Just A New Challenge

This blog has been about creating a new life, and as one of our visitors put it, “living outside the box.” It is true that we have never put limits on our endeavors, believing that life is a gift to be lived fully. We’ve had lots of adventures in the twelve years that we have been together… first trekking in war torn Guatemala, then living aboard a sailboat for three years and homesteading on a small B.C. island, and finally our move to an off the grid log cabin in northern British Columbia. Along the way we have also dealt with unexpected health issues… Bob’s diabetes, bladder cancer and five-bypass heart surgery, plus my own back surgery. My diagnosis of lung cancer is just another chapter in that life, another challenge to undertake, and no different than any of the others. As soon as I heard the diagnosis, I began gathering information and reading accounts of cancer survivors. Over and over I read that it is important to “think like a survivor” no matter how dire the survival rates may be. Rather than dying of cancer, I am LIVING with cancer.

In a little book called “There’s No Place Like HOPE” by Vickie Girard, I read this description of what it is like to receive a cancer diagnosis: “Diagnosis is like going to sleep in your own bed and waking up in a foreign country where you don’t know the language or the customs and you have no road maps telling you how to get home.” It is like that for us right now, with more questions than answers. We don’t even know where “home” will be for the foreseeable future. But it will be a world apart from what we have experienced in the past two years.

Our lives in northern British Columbia were filled with forests, mountains, rivers, small communities, wildlife… and silence. It was fun to write about the natural world we shared with wild wolves, lynx, bears, cougar, beaver, and others. It was a simple life with few needs. It may be awhile before I can return to that part of my life. So here… amid congested highways and roads, shopping malls, doctor’s offices and hospital corridors, I must find that place of silence within myself. A bird song outside my window will be all the more precious, as is the patch of wild purple lupine I saw blooming at the side of the freeway this morning. I will need the spiritual lift that nature gives me… it is a breath of fresh air.

... PLM