dumping out my bag of books and toys, raisins and cheerios to keep him occupied while Ernie got his radiation.  It seems so unbelievably long ago.

Of course I've seen the other side of cancer---the cancer that killed my beloved sister Judi only seventeen months after she was diagnosed.  Seventeen months of pretty much hell.  No time to say, "oh this is what I want to do with the rest of my life."  That movie the Bucket List came out around then and it used to just piss us off.  She didn't get much of a chance to live, really live, with cancer but Ernie does.  His treatments right now aren't too hard on him.  He sometimes gets tired, particularly the day of his infusion----something he admits to occasionally and denies the rest of the time.

And so we go, our little family that has so much love....living with cancer.