Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where we will blog as often an we like. There is no limit to how many blog posts there can be in a given amount of time, so if we are sitting around, and the computer is handy, blog we will.

I am hanging out in my nearly clean house. The last of the laundry is in the washer, the bathroom is sparkling, the bed remade with clean sheets, the kitchen has only a half load of dishes left on the counter, the dishwasher door open to let the dishes inside cool off. I had to run it hot and heavy to get all the dried food off of the load that just ran. I should go to work this afternoon and find something that merits getting paid for, but B has given me permission to pretend that I am a wifely sort of person today, one who's husband comes home to a clean house, all welcoming and smelling of cooking and scented candles. I agreed to call him as soon as I was done here. I sat down for a bit of lunch, leftover beans and rice, and found myself staring at a blank screen on my blog, wanting to write, knowing I probably shouldn't.

What makes some of us feel so compelled to be known through our writing? Are we self absorbed? I don't know, but I must admit, I want to be known. I want people to see inside me, and decide to like me anyway. It's not like I think that will be so automatic, that I am so irresistibly likable, but I, myself, am drawn to those who make themselves vulnerable, who admit to the bad and own the good and are self-aware enough to make statements about themselves and their lives that most leave to others to make about them. I like transparency, even when the transparent person is so very ordinary that they think there is nothing at all noteworthy about themselves. I believe ordinary is noteworthy, that the statistical outliers, those who accomplish extraordinary things, are given all the attention when those of us who just manage to live ordinary lives, our small victories, our laughable failures, our funny quirks, our simple strengths are quietly, truly extraordinary. If I were not me, I would read my blog to see inside my head, not to know what I did, but why I did it. I read other's blogs, too, the ones that talk about feelings and hopes and dreams and moisturizing creams, all the stuff everyday life is made of. I want to know what makes us go, and where the going takes us, well, that's just an interesting side note.

When you send me your mass Christmas letters, faithful few, I open them before I even get them home, and read them, and wonder if what you are not saying is where you, beautiful, complex, ordinary you, might be found. I am interested in the facts, that you had Mr. and Mrs. Ordinary over for dinner, or that you drove to Ordinary, U.S.A. over spring break and swam in Lake Ordinary, but what I really want to know is, did you float on your back and stare at the clouds? What did they look like? Did you dig your toes in the sand? Did you stare over the water and wonder why you are here? Did you talk about deep subjects with no answers until you felt you could almost grasp the answer, but then it slipped past you and you were as confused as when you started? When you cooked that dinner, when you ate that dinner with that couple, did you feel connected to community, and did it make you feel more complete? Did life overwhelm you? Do you feel as though the past year was merely lived, or lived deeply? Who are you, the you that lives inside your skin, not just inside your house? And then I tuck your Christmas letter away, because throwing it away feels strange and disrespectful, like I have thrown away you. In a few years, during a spring clean, I might toss it because by then, I am tossing the you that was, not the you that is.

Sometimes, I click on a random archived post on my own blog and read about the me that was. I try to see the events without remembering more than what was written, and I wonder who I was, and sometimes I like that person, and sometimes not. Sometimes I sound self-absorbed. Sometimes removed from reality. Sometimes factual and distant. And rarely, like the warm and approachable person I most wish to be known as.

To know and be known. There is a lifetime of searching needed to comprehend the full meaning of that little phrase.

Right now, I am trying hard to remember, then live by, my new mantra. Joy. That's all there is to it. Live with joy. It is the root of all self-improvement. The root of unconditional love. The root of self-acceptance. The root of a life well lived. The root of mental and physical healing and well-being. When one lives their life with intentional joy, one becomes sensitive to situations in which joy withers. One cannot be joyful while gossiping, while judging others, while hating one's self, while unhappy with one's job, life, spouse, friend, whatever it is that tries one's patience. One cannot compartmentalize joy, then still allow unhappiness in one area. One cannot experience joy while making others miserable, envious, belittled. Insults, other's unhappiness rolls off like water off a duck's back. There is nothing quite like catching grasp of happiness and holding on for dear life.

