Archive for the 'Coping' Category

One Year

One year ago today, 3 stupid little words changed our lives forever.

You have cancer.

We didn’t even really know what that meant. There is no good kind of cancer, but we really didn’t know what to expect. We understood that it would be tough, but like any journey, you don’t really know what you are in for until you go down the path.

Now is a great opportunity for me to be down and talk about how horrible the past year has been, but we were reflecting on it over the weekend. In the past year, while being sick sucks, we’ve done more than most people and are insanely grateful for it all.

It’s been hard at times, depressing at times, frustrating at times and just sad a lot. In short, it has been long. 365 days doesn’t seem that long, but this past year kind of drug on. For me, the biggest challenge is to consistently watch someone you love be so sick.

For Holly, less than being sick, is just how much cancer has taken from her. Time from her family, time from her friends, fun nights out, cool day trips. The little things that most of us take for granted are so dependent on her health. It just sucks.

It’s been a long year, but we are confident that 2008 will be better. We are confident that her health will be better than it was pre-diagnosis. We know that it will take a lot of time, but we are confident that, like so many other people, we will prevail against this.

The F Word

Fuck Cancer

Holly doesn’t really curse. I pride myself in being able to leverage profanity like a fulcrum to emphasize my points.

I can make up curse words like an artist uses mixed medium to create master pieces. Holly just stares at me with disappointment for not being more creative and using a deeper variety of less offensive words to get my point across.

But lately, ‘Fuck’ has crept into the vernacular at the Schnaars household. As in, ‘this fucking sucks’. Our kids haven’t started saying it yet, but after being under the weather for a year, there really isn’t a good synonym that accurately reflects the feeling.

What works for you?

Photo by Ted and Liz.

Writing Tired

Last night is a perfect example of what happens when I’m really tired and try to write a post. I can’t come up with words, so I write things that are a bit cryptic and confusing.

The long story behind that is that I bumped into a friend from high school on Flickr the other day. In catching up, of course the cancer conversation comes up. Rather than try to explain how crappy things are, I tried to explain how unbelievably supportive and selfless the cancer community is. (As an aside, we need to come up with a better name than cancer community.)

It is really cool.