You gotta’ go big in this life, don’t you? Because there’s just no guarantee of anything beyond today. It’s crazy how quickly things can change. You can walk the same monotonous, routine path for decades, watching the same scenery pass by again and again until it’s so familiar you don’t even notice it, and then one day everything changes so quickly and unexpectedly that you just stand there stupidly, stunned, not comprehending why your lovely, familiar scenery now looks so foreign.
This happens to me at work all the time. I run so many dumb calls that aren’t real emergencies at all and then, every once in a while, I pull up on scene of something that is really real. People are dying in a car and somebody should really extricate them, or the house is filled with smoke from the burning couch and Grandma Pootie can’t find her way out or somebody who means a lot to all the family who have arrived for the annual Christmas celebration is now having a massive stroke. And every time this happens it catches me off guard to see really real reality interjected so suddenly into what had been my cozy, clueless stroll through life.
Tomorrow I meet with the medical oncologist who holds my fate in his hands like a tiny bird, and I wonder if I’m going to experience one of those really real moments at my meeting. We’re doing some scans today and we had blood drawn yesterday so that he can decide how best to proceed with my treatment. Basically, it comes down to how my tumor is responding to the current treatment and if my body can take more rounds of it. And I gotta’ be honest, it doesn’t feel like I can take any more of this. With the last round of chemo, there were many days that I was in so much pain that I couldn’t walk or even sit up to get out of bed.
But I’m hoping for the best, and I’m making big plans. Next August 5th (the date of my diagnosis) I want to be standing on top of the Grand Teton. I’ve been scheming how to make that happen lately, and I know it’s ambitious. A lot of things have to fall into place just so for me to beat cancer and have time to get into shape to make that happen.
But if you only ever make little plans, how are you ever going to do great things?
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