Picking Up The Pieces

What's the first thing that pops in your mind when you wake up in the middle of the night?

You can kind of tell how your life is going if you take a minute and think about what keeps you awake, or if nothing keeps you awake. For years it was worrying about my children. This is a common worry I am sure, but I had the added worry of raising a special needs child. It was definitely an honor raising M. but I lost a lot of sleep worrying about how to best parent him. Then I started working again. I had a great job, but a stressful one. I trained teachers and assistants on how to teach children with autism. I loved the job but in those wee hours of the morning when I would wake up........the first thing that would pop up was about a student that I was having difficulty with.

This brings me to this past year. For the most part, I have been waking up and the first thing in my mind is Cancer. You might think "well that isn't healthy". Maybe not. But you try having cancer and not losing sleep over it. It just is what it is. When I wake up I have the reminder of "discomfort" in my abdomen. I have had 7 incisions in my abdomen. Two in the same place, from a couple inches above my belly button to down.......well you know. So even if I didn't think about cancer the second I wake up, my belly would soon enough remind me. I imagine someone with radical surgery from breast cancer would feel the same way. My belly looks like a distortion of what use to be something human like.

So it came to me when I woke up about 4:oo this morning that what my life is about now, me living with intention and trying to make my life interesting within the confines of my home for the most part, is that I am picking up the pieces. It's like my life has been shattered by cancer, like a plate of glass and I am picking up what is salvageable and gluing it back together. The plate will never look the same, nor my abdomen, nor my life, but it can still be of some use and hopefully have it's own style of beauty. That is what I pray for. I pray that God chooses to keep me on this earth and has something good and useful to do with the time I have left. I want to be happy, healthy and a gift in someones life. I want to make a difference. Even if I have to do it confined to my home. There has to be a reason God has let me make it this far on this journey with cancer. Well stay tuned...............I will let you know what it is when I figure it out:)