Choosing Your Path

 Today was a good day. 

That's the thought that was roaming around my head on Saturday. (Today was pretty good too but more on that later).  In the world of positive encouragement that you often run into in cancer survivorship, it's hard to find something more universal than the mantra: live in the present. It comes in various flavors, the most popular being the notion that you can't control the future, so live in the moment, enjoy it and don't worry about the what ifs. A corollary to that is that a silver lining to a cancer diagnosis is that it makes you  appreciate the now, more than ever. 

Well, I don't know about that. There's some truth to the cliche, I suppose, but I always felt it to be more cliche than truth. To be honest, that's probably because living in the moment has never been my strength. My mind is almost always going -- which makes for wonderful insomnia at times -- and my anxiety gene is a well-honed one. The combination of the two means thinking about the future and the dreaded "what if" is an easy state to drift into. 

But Saturday really was a good day. I mowed the lawn, caught up on some work in anticipation of some tired days ahead, and had an all around normal day on the homestead. For the record, I crashed a bit on Sunday and Monday, but by Tuesday night, I was feeling good enough to start this blog post. That it took me to Thursday night to post it has nothing to do with chemo effects. And by Wednesday, I was back full day at work, I'll take it. 

Yet when I'm having a good day, I sometimes feel that I need to literally remind myself of that, just to keep me on that positive path, and more importantly, to avoid traveling down that other road that darkness and solitude often invites. That particular path is overgrown with weeds and worries; it's a dark and often scary jungle and it leads nowhere.     

It may be hard at times, but I do  think you can choose which path you want to follow. And I'm going to stay on that positive path as often as I can. 

Backyard blogging on a beautiful September
day, with cameo appearance from Rocco

So here we are, halfway between rounds two and three of R-Chop. Based on pathology of my disease, it seems like CAR T-Cell may end up being the prescribed treatment approach. We'll know more after we do PET/CT scans on the 19th, before round three. And yes, I can feel the seeds of scanxiety starting to take root. The battle I fight (and will fight) in my head is to not think about "Will it work? What do we do if it doesn't?" but instead focus on where we are today.

As I sit out here on a beautiful late summer day, I'm managing the side effects okay of treatment and am pretty much pain free with no medications helping me along. And in a week and a half, I expect to be visiting Noah at Lehigh for Family Weekend. 

I like that path.