Sunday, December 26, 2010

A new year, a new blog

It's funny when life starts to point you in a direction if you're paying attention and that's exactly what's been happening to me.  Just over a week ago, I was hanging out with Tricia and we decided that life continues to send us messages that we need to move forward.  It's a feeling that's been building in me for a while, but it suddenly felt very clear that it was my time to start to move forward with life.  With that decision made, the next question came.  How exactly do I go about doing that?

I spent the weekend contemplating that question and not coming up with any great answers.  Then last week I got a call from the Calgary Herald.  They let me know that I'd been selected for 2011 as one of their top 20 Compelling Calgarians and would be featured in their January 1st issue.  Still to this day I feel like they must have the wrong person and am waiting for the call to tell me that. But they did an interview, followed up with photos and so I think it is true.  Whatever I have done to be compelling in the past year, maybe I could use this opportunity to spread this even further.  But again, how do I do that?

What I came up with is that I don't have all the answers yet, but I have some ideas on how to figure it out.  This will be the last post for this blog site.  It has been the place where I first shared my cancer diagnosis, and then my second one, Ryan's battle and Talyn and my life over the past year.  Although I have learned a lot from all of this, it's time for a fresh start that doesn't have anything to do with the "c" word. 

The word "re-create" keeps popping into my mind and so I decided to start a new blog where I will do exactly that.  In a much more upbeat way, try to re-create my life.  I don't know exactly what that will entail, but I am excited at the idea of it all.  I plan to launch this in January, 2011 and it will be found at http://tashawesterman.blogspot.com/ if you're interested in coming along for the ride. 

I thank you all for coming along for these last few years and supporting us all on our journey. 

Much love, Tasha & Talyn

Thursday, December 16, 2010

With uncertainty comes hope

Last Thursday was a bad day. I woke up to find an email saying that a family friend - Rob (my best friend's brother) had had an accident and had just come out of his first of 2 surgeries. One week later, he's still in a coma but hanging on. Another lesson that no one needed about how precious life is and that everything can literally change in the blink of an eye.

Later that day I went for my 3 month check up to find out that I needed some further tests to determine if my world was changing. I have been having some increasing pain around my ribs and so went for an ultrasound the next day and then a full body bone scan this week. The good news is that the ultrasound was fine and the bone scan didn't show anything of concern where my pain was. It did show some "uptake" (from the radioactive stuff they put into my bloodstream) on my left 2nd anterior rib. So the doctor called to discuss if I'd been in a car accident or had any other trauma to the area that might explain what they thought was a fracture. Which I hadn't, so off to x-ray.

Today they called to let me know that the x-ray was "unremarkable". In cancer terms, this is good. Although my brother quickly reminded me that I am very remarkable....what a smart a**. It's still unknown why this little rib is lighting up, so they will repeat the bone scan in 3 months to see if it has changed.

So the last week has been a bit draining. It actually feels like a month has passed and it's not until I go to sleep at night that I realize how draining carrying stress around with you actually is. I know that the news I got is good, but there's still that glimmer of uncertainty which continues to follow me around. Just enough to remind me that life is short and unpredictable, so make sure to live the life I want. It's time for me to figure out what that is and take some action towards it.

What has finally sunk in from Rob and my recent scare is that we don't have a whole lot of control over the big things in life. So we just have to try and enjoy the ride - whatever it is. But at least with uncertainty ... there is still hope. And hope is what keeps us all holding on at the end of the day - isn't it?