Yup, it’s true.  This is a nightmare that we aren’t going to wake up from.  It is reality.  And it isn’t any fun. I wish Loretta didn’t have to go through this but she does. We both do.

Lots of people have cancer.  My father died from cancer.  My mother-in-law died from cancer.  But, we know lots of people who have had cancer but are still very much alive and doing great.  That’s the thing about cancer: there is no certainty.  You are never certain that you will get it.  If you have it, you are never certain if it will kill you or you will kill it.  If you do prevail, you always have that nagging doubt in the back of your mind that it might come back, that you didn’t get it all.  The only certainty is that when you die, the cancer will, once and for all, die, too.

So, from now on, we are living with cancer.  Even when Loretta is declared “cured”, she will always have that in the back of her mind.  It is a constant.  Learning to live with that is going to be most of the battle.  She has wonderful doctors who are going to “cure” her but she will always have that scar.

Scars are our reminders of things that hurt us once but that we survived.