Welcome back to my journey friends!  Nothing has changed healthwise.  I'm doing very well and considered no evidence of disease, though I still have follow-ups with my oncology team and my surgeon...  and I take that stupid yet necessary Tamoxifen every day.  

No, the biggest issues in me haven't been physical recently...  but spiritual, emotional and mental.  For me, the emotions of the cancer journey are sneaky and took awhile for me to digest.  I see someone else who has cancer and they are in a later stage and I have a little freak out.  I read a book (actually a very helpful book) about a 35 year old woman who had stage 4 cancer and I cry.  I cry because the reality is people die from cancer.  I didn't, but I could have...  and I will die some day.  No I don't know when and I don't know how.  Thankfully!  But I've had to reckon with it...  wrestle with it.

My mortality has been made acutely aware to me.  Not only through the thought of dying from cancer, but because I will not be having children.  I wanted children and always planned to have them.  I had names I loved like my middle name Louise and Ruthie (my mom and Dave's grandma are both Ruths and I love them dearly).  Carter Louis was the name I liked for a boy.  I'm sad that I'm not going to use them. I gift them to someone else!  In my head, I hear some readers thinking or saying "foster, adopt" and to that I say I'm well aware of those options.  But the decision to have children or not by any means is a deeply personal one..  And "just foster or adopt" doesn't let me bypass this grieving.  Currently, our choice is to remain childless and I'm trying this out as my reality.  I just picked up a book called "Living the Life Unexpected: How to find hope, meaning and a fulfilling future without children."  I'm so glad something like this exists because the stage of life I'm going through is a bit like wandering in a wilderness.  I'm  okay and getting by, but it's scary and foreboding and possibly dangerous.  Childlessness is a many layered issue for me.  On one hand I'm sad about it, on another I'm happy and grateful, and on another I feel a little left out.  A major experience most of my friends and family have is not part of my life.  Sometimes I'm a little (maybe a lot) jealous...  sometimes I selfishly think "Thank God I don't have them!"

I feel it acutely right now when I'm asked if I have children.  It's a normal question.  Well-meaning people just want to know.  I've been sticking with "No, just my furbaby" as my answer right now....  but sometimes I want to say "No, because I take a hormone blocker because I had cancer and that makes things pretty complicated in the baby area."  But I don't tell people that part unless I know  them well enough to divulge something like that.  

I always have struggled with conclusions in writing.  I'm a strong writer but my teachers and professors always found my conclusions wanting for improvement.  I'm closing this entry out by asking you dear reader to consider the childless and just make sure you don't pity, don't make assumptions, and consider the value a childless adult might (does)  have in society.  I need to think about all this myself!