It started as an experiment. "Why can't we decide to be happy, and then, just...be happy?!" I don't know why. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered. Our minds have an almost unlimited power over us. Anything we choose to believe, our mind will make real- at least to us. Any good hypochondriac has experienced this. So why can we not simply choose to believe we are healthy, well-balanced individuals? Why not choose to be joyful? Why not choose to believe that we love life and everything, everyone that life brings us? Well, why not?

Don't think it is easy. And don't think I don't fail on a daily basis. But, if I use my imagination just a little, I almost begin to believe it is getting easier.

I am still in the process of filing away my Houston experience. The time I spent with my parents was precious and trying and a blessing and exhausting and hopeful and depressing. My mom and I did a lot of feeding our minds, a lot of talking and smiling and making jokes at the expense of the affected part of her anatomy. We laughed and hung out like girlfriends and prayed and prayed harder and cried over the total ridiculousness of it all. That part was okay. That part I expected. The part I did not think of in advance was the other patients. All the beautiful young mothers, rail-thin, bald and flat-chested, hunched and swallowed inside shapeless hospital gowns, still beautiful and young and with fragile hope, but with absolutely no promises for the future. I was sitting in a comfy recliner in the massive, yet somewhat zen waiting room when one such patient came shuffling by me on the arm of her significant other, and the sight of her legs below the blue and white gown draped over her slumped shoulders just about made me want to run outside and scream at God. They were as tanned, sinewy and muscular as the legs of the marathon runners and mountain bikers I see every day in Colorado, and they made me realize that she had been living a life much like mine, active and outdoorsy and healthy, and nothing could get her down...except cancer. Every one of the women there had a story of heartbreak and disappointment and being betrayed by their own bodies, of missed diagnoses and waiting for the news that would change everything. They were all so extraordinarily ordinary.

It made me determined to value life- healthy or unhealthy, life is precious. It is only ours on loan, every sunset marks the close of another day- another day closer to the day our loan gets called.

On a less introspective note, I got to celebrate being healthy with 7,000 other people day before yesterday. The Warrior Dash is a crazy 5k race over uneven terrain, over and through obstacles, dodging hundreds of competitors in all manner of costumes. As the paper reported the next day, there were more kilts than on the entire set of Braveheart. There were also more codpieces than I care to remember, and warrior princess dressed in a few pieces of faux leather, and tutu's, and, in my case, clothes I was willing to throw away afterwards- a tank top that had lain in the back of Grandpa's pickup, drenced in spilled diesel, for a week and was never the same color afterwards, a pair of B's plaid boxers, a pink polka-dot headband, and black striped kneesocks with pirate skulls and crossbones on them- a gift from two christmasses ago, with big holes in them, and a pair of trail runners that my big toes peaked through and that had been worn through beaver-pond muck. There were capes, and there were spiked helmets and helmets with horns and jedi knights and samuri warriors and warpaint. My personal favorite was a muddy turkey leg speared on top of a helmet, probably dropped on the ground when it's would-be devourer had trouble holding his beer stein and the turkey leg at the same time. There were crusaders. There was chain mail. There was initials shaved into chest hair. There was every sort of humanity and it was fun because it was not the drunk-fest one might expect from such a crowd, because everyone had to get through a 3.27 mile run. Contestants had to run two miles or so up the ski slope at Copper Mountain, climb over rusted, wrecked cars, pull themselves uphill with ropes, scale a mountain of hay, hustle through fifty yards of old tires, crawl through a mud pit over which was strung barbed wire (I emerged less bloody than some, but blood still oozed through the thick mud on my knees and ran down my shins from the gravel in the bottom), through long, black culvert tubes laid on an incline, the bottom filled with slippery mud so everyone had a hard time scrambling through without sliding backwards, up cargo nets to high platforms, then back down the other side, across 12-inch planks over a deep gully, hurdling walls a bit higher than waist-high, fording a stream, icy-cold and so muddy from the mud washing off of constestants feet and legs that it was impossible to see the rocks at the bottom, then, just before the finish line, jumping two ricks of duraflame firelogs, flames dancing higher than most could jump.

