March 30, Easter

March 30th Good Friday, Easter

Easter was always such a fun holiday when I was a child. I grew up in a very spiritual home and almost everyone we knew went to church. Our church held about 120 people on a good day! It was a small church but it was a mighty one.
Sometimes on Good Friday we would go to our church for a special communion service. My church was called “The First Freewill Baptist Church of Novi” and I helped build it when I was little. I remember going with my dad and screwing down the new floor that was being put in with him. I was about 8 years old I think. As I grew up my cousins and I became the church band. We always had lot of people who sang in our church so we had a lot of music on Sundays. None of it was rehearsed. Someone would just get on stage and sing and we would follow them on our instruments even if we didn’t really know the song. I learned how to play guitar by ear and not reading music. When you are born with a musical ear you can just hear where the music is supposed to go most of the time. My entire family plays music buy ear.

Our church was a very spiritual church and often the when the spirit of God was so present people would often shout. Yes, I said shout and often throw their hymnals or their bibles if they were holding one ha ha. My cousin and I would sit in the back row and we could feel that spirit growing sometimes and we would take bets on who was going to shout first. Would it be someone else or my mother?! My mother was the most God fearing woman I’ve ever met and if anyone would ever get to go to heaven it would be her. She was always the best example of a christian that I knew. She loved and tried to help everyone even if it put her in a lessor position and she did without. She never really judged anyone. She invited all into her home with love.

Easter Sunday mornings our church would have a special “Sunrise” service at 6am and I think she was there for every one of those! Then she would come home and get us kids or our dad would bring us. That was one of the few days a year he would go to church with us. He worked a lot and almost every weekend.
We would all get new outfits to wear to church and of course an Easter basket with a chocolate bunny and candy. After Church we would come to our house to have out Easter Egg hunt because we had 5 acres. All of us kids would have to go downstairs while the adults hid the eggs. I remember the reward for most eggs found one year was $5.00! That was a lot to a kid back then! It was always such a fun day.

But…Good Friday, April 3rd, 2015, didn’t turn out to be so good. Actually became one of the worse days of my life. It was the morning that changed the rest of my life. After moving to TN of 20 years ago my family soon followed me and we would always have Easter at my house and have an egg hunt for the kids in the family. All the baskets, eggs and candy were bought and just waiting to be filled for yet another fun egg hunt and dinner but that didn’t get to happen this year. This Good Friday morning my brother called me and said something was wrong with mom. We called 911 all went to the hospital. 2 days later, Easter Sunday my mom slipped into a coma from Encephalitis in her brain. She went into a vegetative coma state which she never recovered from and 6 months later she passed.

I would have to write pages and pages to really explain what all happened during that time and how upsetting it was that the doctor missed diagnosed her with a stroke right from the beginning but that is not what my blog is about. I really wrote all of this to explain my mental status this passed weekend, my first Easter with breast cancer. Easter hasn’t been and will never be the same since mom passed but this one was a very hard one for me. I was reminded every minute what had gone on Easter weekend in 2015 and how much I missed my mom and needed her right now. On top of that, my dad being in the hospital this Easter with an actual stroke and…my own sadness for my health hit me hard this weekend. I have really tried to stay positive throughout this journey but this today…I was just really sad because I had cancer. This Easter I didn’t want to be sick, I didn’t want to be a cancer patient. I didn’t want the terms “survival rate, survivor, fighter, new normal” to be in my world. I wanted my old life back and our old Easters with the kids hunting eggs. So yes, this weekend I had a pity party instead. A friend and I went to the lake where I often go to do a few things and all I could do was cry. Whenever I was alone I would cry. I missed my mom, worried for my dad and couldn’t believe all that I had gone through over the last 6 months and what I still had to go through. I just wanted my old life again with no side effects, no pain or no worries of “will it come back?”. What was my life going to be after this? What really mattered and what didn’t?

