Cancer Sucks

Last night I got a text from my best friend in the entire world...her closest (BFF) friend had been diagnosed with cancer a few months ago...the hope was that Chemo would allow them to shrink her tumor enough that they could do surgery.  No such luck, and she has been told she has about eight months to live...from July.  That gives her MAYBE until around February, perhaps if she is lucky, maybe stretch it out a bit longer, allow her to see one more spring.   How do you go on living knowing you are about to die?  What do you do when you know you have about four months to live, and a great deal of that time is going to be spent in hospitals dealing with all the side effects of the illness that is stealing away your life all too soon?  Cannot imagine what it is like knowing you are going to be experiencing your last Halloween, your last Thanksgiving, your last Christmas, and maybe if you are lucky, your last birthday.

Knowing someone with a serious life ending cancer, or in this case your best friend knowing someone who is dying right before her eyes wakes you up to the reality that life is just to short to sweat the small stuff.  Compared to this woman I am lucky...I don't have liver cancer, I am not sitting in the intensive care section of a hospital, and though I have some health issues, nothing that compares to her reality.  At best, she has a few more months, and will leave behind children, a husband, family and friends.

I have a few things I need to settle here in the area...ending a marriage, hopefully sooner rather than later, a pending Personal Injury lawsuit to get through, but think it is time I look at making some major life changes, down sizing my life and spending more time doing what makes me happy, sees me living my life for me, rather than those in my life.   

1.  Sell off my possessions...well, most of them.  Fact is, contemplating any kind of a major shift in my living situation is complicated by STUFF, none of it really all that important to me, other than it looks pretty sitting on a book shelf, or filling an empty space in a decorative way.  Living in my basement apartment I am realizing I can easily live in a pretty small space if I get rid of all the boxes of little momentous  collected here and there throughout my life...old books, some of them picked up in long ago abandoned houses, CD's never touched now that most of the music I enjoy is on You Tube or my Ipod.

2.  Get debt free...with my credit ruined anyway, thinking I should meet with a bankruptcy attorney, find out if that is an avenue I should consider.

3.  Figure out what I want with the rest of my life.   I've always thought what I wanted was pretty simple to find, but sometimes life's twists and turns change things.  Sitting here today digesting the news shared above, and hating the aftermath of Cancer's ugly head rearing itself into my own life, changing everything.  Cancer changes people, and it changes, even destroys relationships.  As the old expression goes, "Shit happens, then you die".  

I've always said, "The best revenge is living well."  Time for me to leave the past in the past and move forward into the rest of my life, working at trying to live well, letting all else go with love.

UPDATE

Saddest text I have ever received..."They purchased plots in the cemetery where she wants to be.