Needless to say, Copper Mountain got trashed. There was mud everywhere. Inside the conference center, mud was smeared along the walls wherever people bumped, glops of mud littered the floors of the bathrooms. Hoses were provided to hose everyone off. The mud was so thick it was cemented on by the time I got to a Warrior washing station, so I stood while a volunteer turned a garden hose on my bare skin, high-pressure ice picks of water, and scrubbed my skin with my hands until it felt as though my skin might just come off with the mud. He finished with me from the neck down, then announced that my face was still covered in mud. I took a deep breath, said, "Okay, then," squeezed my eyes shut and held my breath and waited for the icy blast. It didn't come. He started laughing. "You really ARE a warrior!" and pointed to a bucket of water sitting nearby. I dabbed at the mud on my cace and neck, then sloshed into the bathroom to change into dry clothes, adding to the muck on the floor.

Yesterday, 3,000 more people competed in waves of 350, bringing the total to 10,000 warriors, plus all of their families. People came from miles around. I am curious whether Copper Mountain thought the revenue from that many summer guests was worth all the gallons of mud in their condos, plaza, and conference center.

I donated my shoes to Green Sneakers, via a very wobbly girl who sat down rather unceremoniously while waiting for me to pull out my arch supports. Drunk as she was, she was determined to gather all the shoes she could for a good cause. As she weaved away, she held the dripping shoes up triumphantly, announcing to no one in particular, "Cheggit out! I got another pair!"

I did not expect B to have fun. He surprised me. He thought it was a good time. He even said he would like to do it himself next year, if it came back. I am pretty sure every single person who did not run wished they had. B is usually pretty anti-crazy, uninhibited people. When we first got there, he turned to me, rolling his eyes, and whispered, "This is just your scene, isn't it?" but after waiting for me to finish, he was into it, too. He just had to realize that there were more sober people there than drunk ones, and it really was all about the sport and having fun sober and being an idiot in your own right, not because of a consumed substance.



That's me at the finish line, and my friend Ginta, who came to cheer me on. Oh, come on...you know you wish you could have done it, too.

That night, we stopped at a friend's house after the race and the guys sat and made intelligent conversation as my girlfriend and I polished off several glasses of red wine, which soon had us speed-talking with big hand gestures about topics way too deep for us until our boys finally just had to shut up. We stayed until fairly late, then went home to sleep, and the next morning, the same girlfriend met me at Keystone and we shuttled up to A-Basin and rode to the top, dehydrated and slightly hungover and not feeling well at all as we pedalled up to 12,500 feet over loose rocks and grades that reach nearly 20% and swore off alcohol again. We flew down the backside of the mountain, throgh scree fields and pristine meadows and I cut my sidewall and had bad visions of walking down, but in the end, the goo in my tubeless tire sealed off the impossibly big cut and we made it down to Keystone where my car was parked...and realized the keys were in her car, five miles and several thousand feet above us. She was cradling her face in her hand because a bee had collided with her lip at 30 mph on the way down and somehow managed to sting her and her jaw and gums were swollen and throbbing, and my tire was still hissing out air occasionally, and my legs were heavy and burning and sore from the jumping and sprinting the day before and the thought of riding up Loveland pass was just too much. I called and called B until he answered, and asked that he come rescue us. 20 minutes later, he showed up and drove us up to her car at A-Basin.

