I spent some friendship time today with a pal who is marking off  her calendar until next Friday when she will go in for her reconstruction surgery after treatment for breast cancer.  She’s been looking forward to this surgery because she wants to feel “whole” again.  Her words. 

She’s already been through a lot.  Breast surgery, radiation and some difficult days and nights of seeing herself in the mirror a changed woman.  She says the tubes and drainage mess presented some of the hardest times to get through.  But she made it….and that’s saying a lot.  She’s not a “tough broad” by any definition of the words and when she got the news that she had cancer, well, let’s just say she wobbled a bit before she found her legs again. 

Now her mind wanders to a place where so many cancer patients go;she’s wondering if she’ll live out the measure of her days or if the disease will find a new home in her body and the next time she won’t be so lucky.  So what to do, she’s asking?  “Should I take that trip to Tahiti once I”m finished healing?”  “What if I don’t have much time left, should I do all the things I’ve dreamt of over the years?”   These are hard questions to answer, so I let her talk her way through them until she landed on a maybe…..She was still thinking about it after I left.

Thinking about the immediate future and new breasts to thinking about the future/future and living a full, long life filled with adventures.

It was an afternoon that reminded me of how quickly we learn to make adjustments to our plans.  Cancer makes that happen in a flash.