“Grit is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

Angela Lee Duckworth

This quote speaks to me for a few reasons. 
1. Grit may be one of the biggest values I hold and look for in others. 
2. I am needing some serious grit because there are times I just don’t wanna and right now, I’m tired. 
3. I appreciate the sentiment of this quote to consider life in the long view but just the marathoner, one step at a time. 
4. But what is most impactful in this quote for me today is that this is exactly how I wish people would view cancer and survivorship. Cancer isn’t this “sprint” that is over when treatment is over, rather it is a marathon that goes until heaven comes. It’s not without victories or celebrations. It’s also not without each arduous step of the now never-the-same.

PS. I took this picture while at the NYC Marathon. My dearest Felicia ran it in my honor in 2018 wearing my “Amber’s Army” T-shirt. I put a heart around her in the pic – look for the girl in the pink shirt about to round the corner. I LOVE YOU FELICIA!!!!

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This Day in 2018:

14 of 18

14 of 18 today. 

This was my social media post today:
The waiting is the hardest part of all of this. It takes sooooo long to get checked in, have my port accessed and labs drawn, see the doc, wait for the chemo drugs to be ready and then get hooked up. ….Breathing through the impatience. Practicing presence. Accepting the slow down of time….. While we’ve been here today, we’ve scheduled my last cancer-related echocardiogram and we even scheduled my port removal (my oncologist gave the go-ahead to have that removed the same day as my last infusion). So, here I sit, Holding the present moment and practicing patience while also being given the gift of seeing a small glimpse of ‘the end.’ Wild.

It was interesting sitting there in this space. There was a peace in the waiting today that I haven’t felt for awhile (after, of course, I accepted the slowness of the morning). That acceptance of the slow down …especially as it’s been forced on me due to recovering from surgery… has been especially tangible today. I gave up trying to make time go faster and just sat in the slow. 

That said, it was pretty surreal scheduling a couple of things today that signify an ‘end’ to some of this. Instead of scheduling “my first” of something, I was scheduling “my last”… I also got to put the removal of this port on the calendar – October 1, 2018, 2pm. Whoa. 

I was also able to ask my doc what comes next. Probable total hysterectomy. Tamoxifen, a daily oral chemo drug, for 5 years. And follow up appointments starting at every 3 months. 

4 left.

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This Day in 2019:

8pm

There’s tired.

And then there is me. 

My head has dropped more times than I can keep track of as I’ve written this. And there are hardly any words…. Cancer is hard.

This is all I have in me tonight. 

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No post for 7/9/20

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