I went home by way of the bike shop and picked up a patch kit for my tire, then came home, sat down on the couch and leaned my throbbing head back and didn't move until B announced he was going on a bike ride with Andy. I don't not go when B goes on a bike ride. I get to ride with him so seldom, I would have to be almost dead to not at least try to go with him. I pumped my tire back up, the leak slow enough to get me back home before it was too low to ride, chugged some water that sat heavy and cold in my upset stomach, and climbed back on my bike. B and Andy and I had a good ride, in spite of the headache, and when we got back, I got unusually dolled up and he took me out for Mexican food. We sat on a shady patio, I drank two tall glasses of ice water, and we couldn't help but feel like we were on vacation. That is, until I asked B some petty, rhetorical question that I really didn't want him to answer, something about was he happy with me, and he started to say something, then stopped, and I pushed, and he squirmed a bit and admitted he had been a bit envious of our friend's nice, clean house and neat-freak significant other. Which led to a discussion about my priorities, not that he does not understand my manic drive to be outdoors every single minute, because winter and cabin fever is looming. We ended the discussion still friends, but it did lead to this morning, when I got up early and have been cleaning ever since. Until now. But now, I must get back to it. If only it would stay this way...

Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where it takes 72 days to replace lost red blood cells after a spur-of-the-monent blood donation. It actually takes this long for everyone, not just those living in Altitude-Problem land. This is just new news to some. Okay, mostly me, apparently. It really doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out. High Altitude = less oxygen available, hence more red blood cells to carry oxygen to one's vital organs at, say, a bike race or a 5k mad-dash obstacle course. Without these red blood cells, the racer has effectively lessened their aclimatization from 10,000 feet to a much lower altitude. Low altitude = more oxygen available, hence less of a need for red blood cells. I do not feel like googling it at the moment to verify this fun fact, but I have heard that people who have spent their lives at sea-level have signifcantly less blood flowing through their veins than those living at 9,000 feet.

And why do I now possess this bit of information, you ask? Well, since you ask...

I was bored at MD Anderson. I wondered into the blood donation center as a way to pass the time, sat down, answered about a hundred questions, ate a salad to bump up my dwindling blood sugar, and bared my veins, which, I might add, are a phlebotomist's dream come true, all big and purple under the thin skin of my inner elbow. Phlebotomist's eyes gleam as they unwrap their big needles and hold up their tourniquets. Came out 15 minutes later minus a pint of my super-oxygenated go juice, all packed full of energy down at sea level, plus a yellow smily-face bandage and a XL tee shirt.

And then I came home. I had actually forgotten that the last race of the season, a time trial, was only a week after the next-to-last race, which I had to miss. Then, when I realized it, I did not think I would be able to make it home in time. I still was not thinking about the race when we stopped for a late snack in Woodward, Oklahoma, less than 24 hours before the race. After two weeks of a mostly raw, vegan, healthy diet, there were no other options, so I got a roast beef gyro and relished every bite- until the last bite was swallowed and all I could think about was the dead food now working it's way through my system, and sure enough, it was not a half-hour later I began to feel the effects. I know some of you will scoff at this, but after two years of eating high-quality food, with the occasional foray into less than high quality food, I have become hyper sensitive to the difference diet can make in a body's performance. I already know that light, raw food the week before a race will give me the best results. Meat and dairy will make me feel like my bike weighs a hundred pounds, like the air is pushing me down, like my legs just can't do it and I must slow down because humans were not made to work this hard without throwing up or having a heart attack.

Losing a pint of blood + eating meat = bad race.

We got home to my parents house around 1:00 a.m. that morning, 13 1/2 hours after leaving Houston, and I stumbled to bed, deciding that when I woke up, I would drive the rest of the way back to Colorado. I jerked awake from a dream at 5:00 a.m., took a shower, and hit the road in pea-soup fog. The fog did not lift entirely for three hours, during which I drove slowly, searching the white blanket around me for deer on the road, roadsigns to tell me where I was, headlights and highway lines materializing into my isolated world and as quickly, leaving it. The 5 hour trip took 6 hours.

Two days on the road + sleep deprivation = bad race.

