A Woman's Work ....

By the time you read this, I'll have an IV needle in my arm... or maybe I'll just be sitting in a waiting room, waiting for someone to put a needle in my arm. Today is my last cancer treatment. Barring anything unforseen, and of course assuming that I don't get cancer again... I won't have to be back in a cancer treatment chair ever again.

I just finished watching my favourite TV show a few hours ago.
So you think you can Dance... have you ever seen it? I started watching it last summer when I was in chemo. It made the summer pass a little quicker, getting excited every week about the dancers and who would dance what style and how well. There was a brief time I though I wanted to be a dancer, and this show has stoked that fire a little. I don't watch much television and this show made me fall in love with a show for the first time in a very long time. This season a choreographer named Tyce Diorio created a Dance piece dedicated to his friend Michelle who has endured Breast Cancer. In the audience when it was performed again at the finale tonight? Christina Applegate, who was diagnosed when I was in chemo. She was crying, I was crying .. lots of people watching the show were crying.


Skip the talking at the end, if you want to... and yes, I wish it was the original Kate Bush version of the song too.


I wonder, if I saw this last year while I was still in hardcore treatment how I would have felt. I wonder if I had seen this before I got cancer would I have really felt much at all. I wonder, if cancer had never touched me, where would I be?....who would I be?....What is this failing business, this chapter of cancer ending.. what is it all about? Where is it all leading me?

This morning, I found the hairdressing scissors that my mother used to cut our hair my whole life. She cut my customers hair until a few months before she died from cancer. 3 summers ago I watched her health decline after 5 years in chemo. I was there everyday through every step of cancer treatment and her death process.
Last night someone told me I should be using those scissors to start the next phase of my career.

This afternoon I chatted with one of the favourite people in the neighbourhood of my store. His wife has terminal cancer, she has had treatment after treatment after treatment. I looked into the eyes of a man exhausted by the pain of watching his wife suffer, he saddened himself by the fact that he was grumpy today when she never complains about the daily injections, nurse visits and dressing changes. I told him I get his part in the cancer stuff... and for the most part.. I get hers too.

Tomorrow I pack a gift for another cancer friend in her 3rd summer on chemo.


Today I met a customer who was diagnosed with breast cancer soon after I was...she disappeared after her treatment started. I worried about her. I was very excited to see her!
Her newly grown hair looks like what we refer to as chemo curly....

I wonder if she'll need a haircut soon.....