A Celebration: Why We Went Somewhere...

My plan is to tell you about our trip to the Florida Keys in three or four postings. I'm breaking the story into pieces because there's so much I want to tell you about the trip -- but I want to keep these posting at some reasonable length! So let's start with the "Why":

-- Last August, when I finished my chemo and radiation sessions, a number of folks asked me, "What are you going to do to celebrate?" Well, at the time, my mouth was so sore that I couldn't drink tap water, much less anything more interesting. And eating anything by mouth was similarly out of the question -- the food tube was still in constant use. (I suppose we could have spiked the Jevity I was ingesting through the food tube with rum or scotch or even beer, but that didn't occur to me until a couple of days ago. Simple lack of imagination, I suppose...) And I was pretty worn down from the treatments, so any kind of a celebration more involved than a short walk around a couple of blocks of our house was out of the question.

-- In September, when the squamous cell carcinoma was identified and removed, folks asked me, "What are you going to do to celebrate?" And I was still pretty much in the state described above. So while Deb and I were supremely grateful for the positive turn of events, I was still not ready to eat, drink, or do anything celebratory. So we were quietly grateful, and that was that.

-- In mid-October, when the PET/CT scan came back negative (which, the astute reader will recall, is the Good News To Receive), folks asked me, "What are you going to do to celebrate?" By this time, I was starting to eat and drink normally and my strength was starting to return. But the food tube was still in place, and I was under this requirement from my medical team that I had to prove that I could keep my weight up without resorting to the tube and yet another set of cans of Jevity. So that eating and drinking by mouth was more a competition than a pleasure: every pound gained was a victory, every pound lost was a defeat. (And this is an attitude about my weight that I have not shed. To this day, every time I step on the bathroom scale and see a number that's smaller than the day before, something in me begins to panic.) So celebration was something to see on the horizon, but not something I felt was immediately available.

-- In late October, the food tube came out, and folks asked me, "What are you doing to do to celebrate?" Well, you know, I had this pencil-sized hole in my stomach and a wad of dressing over top of it. And while I was grateful for losing the tube, I was now showering with a makeshift plastic cover over the middle of my abdomen. A classic "Two steps forward and one step back." Now I could see normalcy clearly in my future -- something to celebrate! -- but I felt I wasn't anywhere near there yet.

-- Somewhere in October or November, I suggested to Deb that we should plan a week or so away from home and the doctors and the treatment centers and the visting nurses and the Jevity and everything else that reminded us of the ordeal we were coming out of. But I wanted some time to make sure that I didn't need immediate access to the wonderful medical people who had taken such excellent care of me for so many months. We wanted to celebrate. We deserved to celebrate. But we wanted to make sure that the celebration resonated solidly all the way through our lives. So we selected a week in February. And we selected a place that we knew and loved: the Florida Keys.

-- Since then, Deb and I have been "plugging back in" to our normal lives. For me, this meant back into performing. Back into giving dinosaur lectures. Back into the life of our Quaker Meeting. Back into my juggling club. Back to working out at my health club. Back into my Healing and Transformation School in Meadville. Back into doing housework and building things and making things in the basement.

So by the time that our selected week came around (i.e., the week we've just been through) we were back to a wonderfully normal life.

And that was, perhaps, the greatest gift of our celebratory week: it was a great deal like the vacations we had taken together over the last 30-odd years of our marriage. It was a normal event. We ate well and drank well. We hiked through parklands and saw marvelous birds and lizards and butterflies. We paddled a canoe through mangrove forests. We watched sunrises and sunsets. We appreciated each other and held hands and hugged and laughed and stuff. We were a lot like we had been before the trials of the last year -- except more deeply grateful, more deeply in love with each other and with life itself.

So now, when folks ask us, "What are you going to do to celebrate?" we can tell them what we've done to celebrate: something wonderfully normal.

I've got photos to show and stories to tell. And all of this will be revealed sometime soon.

Promise.