Cat Walking: Trifecta

Modern therapy is very result and topic driven. Unless you have money to pay for it you are given X number of sessions to deal with something and then you are healed. Yay!

Cancer has enough cachet around it that the number of sessions you are given is quite generous. And let's face it, for a number of people with cancer the need for therapy is involuntarily finite.

But there is never "just" cancer in anyone's life. The human brain overlaps. We are good and bad and indifferent. We feel happy and sad at the same time and we don't even know it.

I remember very clearly that my gut reaction to being told I had cancer for certain was relief. Oh yes, then all the dread flooded in, but my first feeling was - thank God I'm not going to die of Alzheimer's like my mother already has even though she is still alive.

There are worse things than cancer. It's just one of my fears. Just one of the things in my life.

I think that my blog is fairly positive. I hope so anyway. But I never want to give the impression that I don't struggle or feel down at times. If you never feel down then maybe don't peek in too many drawers of your emotional closet. Better keep that sucker in moth balls.

You can probably tell that my next therapy session is the next day when I do one of these introspective posts :)

In a two month period in 2012 I found out I had cancer and that my knee replacement was infected meaning I had to have it replaced again twice more, and then a year later a week before my third knee replacement my mother died.

It was a trifecta of pain. Only one of those things is about cancer but they are as interrelated as anything.

Cancer. Infected knee. Mom. But not in that order. The cancer doctor was adamant that the knee infection had to be fixed first or they wouldn't operate. I can make myself crazy wondering if it wouldn't have gone to my lymph node if that wasn't the case. Or if both the cancer and the knee infection hadn't been misdiagnosed. That's not a closet I can dwell in for long. But I can tell I will need to visit and do some art work around it.

On June 27th 2014 I had another trifecta.

1. I got to watch people meet Lizzy for the first time.

2. I rode a water slide for the first time in my life and I faced down the big blue bucket!

The big blue bucket should not be in the kiddy section. It is NOT for toddlers or the faint of heart.

Let's review. Even though I was not totally in the flow I nearly fell off my rollator. The little girl actually disappears and reappears on the ground behind us and a nice lady passing by claps for us!

Clearly it's not safe. Let's do it again! This time I'll hang on and we'll move forward.

Thanks little kid that noticed my glasses were no longer with me, I sure didn't!

Emily got to go on waterslides despite her broken thumb.

The air show practising overhead just added to the day.

Not bad for one afternoon.

3. That evening I joined the annual burning of the homework campfire.

We started the conflagration of superfluous homework tradition after grade two Word Wall. I don't know who thought that seven or eight year old kids should cut out individual letters from magazines and glue them neatly into workbooks but I hope that person has to give scrapbooking lessons to hippos for eternity.