Goodbye 2012.....HELLO end of treatment 2013

This has been a long time coming.  I have several very good reasons for not doing our Christmas letter or end of year letter or whatever people like to call it.  One being, we have been incredibly busy and steroid week happened to consume the first two weeks of December, and the second being, my netbook died. It was such a sad sad moment.  I wrote 2 books on that thing and took it to Memphis with me on every trip.  It was like an attachment of my body. When it died, I mourned.  In fact, I still have it sitting next to me now.  I cannot bare to part with it just yet. I am quickly adjusting to my new friend and writing tablet, chromebook.  And it does have a bigger screen and better keyboard for typing, but there is something about your first love and what I wrote my first book on.
And as I mentioned before, steroid week has turned into weekS, plural.  I swear each pulse gets worse and worse.  We are chronicling the next one.  From the first dose to when it finally seems to leave her system.  It really is amazing.  Just one pill and you see the change.  And she doesn't sleep, so we don't sleep.  And it takes both of us to get through the pulse, and nothing gets done around the house but making food...lots of food, and lots of holding Lucy and watching movies.  I do not know how single parents do the cancer gig.  I need lots and lots of antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds to get through it.  And Zach and I tag team it.  Hell sometimes we are both in the ring at the same time and then take turns crying when we get a down moment.  We only have 3 more of them to get through, but when they last 2 weeks, that is a lot of time of your life consumed by a drug.  As you can imagine, we have our last pulse marked on the calendar!  And that is a funny thing too.  While we are so excited to be done with steroids and treatment all together, we are scared shitless.  This is the end of a new life we JUST now learned to adjust to, and the end of the chemo. The life saving chemo.  The cancer preventing chemo.  The vile poison that we put in our daughter's body to save her life.  That is irony.  We are afraid of the chemo, yet we are in love with it.  What happens when she is done taking the chemo?  What prevents her body from making leukemic cells?  Or what if it does?  What is there to stop it from spreading?  And then of course, all of the fears I had in the first two weeks of treatment are starting to come back and haunt me.  The fears that I had to put aside because I had to deal with one thing at a time.  The fears of the side effects of what we just did to her little body for 2.5 years all come flooding back.  I start to recall the statistics and side effects and secondary cancers, and short term memory loss, and all the other shit that was thrown at us while we were signing a million papers that first week.
Oh and did I mention that first week is also coming back to me?  Funny...I blogged about it, but yet I managed to block it from my memory.  Repressed is more like it.  And all of a sudden......here it is! Staring me in the face.  We just had our 2 year cancerversary, and that is when it hit me so hard.  I thought I was ready for it, I took months to prepare for it, even had to do some counseling sessions over it.  And the day it came- BAM..knocked me on my ass.  It was the day after Christmas. And I am not going to lie, I had a fast heart beat the entire day.  I tried my best NOT to think about that day 2 years prior, but I couldn't.  I couldn't stop looking at pictures, and Zach and I started remembering things that we hadn't before.  We laughed, and we cried, and we remembered.  It was horrible and yet it was much needed.  2 years of living with cancer and yet it really seems like yesterday.  Its still scary, and it has forever changed our lives.  It has changed who we are or rather who we were.  Our outlook on life has changed, our priorities have surely changed, our friends have changed, and even how we act/react to people has changed.  We no longer have a filter (which wasn't real good to begin with), so that affects relationships for sure! ha! And of course what we thought was life and living, was not.  So we had to make some adjustments to that and we still are.  And now, we ease back into our old lives as we prepare for Lucy to be off treatment, and you know what....we don't want to go back to our old lives.  We longed so much for it, and now that its here, we realize our shitty it was.  We worked all the time.  We spent little time with the kids and each other.  We worried too much about money and getting "things" . We were doing what we were brought up to do.  We were so wrong.  So how do we go back to life the way it was without falling victim to going back to life the way it was?  hmm...... I don't know the answer to that yet...
ok..so after rambling on...let's get to the year in review ;)  I don't remember anything! hahahaha  I know Lucy started preschool.  I know we got a new dog.  I know we got to go on an amazing vacation for a long weekend to Branson, which was MUCH needed. Jack had a wonderful "normal" birthday party. We started a new business!! Weber's weenies!! I wrote a book.  We raised so much money for St Jude! I am so proud of it.  I think we are in the 10,000 range as far as total raised.  Which for one family and a garage sale....is pretty damn good.  Oh and of course our outlook on life has changed dramatically.  Our life goals have changed.  And our bucket list is no longer a want to do list, but is quickly becoming a "I did this" list.  And we keep adding to the list ;)  I LOVE our new list.
It is odd that as I sit here and try to "recap" our year, my mind goes blank.  I cannot hardly think of one thing cancer related.  It is like that is everyday, so nothing sticks out. Not like our first year when EVERYTHING stuck out.  And I wonder if that is why I am so nervous about the end of treatment coming. Its not just about that, its about us having to change our lives AGAIN.  And this time, we know more.  We want more. And we don't want to go back to our old "normal". We want a better "normal" than BC (before cancer).  You know, my psychiatrist says that I have PTSD.  He says Zach and I are an interesting "study" because he has wrote books and did most of his research on Vietnam war vets with PTSD, and he is astonished at how similar our actions and reactions are.  And there are some new studies out that have found most parents of cancer patients tend to end up with PTSD.  Its a new concept.  Interesting and scary, and yet I am glad people acknowledge what families go through.  That didn't used to be the case.  And like many other people who experience PTSD, people around you will never know how you feel or "get" it, or even be able to show empathy.  We have to learn to adjust to that.  We have to remember not everybody has been in our situation, and that is a good thing.  We forget. So when somebody fails to show empathy, we tend to be assholes to them. Just being honest here!  And the filter I mentioned that we do NOT have...yea...that tends to come out.  I guess since we have been through what we have, I feel as if everybody needs to take a class on empathy.  I have a lot more of it now, and it doesn't necessarily mean I have experienced the same "things" as the people I feel it for, it just means I can respect their feelings and not judge them based on them.  A lot of people need to look into that.  It would make the world a more caring place.
As I say goodbye to 2012, I say hello to a new life in 2013.  We have 6 more months of treatment.  wow!! After 2 years....all I can say is wow.  I am speechless....and that NEVER happens.  Wow!