I got home and stopped at the office to see B, then, since it was Wednesday, the day fish tacos are the lunch special at the Mexican Grill down the street, we went out for lunch. I drank a little water with my lunch. It was not until I was home again, looking around at my messy house and piles of laundry, that it actually sank in that I was paid up, non-refundably, for a race that started in three hours.

Fried food and fiber 6 hours before a race = bad race.

I immediately chugged a 12 oz bottle of water and Emergen-C, an electrolyle and vitamin powder, and hit the couch, and was almost immediately asleep. B came home at 5 to find me just waking up. He asked me what time my race was, and I absently told him, 6:24:30. I dragged my heavy limbs off the couch and began looking for my team race jersey, my bike shorts, my team logo socks, my helmet, my gloves. I lubed my chain. I found clothes to change into after the race. I sprayed hairspray in my hair and tousled it and put on mascara. I loaded my bike. I called for Andy, and asked B if he was ready to go. He looked for Andy's leash. We loaded B's bike. I searched for my watch and my yellow lenses for my sunglasses. I found my watch and looked at it, and for a moment, accepted that it was 5:55. Then I whirled around and looked, shocked, at B as the realization sunk in. "We have to go, NOW!"

Dehydration + sheer panic = bad race.

On a good day, it takes 25 minutes to drive to Breckenridge. It was not a good day. The shortcut road was closed. We had to take the interstate, and drive through two towns with about six stoplights apiece, many of which we hit on red. There was road construction and a 30mph speed limit. We screeched to a stop at the start line a full five minutes after my scheduled start time, and I was a panicky bundle of nerves as I sprinted to the registration table and signed in, fixed my race plate to my handlebars, sprinted to the start line, took a precious half-minute to duck behind a bush because nothing makes you have to pee like panic and adrenaline. They fit me in after all the other contestants had gone because it was a time trial with 30 second interval starts and they could not throw everyone else's times off by fitting me in whenever I decided to show up, and if we had been another two minutes later, everyone would have been gone and the race officials packed up and headed for the finish line, ten miles away. As I pulled into the start gate, my dry mouth remembered my water bottle, back in the car, and the Clif shot in my back jersey pocket. I ripped off the top of the gel with my teeth and squeezed the thick goop into my mouth, forcing my dry throat to swallow it, no time for water, clipped into my left pedal, and heard, "GO"! And I went. I pedalled hard, wheezing and forcing my feet down and up, trying to calm my jangling nerves, my fingers cold and shaking. As hard as I was riding, it felt like I should have been flying up the paved hill to the start of the singletrack, but when I looked down at my legs, they were moving slugglishly, the pavement not flying but crawling under my tires. I hit the singletrack, and after ten days off my bike, I was unsure of myself, lacked confidence through the rock gardens and jumping up onto bridges and I got off my bike three times when a pedal hit an obstacle.

Not having time to warm up + waiting until you get to the starting gate to climb on your bike for the first time in 10 days = bad race.

On the downhill, I berated myself every time I feathered my brakes, sure that, without my being able to judge the speed of those around me, I was going slower than all of them, but every time I pedalled up an incline, my breath became ragged and I just could not force anymore power down through my legs. When I finally popped out of the trees onto the jeep road, then around the curve to the finish line, I felt like falling over, I was shaky and exhausted, my stomach was upset, my mouth was dry and filled with dust. B was there, and he told me that the girl I had to beat to get third place overall had a flat tire, and I began to hope. Since it was an individually timed event, we all had to wait until results were posted several hours later to see how we had finished, and I squinted up at the print-out on the wall and felt like crying. There I was, DFL (Dead-freaking last). While everyone else had finished sub-53 minutes, including the girl who flatted, my time was 1hr, 1 minute. I plopped down next to Bobby and sipped my free beer and wanted to go home. He was puzzled. He had timed me at 50 minutes, and it took my girlfriend wondering if they had used my actual start time or my scheduled start time to make me brave enough to go tap a race official on the shoulder and ask. After a bit of a debacle, they found their mistake, but my time was still 30 seconds short of what I needed to get third place overall and next-to-last on the final results.