I didn’t really discuss it with anyone either. Sometimes the pain is too deep to share with anyone. I allowed all of my pain to surface from the past several years of losing my loved ones and now dealing with my own illness.
Though I am thankfully through the hard chemo’s that kept me sick on the couch 24/7, I still am sick with stomach issues, digestive issues, still have bone pain, muscle pain and neuropathy in my feet. I’m still sore from my surgery and I’ve started the reconstructive surgery that also makes me sore. The doctor said I will remain sore until my final surgery later on in the year. Today, this weekend, I just wanted the old me back. The person that was always working or looking for fun things to do!
I know there are many people who read this blog who have gone through breast cancer or another kind of cancer and they understand all of this because they write to me and tell me. Until you go through this you really can’t understand how one feels. That’s why I’m trying to be brutally honest about everything from tests, doctors to emotions good or bad or sad.

The next day, Saturday, my mood was a little better but still not great. My friend went into one of the bathrooms and just pulled off a large strip of wallpaper. So…I started taking the rest of it off. This may sound funny but I was so excited to be able to rip wallpaper of the walls ha ha! Thank God they had painted the walls before applying the wallpaper because it came off pretty easy there than few spots that were a bit of a struggle because I can’t really scrub too hard right now because it hurts my pec muscles. It just felt so good to finally do something productive and not sitting on a couch. Not many would be excited to pull of wall paper but I was and it was also a bit of therapy for my sadness.

Easter Sunday one of my best friends Terri Clark invited me and some of our mutual friends over for Easter dinner. Like me, Terri also shares sadness at Easter time. She and her mother were always best friends like my mother and I. On Easter Sunday, 2010, Terri’s mom passed from a rare type of cancer.
Terri thought it would be great for both us to do something together with some more of our friends to make our Easter better and different this year. Terri and I have often said we lived sort of paralleled lives growing up and would have been best friends if we knew each other as kids. We both find it odd that her mother passed on Easter Sunday, April 4th, 2010 and my mother went into the coma on Easter Sunday April 5th, 2015 and never recovered. So for both of us to suffer the loss of our mothers on Easter is a bit strange. After leaving the lake which about an 1.5 hours away we went to Terri’s in the afternoon for dinner and I am so glad we went. The group of friends that were there is the group that laughs the entire time we are together. It was really a great time and the picker upper that I needed. So Easter Sunday turned out better than I had planned, thanks Terri! Oh and the ribs were fantastic….almost as good as the company!

Something that is really hard to deal with is once you are diagnosed with cancer it’s always on your mind. You can’t help it. If you aren’t worrying about whether or not you are really going to beat it, you see tv commercials about it to remind you, or you have to remember which doctor appointments you have this week
and writing down notes to ask your doctor. The side effects of chemo and soreness of surgery you sort of just learn to living with because it’s been something you’ve lived with for that past several months though they are reminders as well. Also the stress and frustration you get from the financial stand point if it has put you in the situation of not being able to work. Some of your friends see you are doing better and surgery is over so to them it looks like everything is ok and you should be back to your old self which really is not the case on the inside. Sometimes you just get fed up with it all and want to run away or seclude yourself from people. You don’t want to talk about it but yet you do..?? Your friends want to know how your are but you worry about how much to share with them because you don’t always want to be the Debbie Downer right? It’s not always easy to just throw away your thoughts of your illness and put on a smile to be social but today I was glad I did and got to be with my friends and laugh. Laughter is good for the soul and a big part of healing. I am so thankful for everyone that has been there for me and some have done so much for me but they can’t fix everything or know exactly how you feel so you have to fix it yourself and find out way of the sadness. I honestly feel that I’ve been mostly positive and have remained a fighter though at times it is very hard. Sometimes you face reality and you can’t help it and you allow the sadness to come in. Though sad days come, I am so blessed and thankful that so far I’m winning this battle and I am very thankful to have the word “survivor” in my life and I pray that word stays attached to me forever.