A fighting chance

                                                                      my art

All is fine.  I went back for the followup x-ray.  My daughter went with me although I told her again and again that it really was no big deal, she didn't need to go.  But sometimes you can tell that the going, the lending of support is something they need more than you do.  So the look on her face when they said, "just a cyst" was more relief to me than the diagnosis itself actually was.

I'm not afraid of cancer.  Maybe I should be, but I'm not.  This is probably a ridiculously delusional  attitude, of which I've had many in my long and winding life, and comes in part from surviving it once already.  On a more rational level I know it's nothing to be cavalier about, it takes many, many lives every year.  But for me, in the particular play of my own life it is not at the top of the list.  I worry more about the everyday struggle of coping with PTSD from unsharable things and the littered path I have to walk from a lifetime of undiagnosed and self medicated disarray.  And how to make the path easier for my exquisitely wonderful, beautiful, smart, funny, savvy and brilliant daughter who has guilelessly inherited her own journey with it's particular brand of disarray.  She has taught me so much.  I've always known, from day one, that she was way, way smarter than me.  I think, now, that we are coming to a place where we mutually help one another.  I hope so.

"Inner" disabilities come with their own often invisible struggles.  Invisible to others that is.  As they are very, very visible to us.  When you look normal on the outside and even beautiful, as in my girls' case, but are forever mopping up hurricane like devastation on the inside it wears you down.  It's a daily mountain to climb to find a place to stand solid.  I get very jealous of people sometimes, who's disabilities show.  I want mine to show - no I don't - yes I do, sometimes.  I want people to understand - feel for her, for me.  It isn't polite to show the inner........stuff.  So we don't .  Except to each other, or when it accidentally spills .....  seeps under the door.  But you work really hard to prevent spillages, keep that black door closed,  if you know what I mean.  No body likes to see that kind of stuff.  I wish I was as strong as Maggie May who lets the all of her life show with brilliance and grace.  But I am far from that in courage and in prose.

So, anyway.  I was not worried about a malignant diagnosis.  They are sooo good at mending physical things now - you really have a fighting chance.  And of course there was the off chance that with a new bout, I might get some reconstructive surgery to fix the lopsided terrain of my chest - we laughed about that one, leaving the doctors' office (cancer humor).  So now I am back to trying to get a fighting chance for my girl - and for me.   I'd say, it was a good day.  Yeah, a good day.

Thanks for reading, you have no idea what it means to me.