Having an epic fail on the last race of the season = bad entire season.

Okay, that is your race story for the day. I hope it made you laugh a little. I am trying. I do find it funny (tragically so) that when all is said and done, it was not the Sandbagger, it was not the mechanically-challenged old bike or the slipping chain, it was not the mud or the rain or a crash that cost me that pretty medal and a few seconds on the tall, three-level silver boxes in front of a hundred mountain bikers for an overall podium finish, it was me. I was sabotaged by my own worst enemy.

On other fronts, I am blogging to procrastinate having to clean this house. I am also hungry, but getting food would require me to heave my self over to the kitchen to find food, and in my hypoglycemic haze, it feels better just to sit here. Now that race season is over, I am free to detox, to eat only mostly-raw, vegan food in an effort to find that lightness of movement and clear mind and ready energy that only comes after one has gone through the crash of coming off of ice cream, sugar cookies, peanut butter, graham crackers, egg white protein, seafood, all of my vices that provided temporary fixes or long-lasting endurance, but with side effects of weight gain and exclusion of the good stuff. You try racing after having eaten nothing but a few raw almonds and carrots for breakfast. Eventually, I will be back to where I was before I fell off the diet wagon into the box of Tollhouse cookies and coffee ice cream, ready to run and bike without heavy fuel, but it takes two weeks, and I was never more than two weeks between races all summer.

The cancer front has stalled. All of the results from all of my mom's scans of systems not breast-related are in, and clear. As far as they can tell, and they can tell with about 89% accuracy, her lypmh nodes are clear, Her bone scans are clear. All systems are go. It seems to be localized in her left breast. We left Houston because their labs were not through analyzing the slides from her biopsy, and would not be done for another week, and a week at home, even with 28 hours in the car, still beat paying $30-$60 a night to sweat in Houston's oppressive August heat with nothing to do but wait. We got six hours down the road before her oncologist's nurse called back to say that a mammogram done three days before on her right breast was suspicious, and she would need to come back in as soon as possible for a biopsy, without the results of which, we could not see the doctor to discuss treatment options a week later, as was the plan. We kept driving toward home.

She will have to go back down for the biopsy on Friday, then home again until her oncologist's next available opening, which will be on the 10th of September. So until then, cancer gets back-burnered. In the meantime, there is a family reunion in Kansas, and many other things that need to be taken care of.

Long story short, for inquiring minds that want to know, is that her girls have a good chance of coming off, but the chances are also good that only her girls will have to give anything to cancer. Radiation, chemotherapy, all the cancer treatments will not be necessary if it has indeed not spread anywhere else.

And now, with nothing else to write, this blogger has a salad to eat, an entire wardrobe to cycle through the washing machine, a house to clean, and a dog to exercise.

Strict Joy

Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where the altitude down here at sea level lends itself to heat and humidity and the smell of hot pavement. This Colorado girl is missing the high country. Usually when we spend this long in the low country, we are on vacation, de-stressing, hanging out by pools and bodies of water both large and small. Instead, we have poached parking at a nearby hotel to save ourselves $8 and walked in several blocks in the morning heat, which by now feels many degrees cooler than afternoon heat, cut through a massive parking garage and now sit in Mays Clinic, awaiting yet another test, another scan, another imaging procedure on the tata that is causing all the fuss.

This girl is also missing her Colorado boy. Please don't tell anyone. It could blow my reputation. But the sad truth is, I have grown a bit used to doing things in tandem. I don't especially like boardwalks and beaches and pools and sunsets over water and such things alone, surrounded by happy people who hold hands.

I missed the bike race on Wednesday night, because I was 1,000 miles away by that time. There is now no chance of me getting an overall podium spot, which is certainly not the most important thing at the moment, even though I have invested a lot of hard pedaling and training to that end this summer. But Houston has it's own bit of charm, I am sure, and I am pretty sure it can be found. The next two days are vacation days, no appointments on the weekend, which means that for the next 48 hours, we can stay far away from the concrete hell that is the Houston Medical center.

