The last few weeks, since my incision closed up and I awaited radiation, it's been like finding pieces of my former life. As if I stand at a battlefield, or demolished city, wreckage surrounding me, and try to assess the damage of what's left. There's the stench of death in the air, while some aspects of me lay dead at my feet, others are still hidden underneath the rubble. Wounded parts cry out for help, to be saved, screaming in fear that they'll be lost to me forever. I know I have to tend to them before they slip away from me, but while I try to save some I know it will cause me to lose other pieces of me. I don't know which to save first. I want to save it all, but I know it's too late for that. There's already so much that's dead, lost, gone forever. The girl I was before this battle started is gone, emerging from the fog and smoke looming in the air is someone who looks like me, but she's scarred now, both physically and deep within her soul...

Ever since I had the last drain removed I've started to feel, almost, normal. During this strange time when people of our state are being told to stay away from others and stay home. My Facebook newsfeed has been filled with people complaining about this time of being trapped in their home. Stuck with their family. Having nothing to do. Where as I have been savoring every minute of this. I've been in this weird stretch, where I feel pretty okay but my incisions weren't quite ready to start radiation. So I've used this time to do all the things I haven't been able to do for months. I've cleaned all the things ever, I've reorganized, I've done some cooking, endless laundry, I've taken daily walks with my son, I've started doing my bible studies again, started writing again. In the middle of all this chaos of cancer and Covid, I have been given a tremendous gift - the gift of being a stay-at-home-mom, if only for a moment. I used to say that I...

The last nine months of my life have been filled with change. Unexpected change, unwanted change, forced change, so much change. For a girl who likes change in small doses in a controlled manner, it's been a learning process. During all of it, I'm trying to listen to God, for guidance and courage to do whatever it is He guides me to. I feel like I'm just stumbling my way through, blind, no idea where I am or where I'm going. I only know that I am in fact, going somewhere, to do...something. I ask Him what I'm supposed to do, then listen. If I'm not sure, I ask Him to be a little louder. Really, I ask Him to slap me upside the head just to make sure I don't miss it. I was once called a writer. Long ago, that was my passion, my job. But life and the world changed and for years I just thought of that as something I once was, that girl I barely remember now, she used to do that writing thing. For a long time I missed it, like an addict needs a fix. But over ...