And now for the report you have all been waiting for- which really is not much. Nobody will know anything beyond conjecture for two weeks yet. There is a tumor, yes, and it may or may not have spread to other systems, lyphovascular or skeletal, but, based only on the pokes and prods and assumptions of doctors, most likely invasion of other systems is minimal. The blessing of a place as large as MD Anderson is also it's curse- the sheer volume of really sick people here. A mere tumor is simply not enough of a priority to merit any sort of rush, but here, it is reassuring that it is merely a tumor. The work of a normal day. We are booked through 9:00 Tuesday morning with diagnostic appointments, after which time we will hit the road for home, wait until all the pathology and scans and imaging have been analyzed, then come back for the first appointment that will involve treatment on the 26th of August.

Mentally, two of us are in high spirits. I have spent the last year in search of that spring of joy that keeps dogs and children from recognizing that life is cruel, the thing that lets them have a two-second rebound from angry or frightened back to joyful. There is one thing dogs and children do that we who are intellectual rather than instinctual do not- they live in the moment. They do not dwell on past mistakes or past bad experiences, nor do they have expectations for the future. In the moment, they are happy, they are loved, they are well fed and secure, and if they do not have one of these things, they are upset until the thing that is broken is fixed, at which point, it is in the past and the sun shines and the sky is blue. It feels like a monumental discovery, monumentally simple. The fact that it is okay to live in the moment is a difficult one to wrap one's mind around. There is no need to judge, no responsibility to prepare one's emotions for the train wreck just around the corner, no need to do anything but live and enjoy the life pulsing through our veins and live among the living and love and accept the living and the alive.

My mom is more annoyed by having cancer than anything. Annoyed that it has decided to root itself where it does not belong, as if it does not recognize that she does not have time for it. It is an unwelcome guest who needs to be evicted so she can get on with all the life she has lined out, all the bulleted to-do lists that do not include "get rid of cancer". It is an unforseen, and it is uneccessary, and it is causing a hiccup in everyone's life, and there is no reason to give it even a bit of satisfaction by falling apart or panicking over it or allowing it to affect her life or attitude. In the end, the way it affects her is by her seeing how it affects others, how it causes bumps in their roads, how they had to rearrange their own busy schedules and lives to accomodate her annoying, unwelcome, uneccessary tumor. The outpouring of support and love has been extremely affirming to her self-worth. I actually wonder if, in her mind, the tumor has feelings, and she is determined to hurt them. She has already paid the (insert insulting adjective here) thing a trip halfway across the U.S., a week's worth of hotel bills, food that comes from restaurant kitchens and the backs of trucks instead of the garden outside her back door. But that's all it can have. She's cutting it off at emotional payment. The day will come, perhaps in two weeks, where it will be literally cut off, but until then, it has fed enough off of stress and depression. She needs a strict diet of joy and living and for all she cares, it can starve to death.

My dad is the one struggling to control his emotions and stay positive and not project into a bleak future. It is not automatic for him to be the natural free spirit that my mom tends to gravitate toward when left to her own devices. I suppose he was the moth to her flame because of this, even though it has caused, to say the least, a bit of conflict. He is trying hard to remember to utilize all the coping mechanisms he has learned over the years to apply in situations that are trying to him- ones that involve lots of public, lots of stress, time management and unsure outcomes. Watch him go when he has directon, but here, there is no direction, just waiting and conjecture, the very things that, to function the best, he needs to stay far away from. His best direction and most effective coping tool is to be indulgent toward my mom, which is why we now sit in the very best cancer center, with the highest success rate, and nary a thought toward any option that might be more convenient but less than the best.

So, my faithful few, thank you for being you. I wish you joy, and I hope that you focus on my mom with all that joy. Send her joy with your prayers and your thoughts and your well-wishes, and in return, I wish you a life full of back-to-back lingering beautiful moments. Thank you for your prayers, hope, and support.